21 September 2012

salt flats, new hip-hop lexicon



i'm not sure i've seen any imagery as of late that has made me as happy as this video. rapeando desde argentina, pero tambien parece partes de bolivia (salt flats?). unmistakable bolivian hats, wools, and colors but ON BMX BIKES, this face below with a new york attitude, this girl in the middle who is equally comfortable rapping in front of an alpaca, with some abuelitas, as she is in door-knocker earrings and fake-ass dreads over a baggy outfit. UNNNNNNNNNGH, MATANZZZZA!! i am so happy to see this. spanish rap is no new thing, nor is spanish rock. but sometimes these things strike a chord, and we identify. you could say the right verse to the wrong person, right mikey? or you could say the right verse to the right person, and therein lies the joy. since when do we create for everyone everywhere all the time? we don't. 

© i. cunningham

now that's a photo - for starters. 

17 September 2012

rubens

ps this is what i wanted my wrestling fotos to look like. pssssh.

09 September 2012

laura & karen (LP & KP)


shirley schwartzman was born in williamsburg, brooklyn, in the early 1900s. she met an engineering student with the last name paleschnitzki, or was it pauleschnitzki? no idea, unfortunately. they had two girls: karen, and later, laura. both girls were raised in the bronx, were beautiful and intelligent, went off to college, and eventually to california. what is it that drives children across the country, or to another country, as opposed to growing up and raising a family right next to their parents? up for debate, here. as i recall it both girls were a multitude of things, but each one was known for having her 'thing....' something i think has to do with the roles we play within our family structures. one sister is 'strong,' one is the 'shy' one, one brother is the pilot, one is the 'accident,' 'the baby,' or the superfluous! one is 'silly,' without substance, trite, pretty, the other is sad, heavy, studious...these sisters played into these roles, and spent a lifetime shaking them off, and for many stretches of time, without any word with or from the other. in what could only be written by someone else, both women had 1 daughter by a south american man. both divorced around the same time. both then married older, white-haired gentleman who spoke more to their jewish upbringing and who each had one daughter from a previous marriage. now 2 was four; and each of us had a playmate the exact same age as us. one of these white-haired gentlemen was a royally damaged psychologist, who struggled to be the best man he could be for most of my childhood, and the other was a berkeley lawyer about whom i can't speak much. i remember him on thanksgivings and fake christmases. i remember his laughter, his controlling tendencies, and his nervous twitches. both daughters of LP and KP went to east coast liberal arts colleges, kept the names of our fathers, and never saw shirley or the engineer growing up, and at this point the story deviates. now we are here, 3 of these 4 daughters and step-daughters of LP & KP have 2 children a piece, while one remains sorting her shit out in the city in which her grandmother was born. shirley died last sunday in florida. i don't know how old she was. i don't know how i feel because it was clouded with guilt at not having felt a thing in the first place. the memories i have of shirley are mostly negative, and that's the truth. it is my truth, at least. LP and KP are there now, figuring out the details of their mother's death. the last time i saw her i was 15. my mother as always, having a long time ago choosen happiness, possibility, and forgiveness over everything, brought a sullied me to Florida in 1996. i have 3 images from that trip. one is my grandmother's room. there was a TV, cigarette butts, a blue reclining sofa chair, and windows full of green plants that for some reason were thriving. whether this is true or not i can't fact check. it is a memory only. the second pulls information from a photo i think taken on that trip. i am wearing a white t-shirt, blue jeans that fit, a dumb necklace, and a purple cardigan i loved under long, long, flat hair. my make-up dust is a shade too white for my skin tone, and my eyebrows have been plucked to the point of abstraction. my face is growing; the bones show it in transition. i remember the three of us on the beach the day i'm wearing that outfit. i don't remember strolling. i remember sort of a lump of a woman that was my grandmother, shirley, and in later years when she came to proclaim herself a buddhist, asha. she was a sort of hunched over figure along the horizon of the sarasota seascape. she had bright eyes, short grey hair, looked like, sure, she had contributed some features to my mother and KP, sure, but her voice was gravely as only a chain smoker's could be. i remember feeling very distant, if unamused. the other scene is us on a street in a florida. that's it, that's the memory, though in my mind the exposure is always the same - overexposed. the other memories i have of her involve the telephone and her hanging up on my mother every time she would call the house. it used to end in tears and then it just ended. i don't know, yet again. i have no idea, and i am, also, in no place to say, how someone could not budge or ask themselves how to budge, or make moves towards a better self in 60 years...this is a mystery to me. i feel neither like a shithead nor a saint writing about her posthumously; i think these words are really all i have or will ever probably have to say about her. wherever buddhas go in the afterlife, i hope ms. shirley schwartzman is there, and in her next reincarnation, i hope she is granted freedom from herself.


broadway, numero que sé yo


04 September 2012

susy-come-back. suzy! come back.


FLORENCE HENRI, c. 1929

in case you still thought you were doing something contemporary. 

03 September 2012

beautiful friend bad photo


carama cámara


nip slip (welcome back saha)

staying on friends' couches and in friends' beds for a month proved rewarding (HA! and for them, too, i bet...) the last two weeks i found myself by the brooklyn park on a tall 4-poster bed with a white cat on white sheets, white sky...the whole week was a blank canvas. the books i read and the conversations we had were, for me, equivalent to the turning point in a film. the big realization. the low (and as such, high) point, acknowledged. how much do we know about our friends? what do we purport to know about them, because of our own insecurities? we only know as far as our insecurities will let us. conversely, how much do we let other people get to know us? how much do we want to be known? we could be friends, or partners, or wives for 40 years and never really know each other. we are adults in that sandbox, talking at and through each other. i see it. we all know we die alone, and so we do almost everything within our power to distract ourselves from that fact. we consume, and we consume ourselves with worry, pre-emptive regret, anxiety, hate, stress. we eat, we drink, we smoke, we sex, we ruin, we self-implode, we self-destruct. we have no distance, none. we do everything we can do to not sit with some discomfort for any amount of time....don't we? some of us? so anyway, that gets tiring. there is a mouse on a treadmill in my head, and he has gone nowhere, for a really long time. i will not burn patchouli or stop shaving my pits, nor will i substitute meditation for dance, but i will put it all up in the air, for grabs, for the taking. it's not on me, it's me but it's not on me, do you know what i mean? let something else move you, if you move nowhere, you know? like when you are 3/4 of the way submerged in a sunday swell, and the waves around you have broken, and some are about to break in front of you, and you are squatting on the sandy bottom to get your shoulders completely under the water, too, and you lift your feet up, and the ocean sort of massages you around, pushes you up and around like a soft planet in space, in no discernible pattern like a bouy...you give it up. you give it up.
you do not enjoy the beach thinking that you can change the swell...no way jose! you dive face first into the approaching wave with your eyes closed, you charge forward cutting through an element, you are salty like, and you emerge, bandeau has been blown off by the force of the atlantic foam and your tits are out - - SHIT! what an obscene scene!! you are, however, overwhelmed by the end of this month with thoughts of the places you thought you'd never go while everyone else has already been and then some, and as always you are wrong...you are so delusional and so wrong. for this you are so grateful, because everything about you carries the amazing capacity to bend, to try and again try, to morph, to shape; we are our own davids, we are. at this point, now, there is nothing better than the slap of the sea against your smooth body and the brilliance of the sun and air-on-the-'olas, those sheltered islands, oh those sheltered islands! you are at the place where the sea meets the sand and there is nothing better...anyway, nip slip. welcome back, sahara marina. i love you, bestia salerosa, i love you deeply.

mis pelirojos





i'm laboriously working on my laborious fulbright application. i wonder if i'll be awarded one. laboriously fitting, since it is labor day. i recently began thinking about the early 30s as tumultuous a time as the terrible 2's, or adolescence...is there evidence to back this up? i also began reading a book loaned to me by JSV, one that i should have read in 2004 but as always, i have my own rhythm and nothing is ever forced; the sand settles as it always has. fine. i'm not mad. i moved yesterday to a lovely street (lemme upgrade you) to a small room that has two windows overlooking whatever. by that i mean it only matters that i am not facing the street, because i can take the sanitation trucks no longer. i slept better than i have in a month and for that i am so happy. i know the bouncer at my favorite bar on starr street (he got half an MFA but had to drop out to support his daughter), i know the makers of the tortillas down the street, there are arepas to be had a few blocks down that come venezuelan approved, a hegdish of a hassidic furniture store that sells overpriced chaos, a solid laundromat that shows the likes of 'the professional' while your undies tumble dry, and the twosome known as Vilma and Saul, whose cat Lola, next door, has a little black chin on a body of all white... in general, there is the sense that where i once tread by accident was meant to be a place of semi-permanent treading, now. if i ever had my heart broken on starr, say, i should go back, instead, to find the opposite, if not a bit taller. that is how these things work.  above, my favorite redheads, sarah and her boys. sarah and i used to stand on the bathtub when we were 10 or so, and turn our asses to the mirror and squeeeeeeeeeeeeze 'em tight to make asscheek dimples. i hope that she comes to see that we were, for reasons like this and a hundred others, placed next to each other during our most formative years by the cosmos because we each had something to gift the other. if we didn't see it then, perhaps we try to do so now.

feliz cumpleaños copper penny o' mine - 31 de agosto