Lao Girl Bubble

Leica Fotographie International (LFI) selected one of my images for their KIDS gallery.

Thanks to them and here she is. Happy, strong and brave. It's good to be alive.

Leica - Witness

Leica has released its first ad campaign in 10 years.

Our world deserves witnesses.

One World

Enjoy.

Burma

Short Fast & Deadly

How slow can you go?

Walk at the speed of a camel.

Design charcoal elements of crisp fire

infants scream at talking head women

driving young ones crazy

in out in out

their tongues bang like pistons

on a desultory 125cc engine propelled by virgins

returning home with their unblemished shy dignity intact.

One woman fans skewered buffalo meat to a crisp.

A Lao grandmother cradles an infant. She has diabetes Type II.

Shuddering wedding photos are frozen on a wall. It never turns out like people imagine.

They breed work and get slaughtered.

They trade hands and hearts.

She skewers another hypnotic form of laughter to preserve her ugh ugh conversation.

Fat lost European tourists waddle past.

With an accusatory tone men get smashed on weak beer.

A mechanic hammers one sharp line of description vs mundane observation.

Exile spills midnight blue Mont Blanc ink next to attention deficit disordered humans dancing 10 seconds down dirty.

Write short, fast, deadly.

Ikat silk designs drape well.

Non-listeners living abject cause and effect seek meaning with suffering and loss, accepting no responsibility.

Someone else controls their existence.

Milling Around, a fine art, embraces kindness and compassion. 

Mandalay, Burma

Before Indonesia - TLC 75

Behind reinforced plate glass Istanbul airport windows near conveyor belts and x-ray security machines was everyone who stayed behind - guards, cleaners and Konya dervish dancers.

An attractive thin-legged blond duty free clerk finished her day shift and stripped down for her baboon floorshow at Kitty Cat Night Club. Get down sweet thing, said a Turkish Deep State operative. Shake your moneymaker, said his bodyguard.

She drifted through life with clowns, misfits, literary outlaws, gravediggers, social deviants and manic depressed tourists waiting for airline workers to clean toilets, load beverages and MSG processed food onto Luftwaffe flight 3343 destined for Bang Cock as late afternoon light slashed through terminal dungeon zones of serenity.

“Travel isn’t supposed to be fun. It’s an adventure,” an American father said to his whining son on a rooftop cafe overlooking the Phosphorous. Staring at golden needle mosques, blue waves and catamarans sailing the seven seas they slathered red jam on toast.

After a year soaking in a wet misty Turkish hammam, this abject polite and emotionally distracted future tense void-like dream sequence passed through frequencies where idle people sat around showing no incentive and no desire to be creative or think for themselves as if their loss, their fate was always a long now.

They’d failed to take control of their lives as willing victims in life’s short sad joke.

One was the sullen masked security woman in her 20’s, forced by economics to meet and greet departing strangers. Lucky put his Eagle pack on the conveyor.

A laptop, 120-year old Monte pocket watch out, Leica rangefinder and cell phone went in a plastic tray. Stuff rolled away. She approached. “Do you have any knives in your luggage?”

“Yes,” he said to her death mask, “in the checked bag. They are from Tibet. They are silver with turquoise and coral stones. The handles are yak bone streaked with brown earth colors.”

Insecure security personnel wore death masks to confuse angry spirits eating incense minus verifiable identification. 

Her mask said, I could care less, I'm so tired, so anxious, so bored about everything in general and nothing in particular I could shit a kebab sausage shaped like a small powerful package of torpedo feces grilled to perfection in a tomato based food culture served with onions and wedges of lemon garnished with sour reality. 

“Open your bags,” said her edgy mouth behind cotton fibers.

“Which bag would you like me to open, big or small?”

“The small one and where’s your passport?”

She’d never have one. He handed it to her and she really wanted to be important, self-sufficient, self-reliant, strong, courageous, adventurous, and other impossible to imagine allegorical brave daring metaphorical nightmares in her short sweet life controlling the situation with this Bardo traveler free on parole from a dusty Byzantium archeological dig caressing pottery shards, glazed Ottoman tiles, castles and mosques while stirring musical sugar cubes in brown tea and weaving magic carpets in Kurdish villages under perpetual attack by Predator drones released by aggressive profit motivated war mongers to keep the anxious populace guessing and manipulated 24/7 by terrorist media FEAR propaganda machines controlled by moronic corrupt inefficient political idiots serving as an excuse to waste money on expensive military toys as global environmental, educational and health care systems collapsed under the weight of corruption, greed and eight billion starving mouths. 

After dusting off Patriot mussels and fixed-wing Turkish military aircraft for Syrian no-fly zones, hand carved Meerschaum pipes, glazed ceramics and Roman ruins he unzipped the small Eagle bag.

Winter Hawk flew free.

Lone Wolf ran free.

Shocked back to a fake reality she rummaged. She found music. She couldn’t hear beatific notes blooming along broken-hearted trails of Turkish and Kurdish women fleeing from arranged marriages.

She didn’t hear singing, keening women drumming soil above a wooden Ankara casket six feet down or melodies composed at transcendental borders coalescing with feminine songs birthing, cultivating children like seeds after a quick rain. 

She went through the motions.

“You can go,” she ordered in a short, fast deadly sentence.

Go was music to his ears.

The Language Company

 

the center cannot hold

Blindness danced on through late yellow faltering light penetrating bamboo leaves spreading themselves over banana baskets impaled on swinging posts. Literally.

Nearby, a quiet young girl watched the Vietnamese girl do her toenails. Cutting, trimming, lemon/lime soak, cuticles, clear before applying a silver-hued glossy glean.

Nail by nail.

In a Fujian, Chinese university classroom an angry undersexed, overworked teacher yelled, "the bent nail gets hammered down." - 80 comatose students understood her implication. Keep your mouth shut. Do not express your individuality and above all do not question authority.

Authority will SHAME you in public. They will execute your parents and burn down your house. They will exile you to a Reform-through-re-education work unit where you will haul shit for years and tears.

Blindness solved the mystery of sight, crying tears of silence.

A van of blank faced stupefied white Europeans trapped behind stained glass held their rampant desires and expectations on laps. Fidgeting as uncomfortable languages floated into inner ear canals.

Assaulting their long painful strides navigating tomorrow's promise.

Blindness resolved to practice the subtle art of Tai-chi with precision.

Movement.

A dance.

A watermelon. Circle, sever center.

Slowly push the edges out from the center.

The center cannot hold.