luminous effigies of binary transmission

Coreen is homeless and lives in the St. Aubin district, an inner city  neighborhood of Detroit populated mostly by burnt out homes and abandoned factories.
Coreen has been on the streets for over fifteen years.

“What happened to Detroit?  I mean, I’m here all my life, this area, that place, I know all the buildings, I know the people, got enemies but most people like me.  I wake up and have to take care of things, get enough for the day, you know, ’cause its cold now, sometimes I go home with someone but that don’t work out good, people always take advantage.  I finished school, well, sort of.. my father threw me out when I fifteen, don’t want to talk about that, where are you from?   Nope, never travel anywhere, always around here, you can find me easy. It’s cold at night, real cold. I had braces on my teeth when I left home, they just fell off one day, I don’t remember when, my teeth are bad, it was funny – I tried to pull out those braces with my fingers but I nearly pulled all my teeth out of my head. My brothers are gone, dead.  My mother,  I don’t know, don’t care about my father.   We take care of each other here, and when we don’t, we move on.  I have three kids, they all live with services.  I eat a little, gotta save up, you know. One thing at a time, gotta make a little money.  I’m not going to leave here.   I don’t leave this area anymore.  I used to ride the bus all day for 50 cents.  You don’t think there is evil but it’s everywhere, at night it is alive.  Gotta get to Deli (abandoned factory) early or my space be gone, but no one touch my stuff. You can’t sleep in the cold and you can’t stand up all day, you have to lay down sometime, even in shit.”

Coreen smokes rock and spends about $150 a day on her habit.
She agreed to talk to me for $20
We walked out to a small house in a abandoned field which she called the “killer room.”
I didn’t ask many questions.  Just let her talk.
She has been turning tricks since she was sixteen.
She doesn’t remember how old she is today.

“.. he could not find a word which would dispel that hostile silence;  he then walked toward the door slowly, resignedly, hanging his head, while someone else, someone forever turning his back, walked at the same pace in the opposite direction into the depths of the mirror, through the row of empty rooms which did not exist.“    – Bruno Schulz,  Street of Crocodiles

Detroit is a shadow now,  I’m far away, home – far from that place which embodies sleep, that which the Surrealists enthused to exist within;  the waking dream, a fall from grace descending and deriving beauty from the hideous, perfumed with misery, a colorful mix of monotones.   The harmony of life is that all things assembled are coming undone.  Some cities are destined to perish from memory, from prescience as time allows  each of us to believe that things will be again as they were before.

Circular life is time and photography, seeing an image as the day passes.  There is no subject but phases of light, objects which exist in an environment ever-changing. Turn the time dial and find yourself at midnight near a garbage can in a lonely park, another turn, children play nearby, men walk to some unknown destination.  Merging sound and image into flashes of time and life presented in haunting stillness.  Fascinating.

Their Circular Life

I’ve always thought of my music as having a visual element,  each piece is evocative of some place, some coordinate of memory, something seen or imagined…. dreamed; and I was glad to be able to incorporated sound into my last photo montage.    A greater consumation would be to create films for music, or more images for sound.  

The largest store of my music can be found above at Reverbnation.   Please feel free to email me if you wish to download any of the tracks.   I no longer desire to sell or market my music; I have never been comfortable with model of distribution of creativity as an enterprise.  I’m not criticizing the concept, just my discomfort with the process.

My trips to the buildings began to feel like that of a person who finds himself amidst the ruins of a lost civilization, no one left to tell the story but only witness the scribbling that communicated a massive broken codex in spray paint, pictogram symbols, urban hieroglyphics, some of the artists carried on as if nothing had happened, others noted deaths, obituaries in a few short words, no eulogy – “Kareena lived-died,” she was fifteen.  The indecipherable was also beautiful, like a scream on key – a few lines of poetry were scattered and painted throughout, the prosaic observer testifies that all this was not a complete act of madness. Animated characters drawn on a wall depict the violence of a society that seemed to have murdered itself, each one a suicide.

Schools opened and doors are splintered wood and off their hinges, all windows broken, glass scattered, books, new textbooks litter the hallways. Behind the school, through bent pipes and broken window frame I can see a brand new swing set and red slide, not a single inhabitable house beyond. As if they had “bugged out,” everyone got up and left and never returned.

A small pink Baptist church, its seats all stacked in the center of the floor, like the preparation for a bonfire, and the prayer books tucked away in the back of each pew. The ceiling had collapsed and a minister looking out from the altar would see the cruciform pattern of beams on the roof, the podium was laid out like a casket before a large window which still had a few pieces of green and orange glass remaining.

Each step my shoes hit broken glass, echoed into the long acoustics of a maze-like system of hallways, propped on one knee, looking for the right light in a room filled with empty bookcases, Dewey decimal ranges taped to each shelf. No sound at all, and then suddenly I hear footsteps all around me, running -blood cold, running towards me or away, can’t tell – the sound of movement intensified and then stopped, silent, still and waiting, looking at the door; there is no other way out, no shadows, no more echoes – nothing to see here.

Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors.
The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.
Sure of my life and my death, I observe the ambitious and would like to understand them.
Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air.
Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.
They speak of humanity.
My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty.
They speak of homeland.
My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits,
An old sword, the willow grove’s visible prayers as evening falls.
Time is living me.
More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude.
They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow.
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t expect to arrive.

- Jorge Luis Borges