Angkor Wat Photo Book

Angkor Wat, "City of Temples" in Cambodia is the largest religious monument in the world.

It was built between the 9th and 13th century. Originally Hindu, it absorbed Buddhism into the art and culture in the 12th century.

It is estimated 1,000,000 Khmer lived, worked and created 1,000 temples honoring kings.

The city had the world's largest population before the Industrial Revolution with a land area exceding 280 square miles.

My new photo book explores the magic and beauty.

Angkor Wat, Cambodia

Feel Experience With Camera

How many tourists see only through their phone camera? Millions, said Rita.

She is a tour quide, archeologist and author of Ice Girl in Banlung. She continued...

They feel the experience of 8th century Angkor artistic splendor only with their cameras, cold impersonal little tools. Their experience is defined by camera. Obscura.

Do you remember Li, the trek leader in Sapa, Vietnam talking about Hanoi day trippers with cameras? How she said, it’s fucking hilarious? Same here.

For the majority of tourists it’s not about understanding the Khmer people, culture, food, art, music, and language. It’s about feeling with a camera. They are in a big fat hurry.

Rita (L) and friends

They’ve learned through hard fast lessons to trust the machine. It is their weapon against mediocrity and boredom and shallow emptiness. They don’t comprehend the intricacies of the machine. They believe it can and will save them. The machine controls them. They gratefully accept this reality.

They press optical machines tight against their faces, piercing retinas, flickering lids. Point and shoot. They lower the device and stare with hard lost eyes at the image of their faded memory. They judge it. Crimping. Evaluate. DELETE.

Shoot again. Point. Shoot. Delete. Repeat. A snapshot. Snap a shot. Preserve this moment forever. Quick. They must go. They must move to the next great big thing. They are in a hurry. Death is closer than white on rice.

The tuk-tuk driver is impatient. He wants more money for his time. He waited when tourists slept, while they screwed. He waited as they stuffed eggs, watermelon and soft bread into tired bored faces. They ate like animals. They point and shoot. They delete.

Hurry. They have no time to see their obscurity. This loss, this sense of amnesia envelops them. It accompanies them through radioactive meltdowns. It is a dark cloud of forgetting. They remember to forget. They are on a Homeric quest of infinite proportions and magnitude. 

Their memory card is full. They attach electrodes to a cerebral cortex and press the DownLoad switch. Memories of Apsara dancers, elephants, monkeys, celestial deities flicker on a screen behind their eyes.

Avalokiteshvara - the Bodhisattva of Compassion smiles.

Be Human

"Then we’d get to wondering about the billions of other minds at work just like ours, like the mind of a stockbroker in Tennessee and the mind of a toddler in Costa Rica and the mind of a mother in the Congo and the mind of a construction worker in Lebanon, and we’d imagine how all their thoughts are knit together in the same way ours are.

"And we’d think, “Isn’t this whole thing miraculous, the fact that we can share all this stuff and the only thing we’ve got to do is be human? Now this is one hell of an idea. This is something I can really get behind! What’s the point of hermiting yourself in your own brain if there’s a whole world out there full of love and fear and pity and compassion?” - David Foster Wallace

Tranquility

Sitting in a quiet zone noon hour
Nourishment
Zen equilibrium peace

Overhead fan curls churns air
Grandmother peels purple grapes
Mother waits for noodle soup people

Son plays homework game on phone
Chattering with friends, no TV, no obscure blaring idiot box
Voices from slurping nurses, doctors, poor Lao patients
Wait for a miracle of modern medicine

It's quiet enough for scribbles, a poem story
Tranquility
Stranger sits alone
As whirling fan
Discovers invisible air

Angkor Wat

we gave them everything

Two pale female French tourist conspirators plotted their narrative near the Khmer gardener.

Colonizing this hell hole we gave them baguettes, war, illusions of freedom, top heavy dull administrative procrastination tools, fake NGO bureaucracies, wide boulevards, legal beagle systems, an eye for an eye, corruption potential, designs of egalitarian ideals, morals, ethics, principles, values, faded yellow paint and French architecture.

Yes, said her friend, this IS the old brave new world and I am lazy and passive and my stomach comes first. I am starving.

Let’s eat our sorrow and be grateful we don’t live in this depressing country filled with compassionate Buddhist people. I’ll never understand their intention to do nothing with mindfulness.

It’s the hardest thing a person can do.

She was a super thin model of anorexia boned with stellar constellations. Her grim hawk faced rotund lesbian lover had flabby upper arms. She scribbled serious fiction-memory and sense data entitlement in an unlined black notebook with one hand while massaging her forehead to increase creative blood flow.

They examined a microscopic map of Angkor Wat filled with unconscious alliterative jungles,

gold lame Apsara dancers,

232 species of black and red butterflies,

2 million anxious tourists in a big fat fucking hurry,

Chinese, Japanese and Korean robot tour groups,

crying elephants,

super tour buses,

125cc motorcycles,

tuk-tuks,

begging children speaking ten European languages hawking gimcracks

whining predatory adults with an 8th grade education accompanied by miles of flaming plastic garbage,

narrow boned white oxen pulling carts,

14 million attention deficit disordered citizens addicted to simple minded FACELOST entertainment diversionary cell phone adolescent sex text nonsense and 1,001 laterite cosmic Hindu temples stretching across Burma and Thailand into Laos and Vietnam in a circular boomerang dance evolving from the stillness,

letting go of outcomes as the French ladies whispered,

Where have we been,

Where did we go,

What did we see,

Where are we,

How do we feel,

Did we discover the intuitive third eye of enlightenment or any wisdom in this totality of mystery, devotion, and sublime splendor?

They’re trapped in Cambodia.

One described fragments of her short life history with an animist talking stick.

The other cut out brochure glossies, ticket stubs and bleeding hearts to paste in her book. A future visual memory of her ear and snow.

Her attention span was shorter than a tour at the Genocide Museum in Phony Baloney filled with 2,000,000 smiling skulls.

Here we are.

The Language Company