October 2007 Archives
“While questions have clearly been around since time immemorial . . . the question mark has not. This handy graphic sign seems to have been formed from a Q with a little o under it as an abbreviation of the word quaestio (query, question). Similarly, the exclamation point—a.k.a., ‘screamer’ or ‘bang’—is derived either from an abbreviation of Latin interiectio (interjection) or else from the interjection Io! (‘Hey!’).”
—Alexander & Nicholas Humez, ABC Et Cetera: The Life & Times of the Roman Alphabet, 1985.
“The word punctuation comes from the latin verb pungere (to puncture, prick), of which the past participle is punctum, a mark of punctuation having originally been a spot pricked with a writing instrument.”
—Alexander & Nicholas Humez, ABC Et Cetera: The Life & Times of the Roman Alphabet, 1985.
“During [the early 1700’s] the period and the comma were also known as the jot (ultimately from the Greek iota) and the tittle (from Latin titulus). As for dot, the word seems originally to have meant head of a boil or pimple.”
—Alexander & Nicholas Humez, ABC Et Cetera: The Life & Times of the Roman Alphabet, 1985.
“Harold Blume writes of the mystic Kabbalah as ‘a collective, psychic defense of the most imaginative medieval Jews against exile and persecution pressing on them inwardly. So, some Kabbalists spoke of a missing twenty-third letter of the Hebrew alphabet, hidden in the white spaces between the letters. From these openings the larger Torah was still to emerge.’”
—Richard A. Firmage, The Alphabet Abecedarium, 1993.
“I was killing time and pain at a nearby bar called The Ear, so named because the two ribs of the ‘B’ in the neon sign that read ‘Bar’ had burned out years ago. So had most of the patrons.”
—Kinky Friedman, Blast From the Past, 1998.
“‘The sun is the greatest, the most resplendent, and the most wonderful of heavenly luminaries, but you cannot contemplate and examine it simply with unprotected eyes. You have to use a piece of artificial glass that is many millions of times smaller and darker than the sun. But through this little piece of glass you can examine the magnificent monarch of stars, delight in it, and endure its fiery rays. Holy Scripture also is a dazzling sun, and this book, The Philokalia, is the piece of glass which we use to enable us to contemplate the sun in its imperial splendor.’”
—Anonymous, The Way of a Pilgrim, first published in 1884, translated by R.M. French, 1965. ‘The Love of Spiritual Beauty’, or The Philokalia, is a collection of mystical writings by the Fathers of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
“It is Mardis Gras. Creole food everywhere. Crowds in costume jam the streets. A man dressed as a shrimp is thrown into a steaming pot of bisque. He protests, but no one believes he is not a crustacean. Finally he produces a driver’s license and is released.”
—Woody Allen, Reminiscences: Places and People, from Side Effects, 1980.
At the abandoned Exxon station on Highland Road. I know Seek, Seek was a student of mine.
"There were dim lights burning far off on the highway, on the river. There were lights even beyond those, stretching miles off in the night; he wanted to go there, to see what was there. There were lights like that stretching across the country, across all states and cities and places, and things happening everywhere even now. "Even now, even now," he kept thinking. There were bridges swooping across rivers and Mississippis, cities at night casting halo-glows in the sky seen from far-off, there were giant water tanks waiting by the railroad tracks in Oklahoma, there were saloons with checkercloth and sawdust and fans overhead, there were girls waiting in Colorado and Utah and Iowa towns, there were crap games in the alley and a game in the back of the lunch-cart, there was soft odorous air in New Orleans and Key West and Los Angeles, there was music at night by the sea and people laughing, and cars going by on a highway, and soft neon lights glowing, and an old shack in Nevada seen across the wastes. . . . Joe had to go see it all, even now, even now."
"Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City, 1950.
A sign shop, apparently, on North Boulevard.
"I would suggest that academies be established where young people will learn to get really high . . . high as the Zen master is high when his arrow hits a target in the dark . . . high as the Karate master is high when he smatshes a brick with his fist . . . high . . . weightless . . . in space. This is the space age. Time to look beyond this run down radioactive cop rotten planet. Time to look beyond this animal body."
"William Burroughs, Academy 23: A Deconditioning, The Village Voice, 1967.
"We, all of us, have a need to identify our bodily rhythms with those of the cosmos.
The wind in a forest of fir. The spilling of grain in the fields. The migration of bird and seed. The trek of atom and star.
That is why we dance."
"Tom Robbins, To Dance, Helix magazine, 1967.
"It was the night of the full moon. Flaring like a white-hot coin, so brilliant that it hurt one"s eyes, the moon swam rapidly upwards in a sky of smoky blue, across which drifted a few wisps of yellowish cloud. The stars were all invisible. The croton bushes, by day hideous things like jaundiced laurels, were changed by the moon into jagged black-and-white designs like fantastic woodcuts. . . .
"Look at the moon, just look at it!" Flory said. "It"s like a white sun. It"s brighter than an English winter day."
Elizabeth looked up into the branches of the frangipani tree, which the moon seemed to have changed into rods of silver. The light lay thick, as though palpable, on everything, crusting the earth and the rough bark of trees like some dazzling salt, and every leaf seemed to bear a freight of solid light, like snow. Even Elizabeth, indifferent to such things, was astonished."
"George Orwell, Burmese Days, 1934.
"Battalions are trucked into the city to rehearse for the elaborate military parades. Security is heightened, government buildings are spruced up and repainted, and billboards promoting the army are hoisted above major intersections and roundabouts. The oversized boards look more like movie advertisements than army propaganda. Painted in soothing pastel colours, they depict handsome soldiers in pistachio green uniforms marching down pale yellow roads and cheered by crowds of onlookers. Above the parade, a fleet of pink fighter planes glides placidly through a postcard-perfect blue sky."
—Emma Larkin, Finding George Orwell In Burma, 2005.
"Tun Lin refers to the years under Ne Win as "the time of the green spectacles". To look at something through green spectacles, he explained, is to look at a thing that is bad and be forced to think of it as good. The phrase has a curious history. The battles and bombs of the Second World War devastated Burma"s paddy fields and plantations, and by the time the Japanese army eventually occupied the country farmers found it hard to grow any edible produce. Even the farm animals and pack-horses refused to eat the parched grain, because of its unhealthy-looking white colour. The Japanese, fearful that the donkeys they needed to transport munitions in the mountainous terrain of Upper Burma would starve, came up with an ingenious solution. They fashioned spectacles out of green-tinted glass and wire and hooked them around the donkeys" ears. "The donkeys saw that the grain was green and happily ate it," explained Tun Lin. "That"s what we had to do during our years in Burma"s Animal Farm. The entire nation was forced to wear green spectacles just like those donkeys."
"Emma Larkin, Finding George Orwell In Burma, 2005.
"All these book collections . . . had one thing in common: they were gradually disappearing. Their pages were being glued together by damp and mildew. Pull any book from a shelf in Burma and it will be followed by a sprinking of powder-like dust, the work of white ants relentlessly munching their way through thousands of texts all around the country."
"Emma Larkin, Finding George Orwell In Burma, 2005.
"They went out into the glaring white sunlight. The heat rolled from the earth like the breath of an oven. The flowers, oppressive to the eyes, blazed with not a petal stirring, in a debauch of sun. The glare sent a weariness through one"s bones. There was something horrible in it"horrible to think of that blue, blinding sky, stretching on and on over Burma and India, over Siam, Cambodia, China, cloudless and inerminable."
"George Orwell, Burmese Days, 1934.
"In the borders beside the path swaths of English flowers"phlox and larkspur, hollyhock and petunia"not yet slain by the sun, rioted in vast size and richness. The petunias were huge, like trees almost. There was no lawn, but instead a shrubbery of native trees and bushes"gold mohur trees like vast umbrellas of blood-red bloom, frangipanis with creamy, stalkless flowers, purple bougainvillea, scarlet hibiscus and the pink Chinese rose, bilious-green crotons, feathery fronds of tamarind. The clash of colours hurt one"s eyes in the glare."
"George Orwell, Burmese Days, 1934.
"The merchandise was foreign-looking, queer and poor. There were vast pomelos hanging on strings like green moons, red bananas, baskets of heliotrope-colored prawns the size of lobsters, brittle dried fish ties in bundles, crimson chilis, ducks split open and cured ike hams, green coco-nuts, the larvae of the rhinoceros beetle, sections of sugar-cane, dahs, lacquered sandals, check silk longyis, aphrodisiacs in the form of large, soap-like pills, glazed earthenware jars four feet high, Chinese sweetmeats made of garlic and sugar, green and white cigars, purple brinjals, persimmon-seed necklaces, chickens cheeping in wicker cages, brass Buddhas, heart-shaped betel leaves, bottles of Kruschen salts, switches of false hair, red clay cooking-pots, steel shoes for bullocks, papier-mache marionettes, strips of alligator hide with magical properties. Elizabeth"s head was beginning to swim. At the other end of the bazaar the sun gleamed through a priest"s umbrella, blood-red, as though through the ear of a giant."
"George Orwell, Burmese Days, 1934.
"Fanquist was one of those take-a-second-look dames. You know what I mean, don"t you" An all-metal blonde with a build-up that does things to you, and a figure that weakens your resistance."
"James Hadley Chase, Get A Load Of This, 1942.
"The phone must have rung 15 times before Booker got out of the Jacuzzi, put on his green satin robe that matched the emerald pinned to his left earlobe and picked up the phone. Booker said: "Who"s this"" A woman"s voice said, "You sitting down"" The phone was on a table next to a green leather wingback chair. Booker loved green."
"Elmore Leonard, Freaky Deaky, 1988.
"Foe-damned ruby motor, it only rebels."
"anonymous, a tiny excerpt from "possibly the longest palindrome ever", at PalilndromeList.com. I haven"t counted the words or characters, but printed it came to 12 pages. It"s long. Click here for the full rendition.
This weblog has inspired something interesting! After browsing through the color quotes that are semi-regularly posted here, Craig Conley, author of One Letter Words, A Dictionary, devised a set of rebus-like roll-over quotes which are difficult to describe but easy to experience. Click here to check out Colourful Allusions, vol. 1 at COLOURlovers.com.
"He looked very tired and at the same time enthusiastic, if the combination can be imagined. Red rimmed his eyes, blue shadowed his jaws, but he had a triumphant look on his face, the look of a man who has done his job well and expects a kind word."
"Cornell Woolrich, Dead On Her Feet, 1935.
"Every joke is a tiny revolution."
"George Orwell, quoted by Emma Larkin in Finding George Orwell In Burma, 2005.
"When [George] Scott entered [Shan] territory over a century ago . . . [l]ocal people drew maps for [him]. A few months before I had sat in a reading room at Cambridge University Library marvelling over some that had survived. They were as big as bed sheets, and thickly painted on rough paper or mould-speckled linen which crackled as I unfolded it. Some were quite beautiful. The rivers were painted ruby-red; the mountains, which were often given strange, curly peaks, were done in electric greens and purples; pagodas were painted gold. The maps were surreal, magical, like illustrations from a Dr Seuss book, yet utterly true to the wonder inspired by the real scenery now unfolding before me."
"Andrew Marshall, The Trouser People: A Story of Burma"In the Shadow of the Empire, 2002.
"The country"s most famous comedian was a man called Zaganar. In 1990 he joked that he"d just bought a new colour television, but when he got it home and turned it on it only had two colours: green and orange. Zaganar, whose name means "tweezers", was poking fun at the endless airtime devoted to showing generals in uniforms making meritorious donations to orange-robed monks. He was arrested after the show, and spent the next five years in the notorious Insein Prison in Rangoon"s northern suburbs. (And yes, Insein is pronounced "Insane".)"
"Andrew Marshall, The Trouser People: A Story of Burma"In the Shadow of the Empire, 2002.
The secret of history of graphic design, marginalized, at best, by most American books on the subject, involves a thing called punk rock. Punk was born in the United States in the late 1960s, in the form of bands like the Thirteenth Floor Elevators in Austin and Iggy and the Stooges from Detroit. It further developed in New York with the Velvet Underground and the Ramones. But it ultimately had its strongest flowering and its greatest impact on graphic design in Great Britain, in the mid to late 1970s. I feel that I would be remiss as a graphic design educator if I did not now present, from the ten-part documentary The Punk Years, Programme 7: Ridicule Is Nothing To Be Scared Of.
Last week I mentioned that the Shwedagon Pagoda in Rangoon, Burma, reminded me of the North Carolina State Fair. I think I should explain that comment further. The Shwedagon Pagoda consists of a massive, stunning gold pagoda, and a complex of hundreds of smaller pagodas and temples. When I visited it, the area was thronging with people and monks who were gradually circling the main pagoda on a beautiful day. Everyone seemed to be having a wonderful time. There was plenty to look at; there were painted concrete animals and characters, temple after temple, with spinning fortune-telling devices and other clever ways to give offerings at many of them. OK, the Shwedagon Pagoda was not nearly as crowded as the North Carolina State Fair, and it was much cleaner and more aesthetically more appealing than the North Carolina State Fair, but there was a similar sense of camraderie and excitement and plain old fun in the air.
Have I mentioned the great courtesy and sly humor of the people I spoke English with in Burma" At one point a man, perhaps noticing my eyes, showed me the way to a beatiful deep green wooden temple. It was built, he said, expressly for green-eyed people. There was no Buddha in it, because green-eyed people tend to be foreign and non-Buddhist. The temple was very tall, because green-eyed people tend to be tall. And, he added, tapping his head and smiling, "they tend to have good brains."
I bought these postcards from Burma while travelling there in 1986, because, with my recently acquired degree in graphic design, I was astonished at the print quality. Which is awful, of course, but so bad that the images become unreal and maybe even magical. Amazingly, they capture the spirit of the place"both the terrible poverty and the transporting beauty.
"I had only a smattering of Burmese, but even that seemd like a small victory over astounding linguistic odds. Burmese has the perverse syntax of Japanese and the tonal complexities of Chinese. Its writing system is based on a devilish series of interconnecting circles. Apparently, it is a great compliment to say to a Burmese person:
This means, "Your handwriting is so round.""
"Andrew Marshall, The Trouser People: A Story of Burma"In the Shadow of the Empire, 2002.
Having just learned how to cut "n" paste YouTube videos into my site, I am now proud to present an instant graphic design education to anyone who might be interested. This should take about half an hour. I have carefully arranged the curriculum, but of course you can click wherever and whenever you like.
(P.S. I have just been informed that watching multiple screens simultaneously can get you through the program even sooner. What the heck, I say go for it!)
There, wasn"t that fun" It was fun for me. (I"m learning more about this blog thing every day. COMING SOON: individually linkable entries!)
"In the evening after dinner the whole family liked to bask in the flood of moonlight on the balcony of the house. The young night was pollinated with stars, and the full moon looked to me like a huge lollipop as it rose in the east over the purple hills and shed light on our unlit town. The nights of the full moon were magical for us, and filled us with excitement, for we were not brought up with electricity. The moonlight seemed to give a sort of warmth on a cold night and coolness on a hot night. It even seemed to heal sorrows and spiritual wounds."
"Pascal Knoo Thwe, From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey, 2002.
"When [Mindon] died without an obvious heir in 1878, one of his queens intrigued to raise to the throne one Thibaw, an insignificant son of the king"s who had spent most of his life in a Buddhist monastery. She and her supporters hoped to rule the country with Thibaw as a puppet. . . .
It had been an immemorial tradition when a new king succeeded for there to be a "purging of the realm according to custom""i.e. a massacre of the previous ruler"s kinsmen. Since Thibaw was distant from the throne, he had to kill eighty-three members of the royal family. The killings were spread over two days and were carried out by members of the Royal Guard. As was customary, the princesses were strangled while the princes were sewn into red velvet sacks and gently beaten to death with paddles"it being taboo to shed royal blood."
"Pascal Knoo Thwe, From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey, 2002.
"My anxiety grew as I watched people stepping on and off what looked to me like moving stairs, and realized we would have to do the same. As far as I knew there was only one escalator in the whole of Burma, in Rangoon. It was quite a tourist attraction, and I had once gone to look at it, but discovered that it had not been in working order for years."
"Pascal Knoo Thwe, From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey, 2002.
"Charles McGrath, Death-Knell. Or Death Knell., The New York Times, October 7, 2007.
"The lights of Philadelphia burn in oncoming night beyond. Everyone is going off to eat, there will be drinking in bars, and parties, and wild hilarities. And the football players, taking showers or combing their hair or being rubbed down by some consoling trainer, are thinking of the soft sweet girl awaiting them for the dance.
This was when Peter saw the joys of his college life"always on the Saturday night when the game was over and night spread it rewarding darkness over all."
"Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City, 1950.
"As they sped downtown past 59th Street, they began to see pepole in multitudes, they began to see a sea of heads weaving underneath lights unlike the lights they had already seen. These lights were a blazing daytime in themselves, a magical universe of lights sparkling and throbbing with the intensity of a flash explosion. They were white like the hard white light of a blowtorch, they were the Great White Way itself."
"Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City, 1950.
A Baton Rouge slash Coca-Cola classic.
"It was Friday night. I was tooling home from the Mexican border in a light blue convertible and a dark blue mood."
"Ross Macdonald, The Singing Pigeon, 1953.
"I must have dozed for a few minutes. A dream rushed by the threshhold of my consciousness, making a gentle noise. Death was in the the dream. He drove a black Cadillac loaded with flowers."
"Ross Macdonald, The Singing Pigeon, 1953.
"Then, a golden mystery upheaved itself on the horizon, a beautiful winking wonder that blazed in the sun, of a shape that was neither Muslim dome nor Hindu temple-spire. It stood upon a green knoll, and below it were lines of warehouses, sheds, and mills. Under what new god, thought I, are we irrepressible English sitting now""
"Rudyard Kipling describing the Shwedagon Pagoda in From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches"Letters of Travel vol. 1, 1899.
The Shwedagon Pagoda is a massive golden stupa, in Yangon (Rangoon), Myanmar (Burma). (Darn this endless double-naming!) According to Wikipedia, "The crown or umbrella is tipped with 5, 448 diamonds and 2,317 rubies. The very top, the diamond bud, is tipped with a 76 carat (15g) diamond." In the background of this picture you can see the base of the stupa, and surrounding it is an enormous complex that buzzed with the activity of monks, worshippes and tourists and reminded me of (no disrepect to this sacred site intended) the North Carolina State Fair.
At the airport as I was leaving Burma, I spent my last few kyats ("chats") on a souvenir picture postcard of one of the thousands of temples in Bagan, which I had visited just a few days earlier. The color does not seem oversaturated to me. It strkes me as just right. Perfect. Bagan ("Pah-garn") is an amazing place.
At one time there were over 13,000 temples on this plain in central Burma, on the east bank of the wide and muddy Irrawady (properly the Ayeyarwady) River. About 2,200 of these temples remain standing today. It is not until you climb to the top of one of them that the rest of them are revealed. They dot the landscape like jewels. Really, that"s how it feels!
Climbing the temple. Up here some boys tried to sell me some stones, which they said were jewels, rubies I think. The scraped them and showed that they didn't scratch. They said they would take anything for them, but I (foolishly") wasn"t interested.
A massive Buddha in the base of one of the temples. You had to wander about, into the shadows, to find the doorways and stairways to the next level. There was a feeling of real adventure about this place. Like Indiana Jones, but that was just a movie!
Panning for gold by the Irrawaddy river.
The world"s largest book stands at the foot of Mandalay Hill in Mandalay, Burma. The text is carved and inscribed in gold, in the Burmese abugida script, into both sides of 730 stone tablets, for a total of 1460 "pages." Each stone tablet stands under a white structure with its own roof with a precious gem on top, and these structures are arranged around a larger golden pagoda. The carefully edited text is the Tipitaka Pali canon of Theravada Buddhism. Construction on this enormous project began in 1860 and was completed in 1868. I visited it in 1986. It was a grey day and as I recall was no one at all on the grounds, tourist or local, as a friend and I explored it. It was run-down, but there were signs that someone was caring for it as best they could. As a graphic designer and a book lover I was impressed but saddened. It is an amazing structure, an astonishing thing, really, standing neglected in a dusty corner of the world.
Click here for more pictures and information from Wikipedia.
By way of the Digital Traveler, here"s a picture of a storefront in Rangoon, Myanmar. The name Myanmar suggests that the picture was taken after June 18, 1989, when the ruling junta changed the name of the country from Burma to Myanmar. The striking circular letterforms are Burmese characters. (Let"s hope they will never be designated "Myanmarian.")
Here"s what I just learned about the Burmese alphabet at Wikipedia:
It is properly called the Burmese abugida, and the characters are round because straight lines would have ripped the palm leaves on which it was traditionally written. There are 33 consonants, but the last letter in this alphabet "although recognized as a consonant, is actually a vowel," and this secret vowel can furthermore be used to indicate other vowels.
This alphabet reads from left to right, just as English does. There are no spaces between words, but when casually written there are sometimes spaces between phrases. The puctuation is limited to two characters, one or two downward strokes, which serve as a comma and a period, respectively. (This is perhaps not so strange when you consider that in Roman times, Latin was written without worspaces and without punctuation of any kind.)
The Burmese abugida evolved from the Mon script, which has its roots in the Brahmi script of ancient India, which many academics now believe "had indigenous origins, probably from the Indus Valley (Harrapan) script." Which is a way of saying that it probably does not share a common ancestor of European scripts, as had long been believed.
"He was giving orders for a toothpick-case for himself, and till its size, shape, and ornaments were determined, all of which, after examining and debating for a quarter of an hour over every toothpick-case in the shop, were finally arranged by his own inventive fancy, he had no leisure to bestow any other attention on the two ladies, than what was comprised in three or four very broad stares; a kind of notice which served to imprint on Elinor the remembrance of a person and face, of strong, natural, sterling insignificance, though adorned in the first style of fashion."
"Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 1811.
In 1986 I was admitted to the country of Burma with a one-week tourist visa. I quickly teamed up with three other travellers, and we enjoyed an astonishing whirlwind week. This was way back when Burma was called Burma by everyone, before thousands of marchers for democracy were killed in the streets in 1988. This was before tourist restrictions on photography so I was lucky to be allowed to take them freely.
There were very few cars in Burma, and these were all decades old and therefore delightful to the tourist. I also liked the ornamental luggage rack on this one. After taking the picture, I helped these guys push-start it.
"He had expected somehow that Washington would be a scene of great international excitement with diplomats, ambassadors, foreign generals rushing by with eager entourages towards some indistinct place in the city blazing with light, all a-murmur with rumors, great preparations, mighty pronouncements. But it was just a lot of soldiers and sailors and Marines passing in the dusk, and sad girls strolling, and birds singing in the park, and trolleys clanging mournfully across the lowering darkness, and the lights coming on. Something was lost and forgotten, like sunsets vanished, and old names and dust, and the remembrance of history books, Civil War songs, and brown daguerreotype portraits of dead families."
"Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City, 1950.
Thanks to the rebranding of QVS, the cable shopping channel that no one has ever admitted to watching, let alone using, the letter Q is in the news! Here are a few things I learned this week:
The US trademark database reveals 1,971 records with the letter "Q" on its own, in every conceivable category, from clothing and consumer goods to piezoelectric crystals to food products."
"NameWire, "the product naming blog."
"In fact, there are 603 US trademarks either pending or already registered for products and services named "Q," without any embellishment.
And in the past few years, "Q" has actually become a popular substitute for "K." This is partly to make names seem more hip and partly to make them easier to trademark."
"NameWire, "the product naming blog."
"Q is a sexy, cool letter. It"s much better than an L or an A, which are tough to brand."
"Jeff Charney, chief marketing officer for QVC, at Advertising Age.
"We"d really like to own the 17th letter of the alphabet."
"Jeff Charney, chief marketing officer for QVC, at The New York Times.
Is this what it has come to" Am I the only one disturbed by this" We can"t let them take, uh . . . any more of OUR letters!
"And then they lay back with their arms as pillows and looked up at the milky stars and talked.
"You look at those things long enough and you"re knocked out," said Buddy, staring astonishedly at the stars. "They"re so far off, you know""
"What do you expect!"
"I mean they"re so far, so far gone! Deep! You look up there long enough and it"s just like looking into a big hole, you"re afraid you"ll fall in it"like when you drink too much.""
"Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City, 1950.
"As I write you the stomping, rollicking, scintillating, solid, hot, strains of Guy Iturbi Ignacz Lombardo are filling the air. To say his occarino and glackenspiel sections have improved is an understatement."
"Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City, 1950.
From Japan, an amazing collection of vintage American album cover art. And it"s all clickable.
"This slideshow of photographs from 1989 is dedicated to the people of Burma " as they again confront one of the most brutal regimes in the world."
"William Drenttel, at DesignObserver.com.