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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

Pick-up sticks (the crossing)


There are hundreds of worms on the sidewalk, strewn across the puddles like someone threw them up in the air and let them fall like pick-up sticks. They are inching away from fresh cut grass and water-logged earth towards the street where trucks and buses churn past. They are homeless, tiptoeing towards death. Blind and slow they cross this stretch of pavement, all sharing this collective dream. It is so intensely ironic, so sad, such a gruesome metaphor for anyone that glances down at them. How are we any different? 

No one is out for once, as the rain pelts down and the puddles stretch into ponds. The city floods so easily, as there is no sewer system here just earth that grows soggy until it can absorb no more. I smell things that are green - the tiny buds at the ends of tree limbs. Then smoke, and lamb fat as someone makes shashlik in the woods. Then sour detergent, ammonia and gasoline that stretches into dull rainbows in parking lots. 

A woman is leaving our building just as I go in. I hold the door for her, and she stares at me once, wordless, no nod of the chin as if I do not exist. 



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