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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 clarinet and the saxophone


On a quiet side street, the sound of a clarinet bubbles out of a window. Someone is playing scales and arpeggios. There are squeaks and mis-steps but they do not stop. There is no moment when they stare at the instrument, reseating each section or adjusting the reed. No, they just keep going.

I stand on the sidewalk, gazing up.

It could be any one of these windows. There are tall flowers in a messy garden, foxglove and ones I cannot name that sway in the late afternoon breeze. My eyes close. I just listen, hoping they know they should keep going. When I was a boy in my bedroom with a new saxophone I was subjected  to jokes when I shuffled downstairs after trying to practice. "What, are you killing a moose up there?" I would hear them say. It was meant in some odd version of humor, but it was never funny.

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