Refugees
Suffering
Sacrifice
Letting go
Human dignity
Freedom
Brave New World
Memories of WWII
Survival
Beginnings
Life is discovered in a desperate situation
World wakes up from slumber
Heartbreaking nightmare
Humans help humans
Courage
Gratitude
Safety
Hanoi.
Twisted alleys and side streets were clogged with speeding manic motorcyclists texting lovers, women hawking apples, bananas, greens, meat, tofu, used clothing, used condoms and tongues babbling incongruent incomprehensible musical tonal frequencies.
Language is music.
Music is the fuel.
Words play a poor second violin or cello compared to music.
Boys sew heavy yellow plastic tarps. A woman behind her mask paints bicycle chain guards with a green spray. Men grind automotive parts with decibels and electrical impulses. A boy riding behind his friend on a bike spins out a universal red yo-yo string theory.
I sat in a red kindergarten chair near a curb at an artery eatery. The woman serves delicious grilled spring rolls filled with veggies, cold white noodles and a plastic container of greens with chilies and sauce. Using ivory chopsticks from Shanghai I dip noodles and spring rolls in sauce. I smell, chew slow and swallow. It’s cheap and filling. Great taste.
Across the narrow noisy street men drink beer. They accept you being a little stranger than yesterday. Food mama stays busy doing only the lonely lunch. She’s gone before dusk when a woman selling apples takes over the prime real estate sidewalk space.
Street pedestrians dodge speeding motorcycles and women lugging baskets of bananas balanced on bamboo staves past merchants selling goods from ground floor flats. The sidewalk is life’s marketplace extending from long dark narrow dwellings. Kids piss in the gutter.
A motorcycle kills a dog. A man drags the carcass out of the street and leaves it in the gutter. Death is fascinating. Silence covers the dog.
Mechanics hammer metal fixing bikes and broken appliances, salon girls cut, wash and dry, old women gossip how the younger generation is wild and crazy, young boys haul bricks on a deranged frayed rope pulley system up to a flat undergoing renewal, older men in pajamas playing GO slap scarred wooden pieces on a board while drinking beer or tea with friends as children scamper through the maze.
At dusk a sex worker behind a mountain of broken red bricks fondles a construction worker relieving him of fluids and Dong.
Pajamas are the national costume. Cute teddy bears, little animals, pink, red, floral designs. All-purpose all day all the way.
Knowing you live here no one bothers you. Other foreigners are not crazy enough, lost enough or blind enough to discover this dense narrow vibrant rabbit warren neighborhood filled with families and ceaseless racket.
A slouching cafe owner watches family soap opera dramas about love, hope, betrayal, and deception on an entertainment box with rapt attention. Everyone has a box here. It’s the BIG diversion, all entertainment all the time. Loud and louder.
We took a bus to Hoi An. We passed through Da Nang, a mess of glass and brass mega resorts swallowing farmland with miles of beachfront developments creating imaginary golf courses faster than speeding high finance and rabid speculation.
Up early I am on the street. A winged shadow caressed my forehead. A black and orange butterfly fluttered in front of my eyes. Touched, grazed, blessed by Psyche. Magic.
I am a prime lens on a 35mm tool. I capture soft light inside the old city. I slow down, feeling free, curious and open, wandering. Before noise and lightning bolts of laughter’s language fills the air. All the tourists sleep off heavy European food and distilled beverages. Streets are empty.
A young woman under a bamboo hat shovels sand. It takes her 21 gestures to fill up a wheelbarrow. No more, no less. 21. Blackjack. She pushes it down a street to a new home project. She dumps it. She repeats the process. All day. Every day. Her Tao.
I walk to the river near an ancient Japanese Bridge built in 1593 and sit near two elderly women. They’re surprised to see a foreigner sitting alone with coffee. Black with ice. I smiled. They smiled and whispered ... strange man alone has a camera it’s so early for him to sit here with us.
We shared humanity, silence and morning light. We communicated without words. I see their lives, childhood, growing up here, families, surviving wars, meeting every morning for conversation, walking and tea.
Supporting each other they walk through quiet streets, past yellow walled homes with red tile roofs protecting long deep brown wooden interiors. Ancestors whisper stories from the 15th-19th century when Hoi An was the major port in Southeast Asia and the first Japanese settlement in southern Vietnam.
Ships unloaded cargo and loaded high-grade silk, paper, porcelain, tea, sugar, molasses, medicines, elephant tusks, Sulphur and mother-of-pearl. Now 400 tailors measure, cut, sew, iron, hang and sell threads.
Women in teddy bear floral pajamas play badminton chasing a shuttlecock. Pajamas make utilitarian sense. Cotton is cheap and easy to wash. You sleep in them, get up, cook, eat, talk to your pajama neighbors, sweep dust, yell at your kids because they are spoiled brats and terrorized since escaping the birth canal, go to the market, buy food, admire new pajamas, return home, eat lunch, talk to your pajama neighbors and take a nap. Pajamas have a warning label on the collar. Remove Before Sex.
Pajamas are cool. One size fits all.
Residents stretch and talk. A leather-faced canoe woman set up her small clay figurines under a tree. The two women finished their tea, gestured goodbye, held hands and walked across a wooden bridge taking care of each other.
Book of Amnesia V1
Fight
Flight
Feed
Freeze
Fornicate
*
Decisive Moment - ephemeral & spontaneous
Image represents the essence of the event itself
Work the scene
Use your intuition
Poetic
Lose yourself zone
Or creative flow state
The beauty of shape & form
A sense of simplicity expression
*
Yangon, Burma, 2015
“Writers are shamans. We go into the mountains and come back with visions for our tribes. Our holy assignment.”
*
A Turkish train chased moon, seawater and oil freighters. Two veiled lovers held hands at a station. Heavy green and purple grapes draped fences around barbwire stations. A sad man waiting for his life to unfold stared at the ground.
He’s married to his mother and her tomato-based history of love, regret, unemployment and zero opportunities.
A commuter ferry sailed across the Bosporus in elemental light. Visions of a Blue Mosque, spires and silver domes sparkled as blue waves swelled hearing artists carve Churning The Sea of Milk at Angkor Wat in the 9th century.
A heavy Chinese rain mutes voices with refined elegance. Moisture softens edges where words slash and stab, committing heinous crimes inside the imagination of lovers stranded in the long sad misfortune of falling water.
The moisture is a blessing for farmers huddled below brown and yellow ponchos planting rice in geometric rows as shallow water stalks reeds.
Rice steams in cauldrons being stabbed by steel spatulas as 15,000 university students stare at empty bowls. Farmers don’t know them, see them or begin to imagine the spoiled ravishing eaters with heads bowed over chipped white rice bowls, not in gratitude but in hunger’s anger being never satisfied and talking with their mouths full spilling grunts of MORE.
The farmers plant rice. They walk along brown dirt dikes inspecting a precious state owned agrarian middle kingdom as pouring rain music bounces off the surface, slides down leaves, collating green feathers.
Twilight’s heavy mist collects in thick clouds rolling over green forested Utopia mountains caressing valleys, streams and rivers, layering fields where silent men and women plant rice stalks one by one becoming invisible. It’s a poetic Tang landscape painting.
Book of Amnesia V1
Share Article