flesh wounds

[monterrey, california; january 2008]

MOSCOW (AP) — There's no doubt what Vladimir Putin's favorite birthday present is this year — a rare Ussuri tiger cub.

State television showed the Russian prime minister affectionately petting the two-month-old female cub on Friday. The tiger weighs only about 20 pounds and sleeps in a wicker basket at Putin's residence outside Moscow.

Putin says a good home will be found for the tiger, presumably in a zoo or wildlife preserve. He hasn't decided what to call her, but is leaning toward Mashenka or Milashka.

Putin refuses to say who gave him the cub for his 56th birthday, which was Tuesday.

The Ussuri tiger is also known as the Siberian, Amur or Manchurian tiger. Fewer than 400 are believed to survive in the wild.

-Russia's Putin gets tiger cub for his birthday

I just want to show my knees!

[brooklyn, september 2008]

Woman 1: You know, I heard McDonald’s is making lattes now.

Woman 2: McDonald’s? (initially feigning contempt) Well that’s just...(face lights up) fantastic!

Woman 1: Isn’t it?! (with tremendous relief; leaning in conspiratorially) Now we don’t have to listen to jazz all day long!

Woman 2: I can start wearing heels again.

Woman 1: Read gossip magazines! (gleefully discards book )

Woman 2: Watch reality TV shows…

Woman 1: I like television!

Woman 2: I can’t really speak French.

Woman 1: I don’t know where Paraguay is!

Woman 2: Paraguay?

-Not "Lovin' It", Jennifer Byrne, 10/15/08

can't read hebrew like i used to

[williamsburg, brooklyn, september 2008]

"My work is very simple. I have come to New York because it is the most forlorn of places, the most abject. The brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal. You have only to open your eyes to see it. The broken people, the broken things, the broken thoughts. The whole city is a junk heap. It suits my purpose admirably. I find the streets an endless source of material, an inexhaustible storehouse of shattered things. Each day I g o out with my bag and collect objects that seem worthy of investigation. My samples now number in the hundreds--from the chipped to the smashed, from the dented to the squashed, from the pulverized to the putrid."

"What do you do with these things?"

"I give them names"

- "City of Glass," by Paul Auster

opening of scarf season

[new brunswick, march 2008]

Gunnghilder Sveinbjarna and her friend, Anna Lara Magnusdottir, are ordering their second bottle of red wine in the Philippe Starck-designed interior of Reykjavik's Bar 5. Tonight the young women are feeling no pain.

'We come out at the weekend to forget our children and our problems, and this time we will drink extra hard to make sure we forget the economic crisis too,' says Gunnghilder, raising a glass. 'Tomorrow the sore head.'

- "The Party's Over for Iceland, The Island that Tried to buy the World," Guardian.uk; 10/5/08

Birthday Mousse

[new brunswick, september 2008]

[highland park, new jersey, september 2008]

Two directions in Brooklyn

[williamsburg, brooklyn, september 2008]

Autumn Special at Spoonbill & Sugartown

[bedford ave. brooklyn, september 2008]

With Karzai, Palin made a quick connection as a parent.

While being photographed, they could be overheard discussing the Afghan leader's son, who was born in January 2007.


"What's his name?" Palin asked.

"Mirwais," Karzai said. "Mirwais, which means the light of the house."

"Oh, nice," said Palin, who was seen patting her heart and smiling.

--"Palin Gets Introduction to Foreign Policy," The Los Angeles Times; 9/24/08

[tv captures, june 2008]

On flea markets and recession

[chelsea flea market, new york, september 2008]

And about decision-making. At an urgent government meeting on September 18, Dmitry Medvedev spoke the key words: the authorities today have no task more important than supporting financial stability. And he announced the decision to allot half a trillion rubles for supporting the market, along with the decision to decrease the reserves and lower taxes on oil exports...
..Because a political decision can open Pandora’s Box, or it can open a big Matryoshka doll, and then we’ll have to keep taking other, smaller dolls out of it. And you can’t stop until you’ve taken out the last one.
- "Not all Opposites Attract," Russia Profile.org; 9/22/08

end of summer ii

[freehold, new jersey, june 2008]

[point pleasant, new jersey, july 2008]

New York Times profiles TV on the Radio
Jose Saramago's new book
and, with the autumnal equinox, the season's end at 11:44 a.m. Monday

end of the summer I

[new brunswick, july 2008]

"Folks," economist Larry Kudlow, a host on the business channel CNBC begged his viewers that evening, "don't give up on this great country!" - "The World as We Know it is Going Down," Spiegel; 9/18/08

[eggplant, new brunswick, nj, august 2008;
delaware river at frenchtown, nj, july 2008]

"if you're dissing the sisters,
you ain't fighting the power"

[highland park, nj, september 2008]

Bush is a ***** in disguise

...Palin Went to See Ivana Trump at Costco, Saying Alaska was So Desperate for "Any Semblance of Glamour and Culture". "Sarah Palin, a commercial fisherman from Wasilla, told her husband on Tuesday she was driving to Anchorage to shop at Costco. Instead, she headed straight for Ivana. And there, at J.C. Penney's cosmetic department, was Ivana, the former Mrs. Donald Trump, sitting at a table next to a photograph of herself. She wore a light-colored pantsuit and pink fingernail polish. Her blonde hair was coiffed in a bouffant French twist. 'We want to see Ivana,' said Palin, who admittedly smells like salmon for a large part of the summer, 'because we are so desperate in Alaska for any semblance of glamour and culture.'"

-Anchorage Daily News (Alaska), April 3, 1996

[highland park, nj, september 2008]

NIGHT AND THEN LIGHT

[seaside park, ausust 2008]

cross

[seaside park, ausust 2008]

Dunes and 'em

[Seaside Park, August 2008]

seaside shore

[Seaside Park, August 2008]

the light at the end of the tunnel

and it is so good to finally meet

[Pennsylvania Turnpike, May 2008; New Brunswick, NJ, March 2008]

it just gets so hot sometimes

At ninety-five degrees, indoors, all activity ceases.

[New Brunswick, NJ, June 2008]

Cathedral of Learning

[Pittsburgh, PA, May 2008]

Alley in Philadelphia

[Philadelphia, May 2006]

Rice is where the money is

they give you fifty dollars an' take back 49

[Rice, NJ, May 2008]

egg - three

[New Brunswick, NJ, April 2008]

They waited respectfully for him to finish and then they said, their faces slowly disappearing in the gloom, Listen, we'll let you go if you tell us what fuego means in English.

Fire, he blurted out, unable to help himself.

-p. 322 "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," by Junot Diaz

[Demarest Hall & College Avenue, New Brunswick, NJ, 2005-2006]

egg - two

[New Brunswick, NJ, April 2006]

egg - one

"in this neighborhood about 4 blocks north and 2 south sits a small house paint peeling and weeds growing in the front yard and all around this house are other houses with perfect green lawns trimmed hedges flowers and polished autos sitting in the drives.

"I like this guy," I tell my woman. "I'd sure like to see him, you know, see what he looks like."

"I've seen him," says my woman. "yeah? yeah? how? when?"

"twice. and each time it was the same. he was just sitting in his window and he had his hat on and pulled down low

over his eyes." "beautiful," I say, "beautiful."

I keep driving by hoping to see him for myself but I never do. anyhow, for me he's the salvation of this neighborhood. it's when people are all the same that everything gets named and useless

and here's this saint without a name. "

-Charles Bukowski, "Miracle Man"

[New Brunswick, NJ, April 2008]

Almost Home

Hassart and George Streets

[New Brunswick, NJ, April 2008]

patient victim

"I am the Jesus Christ of politics. I am a patient victim, I put up with everyone, I sacrifice myself for everyone."

-Silvio Berlusconi

[New Brunswick, NJ, April 2006]

New Brunswick sunset

[New Brunswick, December 2006]

birdsonpowerlines

[New Brunswick, NJ, April 2006]

WHEN YOU GET BORED GRAB A ROPE (THEY ARE NOT OF THIS EARTH)

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a
depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar
buys a nickel's work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the
counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who
seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to
breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some
local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three
violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad
- worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy,
so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are
living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us
alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted
radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.'

Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone.

-Howard Beale, "Network," (1970)

[Williamsburg, Brooklyn, January 2008; Midwestern United States, January 2008; Monterrey, California, January 2008 ]

Beware the company you reside in...

[New Brunswick, NJ, March 2008]

German politicians, the medical community and especially churches are outraged by Kusch's presentation of the killing machine. What do you think about the suicide machine?.

-http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/04/04/germany.euthanasia/index.html"

[Chinatown, New York City, February, 2008]

PROSPERITY

And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs- and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.

For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.

And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs- and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.

My story ends here. It is a fairly trivial story, and I can only hope that it has been interesting in the same way as a trivial diary is interesting. ... At present I do not feel I have seen more than the fringe of poverty.

-George Orwell, "Down and Out in Paris and London"

[ATM, New Brunswick, NJ, February 2008; Campbell, CA, January 2008; New Brunswick, NJ, November 2005; Fort Lee, NJ, May 2006; Donations, Muir National Woods, CA, January 2008]