caw

Letter to Wyoming

2011-09-21T15:39:00.005-04:00

We are friends now, Wyoming, so I feel I can be honest. I thought you were a loser when we first met. You were lonely and vengeful with your wind, your plains like cold, empty bed sheets tucked into snow covered mountains, polka-dotted with ungulates and dead towns.

But then on that coldest day – do you remember? - we boiled water and threw it in the crisp air and it turned to snowflakes and I started to fall for you.

In the dead towns, I met cowboys with their throats wrapped in silk wild rags and on roads where you can drive fast I found steely skies that stretched out into impossible horizons. At the Hobo hot springs I met a man that looked like a Viking, and in the forest I prospected for gold in the glacial streams, and on a ranch I fished snakes out of a canal, and in the mountains I traced petroglyphs with my finger, and everywhere I watched trains trudge across landscapes in endless caravans, and I met people with faces open as the land, soft-spoken as the ready snow, with belt buckles big as the sky.

I ran my hands against your thick seems of coal in the Basin, too, and I have not forgotten your white outs that made it seem like the world was made of cold cotton candy. Also, I’m still not sure about these loud souped-up trucks, dear, and I remember Mathew Shepard and my landlord, who thought I had an attitude problem because she couldn’t pronounce my name. Sometimes, too, the loneliness and the starkness still reign.

This isn’t goodbye, Wyoming. This isn’t a proposition of any sort. I sunned yesterday on granite slabs in a field of blue columbines and now it is September, which means snow, and I feel alright about that. I thought I would let you know just that. That you’re alright, dear.

Caceres, Spain

2011-07-02T16:29:00.002-04:00

Though the birds and their shrill song is present always here, they come out most fully when the sky starts to pinken and the heat gives in to a slight breeze, around 10. They emerge from the holes in the castles and walls, which at this hour are already glowing, and they circle in the sky madly, their sharp little wings like daggers and their vast numbers in the pale sky making it look like a fine fishing net is dancing in the wind above the plaza.

A man with a cane walks across the plaza and looks up at them. A lone crane flies from one roof to another and looks like a massive white airplane striking through the blackness of rapidly circling little swallows. Couples make out all over the place. A man packs a cigarette before lighting it on the steps below the clock. When it gets a little darker, the sky a deeper blue like the blue of tissue paper, and the birds fly close to the buildings, their shadows swoop along the walls as if on mirrors and it looks like there are even more of them than there are.

Uzbekistan: recent archives

2011-06-28T17:01:00.003-04:00

I went to Uzbekistan, but Uzbekistan failed at the internet. I share:

The Motherland tests you in many ways. At the airport , the line to check in is hella long, moving real slow, and it seems like they'll never get through all of us in time. I seek out a security gaurd and he laughs. The plane is delayed nine hours, he says. It takes three to check in my bag and the man checking me in can't answer any of my questions. He writes a number on the back of my ticket and says to call with any inquiries. My dad comes back to pick me up. We drink vodka at a friend's house and eat shashlik. When I call the number a bit later to see if the flight has been further delayed, the message informs me that their office hours are Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm. It is Sunday. Sunday is for relaxing and so I do.

I return to the airport when it starts to obumbrate. I like the swarthy clientele of this airline, the ladies in sparkling head scarves, the plump women and the men in pointy shoes. The blondes will get off in Latvia, the brunettes keep going East. There are a couple of outliers. An American blonde, older, animal print cardigan, shaking head, bobble-like, that makes me think that she is going to Uzbekistan to find herself a husband. Something attitudinal. A young Korean girl with a laptop. And me. I wore my gold necklace but I didn't bring my gold teeth.

Barcelona!

2011-06-27T08:32:00.001-04:00

Clouds in pants dripping with magenta, from the air a landscape as if acid was splashed upon the land and in the burnt splotches it left fields grew, rows of olive trees and orange groves, a woman in all red with red high heels standing in the café car of the train during golden hour and gazing out at an approaching purple dusk and passing small towns like islands in greenery. My favorite thing to do in new places is traverse the lands inside its borders back and forth in various forms of transport and spend long hours walking in its city streets and drinking coffee. I arrived in Barcelona on San Juan, which I had spent in Potosi last year. From the train I could see bonfires on the beaches and the whole city was shaking with fireworks and explosions – the orchestra of fire thinned out but lone detonations echoed late into the night. City of the sea, city of the mountain, city of the fire.

Breadcrumbs

2011-02-08T02:13:00.001-05:00

Women Photographers: What's 30 Under 30 Trying to Say, Exactly?

2011-01-09T12:12:00.004-05:00

I just looked at the photos selected for the 30 Under 30 Women Photographers, put together by Photo Boite. The intro to the exhibit writes, "Photography, whether we like to admit it or not, is by and large a male-dominated arena where the 'looking' is a masculine act, and the subject is feminine, playing the role of 'looked' and admired mainly for their outward appearance. Photography, then, has been a mirror for conventional gender roles in western society."

Sure, duh, but browsing through the small galleries put up for each artist on the site, a selection of work that is supposed to be representative of these women's aesthetic ranges, their subject matter interest, their skill, etc., I'm a little disappointed to see that a large percentage of the photos on the site are, well, the same photo. Artist after artists seems to favor young, beautiful, long-haired models for their shoots (woa, men would never do that!), romantic, sun hazed lighting, flowing skirts and nests of taffeta in fields, orchards, by time-stained windows and rippling water. Haven't we seen all this before? Does the Victorian-era aesthetic need another comeback? And in such force! Some of the photos veer towards the urban, but again, waify girls in tat shops, looking hot and badass - it's like the bad sister that left her good sister in the field to mope. C'mon.

If the idea of singling out women photographers is to give them a chance to show the world how they see the female form in front of the camera, then the implications are worrisome. Just like for men, to many of these female photographers, women apparently are at their best lounging around in sun dappled nooks, looking languorous and pretty. If the idea is just to showcase some talented female photographers, who are underrepresented in the industry, then why choose so many that do work that looks so similar? Of the 30, there are few outliers whose work is noticeably different - Olya Ivanova has what looks like a series of portraits of Russian youths, Jocelyn Allen has a more conceptual series of portraits as part of her portfolio, Aislinn Leggett has what look like historical montages, Nina Cuviller has travel photography - while the rest are stuck on a romantic, some with a slightly absurdist Joel-Peter Witkin-esque twist, aesthetic.

I obviously don't know who submitted and whether different work was overlooked or the whole thing attracted a self-selected group of similar work that doesn't exactly push the envelope in terms of the photographic tradition or the female form. But I do know that there are women out there making photography that, to me, is fresher, more interesting, more exploratory. The Humble Arts Foundation, for example, also puts together an annual exhibit of women photographers where the work is varied, seeking, more thought-provoking, etc., even if most of it doesn't become my favorite, either. It's not that the artists featured in this 30 Under 30 are bad - a lot of the work is clearly done by technically proficient hands and is aesthetically nice - but I'm not sure what it's representative of. Is this a good sampling of what women under 30 are up to in the photography world? I hope not.

Back in Laramie.

2011-01-06T13:28:00.002-05:00

Back in Laramie. On the drive from the airport, Lu said the skies out here are like a Rorschach test. We looked out the windows. This, she said, examining the empty plains, is the opposite of a good restaurant. And then again, later, peering at a brilliant sky that looked like it was reflecting off of smooth rolls of aluminum, its light oozing out of slits between rolls, she said that she could not perceive physicality, only the misery and desperation that the sky seemed to hold. W.G. Sebald, writing of St. Sebolt's miraculous lighting of a fire using icicles, writes, "This story of the burning of the frozen substance of life has, of late, meant much to me, and I wonder now whether inner coldness and desolation may not be the pre-condition for making the world believe, by a kind of fraudulent showmanship, that one's own wretched heart is still aglow."

I slept 7pm to 7am today and when I left the house, I seemed to float between the physicalities of the real world, perceiving but not participating. I felt it a board (bored?) game on which I floated involuntarily. Here, the polite service people always ask questions about your day and constantly I fail to recognize that I am being spoken to, and do not answer. I stay hush on the plains.

New Life Has...

2010-12-20T23:07:00.006-05:00

Old Life Had Summers.

2010-12-20T22:58:00.003-05:00

BadLands, South Dakota

2010-12-20T17:08:00.004-05:00

On Photo Process

2010-12-06T12:58:00.004-05:00

"I have long expressed concern at how a vast majority of Photojournalism is incapable of representing process; whether it be the process leading up to or underpinning the event being covered or the process of assimilation, appropriation and communication of the real by the photographer. Perhaps this has something to do with Photography or the single-frame’s inability to represent time. Perhaps because for journalists objective reality is not only attainable but can manifest itself through the veracity of the lens - the ‘incontrovertible’ photograph. Or perhaps because in process there is no real end product… just a set of propositions."

- Edgar Martins

from How can I see what I see, until I know what I know?

The Nutcracker, Laramie Style

2010-12-05T00:08:00.005-05:00

Ah, Christmas. The roommates have been glugging eggnog, the neighbors have put up their inflatable snow globe on the frosty lawn, and the snow won't stop coming down in Laramie. Too, I prayed to the ballet gods and they delivered: this year is the quadrennial performance of The Nutcracker. The local paper says "this year’s production would continue the resetting of the ballet in 1890s Laramie with new scenic drops and Western-style costumes." I was kind of thinking of act I of this episode of This American Life as I was eagerly rushing over to the theater.

Mostly it wasn't so bad. The backdrop of one act was an over-sized, macro Christmas tree with one ornament that was not immediately identifiable (it looked kind of like a mouse skull), the dancers had trouble landing their pirouettes, Mother Ginger was slinging whiskey atop her hoop skirt, and there was a strange lack of dancing throughout the first act. But in a way it was beautiful because it was clear that every hobby school in town got to participate - the gymnastics school, the ballet school, the choir. Everyone up on stage helping make this once-in-four-years extravaganza as amazing as it could possibly be.

I got to reminiscing about my own Nutcracker days. A. and I used to dance every dance there was. We had to set up our costumes backstage instead of in the actual changing room so we'd have more time to rearrange ourselves during breaks. I did cartwheels when I got nervous. My favorite dances were the Spanish and the Arabian. The Arabian costume resembled Disney's Jazmine's attire, a little bead strewn top, opaque purple underwear and transparent, billowing, chiffon pants. Once, in my changing frenzy, I forgot to put on the opaque underwear and danced the whole thing, to an audience of chuckling Jewish grandmothers and parents, in just my see-through pants.

Back in Laramie: during the Grand Pas de Deux, a ring went off that sounded like the loudest cell phone in the world. Before starting, the ballerinas had done a cute little intro that kindly told us to turn off our phones, so the interruption seemed extra obnoxious. Then more loud ringing. We finally figured that it was probably a fire alarm. People started shuffling out while the curtain drew closed. The ballerinas kept spinning un-assuredly until the curtain completely shut.

Outside, it took the firemen 10 minutes to arrive. Tutu'd girls pulled on leg warmers, the angels in nurse hats stood chatting in a circle, the matrons from act 1 held doors for the exiting audience. K. twirled on the patch of ice we claimed as the firemen finally strode into the non-burning building.

We decided to go home. At home things smelled a little smoky. Turns out C. forgot to turn the oven off.

Winter in Wyoming

2010-11-26T19:13:00.004-05:00

Winter in Wyoming. It's to think about the elements and to marvel at them: I am in awe that you have the power to kill me. The mountains along two-lane highways sit quietly, they breathe softly, heaving. Signs along the road declare entry points to the Overland Trail. The Overland Trail was a stagecoach and wagon route that was an alternative to the Oregon Trail in the early 1800s. Those superhuman ancestors of the West, what do their strong children do now on these prairies that surge into peaks?

At night, in Saratoga, at the Hobo hot springs a man drank milk out of the carton in the steaming pool. He had a paunch and a blonde beard like a Viking. I dreamed his wild-haired progenitors on the flats, trudging stoically in the snowy sea. The next morning small flakes drifted into our room and back at the hot springs they floated into the steam coming off the water and melted mid air. Ice coated thin hairs on exposed body parts and the dusting of icicles on skin made us seem extra fragile, then.

In the woods there were animal tracks. Moose? I kept falling over in the snow shoes and felt my face slowly freeze. The river was frozen, too. L.'s hands froze and he writhed in pain, in the car, as they slowly defrosted. On the drive back to Laramie, everything turned purple.

Expired: Tryin' to be cool and patient

2010-11-07T15:56:00.001-05:00

Cold mornings, days that drag, fickle nights. When the hypnic jerks start up, like full body hiccups, I am thankful. More and more I meet people at peace and am reminded of that possibility - ye of thin skin and hard heart, what is the purpose of the shield and devotion if it is wasted on barren trees and self defense? Instead, I'd like to ride away on elephants, wild horses with accessible manes, independent beasts that soothe with just their regality and perfectly muscled hearts.

Things that wake me (metaphorically): cars that won't start, hoarse laughter (ha!), creaking doors, fallen leaves, rustling of any sort, unsure stares, waiting, waiting, wheelbarrows and bathtubs, indecipherable compliments ("nice elbows, girl"), blunt objects, steely skies.

When I was a child I thought I was in love with a man who wore a gold eagle around his neck. He looked like an outlaw but he was just a hooligan. Sometimes I still feel that he is the original and best and glinting eagles catch my eye like mirrors across mountains. To distract myself (to look for him?) I commit petty crimes (would you say they are not petty?).

What I like about Julio Cortazar is that he writes about nothing and one always feels that he speaks directly to you (about nothing).

Me, My Car and Buffalo.

2010-11-02T05:46:00.003-04:00

Mostly, my room. I've outfitted it with many patterned surface coverings and a buffalo missing three feet with a lighting bolt in his head. He came from Lander, where a Turkish man looked on solemnly as I put him in my car. So then sometimes, I leave. Clyde, my car, accelerates slowly up winding roads and rumbles on in the winds of the open plains where the setting sun looks like the buried tonsil of a throat enclosed by sky and land. When I drive here, fast, I mostly fantasize about things that will never be; the improbability of the openness, the dark shadows of clouds on scoured lands, the stripes of mineral that I squint at to verify, all lend themselves to wandering thoughts, to wandering eyes, to wandering. Sometimes I check my pulse - I think its always the same (under control?) but I forget to count. That's a good sign.

On Time in Bolivia. (Ha! Get it?)

2010-10-01T04:51:00.002-04:00

One day, I met a retired miner sitting, sunning, in the warm splotches of a small plaza.

Where from, he asked. I told him and he wanted to know what time it was there. I told him there was no time difference and he was shocked that it was the same hour, though it's impossibly far away.

In France, he said, the time is different. Is France farther than your home?

Time, I ventured, is set by longitudes, and France is across an entire ocean.

And what time is it in Japan? he wanted to know.

I didn't know, but he kept pressing. And Germany? he asked.

I told him it took me 7 hours to get to Bolivia by plane and he looked astonished. And your family? he asked.

They are there.

He patted me on the shoulder with a knurled hand. Poor girl, you must be so alone.

Memories of Bolivia. i.e. Working on Some Writing.

2010-09-28T01:41:00.003-04:00

I remember my friend screaming after me as I jumped off a moving bus and elegantly puked upon landing. "We will walk from here," he said. I dreamt that I was dying from thirst and when I woke up next afternoon, still wearing gloves, I found a plastic bag full of cooked llama ribs by my bedside. I had llama blood on my cheeks.

In the email, my Ma threatened to buy a ticket to Bolivia that instant if I didn't reappear on the interweb.

I was busy, Ma. I was working.

Jamaican Beef Patties and Large Photographs.

2010-09-12T02:37:00.003-04:00

It sounds like an ongoing massacre beneath me, high pitched hoarse screeching being emitted by a tiny Dachshund named Odie. He screams from the moment his human leaves the house until the moment she returns. I find solace in his persistence, a strange hopefulness in the fact that he doesn't give up his terrible howl. I think about how if I were him, I wouldn't emit a squeak but rather sit in silent horror awaiting her return, digging an escape route, drinking toilet water.

I sit on my porch at night, silently. My grandmother's shawl has many holes in it and I wrap it around my legs like the Bolivian ladies do. I like to imagine how it will be when the roads close and a houseful of strangers cuddles up together by the fireplace and the wind tears holes through our shitty walls. Out here, there are many photos of women out in fields with infants at their teats and a faraway look. I think, sadly, that I would not have been one of them.

I think about home but the idea seems nebulous. When I tell stories I confuse listeners with the geography involved. I wonder if I should just make stuff up. I wonder if I should use less curse words. I wonder if I should open up a corner store where I could sell Jamaican beef patties and large photographs.

South Dakota Photos

2010-08-24T10:40:00.003-04:00

Lately and Not-So-Lately: Photos

2010-08-12T23:31:00.007-04:00

There was Bolivia and now there's Wyoming. In between, there was a lot of eating, swimming, and, believe it or not, positivity. It's hard to convey the condition of physical bursting that I seemed to float in briefly - a vast revelry, a posi-as-fuck attitude of joie de vivre that I am now coming down from heavily, with all of the symptoms of withdrawal intact. Summer and L. and sushi and all of the luxuries of Western-living-after-Bolivia had everything to do with it and in Laramie they are all missing. But: watchu got Laramie? I'm open.

These are photos from the past: Brooklyn, Bolivia, New Jersey, Philadelphia, New York

Happy Aymara New Year!!

2010-06-25T19:53:00.002-04:00

Right under the freshly installed, freshly painted, white cross sat the Association of Elders of Potosi. A boxy woman in full skirts sat at the head of the bonfire and ceremonially gifted a crate of beer to the attendees on behalf of the Association. Attendees - in ponchos, down jackets, hats with skull graphics - answered cell phones between cups. We were on top of a mountain overlooking a sprawling, orange-lit Potosi, celebrating the Aymara New Year - year 5518.

Earlier, I had sat through a slew of power point presentations regarding the new year and the traditions that surround it. Mostly I confirmed for myself that the Bolivian education system needs to re-evaluate itself hard. The tourism students, all in ponchos and knit hats, read off their slides then slipped into the back room to drink. Their professor, Jaguar, appeared intermittently, shhh-ed them, and made garrulous rounds taking shots from each cup within peripheral vision.

After they'd finished we made languid passes towards the mountain, via the liquor store; at each hilly corner we seemed to lose members of the crew and replace them with canines. Jaguar skipped around like a speeding fairy picking flowers and each time he talked he opened his mouth wide, smiling, and spit chewed coca bits at you excitedly. When the crew - many drunks, one blind man, and one man with a broken knee - finally reached summit, we found four bonfires and one boombox.

The only thing I'd been told about this night was that it'd be cold and that at sunrise the masses would raise their hands up high and twinkle their fingers at the sun. The latter did not seem to justify the former, especially with the increasingly intoxicated Crew, so I wandered off to the other bonfires and found something completely unexpected.

Quiet groups - some of them in hats identifying them as Aymara (vs. Quechua), others in clothes that identified them as from the countryside (vs. Potosi, the city), yet others in imported American gear from, perhaps, the '90s - sat around fires drinking coffee, chewing coca, and meticulously preparing offerings for the new year. Children wrapped in blankets dozed by the fire and women with bare legs sat regally and gazed into the flames.

Potosi is mostly Quechua, and though it's been dubbed the more generalized Andean New Year, I've been told it's return as a national holiday is the "whim of Evo," an Aymara and Bolivia's president. The fact that the Association of Elders set up shop under the cross and were blessing it that night further confused things - as far as I understood, the revalorization of this date was another anti-Colonial, and hence anti-Christian, poke by Evo. Further, while the new year on June 21st was made into a national holiday, San Juan, a Christian holiday which falls on June 23 and is traditionally celebrated with bonfires in Bolivia, was effectively banned when bonfires were made illegal due to "environmental hazards." Do you feel relieved to not have to celebrate San Juan or sad to lose the tradition? one man was asked. Relieved, he said, because it's a foreign holiday that's been forced on us. (He also told me that he's no longer a Catholic, but not because the Catholic church kind of sucks, but rather because he got kicked out for wearing an Iron Maiden t-shirt to mass...which I guess is one of the things that makes it kind of suck.) Never mind that he's the umpteenth generation to celebrate San Juan of free will and, probably, secularly. In fact, the celebration of the New Year had a relatively small turn out and in addition to the Crew of tourism students I spotted some tourists (including the blondest man I've ever met, manning a huge Chacana (Andean) flag) and met a bunch of professors and intellectual types who probably know about the New Years traditions from studies and were helping the population remember this thing of their collective (or not, since Potosi is largely Quechua?) past.

My personal goal for the night was to not get wasted. This has been a goal I had repeatedly failed at since arriving in Potosi some months ago to work on a photo documentary about the mining industry, but one I continued to set for myself every time I ventured out of the house. What makes this incredibly difficult to succeed at is the fact that the drink of choice here is Ceibo, a 96% alcohol diluted with some water often, soda occasionally, and hot, sweet tea when you're expected to stay up all night, apparently. Also this: you are handed cup-fulls of this poison by friends and strangers alike and they watch, threateningly, for you to down it before grinning at you lopsidedly. These quiet groups seem promising! I thought. And these Elders are positively serene under the cross and the stars, sipping beer instead of rubbing alcohol!

By 3am one of the hillsides, dotted with patches of dry grass sprouting like mohawks on the bald mount, was aflame. Silhouettes wandered between the flames in a smoke screen; this incredibly bad idea was incredibly beautiful to look at, framed as it was by a star heavy sky and a twinkling sea of orange, below. By 4am the ever intrepid lady entrepreneurs of Potosi had made their way up and set up gas stoves with steamy venom, bulbous porridge and sweltering pots large enough to fit small children. Others unfolded tables full of cigarettes and candy. By 5am at least one member of the Crew was slumped against a rock wall, folded into himself like a hedgehog, and unconscious. Echoes of the first band approached from somewhere below and their sound climbed towards us, an invisible wave of drums and zampoñas lapping at the darkness unhurriedly until they emerged into the light of the multiplied campfires. By 5:30 buses brought the hoards.

The Elders, up at the cross and looking down on the growing swarm below, were starting to prepare their offering (and in a surprising turn of technology, using a level tool to do so.) They had slung a pretty bag of coca leaves around my neck, as a thank you card for visiting, and a beer in my hand. I think I mumbled, "I'll be back," before heading down but the clever Elders knew better.

The quiet groups were no more. They had invigorated, stood up, acquired bands, and were now stomping and dancing around their fires energetically. One man grabbed me and we went round and round the fire until he released me and another rewarded me with, of course, steamy Ceibo. Groups with chunky flutes and hirsute drums and matching, embroidered tops played while maintaining a circular, slow stepped procession around a smoky fire fed by aromatic branches. Another band was all zampoñas and sang in bass unison about Bolivia's natural wonders. A man and woman huddled over a spread of offerings dipping a carnation into a dark liquid and dabbing the spread hurriedly with it, as if time was running out. And time was running out! To me, the bands seemed to play faster, to walk around in their circles faster, to wave their flags more briskly as the horizon started to bleed light hues into the overwhelming canopy of cobalt. When the sun appeared above the horizon everyone did raise their hands and twinkled their fingers at the blinding disk but it wasn't at all cheesy and I couldn't help but grin stupidly at the gold lit fingers that undulated all around me. (The pessimist in me cowered [briefly] at the sight of the rays and was maybe going to disintegrate but found refuge in the dark annals of my most important organ.) And, I wasn't wasted!

Meet don Adrian

2010-06-08T17:51:00.003-04:00

Corpus Christi Gets My Vote

2010-06-03T20:06:00.003-04:00

Corpus Christi in Potosi is the best day EVER. I went to the market that had materialized suddenly along the streets around the University and walked around grinning at the piles of fruit that sat on both sides of the street. I ate a delicious fish blackened by smoke, fresh off the grill, served with limon and camote, and this felt so good that I went along skipping. I bought grapefruit, oranges, kiwi, strawberries and peanuts. In my enthusiasm and excitement at seeing fruit in Potosi (!!!) I came home with probably 10 kilos of it. I also sampled tahu tahuas, which is a fried dough popular here, and got some sopapillas, which is a cookie made of two cookies glued together with a sweet, thin jam. I ran into J., who noted how happy I looked, and met a French man who actually did a double take when I passed by him and called after me to introduce himself; I think this, also, because oh how smiley I was. Who knew a delicious fish could be so life changing?! Oh yeah, I did.

The Mine is Fea: Meet Carlos and Carlos

2010-05-31T15:05:00.006-04:00

Meet Carlos:

"You know," says Carlos, "I never used to work with clothes on." He's handsome, though downtrodden, and I could see why every tourist Wily brought down to where his group, The Sanchez, worked took home a picture of his shirtless torso glistening in the orange light of the work lamps. The Señoras palliris that we're sitting with squint against the sun and one of them asks, "What was it?"

"Gas," says Carlos, "I saw a ton of colors, all matter of colors, and then I don't remember."

He was dragged out of the depths of the mine by his legs about a year and a half ago, by another miner; dead, according to him, but I don't know if that means he was unconscious or really dead or...After recovering he got a post with the government, guarding the now-defunct COMIBOL processing plant, where he and two other men patrol the massive skeleton of what was Bolivia's mining glory during the short run of reform and nationalization from 1952 to 1985, when mineral prices crashed and the plant shut down permanently.

"We communicate with whistles," he says of the other two men. And later, walking in the sun dappled ruins of the various building he shows me parts that have been robbed and insists, with perhaps misinformed Bolivian optimism, that the plant could definitely work and still has up to date technology - American and Czech! - to process the low-grade mineral coming out of the mines now. The plant itself is not unlike sugar processing mills and gypsum factories I've snuck into - rubber transport belts running between corrugated sided building with missing wooden planks in the floors and stopped machinery, some with remnants of the last load that ever made its way through it, still present.

In the guards' office, he brings me samples of the minerals from the Cerro Rico and we talk about math under posters of callipygian white women. He scribbles a formula on an index card for me - 10√hxd - and draws an arc with twelve little crosses, indicating where the dynamite would go around a vein, to open it up. The accident made him more courageous, he says, but the new job is asegurado; he's salaried and he gets retirement pension. Too, he doesn't explain what long term damage the accident has had on him but says, meekly, "This job, pure laziness. Now, when my wife asks me to help her bring water 'I'm mal [bad]', I tell her."

Meet another Carlos:

Outside of church, Carlos Sanchez Flores' mother stood in the middle of an intersection directing service goers to the rented salon up the way. She wore all black, full knee-length skirts and slips blowing up to reveal that her stockings, too, ended at her knee, and the wind caught the length of thin fabric she had wrapped around her head and torso and floated it, a gracefully amorphous but threatening cape that enveloped and thrashed at each person that approached her. The sky was a soft, voluminous grey and the leaves in the courtyard of the church rustled irregularly. I watched, mesmerized, until Don Juan led me away by the elbow, whispering softly, "And, Señorita, how are you this morning? How cold! No? Did you know the friend?"

Carlos Sanchez Flores died a year ago, of gas in the mine, and there was going to be a big party. "It is because his soul has gone lightly, now," explains Marlene. In a turquoise, scrubbed room, we sat along the walls and received his mother and sisters, who walked around handing out cigarettes and distributing palm-fulls of coca leaves. A picture of Carlos along with all necessary libations plus candles stood at one end of the room and his mother sat by it, smoking, backlit by the engraved windows, and proclaimed definitively through the fog, "Drink!"

Don Juan, cat-like, exhaled at me, "Come back at 5. We will dance."

In the evening, the family had changed out of their black grieving clothing, which they had worn all year, and sat in a line against the wall with confetti in their hair, receiving guests. Guests came, kissed them on each cheek and pinned bills on the lapels and scarves of chosen members. Speakers as big as dog houses were piled up on both sides of the room and a live band recreated songs that would have sounded much better had they been played from a CD.

Drinks were first brought out on little fish trays; each tray contained a rum mixed drink, a sangani glass and two small shots of 96% alcohol mixed with something. Then waiters made their rounds with beer. Then more fish trays. Then large silver trays of just shots with another waiter trailing behind with a tray to deposit empties. Mother and sisters walked around restlessly, foreheads wrinkled with worry, waving both hands palms up, as if soliciting louder applause, and pleading, "Drink, drink!" Bottles appeared and their owners, too, made rounds distributing shots, waiting for you to take yours before ambling along. "I am sick," I tried to explain. "This is 96% alcohol. It will cure you," they insisted.

The dancing was getting sloppier and sloppier and I sat through a 15 minute "conversation" about Arnold Schwarzenegger; the only reason I knew it was still about Schwarzenegger was because the monologuer paused intermittently and slurred out, "Schwaaaaaaarzeneggerrrrr, you knoooow him?" as clearly as he could before continuing on with it. When I started getting aggravated, Johnny, ever helpful, leaned over and said, "Here, one must get along with everyone."

Carlos, I'm told, was rich and also powerful within the mine. The group of which he was the boss, The Sanchez, was the same one that the other Carlos worked in. Three other men, too, died last year from the same group and it disbanded, fearing the ominous (and carried out) deaths of fellow miners. The deaths, some say, were inevitable. With mineral prices at record highs in decades, the miners were working the veins 24-hours a day - day and night shifts - and drinking heavily (see above) in their off time. The mine never ventilated, allowing gas to accumulate, and their bodies never rested, lessening any chance of withstanding an onslaught of gas. Too, The Sanchez worked deep down, aggravating all of the above conditions until they fulfilled fatally, four times over.

There were no speeches and little mention of why we were there. There was a lot of drinking and dancing and then, again in our seats lining the turquoise walls, we ate pig and potatoes with our fingers from overloaded bowls while discussing sports.

"Asi es la mineria," Don Juan had said when he led me away that morning, which seemed melancholy, at best. But Johnny, drunk in a house discotheque later that night, explained: "I do not cry always (though his eyes were moist under the black lights), but here, it hurts very much," he said, pointing to his heart and making a movement with his hands as if his heart was vomiting. Then he grabbed me and we danced a strange stomping dance to a song from Oruro.

Snowy Days Turn to Milky Skies: Uyuni, Bolivia

2010-05-17T21:03:00.005-04:00

Meet don Pablo

2010-05-15T11:52:00.007-04:00

don Pablo looking at mineral with Pablito in the background.

Don Pablo, about 300-pounds heavy just up top with short skinny legs and tiny feet, seemed grotesque at first. When I met him he was sitting, his little legs splayed open to leave room for his three-tiered belly, and chewing coca. Leaves stuck to his lips and green saliva flew out whenever he opened his mouth to let out an enthusiastic chortle.

"Come," he said.

I followed him into the tunnel. He lumbered along unhurriedly and then turned off sharply and began to climb. His giant behind loomed as I followed him up a narrow and steep rabbit hole that squeezed around him as if he was carving it as he went. It ended in a wooden slatted door. Everything beyond the door seemed like a kingdom of sorts: dank, narrow corridors that opened up into high chambers, recently opened, small nooks with arched entryways, serpentine passages between levels and amongst galleries, glittering veins snaking through dull grey rock, piles of angled debris blocking passage, heaps of mineral awaiting transport, glittering with silver in the absolute darkness every time my circle of blue light landed on them.

Don Pablo led me through his Coliseum, as he called it, and pointed out all of the new veins; veins waiting to be opened and taken, veins of chocolate, and la negra, veins of pure silver that are handled manually and sold separately in small sacks, veins of complejo - silver and zinc - that are often signaled by the presence of pyrite. Some appear as thin rivulets meeting into wider streams in the damp rock, others like oxidized banners unfurling widely on the roofs of don Pablo's galleries. He throws a small bottle-cap-full of 96% booze on a new vein, to bless it, and admires it with a sort of ache in his voice, "Pucha, que linda es la plata." With him I stand and admire the brilliance of the vein, like the wing of a bird caught still by a gray mass. I think, for the first time, I understand the greed of a prospector, the avaricious eye that sparks at the glint of mineral and that which it promises. Pucha, que linda es la plata. And que fea, too.
Orphaned at age 10, don Pablo began working in the mines with an uncle the same year. Now 50, he has ten kids of his own, the "black sheep" of which, Pablito, 16, works alongside him.

don Pablo, left, and Pablito.

Yesterday, don Pablo went to the doctor.

"You're healthy," the doctor told him.

"Pucha," says done Pablo, "at this rate I'll never retire."

The sector he currently works was worked by COMIBOL, the Bolivian Mining Corporation, when the mines were nationalized, between 1952 and the 1980s. "People told me there's nothing left here," he says, "but I know there is." He perforates to the east and west with Chinese-made pneumatic drills, looking for the veins that run north-south. As we're standing on the top level of his cave, admiring veins, explosions start to go off, like heavy objects falling far away. He counts 16 detonations and then it goes quiet again.

"What if one doesn't go off?" I ask him.

"You come back in 24 hours."

"And?"

He sort of half-shrugs and leads me to another vein. "What I need is peons," he says. "There's too much work." He needs money for explosives, too, so he can release the veins he keeps showing me.

When we're sitting, resting, he says: "What I really wanted to do was be a veterinarian."

Doing South America

2010-05-08T19:55:00.004-04:00

In any bus along one of the prime backpacking routes of South America or at any [reputable] hostel it is possible to overhear the same conversation taking place between different people.

"Where are you from?"
"..."
"Have you done Machu Picchu yet?"
"Yes. Have you done the Salar de Uyuni."
"Oh yes, it was great. Next I will do Buenos Aires. And you?"
"Oh, I will do Sucre."

The places, of course, can be substituted, but the doing remains. This was something I noticed last time I was on the continent but it has become glaring now, as I live it up in a true-blood tourist hostel in Potosi, Bolivia. The syntax bothers me because in the context of said travel the varied incantations of to do are fully loaded. In the dictionary to do is defined as 1. to perform, 2. to execute, 3. to accomplish, but two additional uses come to mind: to do the things on a checklist, firstly, and to do, as in to fuck, secondly. By substituting said meanings, the conversations sound like this:

"Have you fucked Machu Picchu yet?"
"Yes. Have you fucked the Salar de Uyuni?"
"Oh yes, it was great. Next I will check off Buenos Aires from my list. And you?"
"Oh, I will check off Sucre."

As one moves along the Gringo Trail checking off ruins and charming towns from the list, having, in a sense, one-night stands with the dots on the map without investing so much as some devalued pesos, one really is doing South America. What makes this salient in South America is, of course, its unshakeable Colonial past, during which Europeans came and, for the first time, did America. They came and they fucked it: they fucked America's women, fucked up America's natural resources and, ultimately, fucked over a continent and its peoples, leaving this legacy to this day.

Now, gringos are coming back in hoards for more - and why not, there is much to see. But can we please, with history books at our disposal, not do America this time?

No Llores Por Mi Amor...Pichincha Por Siempre!!!

2010-05-07T14:45:00.001-04:00

I was all depressed because it took me about 45 minutes to send an email with a couple of measly attachments and my Ma was chatting me up about food the whole time, too. Want to know what I ate today? Bread with instant coffee in the morning and in the afternoon a plate of pasta with pieces of bacon and a supposedly creamy sauce that tasted vaguely like chewing on wool blankets. A culinary delight, the altiplano! The whole time marching bands were parading past the front door, too, and explosives going off all around the city. As soon as the labored email went through I went out to see what was going on; cold, walking around a city crying fresh streams of piss down it slippery sidewalks, dynamite galore and accompanying car security alarms with each detonation, I assumed that it was a continuation of the morning marches.

Not so. It was the youths!

The plaza was completely packed with short, psyched students in various states of booziness and jumpiness. There were two marching bands at opposing sides of the plaza, one in full military uniform. At some point one band played "Happy Birthday," which was a little confusing, but then the military band took over and the plaza EXPLODED. At first the congealed mass of black heads bobbed up and down in agreed-upon but discordant enthusiasm but quickly the mass rearranged itself, kind of like a Transformer, into smaller circles. Pouring little cups while jumping and singing and waving t-shirts emblazoned with Pichincha, each circle would take turns doing a chant, something that rhymed Pichincha with Papa - you get the sentiment - and ending in a high whistle.

Some belated background: Pichincha is one of the oldest public schools in Potosi and one of the few public schools that's considered decent, on the level of private schools. It is its anniversary, and like an anniversary in South America, it is celebrated a full.

Last night was exciting - being 16 and psyched and a little tipsy is a universal daydream, or as C. calls it, the YouthFunBoat. It's the kind of thing oldheads like to attend; they make their way around the plaza slapping young men on their backs and congratulating them on being young. But then today, the streets washed down after last night's festivities and urine, the whole city has been lining up to see the parades - nonstop parading with nonstop marching bands.

Is it because Bolivia has such a military infused history? Nonstop, bombastically formalized parades on a big anniversary, fine. But to a lesser extent, marching bands and parades are ubiquitous always - the people breathe to the rhythm of the drumline.

Work, Collapse Or No Collapse

2010-05-07T14:31:00.006-04:00

Bright and early up at the mine, I arrived at some arguments and then a swift exodus down the mount. Where to? I asked Felipe, running alongside him. A la marcha. Duh.

Some things I forgot about Bolivia:

1. There are marches always, for every reason and by every constituency.
2. The toilet paper is pink.
3. Marching bands are ubiquitous and appreciated always.

Yesterday, when I was at the mine, the heads of all of the co-ops were meeting. They must have decided about this march then, because when Felipe and I ran down to the miners market, where people were lining up, the city was already a little paralyzed and totally surprised but the mass of miners.

Today's march had to do with the [potential] closing of the Cerro Rico, the mountain that supports all of the co-ops in Potosi. Since 2008, the State has been attempting to carry out a geological study of the mountain to investigate its condition. 500 years of haphazard, unplanned and intense mining has left the perfectly conical hill collapsing into itself under the weight of its tailings. The profile of the mountain, cherished to the point of being illuminated every night by white lights dotting its mirrored slopes, is losing its perfect symmetry and smooth, unnatural looking silhouette. Even from when I was here about three years ago, the mountain looks different - sunken, ragged.

The problem, historically and to an extent even now, is that miners working inside the Cerro Rico did not plan or coordinate it exploitation. They simply followed the veins with their hammers, chiseling away supports and throwing dynamite at the rock without wondering who was doing the same below or above them. The result is a jumbled anthill of shafts, unmapped and unsustainable.

The study was terminated before completion due to lack of funds. Some insist that funds have nothing to do with it; Evo Morales, who in his second bid for President was supported by the wealthy miners of Potosi (and elsewhere), is just doing a favor to this constituency, they say. If the study is completed, it will almost inevitably show that the Cerro Rico mines are dangerous, in risk of collapsing, and should not be mined any further. This is not something the mine owners want to hear. Neither is it something the actual miners can hear, what with their limited options for work outside of the mine. So collapse or no collapse, work must go on.

The miners filled the narrow streets with bodies and posters. Being miners, they also brought dynamite and detonated it along with loud fireworks as the walked. The only warning I ever saw was the men putting their fingers to their ears, in anticipation of the explosion. I walked alongside, taking pictures. Every time I brought out my huge camera the miners would unfailingly yell, "Tiro a la choca!" which translates roughly as Throw some dynamite at the white girl! When two professional-looking types crossed the marching line, with shined, matching leather briefcases in hand, there was an uproar and a man chased them down the street with a stick of dynamite.

At the plaza, speeches and ice cream. I wrote in my proposal that the mine is close to its end and this may be the last generation to mine it, but I didn't really believe it. I mean, it's close, I thought, but not imminently so. But here, from day one, its doom is all over the place, hanging over the city and talked about constantly. For example, all of the miners I see are older - younger men don't go into the mines now because there is no future there. A mining museum has opened in a defunct shaft. The palliris, women who comb the tailings for any leftover mineral that the miners left behind, are few and those that remain are ancient. A processing center, opened in 2009, is processing the tailings, not even buying new ore. And on and on.

So the question is, will the government find funds and balls to finish the study? Will it then find means to make work for the 10,000 miners that currently work in the Cerro Rico?

I'm in Potosi, yo!

2010-05-04T21:48:00.013-04:00

From the beginning?

Lima:
5pm traffic in Lima is the worst. My cab driver, one pant leg rolled fastidiously up to his thigh, maneuvered slowly between cars, street-sellers (need an atlas, book on dinosaurs, cell phone charger, snacks? Shop while you're in traffic!) and teenagers to where all the separate bus terminals for each company are concentrated, in La Victoria. Lima-to-Cusco-hour had passed so he took me to a "secure hostel" nearby, "the only secure one in this neighborhood, which is not so good." Thanks, dude! I overpaid at the counter and spent all night and morning listening to people have sex while reclining against my own mirrored headboard, watching bad movies. The securest hostel in town provides condoms along with packets of shampoo and soap.

The Bus:
Few folks have cars so if you want to get somewhere you take a bus. Everyone takes the bus - the lady with the ton of bags and babies, the man with the large mustache, the tourists, the soldiers. Now the buses have stewardesses and security videos like the airplanes and class difference can now be recognized by how far the seat in your bus reclines. You cannot, however, take a poo on the bus. The stewardess on the PA system says, "Please, ladies and gentlemen, remember that the bus's hygiene equipments is only for urinating. If you have other needs please inform me and we will make other arrangements." Not that I do that or anything, because I'm a lady.

Cusco:
Firstly, it looks like this:

I dare you to criticize my love of it now.

All the hippies are always talking about "Cusco's magic," which I will not recognize here, but the city's got damn good light. It's all colonial building, with giant Inca-built walls, and clay roofs that are veritably luminescent in the morning and golden hours. At night, the plaza glows with orange light, reflecting off the grey, smoothed stones that line the plaza. Above the city, eucalyptus and pine grow, almost exclusively, so it smells good, too. C., who's an architect, says what makes it so beautiful is the fifth dimension. When we evaluate a building or buildings amassed together we judge by what we can see, which is usually, at its most basic, the four walls or sides of a structure and their intra-play with each other and interplay with their surroundings. Hilly places, like Valparaiso and Cusco, let a viewer see the fifth wall - the roof. And in Cusco, the roofs are like a rippling, orange sea of ceramic tile bobbing with the height of houses and hills.

It's a strange place. Traveling women are always bringing home husbands and babies from Cusco while local men who don't make it abroad seem to become drug addicts, booze hounds, hippies or a combination of the three. I'm not sure what happens to the women because my interaction with them has been limited to a boozy lady hippy and my Peruvian Ma, who defies all categories. Its mysticism also manifests itself in faux-shamanism; this I wrote about once and will post shortly. More than anything, though, Cusco is almost defined by its tourism. When Machu Picchu closed due to massive rainfall in January, the entire city shut down, forcing hundreds into unpaid "vacations," because it was so empty. Tourists often turn into denizens, about which I also wrote once, and maybe will post as well. While everyone kind of does their own thing during the day, at night the main plaza, orange and glowing, like I said, is ambushed by fun-seekers. If you are white or at least foreign-looking, young Peruvians will chase you around the plaza with flyers offering "free drink, meess, free drink" and asking "where you from, meess, Efrance?" The same electronic remixes will blare from intricately carved balcony windows around the plaza, young children will offer you cigarettes at 2am, a Peruvian will ask you for your email address after you refuse to dance with him, another Peruvian will deny you entrance into his club because you are trying to bring in a brown friend (i.e. Peruvian) rather than a white one, some ladies will inevitably dance on the bar for the first time in their lives (omg, travel is so crazy, guys!), and when the sun starts to rise there will be a drunk-burger exodus. Sometimes you'll get something stolen or get beaten by the cops or go to a metal bar or campfire but mostly this will repeat every night. I think I'm over that part of Cusco, but I did manage to drink it up amply regardless.

my Peru ma:

My First Bullfight:
It may be because there are not enough bulls to go around or because Peru retains an assiduous amateurishness when copying allochthonous cultures, but here, in Cusco, they do not kill the bulls during the running of the bulls. They do, however, send subtly effeminate macho men and shy macha girls into the ring with red and fuchsia capes to piss the bulls off and make them charge at the toreros with salivating menace. It is so exhilarating. I kept forgetting to breath and to drink my beer and to mind my manners. Too, for the first time, I experienced the thrill of machismo rather than being disgusted by it. A regality, of sorts, a presence unnervingly imperial, but innately so - the posture, stance, wide arc of arm movements, deep bows, terrifying yet fearless confrontations with the beasts. I kept staring down an Argentine torero so hard that C. made me go talk to him and G. bowed profoundly and kissed my hand upon introduction. Just like a torero, right?!

A 16-year-old torero:

After the bulls get tucked back into the truck, the people dance!

Hello, Bolivia:
I dreaded it. I mean, it's just such a mess. I took a bus from Cusco to La Paz - about 400 miles - and it took 13 hours. I peed behind a smelly adobe house mid-way with the stars hanging heavy and the exhaust, even out in the country, ripe. Immigration was a cement room with graffiti. "Immigration" was misspelled. At around 9am, dust creeping through the shut windows into the bus, we veered off the paved road and on to a dry, trash-strewn plain with oases of brown puddles. For the next two hours, approaching the largest city in the country, with a population of about 1 million, we, along with many other vehicles, maneuvered the plain at the alarming speed of about 15mph. It's like if one had to approach New York through the marshes. The bus would tip deeply at bumps and get stuck in puddles and have to back up at traffic jams (traffic on the plain!!). I was kind of hoping the bus, full of gringos, was just detouring to see what they could get out of us. Nope, that's just how you get to La Paz.

Aaaaand I'm here! Potosi:
I'm here to shoot photos of miners of the Cerro Rico, Rich Hill. Sitting in my room earlier, I kept hearing explosions and gun shots. It didn't seem odd until I became conscious of it and then it was like, "I'm hearing explosions and gun shots!"

"Oh, there's a march," says the Boliviana doing laundry. Of course.

May 1st just passed and the entirety of salaried Bolivia is currently on strike. The factory workers are 8 days deep into their hunger strike and some other workers are literally sewing their lips shut. The problem: the yearly salary increase this year, as mandated by Morales, is only 5%, which workers say does not make their unlivable wages any more livable.

I rushed out to see what was going on and found a bunch of hard hats amid smoke. Fuck! I'm here to shoot working miners and the miners are on strike. "We will not back down," said the man on the megaphone.

Turns out, though, Potosi is still in commission. The reason? Oh, because salary increases don't apply here - there are no salaries! (Here, miners either make commission or are given a day where they work for themselves rather than their boss or co-op.) The marching miners were from the Porco mine, which is Swiss (I think, might be Swedish) operated and does provide salaries. Good thing you're already screwed to the max, Potosi.

Have You Heard About Wyoming?

2010-04-15T19:41:00.006-04:00

Three days in Wyoming and my head was like a racquetball chamber, brain all bruised from the solid volleys of what-ifs and why-nots running amok indoors. On the airplane back to Philly Have You Heard About The Morgans came on. I put on the headphones to avoid the too-smiley dude sitting next to me and turns out the movie is about an uber-NY couple who gets sent to Wyoming by the witness protection program. Prof. at U of Wyoming says, "I like the idea of advertising UW as the MFA program most like witness protection. That works for me." The clear, pink sky was somehow full of turbulence inducing clouds and I just kept laughing to myself. I'm going to be like Sarah Jessica Parker, going for jogs in Wyoming with bear spray in hand. Back home, my dog had a seizure, my Dad shat all over my MFA dreams (they're pretty silly, I admit), and my camera finally arrived. Tomorrow, thunderstorms and margaritas with the Wild Ones.

Printing Press Street: Lima, Peru

2010-03-28T20:53:00.003-04:00

In the very few days I spent in Lima, I managed to wander along narrow streets into a passageway of crumbling Colonial buildings. It may have been an "area where I should not have been," though at this point it probably only exists in my personal record. In my memory, which now houses the images of that small street as a series of still photographs, the street did not have street lamps, the sky was a velvety, cobalt blue and every door was only slightly ajar, cracked and carved wooden portals sitting uncomfortably on their hinges. The whole street hummed with presses. Lima tends to be organized by sector - here is the cake street, where you can purchase a cake to suit your needs, here is the shoe shop street, where you can fix your soles at any one of 50 vendors lining it, here is the weird cardboard-and-tissue-paper party decorations street, etc. This, I gather, was Printing Press Street.

I had just landed in Lima for the first time and Printing Press Street was solidly romanticized by me in the ten or so minutes it took to traverse that alley through cabs and pedestrians. For a word nerd like me, wandering down a back-way where every single doorway led to a giant machine, purring, and the scent of ink and paper wafted out of busted doorways that had probably been carved hundreds of years ago was maddeningly enticing. Nevermind that most of what I saw being printed were [gaudily designed] advertising posters, pamphlets and leafleting sundries.

I didn't yet know about Peru's publishing piracy problem at that point. Daniel Alarcon writes about the absurd facts of said industry - as large as, if not bigger than the official publishing industry of Peru - here. Learning about all this in retrospect is vaguely amusing, impressive and depressing simultaneously, but experiencing it was maddening. As Alarcon points out in the Granta piece, book stores are hard to come by. Before taking off for Iquitos by boat from Pucallpa, I ran around looking for books for the week long trip and did not find a single book store in the entire town. When I had finally given up, reclining in my leopard-print hammock on the boat, a man came by hawking pamphlets and reading materials "to help you sleep." I should have looked for book sellers instead of book stores, apparently. Alarcon also points out that pirates, not bound by publishers' rules, contracts, or moral obligations to the writers, take certain liberties. The most impressive of these, for me, is the power of abridging. Throughout Bolivia, for example, there are book stores and stalls full of pamphlets that look like children's coloring books but are in fact abridged versions of books like Les Miserables and Three Musketeers and The Complete Aesop's' Fables [abridged] - thick books twiddled down to a few breviloquent pages. They all come from Peru.

So I wonder, now, about Printing Press Street. Was it the heart of the illegal publishing industry, pushing posters by day and switching to Don Quijote (a most popular street book throughout South America) reprints by night? The plan is to find out.

Lately

2010-03-28T12:57:00.010-04:00

A Conflict with Geography (Natural and Man Made)

2010-03-12T01:21:00.004-05:00

So malleable am I to the height of the skies and mountains, to the proximity of seas and buildings splayed out like a handful of jacks, that my attention seems to linger on maps, physical, more than maps, otherwise (cultural?). I knew, for example, that Valparaiso would be the Queen – Chris Marker showed me steps looking out to sea, neighborhoods melted over hillsides. And I knew Iruya would be the Gem – its white washed church pierces the sky as a culmination of the winding Route 9 after it has led you past Purmamarca, and Maimara, Tilcara, its mountainside cemetery, and my favorite, Humahuaca, which sounds like wisps of smoke when you say it out loud. New York, too, and Buenos Aires, flat, by water, lit up eternally in the dark – tiny lights like bioluminescent Dinoflagellates in the city sea. Scraggly Maine, salt-crusted, Cusco sunk in eucalyptus trees, Chimgan, snow-capped with icy streams in teal, Pittsburgh stitched together with iron bridges and smoothed by vines running down its hills.

What’s it like here? then is a superfluous question. I see the river, the bridges, the slanted layers of sedimentary beds jutting out in lines only to crumble before they get too far, the buildings dusty and not tall enough, the mounts somehow unspectacular, streets like threads weltering steeply; I get lost and am afraid of driving on them but keep pressing the gas so I don’t sink backwards. It’s un-extraordinary, which is not unusual, but years here would be ___________.

Little Guy Goes To Heaven

2010-03-03T23:59:00.006-05:00

I came home today to find a little mouse – all wet except his head which made it seem un-proportionately large – dying in my kitchen sink. Little Guy was slumped against the side of the drain, heaving at times and then falling still, his slick fur vaguely pinkish, as if blood had been washed off.

I tried to get Little Guy to crawl into a container so I could bring him down the stairs and feed him to the many cats that patrol Quincy St. but he was too weak to climb out of the drain. Ever helpful, I was going to assist but thought perhaps Little Guy had been poisoned by one of the many powders inconspicuously lining the edges of every cabinet and corner of our kitchen. This could kill the cats! I thought. Unlikely, I know, but still, Not me! My cat-lady friends would disown me and the remainder of my days would be haunted by the sassy felines of youtube. My second best plan was to nurse Little Guy back to life. I stood for a solid five minutes leaning over the sink and asking him what he thought of the idea. Little Guy’s breathing was becoming less and less perceptible and finally I had to admit that he probably wasn’t going to pull through. Still, what to do?

It seemed incomparably cruel to flush Little Guy down the toilet or put him in the trash (remember people, disposal methods in Brooklyn are a bit limited) as he lay suffering, so I finally decided I would let him breath his last in peace and then I would do the disposing, with Little Guy blissfully unaware of his inglorious end. I picked him up by his tail, put him in a box on the windowsill, turned on some music and started cooking. The whole time I’m feeling kind of uneasy with the slow yet impending doom of Little Guy on the sill and the apartment is eerily quiet and cold and still. At some point Little Guy II emerges out of the stove and goes exploring while I’m standing there going, “Hey buddy, what’s the deal, aren’t you scared of me?!” I finally make a move to get at him and he runs around my pot of boiling water, singes his fur, and makes a getaway. It smells, undoubtedly, of an impending mouse revolt in apt. 285.

Soon after, my roommate comes home and I laboriously relay the entire tale to her. She picks up the box with Little Guy, goes straight for the bathroom, and flushes him. “I think he said, ‘Thank you.’” she says.

The Wha of Thomas Pynchon

2010-02-25T00:24:00.009-05:00

The best thing so far in Thomas Pynchon's V. is his use of "wha." It's not that the book is bad, it's that the "wha" is so good. V. is made up of this consistent, energetic mad dashery where it seems that at any time quaintly-named characters are sprinting to or from revolutions, open fire, and/or parties interrupted only by song, which sometimes is also mad, or the simple, "Wha?" The casual skimping of the "t" makes the "wha" somehow triumphant; in my head, it sounds like, "Whaaaaaaaaa?!?!?!?!" It's pretty easy to get into the story and tag along on the excursions with the characters and one gets almost blasee about all the delirium that's unfolding until this sassified, James Brown-ified "whaaaaa?!?!?!" like jolts you back to your senses and makes you see the loony hoopla for what it is and makes it exciting all over again. The simplicity of the inserted "Whas" exacerbates the gnarliness of everything else. It's perfect.

uh-oh, it's a rant: telephones

2010-02-24T14:08:00.005-05:00

I know that my employment history is not, erm, traditional. I have no idea how an office functions or what mysterious things happen in a cubicle, conference room or good old office room. Movies, acquaintances who spend time in such environments, and even brief visits to environs that could be qualified as offices have, however, taught me that there is usually a public water cooler and coffee maker, and a telephone on each desk.

My question is this: are the telephones just for show?!?! Are they all set on silent? Is there a special code one needs to dial for said telephones to erupt in coded rings, thereby letting the person at the desk know to actually pick up versus theoretically pick up?! Is it maybe the economy or a deeper existential crisis that has prompted the collective office masses to stop answering their phones?

We will not attend to your offers, demands, polite inquires, calls to productivity or friendly banter. Fuck it!

Is that it?

Making phone calls is an excruciating activity for me to begin with. I have to give myself encouraging pep talks in preparation for each call, practicing what I'm going to say to the unsuspecting, possibly uninterested, busy people on the other end. I have to pretend to be really excited to be having these conversations which in reality make me break out in red blotches all over my neck and chest and which do not subside for 20 minutes after the phone call. (I'm not otherwise neurotic, really. That's true, right, friends?) (As a side note, I once participated in a clinical study about anxiety; I had to answer really obvious, leading questions about "getting anxious" and then play really boring computer games with a bunch of wires plastered to my skull using a plastic pilot's-type hat. I had to call the study to make an appointment.)

So when I go through this exercise, an unceasing little nightmare, many time over in one day and not one person picks up the phone, it's like a cruel joke. Where the hell are you, people? I've been trying to reach one guy in particular for months now, calling almost everyday. Sometimes I'll call from different numbers, at different times throughout the day, etc. I have not reached him once. One day, if anyone ever does pick up, I might just instantly lose it Klaus Kinski-style .

So, uh, keep doing what you're doing and not picking up the phone.

Waitin' on Boombox Season

2010-01-25T14:36:00.001-05:00

I’ve always liked the idea of the Man With The Boombox, a sort of traveling messiah whose sole mission is to bring jams to the ears of those he passes in his infinite travels and undefined quests. But up until I moved to Bed-Stuy the MWTB has eluded me. In Philly, or at least in West Philly, the closest thing we had to a boombox presence was the Man With The Duct-Taped Bike, who often taped a small, antennaed radio to his handlebars and broadcast crackling radio waves to anyone who stepped into the small perimeter of audibleness. There was also Omar, who instead of a boombox carried around a CD player with headphones and, occasionally, small computer speakers and played, almost exclusively, Depeche Mode and Tears for Fears to anyone who’d listen. But Omar’s mission was not to bring the jams, but rather to get drunk, and his sharing of Tears for Fears was only a side effect of that eventual goal, usually successfully reached.

In Bed-Stuy, however, the boombox, especially in the summer, is like an institution. I’ve watched grown men stand across the street from each other, each with a boombox in hand, blasting music - each his own – and talking to each other as they did this at competing volumes. What drifted up through my window was like a poorly planned mash-up. And this seemed alright to everybody; all the grannies hanging out on plastic chairs outside the buildings’ entrances and the Always Outside Dudes and whoever else was chillin’ within the blast volume area. There are also the men – and it always seems to be men who devote themselves to the boombox – who carry their stereos in those wheeled cages that people use to haul their groceries and laundry in. They’ll just walk up and down the street trawling their tunes behind them with no discernable destination or business but to spread the jams. .

My favorite MWTB, however, is the one that lives 2 floors below me, on Quincy St. He goes by Camelot, though he only tells some this, while others call him Allen. He wears a pair of green pants and a burgundy sweatshirt and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in anything less or more than this – no t-shirts, no coats in the winter. Camelot is always hanging out or in the hall or outside the building, usually with his boombox. Sometimes, he goes across the street and keeps post in front of the construction site gates, standing much like a British Royal Guard, immobile, eyes focused on distant horizons, stereo in hand. He plays, exclusively, classic rock.

Camelot’s the nicest dude ever but when I first moved into my building, I thought he was a stoic and unfriendly bastard. It was August, peak of boombox season, and he was hardly ever separated from it. Coming home, I’d see him inevitably stationed under the tree or leaning up on the gate by the entrance or even, sometimes, down the block, and I’d wave or say, “Hello.” He’d look on, unperturbed, feigning as if he hadn’t seen or heard me, standing in a sort of boxer’s stance to be maximally balanced. I was psyched about my new place and ‘hood and he was the only one that didn’t answer to my alacritous hellos! With time I started noticing that he only did this when he had the boombox on him. If I caught him without it, he’d smile all big and goofy and chat with me and generally be super genial.

The boombox is serious business and manning it requires focus I can only dream of, it seems. I can’t wait for the warm weather to open up the boombox season. Bring it, Spring!

Help Fund Potosi, Bolivia Miners: 5 Centuries Deep

2010-01-06T18:19:00.011-05:00

Below is an excerpt from a longer proposal I wrote for the same project, Potosi, Bolivia Miners: 5 Centuries Deep, which I recently posted on KickStarter. I'm trying to raise funds to get this project going, so if you know anyone who may be interested, with some change to spare, spread the word! thanks!

Here is a photo with a miner, taken by my friend Josie, in 2005:

In 2006, I turned in my undergraduate Environmental Science thesis predicting certain doom for the communities that live around the Cerro Rico mine in Potosi, Bolivia. One of my sources predicted that the mine, functioning continuously since 1542, will finally be depleted in 10 years. Though this is true only in part – new technology will permit profitable reworking of tailings as well as exploitation of previously untouched deposits – the conical mine with its manual, anthill-like activity of miners will surely grow quieter as less mineral is left to drag out with the crude methods currently used. Potosi, once the richest city in the world, will have to either embrace the tourism that is already exploding in the city or work out a solution with the international companies vying to mine there and once again, take Potosi’s riches abroad.

The mine’s influence over the years – the tangible riches it produced, the intangible glory it brought to Spain – is mostly gone. And the destitute miners who go into the Cerro Rico mine now, fathers, sons and brothers in a long line of men, may be the generation that will see the mine breathe its last. I want to photograph this particular generation of Cerro Rico miners, possibly the final.

I want the documentation of the miners and the mining community to be threefold – 1.) documentary-style photography of the men in the mines and of the community in general, 2.) formal, black and white portraits, and 3.) to establish a camera distribution so community members can take photos of each other/themselves. The first, I think, is important to show that this place exists, that it exists in this way in the 21st century, and to reveal what happens there, the texture of the place and the people. The second is to give a formality and gravity to the series of images: to take time with a subject, to photograph them head on, to immortalize in the most classic way. The third, which will be the most challenging I believe, is to empower the community to present themselves to the world on their terms – terms to be explored and negotiated with the participating members.

I have been to the Cerro Rico mine twice, both times with Wilfredo Bracamonte, an ex-miner who now gives tours to tourists of the mines. In a recent correspondence he said that he would help me to establish contact with some miners to start off the project, though one mining co-op, the Korimayu, has already extended such an invitation to me. Further, the city is replete with tour guides, many of them ex-miners that I believe I will ask for further assistance once on the ground in Bolivia. Additional routes to explore would be the miners’ market, mining union halls, the mineral processing factories, and to introduce myself to the women who work on the outskirts gleaning bits of mineral by artisanal mining and processing.

I have two personal goals with this project; 1. to document this community and to let them document themselves and 2. to grow as a photographer. The target is to have an exhibit towards the end of the project where both my photos and those taken by community members are displayed for locals and tourists to see in Potosi. I hope to able to incorporate older photos, to be solicited from families or bought in local antique shops, to present a portrait of the city in a historical context, drawing a line between the past and the present and commenting on both the richness of the history and the reality of the present.

I want the project to be ethnographic in methodology, though not strictly academic in scope. Rather, I am interested in reinforcing community and fostering understanding through photography, as well as producing a solid body of photo work. I think this is a particularly relevant time to venture to do this – as mineral reserves in the Cerro Rico wind down and foreign investors start to set up processing centers and operations in and around the mountain to wean profits from poorer ore, the Potosi community will no doubt undergo changes. Martin and Spence (1988), in an essay about photography as therapy, write, “By recording such events [them]selves, particularly by those people who are powerless and marginalized by the dominant stories in circulation a new form of social autobiographical documentation can be put together.”

No daguerrotypes!!!

2009-12-30T13:17:00.006-05:00

marriedtothesea.com

Failing at Glory

2009-12-28T01:17:00.003-05:00

Last time I was at my folks' house, I randomly picked up Glory, by Vladimir Nabokov, and started reading it. I wasn't terribly impressed - the prose drier than what I've come to like from the big N., the story not overwhelmingly interesting, though the pacing an attractively odd and elusive trick that leaps without action - with it but it was good enough to keep reading and I read until I got to page 144.

Several days ago, I grabbed it on my way out, thinking I'd make good use of my hour long subway rides and even got a seat during rush hour where I could successfully avoid Christmas shoppers' packages from poking me in the calves as the train rocked back and forth. It was mad crowded on the train but I was contently ignoring the people squeezing all up on me by adamantly concentrating on Martin's lackluster misadventures. Somewhere between Brooklyn and Union Square, Martin moved from Switzerland to Berlin in an attempt to do something about his unceasing boner for Sonia and things were getting a little more interesting. "You're such a dear that I have to kiss you," Sonia says on page 144, and then of course they kiss (finally!), and then she's all, "And what if I'm in love with somebody else?" and I go to turn the page to find out who it could be and how Martin will ever survive this blow and I hope to inch onwards to the supposed Glory that has yet to develop even slightly. And then somehow I'm back on page 113, where Sonia is again recounting how she turned down Martin's friend's marriage proposal way back in London!

I didn't get it - I kept frantically looking at the dead eyes all around me, swaying to and fro with their hands up on the rails and no one even flinched. I checked again; went back to the original page 113, then to the faux 113, then back to 144, then stared at 144 which faces faux 113 and back at the dead eyes. It felt like I was losing it! Back when I was finishing my thesis, staying up for days at a time and cramming words onto pages at unprecedented speeds, I had a similar experience. There was some sort of glitch with Word where out of nowhere pages just started disappearing and mixing and sleep-deprived, stressed me couldn't fix it, broke down, and just sobbed on my keyboard until a friend arrived with emotional and technical reassurances. But then, order was reinstated!

This time, I kept looking for answers in dead eyes and the pages kept staring back, mocking. Everything between 145 and 176 is, instead, a repeat of 113 to 144. Disaster struck around 14th Street, so I had to ride bookless up to 77th St. and again bookless all the way back to BK. Reading on the subway is awesome; I almost prefer it to reading in a hammock or in sun-dappled nooks. I also like people watching on the subway. In general, I just like the subway. But rush hour subway sucks and without a book it's utterly depressing! Plus, now I have this book that I wasn't even that into to begin with that I now must finish and neither my local library or the local Barnes & Noble (which is bigger and more comprehensive than the library!) carry Glory!! If those 31 pages don't contain some mind-blowing passages when I finally get to them, it's going to be the most inglorious reading experience ever.

Recently

2009-12-04T00:29:00.010-05:00

Cuckold

2009-11-06T22:12:00.002-05:00

I haven't been CAWing lately because I've been tip-tapping on another blog, Art+Culture. Check it out! I interviewed the awesome Donald Weber and accomplished less interesting feats of blogging, as well.

Finally:

Rocks in Nova Scotia

2009-10-21T00:09:00.003-04:00

Books

2009-10-11T18:35:00.004-04:00

Oh yes, I like books! Last weekend I carried around boxes full of them to and from the P.S.1 hosted Art Book Fair and shelved an enviable collection of photo books while trying my hardest not to let my desirous spittle reach their crisp covers. Though I didn't spend too much time looking around the fair, controlling my shopping impulses by not acknowledging the presence of thing I may want, a brief perusal led to the following conclusion: there's so much crap out there, people! It's not to say that there aren't quality art books being put out by large and small and very, very small publishers alike, but with the democratization of access to publishing comes the inevitable flood of things that really didn't need to appear in book form. It's a sacred form, after all.

The fair, of course, has me springing into action. On the one hand, the good stuff makes me want to make good stuff, and on the other, the bad stuff makes me shed all self-consciousness and leap to action self-assuredly, confident that if it turns out bad it will be in the company of other bad stuff that people still consume. It's something, right?

It will be ready by Jan. 1st. Promise. I'm planning to perfect bind it in my parents' garage.

Leek Soup

2009-10-03T18:05:00.004-04:00

boiled chicken bones for broth
throw in the below and cook till soft:
3 thick leeks
6 small potatoes
half clove garlic
1 tbsp margarine
salt, lemon pepper, sage
juice of one lemon

half cup of milk in the very end
garnish with chives and eat with good toast of choice

Archives: Family

2009-09-28T02:35:00.003-04:00

Fact: Printing this in the darkroom was hell. In Photoshop it took 3 minutes to make it presentable and I could probably even ween out a decent print.

Archives: St. Petersburg view

2009-09-28T01:56:00.001-04:00

Never-ending sauce

2009-09-17T10:57:00.002-04:00

in the field

2009-09-16T12:07:00.003-04:00

Of Sleep

2009-09-15T16:55:00.004-04:00

Breakfast

2009-09-13T12:31:00.002-04:00

Farmers' Market

2009-09-12T21:21:00.002-04:00

A Fine Photo

2009-08-19T23:56:00.001-04:00

The first photo book I ever picked out for myself was a Jeanloup Sieff monograph that had everything from fashion to portraits and reportage. I was 16, starting to shoot regularly, and discovering the medium with its various aspects – the technical, the stylistic, the different genres, etc. I‘d grown up with my Dad’s photo books, mostly Soviet produced, worn tomes with black and white images of mountains and grandiose landscapes that seemed to be printed with heavy, metallic inks that glared thickly on the fingered pages. But this was a book I had picked out and paid $40 (!!!) for and I spent long hours leafing its oversized pages and staring. I liked his style, the serenity and loneliness of his fashion work, the contextual ambiguity of his journalistic pictures, the pithy sentences at the bottom of each photo that gave them a vie I could grasp on to, a nuisance interpolated onto the pages and the stories of the photos.

But what I remember being most impressed with was the tones. It was the same wonderment I experienced when turning on the lights in my makeshift darkroom after printing from one of my dad’s negatives, rather than my own overly contrast-y, dirty, pale, etc, negatives. Or the first time I used fiber paper. There was lavishness; a gradation in the grays, a richness in the blacks, a texture in the whites, a range that made the shapes roll onto the pages rather than insert themselves starkly and violently. There was a picture I liked, of nuns gathered to see the Pope, in flowing holy habits and wimples, and the blacks of the robes were defined, the folds full of body and essence. I felt reprehensively attracted to the photo.

I learned that this was kind of a norm in quality photography – properly produced negatives tend to yield a spectrum, a rolling gamut of grays that is subtle and supple. But though I’ve put in long hours looking at other photos since then, the awe of seeing a perfect print hasn’t faded.

A few days ago I went to see the Richard Avedon fashion retrospective at the ICP. I had seen most of the work featured at the museum previously, in books or on websites and magazines and factoring in familiarity, wasn’t really expecting to be blown away. Rather, I went to stand in its presence, to see it printed large and scrape some motivation from the ubiquity of it on the walls of a small space. But it blew me away and I spent minutes lingering, leaning into each photo and, again, staring (L. has asked me what I’m looking for when I lean in like that, sticking my nose in too close to see…I’m looking for the grays.) There was a darkened room with relatively small prints, 11x14 maybe, each separately lit by a small white bulb that further defined the tones, making the photos glow with a glassy sensuality burgeoning from within. There was an oversized print spanning floors and large prints, so many, too many for me to stare at for as long as I wanted.

A gay couple kept trailing behind me and comparing favorite dresses and accessories and another duo, aged denizens of the fashion business I guess, casually pointed out models and where they’d last seen them or worked with them. But for me, the quality of the images was distracting, taking away from the images themselves, from the compositions and the faces and the clothes and the striking, bird-like poses. I couldn’t concentrate and kept obsessing how perfectly he lit them, how crisp the folds of a black dress look, how well he back lit the smooth faces of the models, how intricate the backgrounds are, a shade darker than the foreground but immaculately defined.

During one of the few photo classes I took, I shot a then-roommate of mine playing guitar, lit by a single work lamp pointing at her from above. It had the full tones of a good black and white photo, the oddly placed lamp capturing her in a cone of light around which darkness enveloped gradually and slowly. During the critique the teacher dismissed it hurriedly. “It’s too perfect,” she said.

Though I’m tempted to think that she may have had a point – if I’m so distracted staring at the quality of the image that I can’t grasp it’s content, it’s not entirely the point of photography – I’m loathe to give that thought too much consideration. Though I make plenty of space for the non-Westonian photographers that let technical aspects of the craft go as they may, old habits die hard. Viva the well-crafted photo!

Eats: Brunch

2009-08-17T11:44:00.000-04:00

Budget Eats: lunch

2009-08-14T15:50:00.002-04:00

Eats

2009-08-13T11:20:00.003-04:00

Since moving to the biiiig city, we've tried to keep to a strict budget as we look for work. This has led to extensive bike riding, keeping to our sturdy two-wheelers through thick and thin. We rode down to Rockaway Beach on shitty Flatbush Ave., which to my bare-bones beauty was the equivalent of off-roading, and up and down Brooklyn and the elusive bridges and along the West side and under the East side bridges. I think the map is starting to finally materialize in my head and make sense as a cohesive entity, rather than splotches scattered around NY without order or context.

We've also been eating on a budget - "just like in the military," our roommate commented. And that's really where I was going with this post. I've become more interested in food photography recently and at the same time I feel like I have less disposable income to spend on fancy eats and the accessories to make them look good. So I'm starting a series of food photos - food photos on a budget, that is.

Here's breakfast:

An Ethics of Seeing

2009-06-28T23:47:00.004-04:00

In making a photo, I make two somewhat conscious decisions - an aesthetic choice and a choice in how to represent the subject featured in the photograph.

The first is easily explained thus: though I purport to shoot in the documentary tradition with the documentary ( [subjective] truth, [cultural] discovery, [perhaps] useful documentation) aims in mind, I was raised on images that flaunted aesthetic as much as content. The visual – colors, composition, focus, etc. – remains important and my innate sense of what works cannot be turned off. Nor would I want to turn it off.

The second decision uses the same tools – framing, cropping, focus, etc – but the goal isn’t the best looking picture, but rather the most accurate in representing the scene and what I want to say about it. For example, when documenting a concert, it may be more appropriate to shoot the musician or, perhaps, the crowd. Depending on the scene, it might make more sense to shoot close-ups, or in black and white, or cut off faces, or aim at the feet, etc. Whether conscious or unconscious, decisions are made when taking a photo that reflect the photographer’s subjective interpretation of the view. It is an imposition of how the camera handler sees the world and an edited product that is served up to viewers dictating, inevitably, how they can see the world in the glimpse presented in the photo.

So while I am aware of these forces vaguely circling in my method as I shoot, they have become integrated into a smooth work-flow that, though conscious, is mostly unforced. The fact that I tend to shoot organic situations (not set-up, without instruction to the subjects, etc.) reduces my control over representation factors slightly as well.

These things, always humming in my head as I work, were turned up to a screech when I met X. Without going into details, after brief interactions with X. I developed a healthy aversion to him and was then in a situation where I took photos of him. The question then is this: What is the right way to take a picture of someone you do not respect?

Though no representation is truly objective, a strong disrespect for the subject is blatantly subjective. Is it ok to oblige the viewer to subscribe to this? Susan Sontag writes that “there is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.” How much stronger is that aggression when the picture is taken with a disgust as part of the driving force? Further, Sontag writes, “To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have…” How respectful is the act of this violation (and by inference, me) when the aim is to show ugliness when perhaps, the subject in the photos does not see it thus? Is it more ok to show the ugliness if the subject agrees that he is ugly?

As the one with the camera, I hold the power to shoot, to represent, to show, to manipulate. This is the case with every photo I take. Why then did I feel so uncomfortable in this case? It’s not the mere fact that what I thought of the subject was negative – I’ve shot with negative impressions before without such issues. Is it because he showed vulnerability in addition to the ugliness and I only saw ugliness? Perhaps, though in the end, the picture shows both. Is it because I let the aesthetic carry too much weight? The photo is eye catching and well lit with an overall, attractive (to me) softness. Perhaps. Is it because it’s too blunt? The image conveniently includes the graffitied word ‘vile’ above the subject’s head. I don’t know.

It is tempting to me to take on an anthropological reflexivity when showing photos. I think in this way the judgment is less vague and leaves more room for the viewer to interpret the image, perhaps letting them understand my subjectivity and letting them agree, disagree, or at least put it into context. In a photo book or a photo show one can do this with a statement or a bio. What does one provide as reflexive documentation for a disparate image? It seems burdensome to ask a viewer to invest the kind of time and care that would require in viewing one image.

In the end, the bigger issue isn’t about the photo – it’s about an approach to human interaction and judgment. But the dilemma is this: while I think my judgment is valid, it is private (and about a private figure, not a politician, celebrity, etc.). The photo becomes public as soon as it leaves my camera and is seen by others. So, is it fair to make a public statement about a private judgment and is it avoidable? Also, it would be interesting to figure out if any of my qualms or aversions to X. even come through in the photo to first-time viewers...

ye who remember, don't forget

2009-05-05T22:43:00.003-04:00

She forgot about our appointment repeatedly, up until the moment I arrived to pick her up. I was to photograph her in a white gown, with her long hair, always pinned into a loose bun, down. She never absorbed the part about the gown, and even in the studio she stepped up onto the platform in her clothes and looked hesitantly at the camera.

When I came over, she was dressing – pulling hangers of white, embroidered and cuffed shirts out of a two tiered closet, her short frame reaching into the neat darkness of the space and ruffling plastic coverings on dresses and coats. The girlish way her pile of white shirts lay scattered on the bed and elastic-waist pants intertwined on the rug was offset by the demodéd style of the garments. She changed from one shirt to another, kicked at a pair of pants that tripped her up, finally stepped into a pair of shoes and faced the mirror. “I paint my lips only from memory,” she giggled, and applied rouge. There was a lace coverlet on her pillow, a cheap photo calendar on her armoire, her great granddaughter’s plastic pink beads, an oriental-style rug – a mismatched décor where each item seemed out of context with the next and she floated incongruously amongst the planes.

Driving in the rain, she turned to me and asked quickly, “When will you get married?”

“I’m not planning on it any time soon,” I had responded, “Why?”

“Because I want to get so wasted at your wedding,” she sighed.

She’s wandered in and out my house for years, quietly attending every family gathering, taking her seat by the window or the fireplace, depending on the season, and with her honeyed gaze commanding a soft, sad attention of the guests. I don’t know her; I built up her personality based on her soap-soft features and it seems strange now to see her fall apart, an unwinding that takes with it her real self as well as the one I constructed, leaving only a rapidly tarnishing other.

It’s difficult to attempt to know a person and to try to disclose her in a photo at a time when she is getting lost. What is revealed? I wonder if the loss dominates in her uncertain gaze or if it is the steadfast anchors of her self that come through stronger in her pulchritude.

Take a Bath, Son!

2009-03-25T15:07:00.013-04:00

"You're writing about the banya?" Vital, a fellow bather, asked, "But that's not very interesting."

We were soaking - I in a bikini, he in shorts and a felt hat with a red star on it, my friend in garments only vaguely resembling swimwear – in a luke-warm Jacuzzi overflowing with bubbles. A tall, very mustached man came by in intervals to release a few pumps from an unmarked spray bottle onto us. The room itself was all laid out in blue tiles, except one wall, which is crowned by a salmon pink cap of décor, the top quarter festooned with faux balconies, Corinthian columns and plaster statues; Apollo holding a bouquet of dried flowers, one armless beauty, another, demurely holding up a snatch of cloth in front of her breasts. The TVs, one in each corner, blasted an oversaturated, bombastic variety show of dance and song routines with costumes, snow globe winter effects, theatrical make-up, and leg-flinging choreography.

In a way, Vital was right; there is nothing interesting about the banya, or public bath. People have been getting clean in them since at least Ancient Roman times. Of course, there are the myriad of less than spotless stereotypes about the Turkish bath, implying an un-cleanliness rather than a cleanliness, of den-based, concupiscent pleasures made all the more salacious when performed in dark, steamy, public rooms. When I was attending high school in Israel, for instance, the mention of the relatively more tangible Turkish bath brought on a snickering amongst the gaggle of adolescent boys that was undeniably reminiscent of dorm-room conquests and not of, for example, hoards of Russian men bathing together in mustached man-unity. But in Philly, until 1950, The Public Baths Association of Philadelphia maintained six inexpensive baths for the “self-respecting poor” to cleanse. In New York, one can still see defunct public bathhouse buildings in the middle of major streets and hidden behind wrought iron fences. And yet here, despite our generic past of communal washing, we are now shy and private and Puritan and rich, so public bathing is a little uncommon, unnecessary, and, let’s admit, interesting.

My aunt, who invited me, goes religiously on Tuesdays, when there is a discount to enter - $20 all day for use of all facilities including Turkish bath, Russian bath, pool, Jacuzzis, steam room, Swiss showers, ice pool, and tanning services . She’s a woman that hustles hard, a natural caretaker whose efforts have not been reciprocated enough by her loved ones, who cackles when retelling steamy nostalgia about the saunas she frequented while working on the Baikal Amur Mainline (BAM) in Siberia.

The first time I went with her, it was empty. We spent 7 hours in a euphoric routine of steaming, cooling and relentless relaxation. We’d go into the Turkish bath, more humid than the dry heat Russian bath, and lie down on the top tier, towels on our heads. Sweat appeared in the first 30 seconds, small bubbles sitting on top of each pore like paper candy buttons, as if the body was being squeezed to delicately ooze its liquids. Then we’d stand, side by side, under shower heads that looked like street lamps, and pull on a chain that released a flood of cold water. In matching white robes, thread bare on the sleeves, we’d schlep back to our table, onto white plastic chairs with backs carved into roses and we would sit, drinking tea. That time, the TVs were blasting a program about Russian monastery life; a pretty girl in a black wimple recounted nun fights, a man in robes performed a ceremony where he repeatedly let “slip” a pair of scissors onto another man’s robes, and a handsome priest with a salt and pepper beard conveyed to the viewers how Forrest Gump is the ultimate servant, for “he was told to run, and so he ran.” Russian Orthodox choral music echoed thinly in the main pool room. We sat for hours, red-faced and calm, drinking tea and sweating it back out.

This time, I brought two American friends, similarly inexperienced in the ways of the glorious public bath. We strolled in West-Philly dirty, the man at the desk smirked at us knowingly before handing us our locks, and we proceeded to don the provided, worn, white robes and plastic slippers. And this time, it was full; ladies in ankle-length leather coats kept strolling poolside towards the changing rooms, and tables filled up with thermoses and bottles. One had to sweat parked on a bench between a platinum blond bombshell and a gold-toothed, rounded Aunty-type, across from the strangely intimidating resident banya experts, sitting in a unified buffalo stance with heads topped by their starred, felt hats.

My aunt was busy beautifying and so we ventured, clueless bathers into the wooded infernos of cleanliness, veniks in hand. A venik is, essentially, a broom; a dry bundle of, in this case, either maple of birch branches. These are soaked in hot water until they lose their brittleness and then used to whack the body, providing a termagant but aromatic massage that can, supposedly, not only open up your lungs, but also cleanse your skin, up your metabolism, cure joint and muscle aches, heart aches, hangovers, etc. Use of the venik seems to be a point of pride among the regulars, who smack each other around in practiced rhythm redolent of rich forests and hippie S&M.

We not only got called out on our weak-wristed walloping, but had a group of volunteers who seemed more than willing to perform the cleansing for us. They took to it so enthusiastically that they didn't even hear our whimpers for mercy, burning up under the too hot breath of the branches and the pleasant thump when they hit. After hitting some, ice is dumped and rubbed all over the body, and then the treatment resumes on the other side. When we finally stumbled out of the sauna in a cloud of steam, red-faced and with leaves sticking to our sweaty bodies and tucked into our bathing suits, we must've looked like we had just narrowly escaped an attack by a tree, near a volcano.

And again, between rounds of aggressive sweating and red-faced relaxation in the saunas, we sat. We sat with my aunt and drank tea. And when, after about five hours of this, my non-English speaking aunt gleaned from our conversation that maybe it was time to go, she laughed at us and told us, quite simply, that it wasn't time, yet.

And here, finally, is what I found interesting. Where the public bath was a matter of scrubbing oneself clean, it has vanished. In the U.S. practically every home is equipped with private facilities for the upkeep of hygiene and water is subsidized by the government, telling us, in effect, that we should use plenty of it to make sure we keep that hygiene up. Public bathing is limited to the beaches of various bodies of water, well chlorinated pools, and people’s parents’ Jacuzzis. On the other hand, where public bathing served a role larger than hygiene, it persists. In New York, for example, public bath houses were a popular meeting place for gay men into the mid ‘80s, when the NY Supreme Court ruled it legitimate to close one such establishment (thereby setting a precedent) under the pretext of public safety, citing the rising numbers of AIDS cases. Elsewhere, notably Mexico City, such massage parlors and bath houses carry on as before. In the US, there is no widespread tradition of the public bath except in the context of cleaning, and when cleaning became affordable, bathing became private and public baths extinct. Not so for the Russians, Japanese, Finnish, etc, who have a long history of using the bath not only to wash but also to socialize and conduct business. Those who have experienced the bath in its grander sense don’t seem to want to trade it in for a 5 minute shower in the mornings. And Temazcalteci (Aztec god of bathing and sweat baths) bless ‘em, because I fully support their ways.

Propaghandi, Paint it Black, Witch Hunt - Philly

2009-03-15T20:31:00.011-04:00

I'm a proponent of subtlety. A Propaghandi show is probably the least subtlety infused event one could choose to attend - it's more like the riotous, public beheading of subtlety and its kind. I present, as evidence, lyrics from The Only Good Fascist is a Very Dead Fascist, off the Less Talk, More Rock album:

Swastikas and Klan-robes. Sexist, racist, homophobes. Aryan-Nations and Hammerskins: you can wear my nuts on your nazi chins! God, I love a man in uniform! (But, uh, before we get too intimate here, big fella): what exactly are the great historical accomplishments of “your” race that make you proud to be white? Capitalism? Slavery? Genocide? Sitcoms? Guns? War? Pollution? Addiction? NAFTA? Thigh-Master? This is your fucking white-history, my “friend”.

It's not that I disagree (though I do find the listing of slavery and the thigh-master in one fowl swoop of misdeeds a little jarring), rather that the complete lack of story-telling or mystery or nuance or poetry is a turn off for me; it's sloganeering. (In the song Less Talk, More Rock, they sing, "We wrote this song because it’s fucking boring to keep spelling out the words that you keep ignoring," though it doesn't really hold for the rest of the album[s]). I guess this would disqualify a lot of punk rock all together [for me], though the lyrics aren't what attracted me to it anyway. What's strange, though, is that John Samson (who is now in the Weakerthans, whose lyrics I like and do find appealing) was still with Propaghandi at that time. What gives?

Either way, it is what it is. I went [and had fun] and took photos, mostly of the psyched kids going crazy up front, which is simultaneously sweet and poisonous to a perpetually mid-life-crisis-ing 24-year old like myself.

Philadelphia Tattoo Convention

2009-03-01T18:55:00.009-05:00

Early morning, Philadelphia

2009-02-18T13:18:00.005-05:00

Diptychs

2009-02-17T22:29:00.006-05:00

Lake Placid, NY

2009-02-14T23:51:00.000-05:00

Antony and the Johnsons

2009-02-05T21:40:00.000-05:00

Oh, swaaaan...

2009-02-05T21:27:00.000-05:00

Philadelphia Mummers

2009-01-03T17:34:00.000-05:00

The Worst Superpower

2008-12-25T02:02:00.000-05:00

Orlando Serrell was hit by a baseball when he was 10 years old, in 1979. After he recovered, he realized that he had gained a new and relatively useless, but nonetheless impressive, skill. He can, up to today, recall the weather, where he was, and what he was doing for every day since the accident.

This got me thinking about superpowers I don't desire, and particularly about a superpower I am currently trying to tame - the power to puke. It started when L. came home from NY sickly and pathetic. The day he felt fine, I woke up nauseous and pale. On the way to work, I had to pull over to throw up. I spent a total of 20 agonizing minutes swiveling in my chair and taking frequent trips to the baby blue bathroom to see if I could purge myself any further. At that point, after interacting with only two people, I decided it was time to go home. I made it without incident, but could not make it into the house before puking in an alley. I spent the rest of the day napping.

The next morning, my dad, who I hadn't seen in two days, called me on the way to work. "I'm nauseous," he said, "and M. just called me from the office to tell me that everyone there is puking."

I found this scenario worrisome, but thought that perhaps the office staff was just having a delayed reaction to the Christmas party luncheon, two days earlier. I mean, I hadn't even seen most of them for the 20 minutes I was there.

I pacified myself with these explanations until about 8 p.m., when I received a text message from C. It read, "I puked twice."

At time of posting, there have not been any further pukings. While this is consolotary on the one hand, on the other I am sad to see a superpower come and go so quickly.

NJ’s Hidden Population Going South, For Now.

2008-12-13T20:28:00.001-05:00

An outreach worker at a clinic remarked that you can live in Hammonton all your life, and not know just how many farms there are. They lie flat, hospital corner tucked into the NJ Pine Barrens, with neat rows of vegetables, blueberries, cranberries, turf, even. Down dirt paths, hidden in the middle of fields, or behind, or at the borders of infringing woods, or scattered amongst trucks and tractors, lie the farm camps.

They are quiet now, at the end of the season, and rapidly emptying, if not eerily abandoned already. Hammonton’s famous blueberry harvest wound down at the end of August and its cranberry and vegetable farms shut down for the winter in mid-October.

Homestead Farm, a vegetable farm, had its last work day on a Thursday and most its workers were heading south, to Florida, the following day.

“We go without knowing,” says Jose Huerfano Mejia Perez in Spanish, who still hasn’t found a contratista to take him.

The contratistas are independent or farm-sent contractors that find workers, transport them, and are often responsible for managing them at the farm, as well. In theory, they are supposed to be registered and certified in compliance with the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act, but in practice they are often no more than a man with a van bearing legitimate plates. It is the contratistas, too, that are responsible for checking the legality of workers’ papers and work status, but this technicality also falls by the wayside.

The wayside is littered with unmentionables.

At Homestead, for example, bathrooms consist of two porter potties for the 28 men living in the two trailers and little kitchen house, at time of first interview. Porter potties are often used in the field, where regulations also require such facilities, but, says a lawyer who heads a legal rights project for workers but did not want to be named, using them at camps is a way to sort of provide required facilities without spending the effort or money. Sometimes, porter potties are brought in instead of fixing broken extant bathrooms, a common problem for Hammonton’s off-grid septic systems. Jessica Culley, from the Farmworker Support Committee (CATA), explains that many farmers will wait to get an official incompliance notice from the County Health Department or Department of Labor inspectors before investing the effort to fix problems, even if they were already aware of them.

At Homestead, too, there is running water, but it is housed in a different building than the workers and the facilities are limited. The one washing machine is occupied non-stop and clothes always hang on the lines outside of the locked up kitchen. Pickers make about $60 per 10-hour work day, well bellow NJ’s minimum wage, which they should at least be getting, by law. Some men also complain about the food; they are served three meals per day and the kitchen kept under lock otherwise, but they say that it’s not enough to sustain them for the duration of the vigorous work day and the chef has a heavy hand when it comes to hot sauce, making meals inedible for some.

Celestino Martinez Lopez talks about his impending journey south with liminal fondness. Housing there is more decent, with only one or two people per room, and better sanitation facilities. “At this camp,” he also says of Homestead, “one works a lot. And they take out a good amount for insurance. For us, it’s not good, because they take out $50 for insurance and $50 for meals. That’s $100 taken out…We don’t know what [the insurance] does.” In Florida, he explains, about $20 is taken out a week, and if anything happens, that covers medicine, doctors, etc.

“Here, nothing, none of that. Here, if something happens, here, the boss doesn’t…doesn’t pay anything,” Lopez says.

Both the lawyer and Culley say that while familiar with the other mentioned problems, above, insurance payments is not one they’ve heard recently. More common, says Culley, is a group of workers signing up for paid insurance, like Aflac, without understanding what they are signing. I was not, however, able to reach Homestead’s owners for comment, and its workers left NJ. The constant migration makes any efforts to sort out problems that much harder.

Some New Jersey, and particularly Hammonton, farms have been recognized federally for their commendable treatment of their workers, which fact alone demonstrates that such sterling behavior is rather un-ubiquitary. Or its enforcement unassailable: while in the ‘70s investigative visitors to camps, like NJ assemblyman Byron Baer, were physically attacked and chased off camp grounds for peeping the squalor with ameliorating motives in mind, more recent problems with enforcement range from lack of funds for performing checks at the camps, to a lack of knowledge of their rights by the undocumented workers, with an adjoining fear of State authority, to the States’ conveniently unregulated discretion in cases of union organization attempts by migrant workers. But, Culley says, “unofficial data” reported to CATA by the Department of Labor states that the large majority of camps passed pre-season occupancy inspections. With such low standards (one toilet per every 20 workers, “twenty inches, extending from the floor to the ceiling or roof, between each bed or bunk or tier thereof,” etc.) it shouldn’t be too hard.

Homestead Farm, with its incredibly cramped but relatively neat trailers, its nice lawn, and its friendly, homey atmosphere is hardly the worst. There is a consensus by the men there that they’ve been treated well (suspicious to a journalist familiar with the sometimes oppressive politeness of Latin culture) and Mejia Perez remarks with a wistful tranquility that “there are no drunks here. Other camps have problems.”

Down the road, at Macrie Farm camp, the parking lot is full of vans and there is a group of men standing around out front on the Sunday evening I visit, Columbus Day weekend. They’re all in their early 20s, except Miguel Angel Ropoca Bravo, who is 42. He laughs shyly when asked if he acts as the de facto father figure of the house and admits that he serves as the designated liaison between the men at Macrie and the community clinic that serves the workers.

“This camp has good conditions,” Ropoca Bravo says from the edge of the activity. He says that he’s never been present for the State’s camp inspections, since they happen during the day while they are out in the field, but he knows that they’ve happened during this past season.

He is staying for the winter, along with some of the other men there. Macrie camp’s boarders do not work exclusively for Macrie Farm, rather, they are often recruited by other farms and nurseries in the area, especially during the slow, winter season.

“There are many people that work only for the seasons. They go to Florida, when the season ends, they come up here. They’re not stable people, so to say, that establish themselves here. The way I see it, it’s better to be stable. It’s only 8 hours [of work a day], but they’re secure. And if I go elsewhere, and don’t know anyone there, it’s hard to find work. Here, we don’t pay rent, don’t pay water, don’t pay light. And so, I feel calm,” says Ropoca Bravo.

Inside, beds stand in rows, without any attempts at even curtained partitions, in one large room. Some men are already sleeping, but the light is on and outside, they are playing music. Most of them are a little tipsy and the yard behind the house is littered with a voluminous display of beer cans, strewn around a trash can as if it had volcanically erupted, spewing aluminum cans. Around 8 pm, a white van pulls up and makes a few circles in the yard, beeping like a banshee in the quiet woods; men come out to purchase tacos, tamales, sodas.

With the end of the season looming like a precipice, most still don’t have solid plans. Excluding the few who stay, the most detailed answer given about what happens next is, simply, “Florida.” And despite Lopez’s border-line utopian description of Florida camps, all over the U.S., the biggest factor in the correctness of an agricultural work camp seems to depend on little more than the correctness of the proprietary farmer. There are so many stops along a migrant worker’s way that could lead him or her to somewhere relatively worse – an unfair contratista with unreasonable rates and meager contacts, a poorly kept camp and/or working conditions at the end of the trip, not enough work, problems with INS for undocumented workers, etc. – that staying in a bearable place, once found, almost seems preferable, even if less profitable and hardly ideal.

But Lopez, for whom this is the sixth year in the U.S., says, “Each year, if it’s not good here, you go to another place, over there.”

The grass is sometimes greener “over there.” And it needs cutting.

Philly [the adjective] Schools

2008-12-08T00:50:00.000-05:00

Philly when used as an adjective, particularly as in Philly school, brings on a dirty, unpalatable texture, weighing down school as if with a fetid, boggy layer of inward and outward doom. When I started working for a school picture company, photographers in the office threw around “Philly school” as if it was the F-bomb, ending tails of horrific work days with, “It was a Philly school.” to knowing nods from fellow shooters.

At first, I relegated this to the fact that few seemed to be from or living in Philly proper; not only did they talk about disliking even “going into the city,” but they also didn’t seem to possess that special oomph of endearing and rude aggressiveness and poise that would make them functional in this particular town. They can’t handle a little attitude, I thought.

They started out sending me to suburban elementary and middle schools, in Lower Merion, a bit past the Main Line, in Doylestown, etc. I arrived, without fail, to sprawling buildings with polished floors, lotion in the private ladies’ bathrooms, unbarred, clean windows, and, most noticeably, young bombshell teachers and happy, well behaved children. When, weeks later, my boss started sending me to Philly schools, it was like being downgraded to the crap class, where one has to run behind the train instead of sitting inside of it.

It was familiar, because, after all, I had attended Philly public schools for a good, painful, long while. But with this new reference frame, the suburban school, these old building looked even more haggard and their children and teachers even more tragic.

The problem is this: Pennsylvania funds its schools in one of the most blatantly unbalanced and ungracious manners in the country. It’s so bad that in 1998 the Philadelphia School District and the city of Philadelphia actually sued the state in a civil rights suit, claiming that the state’s funding practices were glaringly discriminatory against districts with large numbers of non-white [read: poor] students. PA does this by making up only 36% of the districts’ budget with state funds, one of the lowest rates in the entire U.S., and relying heavily, 44% heavy, on property taxes to fill in the woeful budget. In areas where residents have money this works out fine and there is a ring of suburbs choking Philadelphia where districts are actually funded not just sufficiently, but extravagantly. Meanwhile, poorer districts are perpetually underfunded. When you consider that in PA the richest district is 84 times wealthier than the poorest district, you can start to imagine the great gradation of quality, like a slowly creeping shadow, that moves steadfastly towards poorer areas until it envelops them in its metaphorical darkness completely.

My schools weren’t terrible; I attended Anne Frank and Comly in the Northeast, Baldi for middle school and the oft-commended magnet, Masterman, for high school. Masterman, which consistently ranks as the city’s best public school and even makes national lists of top 100 schools, remains polemic to me; I was psyched to be downtown, my classmates were mostly smart and interesting and I had a few great teaches. But I also had classes without teachers, where permanent substitutes entertained us with their life stories, tales of meeting men on vegan message boards, asked roomfuls of bored teenagers for advice, or assigned silent reading as a substitute for actual teaching, while brooding over yet another failed law board exam up front. There were teachers who were intelligent and informed on their subject but absolutely incapable of leading an actual class, and the strange reverse of that, as well. The shortage of smart teachers, of teachers good at teaching, and the holy grail of the combination of the two, along with a healthy lack of decent text books and resources in the supposedly best school in the city are telling of the environment in the rest of the schools.

As a photographer, I do not enter classrooms. I interact with the kids and their teachers in the auditorium, and although this probably brings in a different element to student-teacher interactions and student behavior, I believe it is still telling.

There are consistencies in the wealthier and poorer schools, for example.

In the suburbs, teachers sing to their younger classes. With older students, teachers are cordial and trusting, often counting on them to return to class alone. While waiting, students are chatty but do not yell, polite without the city schools’ seemingly authoritarian enforced use of “Miss” and “Sir” towards any figure with power, which often happens to be their white teacher. Teachers seem eager to get the kids back to class. In some schools, teachers address students as “friends” (as in, “Ok friends, let’s all line up.”) and rarely raise their voices for extended periods. One of the most amazing things I witnessed, while packing my gear, in a suburban school, was an assembly. Each grade greeted the rest of the school in a choral hello, and then chosen students did presentations of what they were learning in their classes, both as a way to formally exhibit their progress and ostensibly to tease, constructively, kids coming into that grade in upcoming years, who will get their chance to perform such exciting exercises. At the end, the entire school, close to 500 kids and their teachers, did the chicken dance together. I, sadly, imagined the headlines if this were to ever happen in a Philly elementary school: Children Trampled in Tragic Chicken Dance.

In Philly schools, picture day is louder, more disorganized, uncomfortably chaotic. Teachers bring their students and keep them, or at least try, in strict lines. They yell at their students, not with any sort of escalation, but explosively, from the child’s first offense. Younger kids are often physically manipulated, instead of vocally instructed, shoved into the lines, pulled by sleeves to come here or there. A co-worker told me about a teacher that beat a kindergarten student for taking off his dress shirt without even talking to him about it first. With older kids, it is normal to see teachers chase them around to get them back in their seats or lines, or, alternatively, to see resigned teachers that let their charges do as they will; the kids run around, hitting each other, flirting, yelling, teasing. The return to class is often delayed for elusive, to me, reasons. Kids roll their eyes at me more often, decline my requests to smile for the camera, and boys, without fail, try to throw some Ds on the admittedly lame pose with peace signs and gangsta chin strokes. Philadelphia public school students wear uniforms. Younger kids are taught to respond to rhythmic clapping, quieting down and clapping along with the teacher, instead of instructions. Classes are larger, buildings are older, dirtier, sometimes with the music teacher tucked behind the curtains of the auditorium stage. At one school a teacher refused to let her first grade class get their pictures takes because the six year olds were supposedly misbehaving that badly (they weren’t).

I am describing here an ambiance. But performance levels between the two can be found in statistics and it’s clear that Philly’s ambiance translates to its students’ success – it’s limited. Both state and federal government, however, seem to tell us that just because funding is limited, success shouldn’t be, and Bush’s No Child Left Behind mandates testing for State-set standards blind to State-wide inequalities. Not that poorer schools should strive towards lower goals, but it seems ridiculous to even half-heartedly demand equal scores and reward the ones that do well. Jonathan Kozol writes, “There is something deeply hypocritical about a society that holds an eight-year-old inner-city child "accountable" for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their own kids six or seven years earlier.”

In July, the PA’s state legislature passed a budget developed on a new formula for funding the state’s schools. The budget guarantees a minimum 3% budget increase from the state, and a possible further increase that depends on factors like the district’s poverty level, size, number of English learners, and regional cost differences. And Barack Obama, upon entering office, has vowed to reform NCLB, invest in early education programs and build a new “teacher army.” That all sounds promising in a liminal, vague kind of way, but meanwhile it looks like the Obamas are going to send their daughters to a private school and the Philly school will remain in stigmatized italics.

Sugar Plum Fairy

2008-12-02T21:45:00.000-05:00

Nutcracker costumes

2008-12-02T21:36:00.000-05:00

Oh Phillies! Fires in Hearts and Streets

2008-11-04T22:47:00.000-05:00

I can get down with most mass demonstrations of the emotional mien; admittedly, not always in a particularly participatory manner, but at the least as an affectionate observer. I've gone to protests, demonstrations, shows, and massive street celebrations where my innards were infused with a sudden incomprehensible appreciation for the human spirit and I wandered, dumbly humble to the humanoid crowds and all of their synchronized excitement. It is nebulously reassuring to me that I can still find momentary but tender comfort from standing shoulder to shoulder with many strangers under a live, electric net of limbic resonance and be able to shock myself with it by reaching out just a little.

But just this past week, something went wrong.

Philadelphia had been quivering with the anticipation of the World Series, and when the Phillies finally won on Wednesday, the city, quite simply, exploded. Broad Street was ignited with campfires, fed by paper thrown from the tops of office buildings. Cars were flipped over or, alternatively, beaten with fervor and attention to detail into unrecognizable states. The windows of banks and stores were broken with stones, a newspaper distribution box and who knows what else. Dumpsters were set on fire. Giant planters were overturned and their trees and bushes paraded through the crowds until they were leafless, bare-bone branches dancing atop heads. Flying bottles, fruits, fireworks and high-fives were rampant. Every surface, even the vertical ones, was teeming with red capped bodies. There were 76 arrests throughout the night but, as local news sources liked to mention, no homicides; while this is good news, it’s sad that it needs announcing at all. The night was predictably rounded out by misbehaving cops trying to disperse the misbehaving hoards.

But I couldn’t get psyched for the games and I couldn’t get psyched for the riots. I rode my bike down to Broad feeling besieged by the stampede of honking vehicles, had my back wheel bent up in the festivities, and rode home (after my brother saved the day!) on trash strewn streets with high fives still flying at my face. How is it that I didn’t even get tipsy on the glory when everyone else was positively wasted?

I also wonder, did it ever stop being about the Phillies? Did the hysteria on Broad Street ever tip past the “We’re celebrating a sports event!!” status to an engulfing, adrenaline infused party where revelers were fucking shit up just because energy was so high, because they could, because it was already on fire, because the net was sending sparks that ignited? Or was it all, earnestly, about the Phillies? I have a feeling it was the latter, in which case I stand in awe of Philadelphia’s capacity to wreak havoc to show they care and to, well, care.

I don't

2008-10-22T20:38:00.000-04:00

I find myself surrounded by women planning their weddings; women incessantly leafing through wedding industry magazines and discussing such details as the color of the flowers (satin orange, vanilla cream, lilac dream), the color of their dresses (white, champagne, ivory), the date (two years from now, but the date is already set), their budget (in the tens of thousands (and these are not wealthy women by any means)).

This is not going to be a rant by an unmarried woman jealous of their fairytale parties and flurry of meticulous planning. This is going to be a rhetorical, inquisitive, rechauffe by a jaded lady with limited experience in these desires and the finite quest to fulfill them. These ladies make me worried that I am not enough concerned about my conjugal future, or at least its initiation ceremony, and so, I am trying to make amends to my disinterest.

About a year ago I was looking for photo assisting jobs with Philly's somewhat quantitatively lacking, hiring photographers. I came upon a website where a wedding photographer wrote to his excitable clientele the following, indirectly quoted, entreaty: Your wedding day is going to be the best and most memorable of your marriage. It won't be as good from hence forth, so hire the best and you can at least remember the good times by leafing through your wedding photo album. (I'm not rewording in order to exaggerate, rather, because I can't find the website.)

Was the gentleman's depressing sales pitch telling it how it is? Is the wedding day the lead zeppelin of a convivial future, gleaming so pretty in the sky for that one moment only to fall to the dull ground? Does it set a tone? They're not exactly maidens dressed in their ivory gowns, dancing pretty before succumbing to the dirty fate of womanhood, the couples meeting each other for the first time and having their inaugural quivering in bed at the end of the festivities. Chances are, they already live together, know each others' families, how to make each other cum fast and slow, and how they like their pants folded. Chances are, they'll fight planning it. What is the big deal?

If I get married one day, I'll probably have a party. It will be in someone's backyard and I'll likely have more kegs than flower arrangements. If friends and parents shower us with money on that fine day, we will probably take it and fly far, to not return for some time. It seems silly, to me, to spend so much on a party to then not be able to afford an extra two days on the honeymoon, making it a full week (a week!), like someone at my work just did. This, however, is not the point.

The point is, weddings are rampant. Lasting marriages, not so much. In putting all of one's hopes, dreams, and efforts into a ceremony, are they also investing in their relationship? Who is the showiness and formality for? What is it that they really get out of it? I'm also curious, what's the morning after the party like? Some of these productions seem too unreal to even have a morning [ever] after.

West Virginia - Dolly Sods

2008-10-20T13:41:00.000-04:00

Dolly [after the German Dahle family, who farmed the land and used it for their sheep to graze upon] Sod [1. a section cut or torn from the surface of grassland, containing the matted roots of grass. 2. the surface of the ground, esp. when covered with grass; turf; sward. 3. sodomite; homosexual. 4. chap; fellow; guy. 5. child; kid; brat. 6. to damn: Sod the bloody bastard! ]

The sun sat upon the red leaves of the huckleberries in a rather unspectacular manner, except when it hit them at the right angle, when it shone through them as if they were thin, veinous membranes, alighting them in a lambent red glow that spread over entire fields. One couple was unimpressed; they drove up to the lookout, remarked that 'there wasn't even anything to take a picture of,' and drove back down in their miserable car. Well, sod them! There was plenty to take a picture of and plenty more to revel in without pictures. There was a ubiquitous, lithe silence, crisp mornings in a soggy tent, raging camp fires that in shyly bewildering winds threatened to besiege whole, blond fields, forest floors covered in key lime colored ferns, and fields, fields littered with trees and covered by wind-swept grasses, all poised in an undomineering quietude...

Morn-

2008-10-08T16:25:00.000-04:00

Face

2008-10-06T23:49:00.000-04:00

Persistent Mediocrity

2008-09-21T22:24:00.000-04:00

Hallelujah, I'm employed. Oh yes, I've taken the job that I refused to take exactly one year ago, citing something about freelancing glory and not making plaintive allowances to my bills, my interests or my way.

I work for a certain national company that takes school photos. I can't say which because, in fact, it explicitly says in one of my many color coded handbooks that I cannot blog about them, unless I am prepared to field their wrath.

My job is this: Wake up before sunrise, dress and tuck in my emblazoned polo shirt, take out my lip ring, leave before the coffee shop opens, drive drive drive, arrive in a nice school that makes my alma mater, Masterman, look like a litter box of undesirables, set up my equipment along dotted lines and color-coded, idiot proof guidelines, take photos of kids, jump around so they smile, make sarcastic remarks at eighth graders so they don't punch me with their pimply faces, pack up, make nice with the hovering administration, drive back a) home, where I have to spend two hours recovering from hating my life or b) to the office, where my paper work is checked by senior photographers, a process that makes me hate my life a little more.

Training for this job took two weeks; two entire weeks of assembling and disassembling color-coded, marked and practically Archimidean, self-constructing sets and practicing posing. Lean in for me, yes, just like that, now sit up tall, ok, turn this way just a tad, great, now tilt your stupid head just a nibble and give me a big toothy smile. Great, your ma is sure gonna like that one, you cute, little bastard.

At the end of training there was a luncheon. The main manager, G-, was to come sermonize to us about our bright new futures. "You'll recognize her when she comes in," everyone had said. G- walked into the firehouse wearing high heels and an elegant suit jacket.

After she thoroughly welcomed us to the company, she lectured us a rechauffe, in a restrained manager voice, in passive aggressive rigidity. This season’s motto is Zero Tolerance for Negativity in this Zone, she said. Along with the help of enlisted lower managers and long-time photographers, she talked to a fire hall full of underpaid employees in unbeauteous polo shirts about making it, introducing yet another motto in her speech, Success Is What you Make It . Interestingly, she also mentioned an alternate, darker mantra, not officially written on the cake as the others, We’re All In This Together.

There seemed to be genuine enthusiasm among the more established employees, those beckoned to the front of the room to receive their 5, 10, 15 year rings, trophies like anchors, and the others in their in between years, killicked but not berthed, sitting attentively at their tables. They were psyched about the catered meatballs, the chance to sit at large round tables instead of behind small, cubicle-enclosed desks, the promise of more sales and more yearbooks and a fall photographing season that would no doubt inaugurate that bright, new future G- was preaching, giving an early morning birth to a photogenic hereafter.

I sat at a table with some of the other new photographers, a small conglomeration of the more disgruntled and jaded hatchlings. It was comforting to know that my horror wasn’t singular, my shock at the blatant power play and demeaning slogans not my own snobbery and a lucky lack of previous experience in real, corporate America.

G- had clearly gone through intricate managerial training, where she took extensive notes on the fine art of making people feel appreciated and irreplaceable. She remembered everyone’s names after our introductions, for example, and used them unabashedly. I had stood up and said, “My name is Irina, and I am a new photographer.” “An appreciated photographer,” she corrected. Then, she proceeded to ask questions, a sort of pop quiz review of the slogans and goals and technicalities of the company and the job entailed. She called on people to answer, using their names, and when they answered correctly she pointed her manicured nail in their direction and a man with a stack of crisp bills rushed over to the recognized employee and handed them a $5 bill. There were $10 dollar questions too, after which the room swelled with a covetous excitement and hands shot up faster to answer the next question. She would wait, composed, until the masses settled down and then pop a $15 question.

My table slowly emptied out. I voluntarily stayed, taking notes on this strange scene that I had only previously seen in satirical sketches.

I wonder why they stay. When I talk to people separately now, they readily admit the shortcomings of this company/job (although still with a fair amount less of disdain and, let’s face it, haughtiness than yours truly). Is it the convenience? The company’s willingness to tolerate everyone as long as they tolerate the company? A sense of security? Or is it all ok – am I overreacting to a reality that I simply have not been exposed to before, gaping ignorantly at a norm that I just haven’t had? I grow vicariously weary at the thought of that. Not so weary, I hope, that I stay.

Pittsburgh, ye glorious!

2008-09-02T18:26:00.000-04:00

Pittsburgh is Philadelphia's cleaner, hillier, more industrial, more bridge bedazzled cousin, unfortunately located in western Pennsylvania, hours away from, some may say, anything desirable. It's closer to Ohio than it is to the ocean, and to me, that's not geographically admirable in any way. But Places Rated Almanac rated it the #1 most livable city in 2007; the same year, it rated Philadelphia #5, so honestly I don't know if it's much to go on. While I love Philadelphia dearly, much like I love my mephitic mutt, I sincerely hope our nation can do better.

Anyway, I went west and here is what I saw:

The first night we camped an hour outside of Pittsburgh, in Laurel Hill State Park. Upon arrival, we discovered that our borrowed, gargantuan tent came with an alarm clock and a room-separator-fly, but no rain fly. We also discovered that it had rained earlier and ended up sitting by a waning, sizzling fire. It was awfully pretty that night.

We awoke to a soft, gray morning and a drizzle that was quickly turning into rain. We packed and fled to The Quiet Storm Cafe , where I had the incredible Magic Snake (cheesy) sandwich and checked out locals' bike legs. The hills and staircases of Pittsburgh remind me of those of Valparaiso, only considerably better paved, so I resolved to bring my bike next time. But driving around, we got to see how green it is, neighborhoods poking out of vast and climbing vegetation-covered slopes.

We went to Braddock, right outside of Pittsburgh, on the Monongahela River. It's a depressed town that rises onto crooked hills from Braddock Ave and creeps with broken houses - porches and windows and slanting walls lying in dejected and somnolent heaps, weighed down with stinking furniture and scattered pasts. It's also home to the still functioning Monongahela Valley Works, Edgar Thomson Plant Steel Mill - Carnegie's first, in 1873. Lately, Braddock's bad ass mayor has been trying to gentrify the town to the best of his abilities and to bring in new folks who can appreciate the cheap land and houses and perhaps even revel in the industrial wonderland that surrounds that town. It's not surprising, of course, that the punks are biting then. But so are others, leading to phantasmagorical scenery, like, say, an organic farm with the mill towering in the background.

At some point we made it to The Church Brew Works. This is not just a brewery installed in a defunct church - this is a brewery that put the brew kettles on the altar, and painted angels with pint glasses in the stations of the cross. This is a brewery that made the most amazing beer I've ever had, a coconut stout that was so light and silky and so perfectly tinged with coconut that I might have prayed a little on the way out.

And then Gooski's (3117 Brereton St).

And then there was Zenith. Color-coded, well-dusted antique shop, tucked yet spacious dining room in back, plant-protected windows, goblet-set tables, vegetarian and vegan delights, an entire table set with pies and cakes. Too bad the food wasn't too exciting (although I hear it's not always bad, perhaps we came on bad day?) because otherwise I may have grannynapped the little old lady who must, inevitably, be responsible for this extravagant buffet. She must have been sitting in a back room, where servers took unpriced items to be blessed and valued. Their website says, "Eat where your seat could literally be sold out from under you," but it so happened that the one thing I wanted to purchase was not for sale. The bestest part of this best place was it's bathroom. Its walls are painted a super-saturated cobalt blue and lined with hundreds of owls. They're there to watch and make sure you're not doing anything naughty in the john.

Afterwards, we did some fancy sneaking around and went to the Carrie Furnace, closed in 1982. It's incredibly rusted but also incredibly intact. There are swinging doors, and stream stoppers, and oil still wheezing and bubbling through minuscule holes in the piping. They're planning to build a museum on the grounds, I think?

So, Pittsburgh. If it wasn't so miserably isolated out there I'd be moving there in a minute. But alas, #5 will have to do for now.

Pumpkin Samosas

2008-08-25T16:37:00.001-04:00

A Sushi Feast

2008-08-18T21:01:00.000-04:00

It's fun and delicious to butcher the fine art of sushi making by neatly rolling your maki with a respectful disregard for sushi's minimalism and stuffing it with whatever you happen to have cut up and placed at arm's length. Proceed to do this in large quantities, display on different shaped plates, and eat on Sunday nights. I'm finding the weekly sushi feasts to be a sort of Havdalah for the week - maybe next time I'll light candles?

Something Goes Right

2008-08-13T12:35:00.000-04:00

My pits are a mess - elbow pits, knee pits.

My elbows harbor the tragi-comically stubborn ringworm, persisting on and off since that fateful October ('07) when the Dark Commander was my roommate and mortal foe. He was a ringworm-ridden kitten quarantined in the room I was subletting and I was bemoaning my return to the country and already insomnia-ridden. At night he kept me awake pilfering the room, climbing dressers and curtains, breaking glass, knocking over every possible thing on every conceivable surface. He climbed on my head and tried to spoon with my face. Every morning I straightened the room up as if from a nightly bombing. When a man friend slept over, Dark Commander made himself a known and undesirable presence. The words, "I will always remember this," were not exhaled with cigarette smoke and a smile, but rather through gritted teeth, like one sputters to a nemesis as he insults your mother and walks away into the sunset. Dark Commander also had to be bathed in sulfur every Wednesday afternoon, and until late Thursday the room, too, carried a pungent, yet soft, altogether enveloping aroma of gunpowder. Before the sulfur baths finally cured him of his ringworm, he gifted some of it to me. When Commander's mama returned and learned of my condition she asked that I please not touch her cat.

My knee pit fell prey to its own tragedy just five days ago. An angry rash showed up, made itself comfortable and me very uncomfortable. I tried to test out its seriousness on my housemates. I'd lift my skirt to just above me knee, rotate my body slightly to reveal the beast, and ask, "You don't think it's serious, do you?" To this they, unanimously, made horrified faces and recoiled. I decided to listen to my Ma and see a doctor.

I showed up at Philadelphia Health Care Center #3 at 6:12am, this morning. There was a man that looked like Samwell, oiled up and glistening in the morning sun, jogging in Clark Park in very short shorts. There were few other morning stragglers and I felt positively heroic when I realized that I was first in line. The Center opened at 7 and slowly put its gears into action as the head nurse barked at us to line up in single file and goose-step from one waiting area to another to get processed by three different people. One of the nurses got bitten by a dog outside and we watched the proceedings in the silence of the glass box seating area. I got a yellow card with my name on it and sat.

First, a nurse looked at me. He measured my blood pressure twice before he started fiddling with the wires and plugged a couple more cables in before he finally recorded. He looked at my rash, and said someone else would come talk to me about it. It sounded as though I was going to be educated about my reckless behavior. I got called again, this time by a doctor. She seemed unimpressed and uninterested. She poked at it, gave me a prescription for antibiotics and a steroid cream and sent me on my way. At the Center's pharmacy, I was told to return at 11:30. I came up to the receptionist and told her I was all done, and did I need to pay anything? She laughed me out of the building and as I left, yelled, "It's nice, isn't it?!" It was a little before 9.

It is nice. While I doubt I would choose this clinic for more serious analysis or problems, because the doctors seemed so overworked and distracted, I am pleased. I came home ebullient that I actually got health services I could afford, but I realize there is very limited charm to this. It took 3 hours to get an antibiotic prescription, and I'm not sure I would trust them with too much else. In addition, people were turned away and afternoon walk-in appointments were canceled. What if the antibiotics don't work and I have to get intravenous medicine and/or further, more complicated treatment? Where do I go then?

Plastic Waterfalls

2008-08-05T23:32:00.001-04:00

Pilfered and Poached

2008-07-28T17:10:00.000-04:00

edit: phone was not stolen, rather it was drunkenly and mistakenly taken and returned this afternoon. all other items remain at large.

Things I have had stolen:

- nice stereo: from my bedroom, by a carny who was living there, while I was in Argentina.
- mp3 player and speakers: from shady hotel room, through the window bars, in Buenos Aires.
- bag of toiletries, including toothbrush: from my shady hotel room, while I was sleeping, in Buenos Aires.
- digital camera: from my bag, in a discoteque, I think by someone named Shark?, in Cusco.
- 2 thermoses: from the kitchen, probably by the next door restaurant's employees, in Cusco.
- some years off my life: ongoing, by eclectic forces all around me, which refuse to cease.
- my phone: from my living room, by a mean man, while I was jogging, after he crashed on the couch.
- 100 nuevos soles: in Iquitos.

Things I have stolen:

- poofy sticker of a lion: from my cousin, who realized I was the culprit when I wore the sticker in front of her, when I was 6.
- various books, CDs, clothes, etc.: in my youth, mostly for excitement, or boredom while cutting classes.
- blueberries: not sure if this counts, because was guilted into paying up for the blueberries in the end, in the Pine Barrens.
- various entrances to beaches, museums, movies, etc.

Do these two lists even out? Am I doing something wrong? Should I start stealing everything I can carry, and quick?

New Growth

2008-07-23T11:19:00.000-04:00

It used to look like this:

Some time too late in the season I decided it was time to plant things and, with some help, dug around, picking out tons of glass, a few bricks, and a dense forest of undesirables. I remember the neighbors were barbecuing and I could smell their burgers and beer through the iron curtain of weeds that separates our small yards. One of them came over, beer in hand. "Girl can hoe," he said to my roommate, and went back without offering cold beers.

I had fresh, illicitly acquired seeds and a bag of expired-back-in-'03 seeds. I decided to plant the new stuff, but was still so impatient and so paranoid that nothing would come up that I planted as if I were a little, seed vomiting smurf. Instead of sensibly spacing everything out and dropping one seed, maybe even two, into each carefully hollowed soil pocket, I walked along the rows and dropped air raids of seedlings here and there. I planted squash, zucchini, cucumbers, sweet peas, carrots, brussel sprouts. I was shocked when things started growing; keeping things alive is not my forte. I was a little embarrassed at how patchy said things were growing; instead of rows of plants, I have clumps.

This is what it looks like now:

I'm thinking I should thin the plants out and make it a little more livable for them, so that they are not sitting on top of each other and competing for nutrients and room when there's so much to go around. But I am a little afraid to spend too much time out there, because every time I do I get attacked by mosquitoes.

This is what that looks like:

New Arrangements, 1000 Times Across the Sky

2008-07-19T22:46:00.000-04:00

Sheila washing: a prospectus

2008-07-16T18:37:00.000-04:00

Bella, Ciao!

2008-07-14T07:59:00.000-04:00

Witch Hunt and Brown Sugar from our basement, yesterday.

Fountain of [non]Youth

2008-07-14T07:21:00.000-04:00

Catharsis and Cooties, plus Eats

2008-07-10T01:41:00.000-04:00

This evening, in an effort to make our house more habitable, physically and hygienically, we embarked on a multifaceted attack on the exploding mess that is our kitchen. While I killed the creatures with napalm-esque warfare in the closet with the stairs to nowhere, Nicole cleaned the fridge (found: a kombucha baby, rice wrapped in foil, condiments enough for the world’s largest hotdog, smelly unmentionables), Tim “scrubbed crevices” and Melina washed off the goods to be kept. When the compost was dumped, its inner, immobile, anaerobic depths stirred like the rising dead to punish us for the delayed cleaning and produced an odiferous tsunami that wafted in and out with the breeze, each time like a wave of diarrhea doom.

The positive result of Operation Getting Rank Old Stuff Sequestered (GROSS) is that it is, in fact, slightly cleaner.

Negative aspects of Operation GROSS include, but are not limited to, a disgusting evening, a waste of food, a general disgruntlement, and an unusually copious covering of my form with ants.

We have an ant problem. The problem is that ants crawl in neat lines along our walls, counters, floors, straying sometimes to our bedrooms, living rooms, and eventually, climbing onto us. They tread lightly and I often find my Formicidae foes only hours after I’ve left the house. It is rather uncomfortable to pick off insects from one’s body while, for example, out to dinner with friends or, perhaps, while gettin’ it on with someone unfamiliar with “the problem.” While producing understandable social stigmatization (is the ant the new cootie?), ants crawling all over me is also a physiological fuck. Sometimes it tickles. Sometimes I feel like I am being bitten. Recently, I have grown paranoid and have begun to imagine ants on me when there aren’t any. I swap at myself like a fly-tortured cow every time a breeze blows or a hair falls out of place onto my neck. This does not make me look sound of mind.

The photo, taken during Operation GROSS, made me think of Peter Menzel’s What the World Eats . While I try to mostly consume fresh vegetables and fruit, home cooked grains, and home cooked everything else, I know I’ve been slacking extra hard lately. But I didn’t realize just what a sea of cans and jars was present in the house (although mostly they aren’t mine anyway). But more on this later.

Shakin'-It till the end

2008-07-07T14:11:00.000-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, I once again managed to get some last minute tickets to KSP, a Russian gathering extraordinaire of boozing and singing in a little campground naïve enough to host us, to the amusement and horror of its American, summer-long trailer campers. For years, each KSP gathering was a fantastic orgy, where ye ol' youth came armed to the gills with cases of vodka and left panties scattered under the trees of unsuspecting campgrounds. But of late, after the organizing committee devised a new system that restricted who could get tickets, the event not only toned down, but became veritably family friendly. This year, KSP was so impressively well-behaved that it resembled more a picnic of singing Christians than godless alcoholics on the prowl.

Luckily, some stalwart ghosts of KSP past made appearances. For example, there were the people who loudly sang the Russian National Anthem at 5am, to the beat of a tin drum. There were the bathing beauties that were drunk by early afternoon and yelling at me for leaving camp (to go pee). There was a very drunk organizer who, while whispering sweet nothings in my ear, prompted an older lady to whisper back mysteriously, "Young man, I know all your secrets…" My favorite, however, was Shakin'-It Girl.

The youth of KSP had been strategically banished to the far end of the campground (and named the corner The Strayer), where they are allowed to have their night concerts without disturbing their equally inebriated parents at their own concerts. We sat/stood around on a circle of logs and people would come by, hook up their guitars, sing loud, and we would sing along ecstatically. In very Russian style, The Strayer was littered with bottles, couples danced learned tangos and salsas, in the mud, to seemingly inappropriate songs, and there was a sprinkling of ironic communist T-shirts. And, of course, there was Shakin'-It Girl.

She was wearing a long, flowing skirt, a belly halter top, and a scarf sewed with jingly coins wrapped around her hips. At first, she parked herself in front of her friend and stood shaking her hips like a Turkish Energizer Bunny, mostly rhythm-less but not completely unsexy belly dance moves, accented with bird like flapping of her long skirt way up high on both sides. Her friend encouraged her with her own intermittent shaking from the safety of a man's lap, and with swigs from their bottle. The bottle led to Shakin'-It's slow and ostentatious demise. Imagine seeing an egregiously flamboyant bird get shot with slow acting poison and then spending the next 2 hours watching the bird flail its wings and twist its dense little body in poorly cadenced spasms, until finally, it falls on its side, and unable to get up any longer, continues to twitch in its floored position, slower and slower, but never quite stopping it's own or the onlookers' pain. Shakin'-It just kept getting more and more wasted and straying from the safety of her friends out into the middle of The Strayer circle, where the reaction of smirkers was already heavily outweighing that of her mostly male admirers. She backed it up at musicians as they sang, at onlookers, at inanimate objects, at darkness herself. She latched on to bystanders, both for the support they provided in staying vertical and as targets for the unhindered smooches she handed out, and, amazingly, she kept shaking it.. The shake, by then, had deteriorated into a sloppy, boggy sway punched periodically back to life by spasmodic gyrations. It was incredible. No amount of disapproving hissing, cajoling by friends, microphone amplified announcements by singers and mediators, or falls into the mud, or alternatively, the fire, could convince Shakin'-It to stop. When I left The Strayer and made my way back to my camp through the dark woods, I could still hear her tinny, coined scarf ringing with the aria of an untrued bike wheel bouncing on an unpaved road.