"What you get is a culture of trompe l'oeil degeneracy. People adopt socially acceptable transgressions -- like tattoos -- to show they are edgy, but inside they are still middle class. You run into these candy-cane grunge types: people with piercings and inkings all over their bodies who look like Sid Vicious but talk like Barry Manilow. They've got the alienated look -- just not the anger.

"And that's the most delightful thing about the whole tattoo fad. A cadre of fashion-forward types thought they were doing something to separate themselves from the vanilla middle classes but are now discovering that the signs etched into their skins are absolutely mainstream. They are at the beach looking across the acres of similar markings and learning there is nothing more conformist than displays of individuality, nothing more risk-free than rebellion, nothing more conservative than youth culture.

"Another generation of hipsters, laid low by the ironies of consumerism."

-- David Brooks, "Nonconformity Is Skin Deep", New York Times

Oriental Pearl Tower, Shanghai, 2004

 

"The sociological imagination is the capacity to shift from one perspective to another -- from the political to the psychological; from examination of a single family to comparative assessment of the national budgets of the world; from the theological school to the military establishment; from the consideration of an oil industry to studies of contemporary poetry. It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self -- and see the relations between the two."

-- C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination

"So long as you are praised, think only that you are not yet on your own path, but on that of another."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

Angkor Wat, Cambodia, 2005

 

"To be noticed, to be wanted, to be loved, to walk into a place and have others care about what you’re doing, even what you had for lunch that day: that’s what people want, in my opinion."

-- "The Fame Motive", The New York Times

"To go from San Francisco to Iowa City, it was a pretty big change. What's surprising is that being gay is not that big of a deal here. It's a bigger deal in San Francisco because everyone there makes it a big deal. No, it's weird, but I feel more comfortable here being gay and out, than in San Francisco. There, it's so in everyone's face, it's all about the way you dress, how you look, and what neighborhood you live in. And sometimes that just sets up the differences and keeps people separate. It's crazy, but here in Iowa City it just seems like more of an acceptance and even an interest [on the part of straight people]. It's not ghettoized, it's more like here's everyone, straight and gay, living together. To me, in San Francisco, it's like you're known as either gay or straight. Your sexual identity is your priority and you have to choose one and show it."

-- from Life Outside, by Michelangelo Signorile

Beijing, China, 2004

 

"The force of a photograph is that it keeps open to scrutiny instants which the normal flow of time immediately displaces. This freezing of time -- the insolent, poignant stasis of each photograph -- has produced new and more inclusive canons of beauty. But the truths that can be rendered in a dissociated moment, however significant or decisive, have a very narrow relation to the needs of understanding. Contrary to what is suggested by humanist claims made for photography, the camera's ability to transform reality into something beautiful derives from its relative weakness as a means of conveying truth. The reason that humanism has become the reigning ideology of ambitious professional photographers -- displacing formalist justifications of their quest for beauty -- is that it masks the confusions about truth and beauty underlying the photographic enterprise."

-- Susan Sontag, On Photography

Phuket, Thailand, 2005

 

Bwunnies!

"In science as in love, concentration on technique is quite likely to lead to impotence."

-- Peter Berger, Invitation to Sociology

"Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, to insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?"

-- Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts

"China, it was clear, was not going to go the way of eastern Europe or the USSR. But where was she going? Perhaps the safest conclusion to be drawn at this stage is that she was once again moving to her own rhythms and stimulants, not at once to be interpreted in categories drawn from the western world, for all the rhetoric of regime and protestors alike... Transformed though so much of the world already was, China after Tiananmen Sqaure still baffled observers and futurolgists by her seemingly massive immunity to currents outside her borders. One of the traditional roles of her government has always been to act as the guardian of Chinese values. If, anywhere, modernization might turn out in the end not to mean 'westernization', it could be in China."

-- J.M. Roberts, The Penguin History of the World

Shanghai, China, 2004

 

"This is not so much a political issue as it is a moral issue."

-- Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth