This scant black and white masterpiece photo book, like another black and white photobook Wisconsin Death Trip, is composed of entirely found negatives, culled from historical, industrial and governmental archives (the defense industry is well in evidence). Evidence, made of some of the greatest late 20th century images of American photography, is precisely how future anthropologists will asses our near past. Specifically it will be an introductory map to our various archives of visual data which will acompany the factual data, in a time/era without very much filming/taping ability. Each image the tip of an iceberg of thousands upon thousands of negatives. Services might even rebuild motion events from a series or even a single still of an experiment, and discover what really went wrong. Documentary movies will probably be made from stills in the future, tracking algorithms can spot each speed of a street in motion's objects, render them for seven seconds. The blur has micro blurs in the negative. Evidence will come to life. First published in 1977 (the equally great Wisconsin Death Trip was published 1974). Reprinted recently.

Made as the radical underground began organizing into violent factions, Peter Watkins's Punishment Park is a window into late 60's extremism. Portrayed as a documentary, this fictional window into law-enforcement and justice showcases a brilliantly realized manhunt through desert terrain, with convicted extremists forced to run literally for their lives towards a 58 mile distant flag to escape sentences of up to 21 years for sedition. The deal is quite simple, make it to the flag and your sentence will be vacated. Told explicitly, with some threads well developed, others staccato (as if the crews lost their subjects), the film begins with the convicts' arrival at a makeshift court clearly outside the bounds of constitutional law, with a council of judges made up hastily from the locale status quo (California). A lone civil rights lawyer tries to add balance to the proceedings but is little more than a gnat in the face of a slowly moving elephant. It bears some resemblance to our current fears, the desert locale has an eerie nuance and the procedures seem to predict Guantanamo. Unknown actors provide pivotal performances. A cold satire of both sides. An early demonstration of hunting techniques by a policeman must be seen.

the kite seems to be my destiny, because in the first recollection of my infancy it seemed to me that, while I was in my cradle a kite came to me and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me several times with its tail inside my lips

Viewed without preconception in 1995, the second incarnation of Meier's "The Shining" began at Winnie's on NYC's Avenue A and after a quick beer and a signing of a waiver (physical contact), the seven or so ticketholders boarded a bus for a surreal trip (narrated by a thrift-store cat puppet) to a then non-museum P.S. 1, where one-by-one, disorientation rising, ticketholders were led to a darkened school hallway, where we were given a very slight taste of Stockholm syndrome attitude. Screamed at, cajoled into removing our coats, we were then forced to wait on a bench while Throbbing Gristle blasted from the former school's gymnasium. Then one by one were were thrown into the gym, and told "follow the light." After sixteen years, Meier's craziness gets its revival. Should be seen. Begins at New York Arts Live and travels to an undisclosed location.

A multi-front conflict: The Cartel Wars of the Americas vs. Anonymous.

www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/anonymous-cancels-operations-against-drug-cartel-say-kidnapped-member-has-been-found/2011/11/04/gIQA11SzmM_blog.html

"Back on topic, here is another story I love: It was 1997-8 when Dominic Giampaolo (from SGI, later worked at QNX and now he is at Apple) was testing his baby, the 64-bit BFS file system which earned him lots of fame for BeOS and for himself. There was a specific QA stress test that would use BFS to write on a floppy disk, erase, rewrite, erase etc for a whole night. For some reason, according to the debugging logs, the write procedure would bail out always around 6 AM. Engineers would gather and analyze the problem, but no one could figure out why the test would always bail out at around 6 AM, every morning. So, Dominic decided to stay up all night and have a watch at the machine personally. What Dominic found as the culprit was really funny: apparently, a ray of sun light would enter the window and would fall directly on the floppy drive and that would cause the drive itself to fail for the duration the sun light was upon it!"