Please Happy

The first image Colin Finlay showed us was a goat tied to a brick. We, his audience sitting in a dark room at the new Annenberg Space for Photography in Century City, Los Angeles.

“That is me,” he said. “That is all of us.”

We’re all tied to our shit, our past, our worries, our stuff. And that we need to keep – as my brother says – breaking ourselves apart and putting ourselves back together again. Over and over and fucking over again.

We want to rid ourselves of our bricks. But, it hurts. Colin, a world class photographer, did it recently by ditching the SLR and shooting pics on Hollywood Boulevard just using his iPhone. He wanted to connect, he said. To be one of the people. To get out from behind the security of the viewfinder.

(Still looking for that pic.)
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After the Boulevard project, Finlay showed us the work he has made photographing war and its destruction on humans, its destruction on the earth. He showed us photographs from Athabasca tar sands, from Iceland ice melt. He told us about orphaned elephants in Kenya whose moms have been murdered by poachers. He showed us the faces of people dying in Darfur. He showed us portraits of still-born Vietnamese babies, their Agent Orange bodies preserved in glass jars. Deities, he called them.

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Some quotations from Finlay:

“What does my presence there say to her? What do I give back? What can I give back? I can never do enough.  … That’s what you sign up for.”

“When I see this through my viewfindier, my heart is not beating. I cannot breathe.”

“This isn’t a photograph you take, that man has to give me this photograph. … You can’t go there and take pictures, you just can’t.”

“There are projects and stories that you know about, but it’s just not the right time. … You have to go through a progression … soul intellect … to find these images, to find the truth.”

“All of these photographs, I kneel before these people.”

“Depends on who you want to help and what you want to do. It’ll take incredible perseverence on your part, incredible passion. Good Luck.”

Excuse the cat posts (or don’t). They’re the most amusing thing in life right now, and I can’t post papers, radio shows, videos clips or all the information in my head on all the reading I’ve been doing. Too fried to put something coherent down. Cats transcend the muddled mind.

So, we have this cat. One of her names is Queenie. Queenie has a hair fetish. At first, we thought it was cute. We didn’t mind the nuzzling, the purring, even the pawing on our necks.

But, then she started to bite. To chew. To rip.

When I wear my hair up high, I noticed a piece kept falling down. I thought it was my poor hairwomanship. But, this morning, I swept the kitchen and found a chunk of hair in the pile. Voodoo doll material? Former tenant with severe hair loss? Nope. It was Queenie.

I was thinking of cutting the other side to match, or wearing bobby pins, or not caring. But, maybe one night when I’m feeling especially generous, I’ll let Queenie have a go. Even it all out.

The same day we got the (first) cat, we spent the day with artist John Frame and met an older woman named Carol, who volunteers at the public library in Wrightwood, CA. While clearing out books, we found an old letter wedged in a book, we bought The Story of Ferdinand for 25 cents and we checked out Carol’s neon yellow bug.

Here are some pics from that adventure.

Thich Nhat Hanh’s monks and nuns are in trouble.

The monastery in the hills in between Dalat and Saigon is under attack. About 100 police showed up at the monastery last night. Three monks have been taken to who knows where. The remaining monastics between the ages of 15 and 35 stand in the rain, supposedly waiting to be loaded on to trucks.

This from Thich Nhat Hanh:
“Please practice to send your energy of peace and support. Your help now is more urgent than ever. If any of you can help in any way, especially those who might be present in Vietnam, thank you. Let the Bodhisattvas protect our young brothers and sisters.”

This is the Podcast that has the translation of the SOS message.

SOS from Vietnam.

Practitioners with connections to Vietnam are urged to call anyone they know in-country to try to get information and help. Others are encouraged to call the Vietnamese consulates in the States to tell them what is going on. Thich Nhat Hanh is asking everyone else to sit and breathe and sending loving energy to Bat Nha Monastery.

I actually visited this monastery last summer while traveling in Vietnam. I had hoped to stay for a few weeks to practice there with the monks and nuns. Once there, I could only stay one day because the police were suspicious of my American presence. Here’s the post I wrote about that.

Haven’t written about these guys yet for fear of either sounding like too much of a cat lady or fear of not doing their cuteness justice. Watching beings grow from flea-infested skeletons to week-old fluffy babies who are starting to look around, starting to play, just takes my breath away (in some cases, literally, because I am allergic). I love them: pee, poop, fleas and all.

Here is a teaser from their first week of life. Long story to come.

This is USC’s version of Skateboard Punk Rocker.

Looking at him rocking out in his purple togs, I felt like the housewife in Michele Shocked’s song Anchorage:

“Leroy got a better job so we moved
Kevin lost a tooth, now he’s starting school
I got a brand new eight month old baby girl
I sound like a housewife
Hey Chel, I think I’m a housewife

Hey girl what’s it like to be in New York
New York City imagine that
Whats it like to be a skateboard punk rocker
Leroy says send a picture
Leroy says hello
Leroy says keep on rocking girl
Yeh keep on rocking.”