He said that he wanted to leave his artistic mark on Miami’s seascape in a way that was inspired by the artist Christo in the 1980’s when he draped eleven small islands in Biscayne Bay with hot pink fabric. Is it part of the teenager search for immortality? Or just part of the many faces of heresy that wish to torment established norms until they themselves become part of the establishment’s vanguard. Intersting that the piano had been killed; burnt at a party as if the instrument had a repressed psychic drive that can touch us: the death drive which can be manifested through Harrington and his quest for acceptance at a prestigious school; re. money.
“After sitting for more than three weeks in the sandbar the baby grand piano took off it’s fame in what becomes the famous piano in Miami. Not until a local resident Suzanne Beard took picture of pelicans roosting on the piano that ended up on the National Geographic website. From their the piano on Miami sandbar story was picked and featured in various national TV network like CNN and to many news websites and blogs.
Mr Harrington - whose father Mark is 'Burn Notice' production designer J. Mark Harrington - planned to make a promotional video using the piano. But the plan went awry on New Year's Eve when partygoers lowered it into a canal and set it on fire. The next day, the family placed it on a 22-foot open fisherman and dumped it on the sandbar. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1351146/Mystery-sandbank-piano-solved-Boy-16-did-boost-art-school-portfolio.html#ixzz1CUSpb4FU
Nicholas Harrington said he had planned to remain anonymous but change his mind when others began claiming responsibility.But his original plan of the stunt was to preserved for posterity in photos and on video — will help win him admission to New York’s Cooper Union. “It’s not so much the video as the pictures we took,” Read More: http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/8017523-mystery-solved-teen-put-the-piano-on-miami-sandbar-as-an-art-and-win-college-ticket a
Oakland Ross:When it comes to women who serve as suicide bombers or guerrilla fighters, there seems to be no single, unvarying pattern that explains every case. In some instances — Chechen resistance, for example — coercion of one sort or another seems to be a central factor when women allow bomb vests to be strapped around their midriffs or agree to carry out other acts of political violence. Chechen women who join their people's struggle often do so because they have been previously raped by Russian soldiers and have subsequently been persuaded that violence is the only way to “redeem” themselves. In other cases, they have been raped by Chechen men, but their anger or despair is turned against Moscow all the same. By way of contrast, many female activists in the Provisional Irish Republican Army, those who carried out violent missions against British forces in Northern Ireland, don't seem to have been coerced at all....Read More: http://www.thestar.com/article/901497
Gary L. Wenk: I blame the feelings of immortality of teenagers on the fact that their frontal lobes are not fully working. The reason the frontal lobes are not fully engaged is because they have not yet completed the process of neuronal myelination. Think of myelination as the insulation on the electrical wires inside your house. Without myelination in the brain, electrical signals from neurons fail to reach their destination. The parts of our brains that myelinate last are also the parts that evolved most recently. These parts include our frontal lobes, which contribute most to our unique personalities and allow us to anticipate the consequences of our actions.
Essentially, your frontal lobes tell you that it’s a bad idea to drink alcohol and drive or to ignore the consequences of taking heroin. When your frontal lobes finally complete their process of myelination, they begin to work properly and you stop doing dangerous things. Most importantly, you stop feeling immortal. Apparently, women finish this myelination process by age 25 years and men finish by age 30. Thus a 20-year-old female, although her brain is still myelinating, is closer to maturity than her 20-year-old boyfriend, who still has another 10 years before he can really appreciate the wisdom of warnings such as those against drinking and driving or against taking any drug that comes his way. Read More: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/your-brain-food/201008/why-do-teenagers-feel-immortal a
Bloom: What's more, writes Bloom, female terrorists provide great P.R. for insurgencies or resistance movements. “On average, an attack perpetrated by a woman gets eight times as much press attention as a similar attack by a man.” Should the female attacker be comely in life — if inevitably less so in death — the impact will be further magnified. “Looking at a police lineup of female Palestinian suicide bombers … you would be struck by how attractive many of them are,” Bloom writes. “The groups are seeking that reaction, followed by the obvious question, What could make such a pretty girl do that? There must be something seriously wrong.” read more: http://www.thestar.com/article/901497 photo: http://www.slate.com/id/2249127/
The Harrington case is pretty mild,but what about further down the food chain, such as explaining the phenomenon of teen suicide bombers? Sometimes this idea of fame and being immortal is carried to extremes difficult to comprehend, and infinitely more destructive; their lives compressed into a devastatingly brief stretch of time. Their circumstances force a redefinition of the ideas of love, loss, and a renewal of one idea. A recurrent idea which breaks through the continually sealed crust of orthodoxy because it contains an important truth to them and an irrepressible human aspiration.
Philosophers often expound on the concept of “purpose” in regards to human life. That is, we’ll never accept death if we don’t understand why we live. These teen bombers are aware of their purpose, even acutely, and don’t experience any form of existential questioning. This awareness not only gives them a sense of duty, pride, and identity – but allows them to embrace life in an immediate, moment to moment way. This idea, in turn, encourages th
ocked mass of citizenry to reflect on fundamental questions regarding our own mortality.
"This terror state in the Norther and Eastern state of Sri Lanka crippled the Indian Ocean state for almost 20 year, and almost brought it to its knees. The political agenda of the Tigers was the same as of Hamas. Widespread use of snipers and suicide bombers from Colombo in the West to Galle in the South, and political assassinations of political rivals within the Tamil community...." read more: http://ivarfjeld.wordpress.com/category/sweden-views-on-israel/
But then is our own criticism of what we regard as heretical behavior, really valid. Have we been so destroyed by consumerism and advertising, that objective or traditional criticism does not collide with these situations; all it can do is die with them. Benjamin wants us to feel this death. Hence, he tells us that, like a dead body, or own criticism decays but as it decays, advertising and the consumer wheel lives on;its a new vocation and the end of an old one.The rioting in Egypt as a desire for the car and BBQ. Self immolation as metaphor for burning a human coupon? Witnessing the death of suicide bombers, their advertisement of the fact, touches us more than criticism itself.
How could we accommodate this death if it implies that criticism of these acts will become just another agency of homogenization, which typically accomplished through a mediated and filtered immediacy of the media? Shouldn’t we preserve a real criticism this death, so as to save thought and culture from being effaced by the spinning of events that serve corporate agendas. Ultimately, perhaps these elements could actually encourage thought and heterogeneity. In fact, the death of a truly critical attitude will enable us to get closer to the forces that shape the world and actually change their current direction, as this death puts us in a closer perception of contact with things to establish a relation to heterogeneity that begins with such contact and not out of the naive and sometimes overly and academic objective contemplation of heterogeneity.
read more: http://www.ebooksx.com/Asad-On-Suicide-Bombing-in-title.html
ADDENDUM:
“It also suggests what Freud calls a death drive and a Nietzschean obsession with de-individuation. Here, his work is similar to the Surrealists who created art that took the fragments of mass culture and endowed them with psychic energy. This, in effect, aims to destroy stable notions of selfhood and, according to Hal Foster’s thesis in Compulsive Beauty, installs the death drive at the heart of existence. …Unsubstantiated rumours have spread of a mysterious figure—Black Fatima—who lingers near the bombing sites. Although given considerable credence and publicity by Muzhakhoyeva’s initial confession (in which she claimed to have been trained by a mysterious woman named Lida who gave her spiked orange juice), the story of Black Fatima bears all the hallmarks of a ghost tale: bent on avenging her lost beloved, this fur-clad woman recruits and trains Chechen women for homicidal tasks. There are also well-documented tales of how the women are lured into the trade: reports suggest they are kidnapped by extreme radical fundamentalists, often raped or seduced by their comrades to smear their honour, then placed into safe houses, living under a heavy barrage of ideological pressure and plied with drugs and opiates to commit their missions unwaveringly.
Looking for answers, I turn to Paris-based journalist Barbara Victor (author of Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers) who outlines for me the “fatal cocktail” of circumstances that create a female suicide bomber in a Palestinian context. “It’s a combination of living under an occupying force, a dismal economic future, a fervent nationalistic belief instilled in Palestinians since they are children and absolute hopelessness,” she says by phone. “Above all, it’s also a religion that teaches that life is merely a preparation for the splendour of the afterlife with Allah, and the best thing one can do with one’s life is to end it by committing a suicide attack against civilians and the Occupation.” Read More: http://maisonneuve.org/pressroom/article/2010/mar/29/maisonneuve-vault-russias-black-widows/
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