words: pema chodron

Blocked

The river flows rapidly down the mountain, and then all of a sudden it
gets blocked with big boulders and a lot of trees. The water can't go
any farther, even though it has tremendous force and forward energy.
It just gets blocked there. That's what happens with us, too; we get
blocked like that. Letting go at the end of the out-breath, letting
the thoughts go, is like moving one of those boulders away so that the
water can keep flowing, so that our energy and our life force can keep
evolving and going forward. We don't, out of fear of the unknown, have
to put up these blocks, these dams, that basically say no to life and
to feeling life.

--Pema Chodron

from the vault (kathmandu: hungry?)

from the vault (new york city: mj)

albuquerque, nm: a holiday

new york: times square subway station

queens, new york: moma ps1

brooklyn, new york: waterfront

new york: sneakers

new york: creepy? creepy

queens, new york: warehouse

this just a few blocks from moma ps 1.

why can't art in museums acknowledge the city breathing just beyond its walls?

denver, colorado: gabor's bar

i want to be a pool shark when i grow up.

albuquerque, new mexico: legs

portland, oregon: one summer night recalls another

Nothing started or ended that summer of fire
when orange soldiers raged across the West, wraithlike and elusive,
and a dirty haze hung, unresolved,
each question suspended in smoky amber.

And all we could do was rage into the night,
smolder on the dance floor,
sink into the beat --
now drunken dashing! without rapture, without fright,
for no other reason than to feel the bones in your feet
collapsing into the pavement.

The sunsets brought no relief but masked the blazing reality,
like the surface of the swimming pool, glittering like a moonlit Klimt.
It always felt empty beneath, and your squirming body would not fill it,
a girl coming up for air and getting only
a mouthful of ash.


(matt e. took above photo)

portland, oregon: lost and found

MISSING: a green, grinning t. rex. answers to the name james brown. last seen near belmont, feeding ed m. a piece of cake.

(photo taken by ariel z.)

lhasa, tibet: red light district

we asked some old, alcoholic ex-pats where the prostitutes hung out. we knew they'd be able to tell us.

when we told the cabbie to take us to the red light, he laughed.

we expected the hookers to be destitute tibetans, but everyone we encountered was chinese.


a woman we presume to be a prostitute strides across the street



grinning busboys outside a strip club. they wouldn't let us in to see the girls, so we came back the next night with a guy. they took him to the club, which he told us was filled with mirrors, dancing women and suit-clad men with money.


a 24-hour fruit and veggie stand across from a strip club


teenagers at the roller rink in the red light district. the constant droning of a chinese soap opera on the television, the looped 1990s house music and the never-ending twirl around the rink gave the place a strange, circular rhythm. it just swallowed time.



skate rentals cost a dollar.

portland, oregon: a lamp-lit park

the sky has dissapeared into a blue-black haze. a few neon helicopters buzz overhead. across the park, a group of bellowing homeless men crowd around a picnic table to smoke something out of a glass pipe.

a red sedan parked on the steet near the table has its windows rolled down. it's leaking a hip-hop song with a beat that sounds like a crinkling paper bag.

one man laughs loudly. it's jagged, like it it's caught deep in his throat

or

like its struggling through the branches of a fir tree.

"he fell in love with a prostitute," the man shouts into the night. i can tell by the way he says it that he's shaking his head.

on the other side of me is an elementary school, softly lit by golden streetlamps.

a young guy in tight cutoff shorts is practicing on a fixed gear bike. when he tries to stand up, his calf's tighten. like david's "marat," his muscles are shaded and pale all at once.