Hanging Out the Wash

Last night I went out to deliver the last of hte pictures of the Burmese kids. One of them who was no taller than Calvin despite being years older walked us the six blocks to deliver the pictures to his friend. On the way Calvin walked barefoot. I had my camera along and took a couple of shots on the way. It was another neighborhood with lots of people out on the street. In the evening when the heat of the day begins to wane and the houses are still hotter than proverbial hell, it's a riot of activity on the street. One woman was giving her dog a Popsicle.  I liked the harsh shadows on the was cast by this line of laundry as the sun began to settle down.

On Community

Bill McKibben writes about community in his book EAARTH pp 132-133:

Community may suffer from overuse more sorely than any word in the dictionary.  Politicians left and right sprinkle it through their remarks the way a bad Chinese restaurant uses MSG, to mask the lack of wholesome ingredients.  But we need to rescue it; we need to make sure that community will become, on this tougher planet, one of the most prosaic terms in the lexicon, like hoe or bicycle or computer.  Access to endless amounts of cheap energy has made us rich, and wrecked our climate, and it also made us the first people on earth who had no practical need of our neighbors.  In the halcyon days of the final economic booms, everyone on your cul de sac could have died overnight from some mysterious plague, and while you might have been sad, you wouldn't have been inconvenienced.  Our economy, unlike any that came before it, is designed to work without the input of your neighbors. Borne on cheap oil, our food arrives as if by magic from a great distance (typically, two thousand miles).  If you have a credit card and an Internet connection, you can order most of what you need and have it left anonymously at your door.  We've evolved a neighborless lifestyle; on average an American eats half as many meals with family and friends as she did fifty years ago.  On average, we have half as many close friends.

I've written extensively, in a book called Deep Economy, about the psychological implications of our hyperindividualism.  In short, we're less happy than we used to be, and no wonder -- we are, after all, highly evolved social animals.  There aren't enough iPods on earth to compensate for those missing friendships.

 

SO WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT?  I keep thinking all this running around that I'm doing--delivering bread to the somali family, soup to the man under the bridge, photos to the Burmese kids-- is my personal response to the lack sociopolitical integration in my immediate damnably small circle of connections in this here world. Can making social connections be an art form? --If you look at the history of art it's full of materials and methods that are going out of style, so maybe building a network through the community with face to face interactio-- so 90's,  (1890's)-- so passe-- could be a new art form. My art is networking--not on facebook, but on foot. 

Rabbits and Bird Cages

In clinic we frown on using kids to translate for medical problems of their parents. I'm still working out if it's o.k. to use them to translate about the use of the photographs. I left my card including my  phone number and promised to come back with one more picture of one of the kids who felt left. In the meantime, here is a sample of the northside Burmese contingent and their rabbits. When I tried to ask if they ate the rabbits, it seems they denied it, but I'm still not sure. Rabbits make for good eating and they aren't too expensive to raise. The kids obviously adore them, so I hope they don't have to eat them too.

Back on the Southside

For the first time in weeks I went back to the south side and returned some pictures to families there that I took earlier in the summer. I'm working out how to have an exhibition in non-gallery space where everyone in the neighborhood is likely to show up one time or another, like a neighborhood store or laundry where the walls are available for display. In the meantime I've gotten permission to post the following picture. It's one of my favorite ones from the day I spent there. The kids were in constant motion, except when they were not. I love the way these neighborhood streets fill up with people coming and going. There's eyes and ears on the street and kids are out in great gaggles playing. 

Who are you? You can take my picture.

As I was biking home I passed under the highway and out of the corner of my eye saw some people gathering. I turned around and went along  underneath to see what was going on. I met  a man who was living there. He lives there all winter. When I asked him how he stayed warm, he just said it was hard, but he didn't go to the library or places like that to get warm. He said he sticks his ground.

Butterfly Tatoo

Standing in front of the American Vietnamese Center attempting an impossible picture with the light shining on half the house and the sun setting, I met a woman with a butterfly tattoo and her mother and her mother's Native American friend. The mother likes taking pictures of flowers and we've made a plan to go out together and take pictures of flowers and hair, which she loves too, especially jet black hair like the Vietnamese have.  She didn't like the pictures I took because she thought she looked old despite her blue eyes, like her daughters, but she wanted the picture of the tattoo on her daughter's pregnant belly. Do I look fat? her daughter asked. No, pregnant, I said. Then she put her nose into her mother's hair and I remembered how Calvin's hair smells like sunshine. She said her daughter's smelled like honey.

Laughing

I pulled over today and talked to this woman who was dancing on a table in the park. She was dancing sitting down on top of the table. The music was from a small hand held tape player. She kept waving her arms, and bounced up and down on the table, completely ecstatic in what turned out to be a country music reverie. I like country too, I told her and she laughed, and then so did I. You happy? I asked the obvious. Yeah, she said, waving her arms up and down some more, and bounced  on her bottom so that the table seemed to jump up and down, along with the grocery bags. She agreed to the photo session with another peal of laughter. I sat with her for a while after I was done and we talked about how contageous happiness was and laughed together for five minutes. just sitting there in the city park the sun setting behind us her arms a blurr of Siva, her ears ringing like Hare Krishna.