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somewhere over the rainbow (and other stories)

  Exactly two years ago I found myself flying through a corner of a rainbow, and landed in Oaxaca, Mexico. It was the last film festival I traveled to, a brutal and sweet experience in the harshest of realities, trying to wrap my arms around the slipperiest industry and failing magnificently. Surrounded by fresh faces and eager eyes I ran from the rooms and into the street time and again, wandering off with the camera in my bag as a companion. I took pictures of a blind man that sang on the same corner every day, of wedding parades, of an old woman waiting to see the dentist.  Literally somewhere over the rainbow, I met the ugliest answers to questions I had been dragging my feet towards for years. Cramming the most delicious food into my mouth, joking at the nightly rooftop cocktail parties, grinning like the Cheshire Cat it was all coming to an end. Actually, it had ended before it even started though - and on the plane back to New York and finally Moscow the bone-crunching undertow

the white square


It may be a form of going to church. Shouldered by the humble, there must be a flaw followed by a confession, then a naked stare. There is no room for ego and boasting in this corner of the world. Just the offering, the thin pile of pages that grows in spurts. The marks of blue ink, the subtle changes, the swooping corrections, the reprinting of those same pages now growing like a forest of saplings.

I dreamt of a great room to write in since I was a young man, a perfect replica of Frank Lloyd Wright's office, the one on display at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. How many times have I leaned against the rope across its entrance. smelling the old wood, the ancient carpet, marvelling at the low light and the expanses of wood. Ah, what books could be written in a room like this! What pages of insight and pain, of soulful revelations.

Instead, there is a fold-up table from Ikea. It goes out on the balcony when I am not working to save space. It is small, the surface already scratched, with legs that wobble under the weight of my elbows. It all happens on this tiny white square, the building of worlds, a telescope pointing back towards the earth not at the stars, looking hard at the actions of lost people, witnessing their wrestling matches.

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