Amazon Women

After eating, Turkish businessmen splashed aromatic tonic on their hands, patted jowls and slicked back thinning hair. One man adjusted spectacles. Eating fish fast made him sweat. Sharing a joke about bones he smiled at an assassin writing a character sketch.

Ancient serious women accepted hard mountain village life.

Young women divorced from confronting nature, soil and invisible roots, facing steep cobblestone Trabzon streets, appeared dazed and confused confronting miles of shops, window dummies and aggressive male textile hawkers yelling, BUY FROM ME. SPECIAL MORNING PRICE.

Have a look-see.

Shoppers’ visual examination loved consumption paradigms.

Lucky hung out observing the flow as cats prowled for scraps, bodies with a voice cautioned parking spaces and lost souls attempting sad cellular telecommunication connections stumbled through life inconveniences below Roman walls.

An abandoned Roman castle overlooking Giresun had a secret tunnel to a nearby is-land where Amazon women lived. They mated annually to keep the race going.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint, said an Amazon woman to her Black Sea lover. Take your time. After you make love to me, I will kill you and eat your heart.

I have something to look forward to, he said. Yes, she said, death is a new adventure. Nothing ever happens again.

Swirling exhortations of mosque mullahs calling the pious echoed down cobblestone alleys past Giresun boys riding spoke less bikes between crumbling yellow Ottoman walls and mackerel sellers discussing silver fins lying dead-eyed glossy on ice crystals melting into a refrain, The Sea. The Sea.

51 Days in Turkey

Seamstress

Away from ice girl’s eyes wet season life shimmered in green rice paddies. Beauty, creativity, dance, and music described sensations. Sensations rested between an object and a concept. Stimuli engaged disquiet.

How do you manifest this waking dream, asked ice girl.

It’s all process, said Leo. Any explanation is a well dressed mistake.

Across town a seamstress returned to her guesthouse. She splashed water on her face, changed clothes and spit into red roses. She kick started her cycle and went to the market inside a dark labyrinth.

At her corner stall she keyed multiple locks. She stacked numbered wooden shutters. She dragged out her Butterfly sewing machine, ironing board and manikins.

Dummies wore exquisite yellow, purple, blue, white shimmering silks decorated with sparkling faux pas silver stars, moons, and small round reflecting balls.

Her skill designed fabrics for women needing elaborate sartorial refinement for engagements, weddings, and cremations.

She evaluated serious fittings and adjustments. Her sewing universe process was selecting fabric; measurement, ironing backing, a ruler, white chalk to mark pleats, cutting, pushing her machine treadle, pins, threads, trimming edges, hand sewing clasps, shiny connections, and ironing.

Needles inside a slow prism flashed light and shadow as threads danced through cloth in endless conversations. Needles talked about traditional conservative morals and opportunity-value cost.

Thread followed their conversation securing 1,001 small mirrors. Together they measured precise calculations establishing a stop-loss number. All explanations have to end somewhere. Cut.

Ice Girl in Banlung

Consumption Dramatics

Shopkeeper in Ankara talks.

Life is filled with inconveniences.

We have millions of idle unemployed here in Turkey. Bankers and politicians stole all the money. Greed is good is their mantra.

Government is organized crime.

Soma Mine disasters with catastrophic loss of life is a fact of life for diggers making $500 a month. My job is to sell stuff.

Treasures to be dusted on archaic mantelpieces. People buy things to make themselves happy - in the short term. They want to impress family and friends. They get bored, forget about it, lose it, throw it away or donate it to charity and buy more stuff.

It’s a never-ending insatiable desire of supply and demand consumption dramatics.

Advertising never dies. Fools are ruled by their emotions. Fear. Enough psycho-social-babble.

What brought you here?

My feet.

The Language Company

Playing with fire in Ulus, Turkey.

Buy From Me

“Buy from me!” sang the swarming young Black H’mong girls in Sapa, Vietnam.

They swirled around him like dancers at the faire, like gnats around a flame.

He was on fire and they wanted to save him.

The Black H’mong wear a deep dark blue almost black indigo cloth. After it’s been repeatedly washed and dried in the sun it takes on a glistening silver metallic sheen.

They crowded around him. He was a stranger in town. A stranger goes on a journey. Two kinds of stories.

Girls carried orange and green and blue and yellow woven bags around their necks. Inside the bags they had postcards of the Red Dzao people, narrow embroidered colorful wrist bands and thin hand made wallets. The wallets had a zippered pocket inside for secret money.

“My story is to sell in the street,” said Mo, all of 10. She wore a dirty green t-shirt. Her face was smudged with dirt. Her off white broken plastic Vietnamese sandals had seen their better day.

They cost 15,0000 Dong in the market. He gave her a blue 20. “Go buy some new sandals.”

She said, “Really?”

He said, “Yes, really.”

He waited in the food market surrounded by new languages, clattering dishes, the smell of frying food and a mishmash of costumed humans.

The Black, White and Flower H’mong. Red Dzao. Tay.

Mo came back with her new white plastic sandals in a pink plastic bag. She squeezed between two slurping H’mong women and sat down.

“Are you hungry?” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Ok, let’s get some chicken noodle soup.”

“Ok,” she said. Delicious.

Mo & My

A Jungle Story

Once upon a time in the long now there was a continent, a landmass floating on water. White barbarians called it Asia on dusty maps. Deep inside Asia were vast lands, rivers and mountains.

Overtime and Other, historical bandits with a reputation for laughter, art, music, magic and diverse languages and cultures lived in jungles, forests and remote mountains.

Jingle, jangle, jungle. Using natural materials they created musical instruments, simple weapons, homes, fish traps, snares and looms. The women had babies, wove cloth and prepared food while the men fished, planted crops, domesticated animals. Children played and learned life lessons from nature with extended families. 

One day a boat filled with white men sailed up river to a village deep in the jungle. They wore shiny clothing, spoke a language the people could not understand and carried weapons that made a lot of noise and scared everyone. They pretended to be friendly by offering gifts. The leader of the village welcomed them. They had a party. The village gave them hospitality, shelter and friendship.

The white men took CONTROL of the village, people and jungle.

Every day more white people came up river on boats named Destiny. They were on a quest for gold and slaves. Owning, using and discarding slaves had proven to be an essential part of their evolution on other continents.

Their mantra was: cheap labor, cheap raw materials, cheap goods, cheap markets and much profit.

White people said, we are civilized and you are savages. We have religion. It is called Wealth & Greed. We are on a mission from the great chief. We control people. We control nature. We have machines. We take what we want.

Every day the white men marched their slaves deep into the jungle singing, “We control Nature. We shall overcome.”

They spread diseases. They planted fear. They planted envy and jealousy. They manipulated villages against villages. They divided people against people. Divide and conquer. History taught barbarians well.

They harvested wealth in the form of people, precious stones, rubber and every raw material of value. They were never satisfied. Their appetite grew and grew.

If we want to survive we have to move to a new jungle far away, said the village shaman. This is the story they told their people one night below stars singing with their light.

Weaving A Life (V1)