Hello Len

I'm sorry that I offended you. I know what I said was thoughtless and insensitive and that you were hurt by my words.

It was not my intention and it is also not a reflection of what I think.

I'm also sorry that I didn't say this to you earlier.

Lord Doberman: "Sir! may I have your attention?"

Anode Enzyme: "No. My attention is not something to be given or lent, but for keeping to myself and cherishing during the long quiet of my aloneness..."

Survival of the fittest does not mean survival of the most corrupt.

"After the death of socialism, the left wing went off to fight culture wars and embrace identity politics.

"It worried more about the use of language than economics, and when finacial copitalism collapsed, it had no idea how to reform or replace it.

"More than any opinion poll, the inability of the right to even admit that it has failed, explains why we are stuck in a kind of limbo and the most likely result result of next year's (2015} general election is another stalemate."

As one of a small band of photographers who founded the UK's first radical photo magazine, Camerawork, in 1976, this book ('The Camerawork Essays') comes as a rude reminder of what went wrong. Within a decade it had lost the plot, spiralling out of control in endless discoursing, analysing, theorising and criticising - to the point of paralysis.

One of the book's contributors recalls that in the 1980s "quite a few of the most politically and theoretically 'advanced' photographers stopped taking pictures altogether. The act of photographing someone had been so analysed as a relation of power that it came to be experienced as politically impossible." A cruel joke.

Sir, I am pleased to inform you that my family and I enjoyed the hugely exciting binary palindromic time-check, 10:11:11 on the 11/11/01.
Len Breen
Englefield Green.

There is a predominant voice in the mind of the addict that supersedes all reason and that voice wants you dead. This voice is the unrelenting echo of an unfulfillable void.

Recourse to violence, in such a case, is not an option but a course of action imposed by the situation.

Those who take the meat from the table
Teach contentment.
Those for whom the contribution is destined
Demand sacrifice.
Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry
Of wonderful times to come.
Those who lead the country into the abyss
Call ruling too difficult
For ordinary men.

"The leaders deliver the goods and periodically, the bodies of the enemies who prevent the continued delivery of the goods."

"The photographic pictures we take and broadcast as tourists - on various scales - constitute a dominant way of seeing and then of interpreting the world. That is, they are ideological, their persuasiveness, which is determined by their aesthetic construction: point of view (literally), choice of frame, timing, etc, is offered as a true and representative reality.

That's what the reality is, they emphatically say. And compounding this is the very fact that it has taken a tourist to stamp authority on this realism.

The privileges associated with being a tourist, the social class which permits the freedom to be a tourist, not to mention the wealth necessary to facilitate the taking of pictures, are the essential elements which colour the realism.."

"A child born today will grow up with no concept of privacy at all. They'll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves - an unrecorded, unanalysed thought."

"Memoirs are written for many reasons:
 Stars to celebrate a glittering career;
 Politicians to secure their place in history
 (and boost their pension funds).
 The rest of us are just trying to make sense of our own lives."

"... the past is no longer; the future is not yet; as for the instantaneous present, everyone knows that it does not exist at all but is the limit of an infinite division, like a point without dimension."

"The [First World] war was a vast depraved undertaking of unprecedented savagery, in which the ruling classes of Europe dispatched their people to a senseless slaughter in the struggle for imperial supremacy."

"One slaveowner, Germany, is fighting another slaveowner, England, for a fairer distribution of the slaves."

"Deconstruction holds that nothing is ever entirely itself. There is a certain otherness lurking within every assured identity. It seizes upon the out-of-place element in a system, and uses it to show that the system is never quite as stable as it imagines. There is something within any structure that is part of it but also escapes its logic."

"The Vulnerable Roger of the Cobblestones:  For one half of his life Roger of the Cobblestones lived a life of utter depravity. Then for the other half he devoted himself to prayer and contemplation: Prayer and contemplation by day; utter depravity by night."

"She was always critical. She had no idea how endlessly critical she could be. She did it like breathing - without fear."

"The more people hate themselves, the more deeply depressed they become.The state of depression gives them some protection because they feel (not consciously) that it is a defense which shuts out a whole lot of turmoil around them."

"The study of architecture is a marvellous training for anything but architecture. The frightening thought that what you draw may become a building makes for reasoned lines."

"... he is the tracker, map-reader, collector, code breaker and constructor."
"... in an age when the real is being superceded by the virtual."
"... he transplants apparently firmly situated spaces, architectural structures, images and motifs, to other, different, disorienting settings."
"... he crates a new kind of cartography, in which the once (relaible) universal horizon becomes merely a part, one of the "tiles" - like tourism, colonialism, urbanization, appropriation, movement and speed - that together form the mosaic of cultural identity."
"... he is the arranger of heterotopias (Foucault uses the term heterotopia to describe spaces that have more layers of meaning or relationships to other places than immediately meet the eye.)."
"he explores the surfaces which determine our perceptions of three-dimensionality."

"... the eye of the artist moves relentlessly, oscillating and looking for a foothold, caught up with the urge to deconstruct."

No. For a start they are two different things, but equally meaningless.

Ethics are principles which you choose to live by. Why you choose to live by them is unimportant, and their logic and sensibility equally irrelevant.

Morals are you own prejudices that you insist on others following - and are then essentially evil, for want of a better word. The fact that morals change over time should be a bit of a giveaway - bigotry disguised as virtue.

I have one ethic/principle - I will do anything I like as long as I am not directly harming anyone, and you in return may do the same, providing we can respect each other's right to think differently without justification.

Apply that to any "moral" issue that society regularly grapples with, and the answer (to your question) will usually be obvious very quickly.

Oh Lord it's hard to be humble
when you're perfect in every way.
I can't wait to look in the mirror
cause I get better looking each day.
To know me is to love me
I must be a hell of a man.
Oh Lord it's hard to be humble
but I'm doing the best that I can.


I used to have a girlfriend
but she just couldn't compete
with all of these love starved women
who keep clamoring at my feet.
Well I prob'ly could find me another
but I guess they're all in awe of me.
Who cares, I never get lonesome
cause I treasure my own company.


Oh Lord it's hard to be humble
when you're perfect in every way,
I can't wait to look in the mirror
cause I get better looking each day
To know me is to love me
I must be a hell of a man.


Oh Lord it's hard to be humble
but I'm doing the best that I can.
I guess you could say I'm a loner,
a cowboy outlaw tough and proud.
I could have lots of friends if I want to
but then I wouldn't stand out from the crowd.
Some folks say that I'm egotistical.
Hell, I don't even know what that means.
I guess it has something to do with the way that I
fill out my skin tight blue jeans.


Oh Lord it's hard to be humble
when you're perfect in every way,
I can't wait to look in the mirror
cause I get better looking each day
To know me is to love me
I must be a hell of a man.
Oh Lord it's hard to be humble
but I'm doing the best that I can.
We're doing the best that we can

"A child born today will grow up with no concept of privacy at all. They'll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves - an unrecorded, unanalysed thought."