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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 underpass


To cross most streets here, you have to search for the perekhod, the underpass. I mix this word up with "to translate" perevesti, or perevod, "to transfer". It all makes messy, vague sense to me. To go under, to go through, to translate  - they are all transformations, the space between A and B, the name of that odd little path, those steps down into darkness where the smell of caked mud and stale cigarettes comes up to meet you, the occasional accordion player, the beggar with soft hands held out in the shadows as words are mumbled, a repeating loop of blessings and thank you's. 

You have to go down and under to go across. There is no straight path. You have to surrender to that dark corridor with that peek of light at the other end to get to where you want to go. It all feels like a corny inspirational poster in the lunch room, just missing some kittens and bold yellow text. 


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