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Power Outages
Due to a storm last night, I didn’t have power or air conditioning this morning. I am temporarily living in a mobile home in the woods and the power lines easily get disrupted here. After waking up in the darkness at 4 am in the humid air, I figured that I could toss and turn or just get out of bed. Immediately, I remembered that the stove was not working to make coffee. Since I had a dead cell phone from the night before, I decided to get into the car and go find coffee and charge my phone. I fully realize that this sounds pathetic but being in a hot bedroom unable to sleep with no power was not the better option.
Not many things bring you into a contemplative and almost meditative state like driving on empty roads in a rural place. It is a right-brain activity. While I was driving, some recurring thoughts around outdated beliefs made their way into the driving and forward-moving rhythm. If I can keep driving, I can move them forward into a resolution and leave them out on the road somewhere. For anyone who has tussled with outdated beliefs, when we really stop to think about them, we realize that we are the ones inflicting ourselves. We own them like a hair shirt that we got on the clearance rack. And why? These are the things I was asking myself as I was driving around with my Cumberland Farms bold roast in a Styrofoam cup in the liminal stages of the morning on empty roads with my phone reaching a 50% charge. None of this was environmentally friendly. But it was friendly for bubbling up old excruciating beliefs and feeling into how to best banish them.
Just as the sun started coming up, I was passing a scenic overlook and I pulled over. I closed my eyes and drank from the hot cup. Then I looked out at all of that expansiveness.
The sun started coming up full-on as I drove off. A nearly charged phone. Humming Auntie Aviator under my breath as the bright green fields and hills went by out of my open window. “zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom…”
Sanford Biggers on a Sunday
I walked into the Sanford Biggers show and I wept. It was 2021, one of those gray winter Sundays, right around dusk. I just left my friend Jennifer at her apartment after a futile day of trying to cross-country ski in the closed baseball field. My puppy ate her jacket and wouldn’t let us get two feet without constantly trying to eat the skis. Our attempt at a conversation after was also thwarted by Ziggy, my dog, who had endured the 3-hour car ride to the city and was bursting at the seams. I dropped Jennifer off and debated if I had any stamina left for the 5:00 timed ticket I had for the Sanford Biggers show at The Bronx Museum. I circled the block and decided to go.
What I wasn’t prepared for after giving the front desk my barcode on my phone and walking into the show, was the rushing onslaught of emotion hurling toward me. How magnificent to stand in front of art, this art, in this public place. Sunday service. In a public building for the first time in a year. I hadn’t realized it had been that long until that very moment. These things that used to be normal. I didn’t hold back the tears. They fell down over cheeks and onto my mask. Here was art. Fabric and colors, and shadow, and bliss, and power. And here was I. Here were we. Me and the five other people allowed into the museum during this time. How beautiful. How magnificent.
Route 66 finally continued (for two days of shooting)
December 23, 2020
I woke up this morning in a hotel in the outskirts of Pittsburgh. I am headed to Kansas for something and decided to work on 66 for a couple of days since I will be that way. After a frantic finishing packing yesterday morning, an up-and-down couple of flights of stairs throwing things in my car, and midtown pre-Christmas traffic, I had never noticed that I forgot to put my bag containing ALL of the cameras in the car. I woke up at 6:30 this morning, went to my car shortly after, and realized that my cameras were about 7 hours east.
Artists are if anything, resourceful. We are improvisation experts. It’s in our blood. Then things like becoming an expert at turning that one bedroom apartment into an art studio, creating a show from any sort of 4 walls/hotel room/living room (Making Love Out of Nothing at All, cue intro) make us even better at turning water into wine. So at this moment I said, okay, iPhone edition? This involves writing so I can focus on the writing, right? Then some iPhone photos? But truthfully, I wasn’t sure about this plan. So this time, I decided to call whatever used camera shop I could find off of 70W. Roberts photo in Indianapolis said they had an extensive used camera collection. I’m back on the road with a camera that is thankfully not attached to a phone and carrying a fondness for the happy accidents that frequently come with making art and traveling.
Our Nation's Pandemics
November 05, 2020
I left my apartment on Sunday morning, May 26th, and got in the car to drive toward downtown Brooklyn, about a 15 minute drive. I wanted to see what had occurred the night before and went in search of where the larger protests had been in New York City. I only learned about them on Saturday night while on a call with friends, to celebrate someone’s graduation during the pandemic, when they started getting news alerts on their phones from their cities of Seattle and here in New York. Alerts ordering citizens to go home. There were protests breaking out all across the country, incited by the murder of George Floyd, but not only about just his murder alone, at the hands of police. Decades and centuries of racism, oppression, and the egregious number of deaths of people of color by the police were one root of these protests. A country-wide outcry of anger and demand for justice. The scene is familiar. Protests saying We. Are. Done. Long done. Again.
For almost five months I have sat on these photos of protest aftermath because I wasn’t sure what to write about them. (now I also have to recover most from a hard drive) They are not a symbol of this national rising up. These are photos of damage after just the first night of city-wide and country-wide protests. Much of the physical destruction done to police vehicles and buildings was not done by people peacefully protesting. These images to me when walking the streets that Sunday the 26th glared like a product of the Trump presidency. A product of America looking the other way on its history of racism and accountability. An absence of extending healing and equality.
The President and his administration sent federal troops into cities to stop any upcoming protests. On the 4th of July he made a speech about preserving America’s monuments. This was the chosen speech on Independence Day after months of a country even more divided. Defending monuments to racists in America’s history is what was brought to the table. Not a call for mending, not a recognition of injustice and apology, but a call to preserve America’s monuments. Donald Trump, standing with his unread bible in his hand in front of St. John Church in the late days of May, middle of the protests, held like his flaccid Viagra-eating dick, whipping it out and waving it around at everyone. Pictures next to churches, pictures in front of Mount Rushmore speaking in rehearsed preacher-politician voice and pointing to a large crowd in cowboy hats cheering, Melania elegantly posed lone figure sitting in between two candelabras in front of gold floor-to-ceiling drapes in the grandeur of the White House reading a children’s picture book on the story of the first Juneteenth. Burnt police vehicles and looted storefronts. These are the images of The Trump Presidency. Make America Great Again.
As we all know, the problem of racism does not originate from these past four years. The other larger and longer pandemic we are in is that of racism. This country was built on it. It was physically built via fear of the other and pillaging that of the unknown. And then it continued. My question I asked myself from these photos is, is this what we are going to come to? How do we mend it? How do we no matter our skin color, especially those of us with skin that has been widely accepted as “safe” and “good”, stand up to demand a different future and present for all of us? Starting at the very basic minimal level of people of color not being murdered at the hands of police in the name of enforcing the law. That is a very very basic minimum. And we need to do better. And now what? These events cannot be forgotten without learning from them and taking action to create a place where everyone has the ability to feel nurtured, to thrive, to live their dreams unobstructed, to feel joy, to be equal.
It is hard to not be taken over by anger these days. In 2016 during and right after the election I sacrificed too much of myself to anger. This time around, in another critical election year and in the pandemics of racism and coronavirus, I cannot stand up effectively and with self-preservation while ingesting it. Some days when turning on the news it is still a work in progress. If anger resides in your bones, they win. I find that exasperation is best used when moved through and out and becomes an energy to lift the voice and lift the voice of others. Anger as fuel but not as weapon. There is no solution offered in these photos or writing. Only propositions and questions. A searching for remedies and healing. A searching for a better humanity. Hope for a collective refusal to tolerate acts of hatred and violence because someone is different from us and we do not understand them, or because our vision is tainted by ugly history and what we are told is truth about other. A refusal of the idea that someone is even capable of being other. America has never been great. It has been complicated. With the potential of being great.
Snippets of why I love this city I’ve called home and other times when I want to tell it to bite me.
Source: https://newyorkilikeyou.blogspot.com/
In 2011 I did a two-month excursion of pick a place, any place, and the needle landed on New Mexico. Then San Francisco. These are some writings and photos from my travels.