January 2010
41 posts
WatchHAITI MON AMOUR
between two worlds
Ice on the river, black coats and mittens, to the Bronx beneath the clackety bridge weighted by steel and cable, taxi and truck, the mall flooded with people, the red ruby bull’s eye of Target, Applebees, waft of hot air from the underground, the projects rise up a clump of non- descript browns and beige, trash lining the walkway, little boxes of warm light stacked one on top of the other.
...
The best part about the hospital experience in Haiti was probably also the worst. Machines, medications, and facilities were stripped down to the fundamentals, or less. Doctor Joe, who I watched operate on two burn victims, said he was sad that medicine in our country has become so much of a business and where had the humanity gone. Doctors were having to think outside the box every minute of the...
Le Retour.....
Sitting in the Fort Lauderdale Airport drinking beers and attempting to digest the trip…. 4 hours of sleep, talking to Annabelle until 3am about everything, stories spilling out of our mouths. Left Haiti yesterday morning, Johnny and Denis drove us in rambling truck through the crammed streets to Petionville, market was going on, tables heaped with fruits and meats, despite the surrounding...
http://www.compassionweavers.com/donate
If anyone is wanting to find a good organization to donate to, this is it.
So much so much so much in our heads, hard to process. Leaving tomorrow back to Santo Domingo, then NY. Emotional.
We’ve seen so much trauma in the past days that we’re not sure how we are going to readjust to American life after this. Meeting all of these incredible doctors from Italy and the US, working with them so closely, interpreting and assiting, we even go into the operating rooms in scrubs with them. The American doctors have an amazing bedside manner, so warm and so competent. We are...
From the Earthquake Zone
Last night we arrived and were shown our spot on the concrete roof where we could sleep. We brought towels and sheets to sleep on. Theres a huge guarded gate and the hospital was strewn with tents and injured people outside on the lawn filling the exterior. Families who have lost ten members, people all alone, little tiny babies with gaping head wounds, skinny old ladies with flies all over them,...
Watch
Watch
Well, we’re at Anabel’s in Santo Domingo, and it looks like we’re going to be helping and staying with Artists for Peace & Justice in Port au Prince volunteering at St. Damien’s Hospital. Going to take the bus into Haiti tomorrow morning on Caribe Tours. We have to bring our own food & water and there is only space on the floor in the hallway for us to sleep. We met...
Watch
Travese
Yesterday we stocked up with supplies for ourselves and for people we may encounter. The manager at the camera store gave me film at cost, when I told him where we were going. I am shooting medium format, not digital. There are so many photojournalists doing their documentary work, my perspective will be more from an artist’s perspective, attempting to capture portraits of beauty and...
ke bondye beniw
A frenzy of decision making how to get to Haiti. Abby and I sat in cafe calling and emailing, figuring out some way to venture below to the belly of the beast, news spills from south of the equator, Haiti crumbled to pieces, streets strewn with bodies, the january 12th earthquake rocked the capital Port- au -Prince with a 7.0 shrieking wild-eyed through a city undone, already dirt poor, its vodou...
There were women with stripes across faces, bludgeoned to death
beneath layers of earth, first the crust and then hot molten lava
which took them until they disappeared rust-colored along with the
simple beetles plowing a hole to the next hole, black-bodied armor
buried between the nooks of the underworld. Hair was tangled with roots
of trees until the hedgehogs could not tell the...
story-tellers
Not many could handle the real thing. No one really wants to go to war if one has already been in it, felt the bombs explode beneath the feet, their best friend blown to bits. Only the naive go in, the young soldiers who don’t know any better, who take off their shirts on the front line, feeling invincible, never seeing the enemy of jealousy, hate, and death in the glare of the sun. Losing...
Another little round table with a slew of these plastic machines, hit return and send away a fleeting thought, or an after-thought as he called me, I pulled out the long lines of cocaine hate the other day from the mildewy closet.. I was throwing things away, and I took a couple bumps of hate, but I couldn’t throw them away, I have to let them seep down my throat and flare up my nostrils-...
y
Abby and I sat at the small, wobbly table with the hum of voices scurrying wild around us, the clink of glasses and plates, reflection of a worn mirror in the back, hands gesticulating the everything we see wrong with the todays and the tomorrows, the world of art, the joke of art, the art of life, the life of the joke and so on and so forth…..Ideas come steadfast and vanish just as quickly,...
Conviction. No matter if you change your mind, do it with conviction. I think knowing why you do something helps with that. Really knowing your purpose, thinking it through, thinking about how your actions will communicate with others. I think some people who are in popular culture forget about the messages they are sending with their actions. Why is it that a rap star from an inner city inspires...
absence understood that
our umbrellas are always right side up inside
and upside down outside
filling up like a Victorian novel
little baths for the blue birds and green frogs
who enjoy the rain outside
inside the racks are empty
so many skirts unzipped into lips
that envelop a beer bottle’s neck
so many blouses unbuttoned into mouths
that don’t know wit from weather
so they...
Just wanted to share some lyrics from one of our good Americans, Buick Audra:
the pizza dream so, this is the Big Time… living on beans and rice, hoping I can make it by to keep the lights on, while I try to get the next song down on tape have to narrowly escape verbal abuse, laced with polite hate and keep my chin up, for heaven’s sake, saying: will I ever shake free? does it matter if somebody...
I want to run back to the blue velour seats
where old black and white stories unravel
on bitter mornings like this when the license plate talks
like an Italian grocer on the phone with his meat market
repeating and gesturing this is the state that haunts you
not so fast
you’re never going to get away from
afternoons like this when the quarters reassure
your storm window eyes that...
New York City THROBS
The racket of train rumbling over steel tracks, the biting cold wafts up from the Hudson and pours forth over the highrises, the apartments toppling over one another lit warm- light inside, the heat spewing from the tops all clattering down one concrete row, brick upon brick. We are hedgehogs in this winter, sweeping in our burrows, dug down thick with the ice trimming the sills, strewn Christmas...
Well, after watching “Man on a Wire” and “The Gates” and even “Julie & Julia”, I believe we ‘artistes’ simply need to give birth to our ideas in order to feel fulfilled, to feel that our spirit is somehow seeping out into this blood-soaked scalp of a world. And the only way to plant the seed in the womb is to make love to our dreams, with...
Happy New Year
Last night we went to around fifteen places, sang “Makin’ Whoopee” on the subways pretending we were practicing for a performance, went to Grand Central first and watched the laser show on the ceiling, hit Times Square, went to a groovy gallery show on the LES in a dance studio run by a Rabbi, crashed a Euro-trash black tie dinner, danced to a Cuban band, met two Australians one...
