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Entries in communication (13)

Monday
Jan242011

Tarek Bouazizi

Greetings,

Tarek Bouazizi, 26, finally had enough of the endless cycle of bribery, threats, and corruption. He sold vegetables on the streets in the small town of Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia where the unemployment rate was 30%.

He loved poetry. He supported his mother, uncles, and five brothers and sisters at home.

He set himself on fire. He died. Tunisians grabbed their chance at freedom. The dictator of 23 years ran away. Middle Eastern and North African despots and autocratic dictators went into denial mode.

Oh no, we're next, they cried. Yemen, Libya, and Egypt gave the police and military more money to protect their intractable insatiable greed to maintain power and control. They decreased the price of food to temporarily appease hungry people.  

Protect us in our castles and mansions. Protect us from educated individuals demanding human rights, equality and an end to the charade, to our reign of economic terror. Protect us from desperate citizens setting themselves on fire. Protect us from the aftermath.

You have to sacrifice the peel to enjoy the fruit.

Metta.

Read more, NYT.

Wednesday
Aug252010

what is red for you?

Greetings,

Many thanks to Kerstin Klein for featuring my photography work on her site: What is Red for you?

Kerstin is a graphic designer, movie lover and Moleskine aficionado in Berlin.

Have a look-see and send her your Red inspirations, your visually articulate Red creativity.

People should talk less and draw more. 

Metta.

Friday
Jul092010

798

Greetings,

Living in a huge art museum we can never escape art. Where does the artificial end and the real begin?

798 is a district in Beijing where artists collaborate and present their vision, similar to the Left Bank or Greenwich Village.

798...

Wu Yuren, an artist who led a public protest over land thieves was recently arrested. “You don’t realize how arcane this system is until you have to deal with it,” Ms. Patterson, his wife said. “It’s a nightmare.”

NYT

Metta.

 

Wednesday
Jun232010

Sam and Dave Part 3.5

Greetings,

After I’ve made them yell three times I will answer with a whisper. They can barely hear me so they yell again and again. I have conditioned them to my living nightmare. 

Finally, to teach them a lesson I will answer. Softly. They can’t hear me. They have to raise their voice to compete with the other yellers around them. I reject them for yelling at me. I am easily distracted and I nurture the chaos. Ah, the glare of bright artificial ancestor passion for pain and tongue lashings. 

Two ghosts whisper. ‘Give them 1,000 lashes. With your tongue.’

‘I have 1,000 arms and 1,000 eyes. I am infinite wisdom on the ocean of wisdom.’ 

Ha Noise people grow up in small tight spaces where people yell and make racket and talk over each other and don’t listen and yell louder to be heard and others block them out or ignore them completely and the yelling gets vicious like the starving dog downstairs, howling, “Feed Me!”

Dave pisses in his underwear and his wife lives in her pajamas. They are a cheap red pastel flowering cotton brand decorated with brown pandas. He yells at her and the kid because he had little choice in the matter when his father and mother told him he was going to marry the slob who learned to yell and ignore her parents which is how they evolved into this higher intelligent life form. So they can reproduce.

Strange true tale. The other day I passed one of those narrow minded little hovels guarded by doors and rusting sliding gates. The narrow alleys are filled with these sardine dwellings. Discarded sofas, people cooking in the alley using round perforated coal, workers hauling cement, bricks, wires, stones, creating methods of production: knife, hoe, scythe, axe, hammer, control stick elephant, stick. All fine, well and good means.

In the street packed with screaming, beeping careening cycles, garbage carts, kids playing fast and loose and women selling produce from broke bamboo baskets was a dead dog. A chilled out sausage dog, splayed legs, glassy brown eyes. Inert.

This spectacular spectacle attracted all the people pouring from their shops; sewing ladies held a thread in air, a woman chopping greens held a leaf, a man oiling a bike held a can, a woman working meat caressed a knife dripping blood, a girl held her balloon, a retired man held his glass of urine beer, a grandmother held her future - all staring at the dead dog as rush hour motorcycles beeped impatient noise trying to negotiate through the crowd so they could get home to families, lovers, food, television and their beloved pet. If they had one.

A man came out of his small dark space (millions live in the dark where you can’t see history and hide from strangers) and grabbed the dog’s two rear legs, picked it up and lifted it into the air. It hung down. He resembled an old painting of a hunter holding a wild hare following a successful hunt. After wild dogs flushed it running wild, running filled with fear, afraid and free.

He was in shock so he just stood there, holding the dripping dead dog as blood formed a small pool on the street surrounded by all the angry confused voices of friends, neighbors, strangers pealing like bells in his brain saying something, offering suggestions, advice, warnings, predictions, songs, rituals, chants, musical operas, significant silences, stares, no appropriate words inside, outside the mystery so he stood there holding the legs and then he gently laid the dog closer to the gutter and the dog’s body eased itself into itself and the man turned away from the people, noise, confusion and returned to his dark interior space.

Metta.

Monday
Jun212010

Sam and Dave Part 3

Greetings,

One day I’m sitting in the garden balcony. There’s an invisible guy next door and they have an infant. He raises his voice. People yell here. It’s normal like breathing. They get yelled at when they are kids, like the man yelling at his infant until the kid balls. Tears stream until mother rescues her darling from the emotional abuse. Yelling affects their self-esteem and their well being. Children will learn how to reject this yeller. How to close down. 

They, in turn will learn to raise their voice in a whining, demanding yelling overture. They will be passive, then turn on the yell. As they age they turn off. They turn off their ears. Their ears are assaulted non stop 24/7. The volume control is broken. They grow up to be non-listeners. Never engaged unless marriage and procreation reaction recreation speaks.

The adult savors this power. It’s a throwback to his parents, a generation raised with fear and intimidation and suspicion and insecurity and poverty and informers and empty promises and empty hope and loud voices. Some voices are real and some are pure nightmares.

Hope is the last thing that dies, yells his wife. Take out the garbage fat man. Lose face idiot. Hide your shame. Raise your voice like a flag of authority. Signal your displeasure with the infants. Get them in line. Shape them up because you can’t ship them out. You will raise them to yell with the best of them.

They will yell and bellow like stuck pigs bleating sheep cackling crows breaking palm branches sending shivers down your spineless self pity, with regrets and anger and fear manifesting inside narrow tight lives under long florescent lights, this shattering glare.

They will grow up to be passive-aggressive yellers. They will bury you and take your photo to the artist who will memorize your face. They will look you in the frozen face and give you offerings of fruit and water. They burn incense so your spirit has something to eat, so it will not be angry and return yelling, demanding, pleading. 

One day in the not-too-distant future your dead ancestors will learn to make sounds, then words, phrases, sentences called talk, then louder until they will achieve the decibels required to re-join the family. They will compete in yelling contests with talking monkeys.

Someone - a parent, boss, lover, stranger - will yell at them and they will ignore old yeller. Doesn’t matter who it is, family or friend. Ignore the human, beasts and gods. Old yeller will yell again, a little louder. No answer. 

I wait for them to really get their yell going, louder says the listener, hiding inside silence.

Metta.