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Entries in photojournalism (175)

Wednesday
Jul012020

Juke

My Cadiz, Spain experience sang of Juke, an African word meaning wicked or disorderly in one language.

It also meant a building without walls in the Congo. For American Blacks it took on sexual connotations and a type of dance.

It may have also described jute - a rough fiber made from the stems of a tropical Old World plant used for making twine, rope, or woven into matting - fields and jute workers visiting makeshift bars. Juke joints were bars with dance floors and back rooms for gambling and brothels. Shake your moneymaker.

 

Your Mask Eats Your Face

To juke was to lead a wandering life, have intercourse. To go in, jam and poke. Whorehouses. From the 1930’s on Delta blues players played juke joints, passing the music from generation to generation. Juke boxes were invented in 1927.

Nothin’ but the blues, everybody’s talking ‘cause talk is cheap.

Hard field work prisons, slavery, life, death, love, loss, leaving and living the blues with a feeling.

It was nothing but the blues talking.

While living, singing, and playing harp blues in the key of C, I trimmed long fingernails down to the quick brown fox jumped over the fence. WYSIWYG. Small slivers of enamel snow spiraled into air floating to cobblestones.

It was a clear truth after three days in the Sierras on narrow Roman passages, chopping and climbing in ancient forests removed from civilization’s discontent.

People moved fast and furious in Cadiz. I sensed their malcontent maladjusted wild crazy freedom from being closeted, closed in, no sky, no air, stoned frustrations manipulating mainstream desires down ways and means with cause and effect in the big city.

It was all a relative reality in the absolute reality and most of my relatives were dead.

Their grounded headstones decorated with names, ages, epitaphs collected dust living with memory.

Weaving A Life (V2)

Wednesday
Dec272017

5 images - 2017

Five images from 2017.

Saturday
Dec092017

Life in Hanoi - Ice Girl

Chapter 14.

Leo’s neighbors are Sam and Dave. Sam’s the kid. Dave is daddy. These are not Viet names. If they were they’d be named Binh and Thin and New Yen, like new Yin or old Yang. 

Dave had a kid so he and his wife can yell at them. So they will have someone, anyone to take care of him or her in old age. When they are sleeping on bamboo recliners absorbing 10,000 kitchen smells. 

It was an arranged marriage after a three-year courtship. Her parents demanded $5,000. Cash or no deal.

You play the game or the game plays you.

They pretended to need kids to support them in old age. When you’re young and naive pregnancy is always an option. It’s easy to have kids in the 13th most populated country on Earth. There are 85 million hard and fast rules of parenthood according to the wildly popular and heavily censored Socialist Party book, Produce & Consume.

Get married early. The pressure is on. 

You do not want to be unmarried, single, sad, lonely, and forgotten like a bad dream. Loneliness increases the chance of heart attacks, strokes of genius, and arterial vestiges of debilitating forms of social upheaval and personal instability in a well-mannered society. 

Extreme pressure is on girls to find a husband. Girls in Sapa illustrate exchange and user values for rural girls to get married at the ripe old age of 16 and begin producing genetic copies. Petri dish. Wash and tear.

It takes hard courage to raise kids with integrity, respect, authenticity and a low level of pain tolerance.

Sam cries. Dave releases streams of anger, bitterness and frustration allowing him to relax, expend, and expand the sound. Dave is startled to hear the sound of his own particular voice ricochet of substandard cold molten gray Hanoi cement block walls. His life is a cold cement wall. Echoes dance through his brain like little sugarplum fairies.

He knows the echo because he made it. He mixed the fine sand and quick dry cement. He slathered it over broken red bricks in circles with an abstract desire to make a work of art lasting forever which is how he thought of it the day he trow welled the paste.

Life gave him art and he used art to criticize life.

His voice, this manifestation expressing human vocal tendencies in a tight enclosed space near the gigantic liquid plasma television permanently implanted on a blank wall blaring news propaganda and perpetual adolescent reality soap shows about life next door where the family sits on cold red floral tile hunching over chipped slurping from cracked rose bowls shoveling steaming rice and green stringy vegetables into lost mouths yelling over each other in tonal decibels competing with a gigantic plasma television featuring dancing bears and pioneer patriots devouring rubber plantations, beaches for golf courses and farmland with a double bladed axe singing, in a high Greek-like chorus, their national anthem about land, sea, air, water as pianos being played by a young Japanese wisp, her fingers a delicate blur of incredibly fast incantation channels dance near a woman garbage collector who rings a bell every day at 16:55 alerting people in Dave’s neighborhood it is time for them to bring out their daily garbage. Remove the evidence. Bag it and tag it. Autopsy material.

Mrs. Pho hears the bell. She’s ready. She’s willing. She’s able. She’s carefully arranged her family’s daily consumption waste into two plastic bags. One pink. One white. Orange and yellow fruit rinds went white, everything else pink. Like shreds of fat. She didn’t waste a thing. No one does. 

Life is a nasty, brutal short struggle she reflected bowing in front of her parent’s images, dead and gone remembered forever with their stoic black and white ghost faces above eternal glowing neon flickering pulsating red, green, blue and white electric Buddha bulbs on the family altar. Plastic flowers, fruit offerings, burning incense - spirit food. Pho hears her father whisper in her burning ear carrying her away from their flaming village. ‘Remember where you came from.’

She never physically returned. She carried memories.

It didn’t really matter which went where because after she’d taken it down the high walled alley blocking all but the most sincere light of fading day, she casually tossed plastic bags into a rusty gray rolling cart with plywood boards reinforcing the height because the massive accumulation of garbage was tremendous. Growing day by day it became part of the collective mess, a collective consciousness. Garbage in-garbage out was everyone’s mantra.

She was content knowing her contribution was not extensive. Just enough. Just enough to get her away from walls where she’d gossip with her neighbors as white twilight cracks filtered past musical hammers, creaking wheelbarrows pulled by skinny boys, incessant motorcycle horns echoing through tight chambers with floating dust particles breaking light into a magical sense of mystery for her tired eyes marveling at this visual epiphany as exactly 21 emaciated shovels of earth were moved and manipulated this way and that by young desperate hungry boys and girls with limited educational opportunities from poor villages very far away laboring wheelbarrows filled with sand, gravel, bricks, mud, sludge, wood, dreams, their bodies caving in from exhaustion, heat, H1N1 virus, mortar attacks, suicide dreamers, drifting among H’mong Sapa kids speaking excellent English with no further hope of an education after 8 dystopian educational years now selling their handicrafts to tourists; bright beaded bags, embroidery stitches, indigo blue staining their hands through long dark cold endless mountain winters as storms howled, ‘Have mercy, Have mercy’ on war weary logic infested objectivists, the towering inferno of their external nightmare reduced to self-pity, leaving

No Exit. A shattered mirror reflected her face.

Inside his cement cell Dave’s angry voice danced with stranded rusty brown barb wire encircling his social network domain name, easing over shards of fractured green glass embedded in shrapnel’s perimeter. The Chinese introduced barbwire when they occupied the neighborhood for 1,000 years. Vietnam forced them all the way back to Manchuria.

The French ate pastries, introduced excellent wines, produced intricate glass mosaics for Dalat spring garden walls to prevent strangers and invaders from getting in, getting on, getting the better of them, as shards of glittering glass composed minuscule myopic musical and colonial architectural ideology. Yellow buildings aged gracefully along Rue this and Rue the day. Vietnam slaughtered the Frogs. They kept the language and baguettes.

Then the Yankees with their megaton Catholic missals of mass destruction and chaos unleashed their fury on the poor unsuspecting suffering masses gathered in Chu Chi’s tunnels below the surface of appearances.

Dave knew this because his grandfather’s father and his father’s family remembered dynasties encroaching on walls, shrines and brown temples welcoming silence.

During the day they worked paddies before evolving underground when nightingales brought carpet-bombing, napalm, Agent Orange. 

“Quick into the tunnels!” They sat sweltering, crying, still. Listening to the dull roaring threaded whoosh as steel and iron canisters thudded, this tremor, shredding forests, fields, homes danced into flames. Heat soared over their tunnels bathing them in sweat. They burrowed deeper. Deeper, following hollow carved earth trails. The earth swallowed their breath. Their bones fertilized soil. Ancestor bones cried in their sleep.

The sweet silence after all the crying and wounded foreign d(evils) fled in terror as peasants streamed down mountains, out of caves and tunnels, poling rivers, attempting to escape, walking on water, drinking oceans of creation myths, draining lands of blood, forcing d-evils into shining seas. A blue green sea danced red.

Their city voices flowed between crumbling sand and crushed red bricks laid haphazard. Cement walls blocked everything but sounds of their anger, frustration and repressed bitterness at life’s twisted fateful reality.

Their memory was a fiction.

This fiction created their memory. 

Ice Girl in Banlung

Friday
May262017

Room 317, Yang-en University, Fujian, China

He liked her immediately.

She knew how to wear her sadness with dignity. It was a warm, comfortable security blanket woven in threaded hopes, dreams, lies, beauty and love. He didn’t feel pity for her potential rising like a bird leaves a branch toward higher sky.

Her meditation involved multiple personalities - student, wife, lover, worker, artist, laborer, dancer, commodity broker and teacher. She played an actress pretending to be someone else in her life’s play. Do not break character.

She was all he had at the moment. Time stopped for him swallowing all the tears she’d never cry. Perhaps it was deeply ingrained Confucian cultural modesty masks forbidding her the luxury of being open, real, honest, and human. Hide your true face, said Mask. Your face eats your mask.

 

She lived in a time warp where emotions were controlled and rationed by parents, Party leaders and invisible social ghosts.

A tight feeling constricted her throat. She wanted to scream, ”Help me please, I am dying of infinite inexorable sadness.”

No one heard her silent scream. Peasants, students and teachers were busy, busy, busy staring at cell phones reading/texting 5,000-year old characters. Word pictures.

Ideograms symbolized the idea of a thing without the sound used to articulate it. A day in the life peering down, down, down at a green ionized electronic glowing screen. Their universe encapsulated screaming screened electrons.

They were auditioning for walk-on roles as student and teacher character actors at a private Chinese business university of 15,000 students.

They needed to stand out, to find the essence of robotic behavior where daring wasn’t fatal. Express their inner emotional state with abject distraction. Where their self-esteem and courage nurtured support, respect and empathy in their longing.

They had latent desire.

Their struggle was for jobs, money and social position.

They’d accept financial filial piety responsibility for aging parents. If married they’d support four parents. The iron rice bowl theory of a guaranteed collective security network collected dust in history’s rubbish bin. It was discarded with state housing, state jobs, and state health care.

She lived in a Brave New World.

She knew this and failed to accept it. Her consciousness shift grasped fragmentary what ifs and maybes.

“If students spent as much time looking forward as they do behind they’d make amazing profound progress,” she thought, approaching old campus.

She inhaled the sweet scent of yellow, pink and red wild roses outside barred windowed classrooms near the stinking W.C. basement where school guards planted green vegetables in trash strewn plots.

She trimmed dead stems with her Tibetan knife, caressed a thorn piercing her heart and severed one fresh rose. She carried it through a gate and up uneven cement stairs evolving into a paradigm shift. She was always early and well prepared.

White chalk dust covered the teacher’s podium in room 317. She lived, breathed, swallowed and spoke white chalk dust. On a broken blue table in the corner was a small green plastic bucket filled with water. Dust floated on the surface.

She opened the window, picked up a torn crumpled rag, soaked it and squeezed it out.

She placed the rose in a cup of water and put it on the podium.

Stubs and nubs of white chalk littered the podium. She collected fragments of academic history, an ancient educational memory scattered by a previous teacher. They always left a mess of exculpatory evidence.

She placed them in a box of discarded chalk next to the water bowl and blew white dust scattering flying powder elements into the air dispersing particles. After wiping down the podium, she rinsed and squeezed out the rag, hanging it to dry on the windowsill. She looked out.

Rolling green Fujian hills and a large blue lake escaped her eyes. An old weather-beaten woman farmer behind a red brick wall tilled soil to plant vegetables. Motorbikes heavy with woven wicker baskets spilling vegetables, toilet paper, apples, gas canister and wide-eyed children chugged along a cracked cement road.

Ancient blue one-cylinder rusty miniature dump trucks loaded with white granite blocks rumbled past fuming diesel exhaust, throwing red clay dust into the air where it collided with white chalk dust escaping room 317.

 

It was a poor landlocked rural peasant infected paradise.

The Boss died last year. She attended his ceremony in the Great Hall at his campus villa. She wore white as a sign of respect for the dead. Her ghost persona sang a comfortable sadness past rows of flowers to the casket. She bowed. His thin white mustache face reflected glass smudged with fingerprints.

He reminded her of a Tang poet living in solitude inside a long Chinese painting where wind whispered songs with trees, mountains and stars.

After his death and passing tribute, students began holding hands in public. His private army of guards lost their power to intimidate, coerce and extort money from adolescents displaying affection in public. Guards roared around on bikes with flashing red lights looking important and, if motivated to survive, begged for jobs slinging hash, cleaning tables, and peeling vegetables behind student restaurants.

Hundreds of local villagers, officials, educational specialists, farmers, teachers and drones followed the funeral procession to a hill overlooking the campus.

They put him in the ground and exploded fireworks to scare away running capitalist dogs and ghosts. They returned to fields, kitchens, gardens, offices and classrooms.

A year later the school started building a grand tomb for their dead leader on a hill above the computer center building. It cost $261,591,79.

Small change.

Turning away from the window she selected yellow, blue, orange, and green chalk from a seldom-used box.

She wrote on the blackboard:

I hear and I forget.

I see and I remember.

I do and I understand.

She drew a picture of a face with bubble words - “I am an autodidact. You are responsible for your learning.”

She splashed rainbows, suns, faces, laughter's wild memory and imaginary abstract colors on a green canvas, barely scratching the surface of appearances.

An obnoxious loud rusty metal bell clanged for fifteen seconds. She turned and faced 100 university students. They were physically eighteen with the emotional maturity of a thirteen year old. This disparity explained why the university treated them like children to keep them in their childlike space place.

They had “Sports Meetings” on the “Playground.”

They had “Nap” time after lunch.

Maybe twenty-five cared about learning. Most just wanted to pass. Some might ask questions and develop a life long love for learning, knowledge and wisdom.

Anyone asking why was reported by spies to authorities and disappeared. Poof.

A rare one possessed an innate creative playful inquisitive nature. The majority slept with their eyes open. Lights on and no one home paradigm.

She smiled. Her sadness evaporated. She inhaled delicious dust and spoke in tongues.

“What color are your dreams?”

“Stop making sense!” yelled a student. “What’s the context? Critical thinking skills with humor and curiosity are forbidden! ”

They whined in unison, “We are worried about our marks, not learning the material. 60 is heaven. 59 is hello.”

“People are more affected by how they feel than by what they understand,” she said.

“We know so much and understand so little,” said Curious, a bright star in the universe. "I want to be a waif when I grow up. A real person with dignity and self-respect.”

During meditation they heard an authoritarian Mandarin voice yelling next door.

“The bent nail gets hammered down!”

A Century is Nothing

 

Sunday
Feb122017

Chinese Education System

In China everyone is safe, happy and well adjusted, Leo said to Ice Girl one torrid day in Banlung, Cambodia.

They sat on an operating table next to a sewing machine and an umbrella.

I cut, you talk, she said. A drop of sweat from her nose landed on a block of ice.

It’s called THE SYSTEM, he said. Brainwashed. You see this in all Asian educational systems. Laconic students shuffle in, remove their brains, soak them in a cleaning solution, which is not the solution for fifty tedious minutes and replace said gray matter at the end of class. It’s endemic.

Big Brother is always watching you.

Save face.

The fear of public humiliation is greater than the fear of death.

Intention is karma.

Tell me about your life in China, said Ice Girl.

After completing five years of a night soil shit job in the Re-Education Through Labor experience for questioing Authority I visited my family graves in Sichuan. I offered prayers and burned incense. I prayed for strength, courage and humility. Then I walked east. Fortune smiled on me.

I worked as a facilitator at a private business university in Fujian with 15,000 replicants.

I faced eighty stone-faced freshmen in a long cement tomb. It was a required speaking class. Desks were bolted to the floor in groups of four. They had year zero English skills. I gave two a test. How are you, I asked a boy. I am 18. How old are you, I asked a girl. I’m fine, and you?

I paired eighty off, boy girl, boy girl. They didn’t like this. They got used to it.

Will someone please share a story?

A girl raised her hand.

The less I do the less likely I am to make mistakes and the fewer mistakes I make the less I am criticized then I feel no shame.

It’s easier to do nothing, said one clever robot.

Correct, I said, you’ve both expressed the essence of your cultural and intellectual education.

That’s a long sentence filled with verbs and significant philosophy said Ice Girl, waving a Blue Zircon reflecting 10,000 things in an elegant universe. Don’t let school interfere with your education. Say more about Becoming.

Ice Girl in Banlung