about the photos
the one arm bandit..
someone had given me this thing out of their basement apt in the 60s...so I set it up in my loft in Chelsea (then the rent was only $125 a month for a double loft...no bathroom...in the hallway..and it was not legal then to live there, but everyone did)I set it up in my makeshift photography studio, I had background paper up and so on...during that time I let Jay Milder use my loft for an after opening party of his show...when I got back the place was filled with people, filled. I had one record on a tiny record player, lp, of Chubby Checker and every one was dancing to it...Red Grooms, John Chamberlain and who knows who else, they brought their own beer. They thought I was an eccentric millionaire who hated furniture. I mean the place was bare, with only one bed in the corner, a futon on the floor. Robert Frank came and so did this man who was like a patron of the arts and from wall street...can't remember his name right now...
in any case, one day I was blasting some music on my JBL speaker someone had given me of Bach...and I went upstairs to visit a neighbor, the painter Zax? when I came down two plainclothemen were in my apt and checking out the slot machine. Hey this works real good they said....do you any shoes to wear you are coming with us to the station downtown. yes, I was arrested that night, labor day weekend, for breaking gambling laws. Imagine this. Also, no Miranda rule then. They took me downtown, I was fingerprinted, interrogated , "what is it you do?" "I am a photographer" Oh another fucking photographer hey?" so the booked me breaking article 80, gambling. I made it to night court, after spending some hours in a cell. There were two guys across the way in another cells and I asked them what they did and they said they kept books...I said I had one arm bandits. In any case the judge heard my pleas for mercy and he said I could go home but needed to get back for a trial. About a month later I went to court. When my case came the judge yelled "Give him a lawyer!" I did not have one. Of course I bought photos of the slot machine (see photo) and the judge looked at all this and said he had a dental appt for an aching toothache and said "I will give him the benefit of the doubt let him go, dismiss the case". I asked if I could have my machine back and the judge said, as he got to go to the dentist "Tell your client not to press his luck." A reporter from the New York Post or Daily News was there and wrote up a story called "Photog takes wrong picture." I was never able to find it. If you find it let me know...
Sunday, July 26, 2009
agnes varda
just got this review about the Beaches of Agnes by Deedee Hallack:
http://deedeehalleck.blogspot.com/2009/07/beached.html
I found it strange in away, since most people have told me how they are dying to see this film, mostly women. In fact one told me that this is the movie she wants to see when she dies...mmmm....sounds a bit like trance...or feverish hallucinations...
http://deedeehalleck.blogspot.com/2009/07/beached.html
I found it strange in away, since most people have told me how they are dying to see this film, mostly women. In fact one told me that this is the movie she wants to see when she dies...mmmm....sounds a bit like trance...or feverish hallucinations...
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
letter to Noor Durkee about Amy goodman and her interview of Amira Haas...
watching the show now...you know this is second generation surivor commmenting on their parent's experience in the Holocaust...which I assume will happen to me when I am gone and my kids talk about their experience knowing me and hearing my story of hiding from the Nazis in WWII.
But the idea that Haas brings up about "merchandizing " the Holocaust is a bizarre accusation. You could say this about any fund raising activity, from Polio to Cancer funds....think about this.
It is also an insult to survivors who are not making money out of this...in my case asking me to talk to schools and getting an honorarium. If I was Mother Theresa I would go around free all over Maine, sometimes a 6 hour car ride, to speak to schools. But I am no funded like she was and I am not a saint. It could be that some are using the Holocaust to get money from Germany and elsewhere, or a raison d'etre to exist, like Israel. But be that as it may, the Holocaust, the murder of 6 million Jews, was a tragedy without compare, the factory setting of camps is unparallel in history, even the murder of 32 million of Russians by Stalin does not compare to this atmosphere with companies involved in construction of the camps, even chemical factories still active today i.e. E.G. Farben.
Suffering does not end when the beating stops. We still fell the pain from the scars, wounds which often open up and we find out they did not heal, as Bishop Tutu once said.
Whenever I tell my stories to kids and adults the wounds open up and sometimes I cannot speak. I do not have to do this but now feel it my duty to make people aware of how low humans can go. As the Germans did in World War II.
It is ironic too that this woman, Haas, who is a second generation survivor, not being there at all, will make money out of this book? She is not giving this book away is she? Who is making profits here? It is a complex issue.
If I were to write a piece of fiction, and therefore not worry about detail (my brother and I argue all the time about detail, even to this day when he does not want to speak with me unless I drop all that I remember. This is another matter, when my brother accuses me of lying, of making things up and making money out of the Holocaust, my own brother who was six years older than I during WW II.
If you remember, Kosinski, author of the Painted Bird was accused of making things up. Of course he was making things up, his book was fiction. How a boy escapes from his enslaving gypsy, he find a bloated pig's stomach and floats on in downriver, as if in a Bosh painting...phantasm and horror, as it was in World War II.
For many of us, the War was a hallucinatory experience.... now the accusations, even the denial, are murdering the Jews all over again, as Elie Wiesel once said.
I bow my head in humiliation, and I will continue telling my story as I remember it vividly, as long as live...hoping...hoping....it will not happen again.
But mass murder is inexplicable. Look at the terrorist blowing himself up with shoppers, people going to look for work, buses with school children, all under the name of their god. How do you explain this? And with the blessing of the high priests.
Can we trust lawyers, politicians and religious leaders anymore?
I will go on, go on I must....
watching the show now...you know this is second generation surivor commmenting on their parent's experience in the Holocaust...which I assume will happen to me when I am gone and my kids talk about their experience knowing me and hearing my story of hiding from the Nazis in WWII.
But the idea that Haas brings up about "merchandizing " the Holocaust is a bizarre accusation. You could say this about any fund raising activity, from Polio to Cancer funds....think about this.
It is also an insult to survivors who are not making money out of this...in my case asking me to talk to schools and getting an honorarium. If I was Mother Theresa I would go around free all over Maine, sometimes a 6 hour car ride, to speak to schools. But I am no funded like she was and I am not a saint. It could be that some are using the Holocaust to get money from Germany and elsewhere, or a raison d'etre to exist, like Israel. But be that as it may, the Holocaust, the murder of 6 million Jews, was a tragedy without compare, the factory setting of camps is unparallel in history, even the murder of 32 million of Russians by Stalin does not compare to this atmosphere with companies involved in construction of the camps, even chemical factories still active today i.e. E.G. Farben.
Suffering does not end when the beating stops. We still fell the pain from the scars, wounds which often open up and we find out they did not heal, as Bishop Tutu once said.
Whenever I tell my stories to kids and adults the wounds open up and sometimes I cannot speak. I do not have to do this but now feel it my duty to make people aware of how low humans can go. As the Germans did in World War II.
It is ironic too that this woman, Haas, who is a second generation survivor, not being there at all, will make money out of this book? She is not giving this book away is she? Who is making profits here? It is a complex issue.
If I were to write a piece of fiction, and therefore not worry about detail (my brother and I argue all the time about detail, even to this day when he does not want to speak with me unless I drop all that I remember. This is another matter, when my brother accuses me of lying, of making things up and making money out of the Holocaust, my own brother who was six years older than I during WW II.
If you remember, Kosinski, author of the Painted Bird was accused of making things up. Of course he was making things up, his book was fiction. How a boy escapes from his enslaving gypsy, he find a bloated pig's stomach and floats on in downriver, as if in a Bosh painting...phantasm and horror, as it was in World War II.
For many of us, the War was a hallucinatory experience.... now the accusations, even the denial, are murdering the Jews all over again, as Elie Wiesel once said.
I bow my head in humiliation, and I will continue telling my story as I remember it vividly, as long as live...hoping...hoping....it will not happen again.
But mass murder is inexplicable. Look at the terrorist blowing himself up with shoppers, people going to look for work, buses with school children, all under the name of their god. How do you explain this? And with the blessing of the high priests.
Can we trust lawyers, politicians and religious leaders anymore?
I will go on, go on I must....
Monday, April 20, 2009
disillusionment
I had this fucking strange dream last night about my moving into a sort of commune (like the 60s) and I could not find my jacket, my wallet, my keys, or even where I was suppose to stay...and when I found the owners, living in the basement, they told me you crashed wherever you can, on any bed on the floor you can find and if you left your jacket with money and all it was probably gone....etc...
I woke up feeling like shit...it was 85 in my apt for some reason....took a good long shower and got back to my sense....then I was scanning this newspaper all about so called healing centers and using animals for wisdom, from horses to eagles to birds maybe even plants...all such bullshit it made me feel noxious....
it was only when I made myself a good breakfast, of toast, scallion and mushroom omelet, chipotle sausage, and black coffee, that I came back to my sense and felt the ground....and watched Cspan which deals with real problems in the world, no hocus pocus.....
most of those workshops with words like shaman, promised to cure cancer, spinal injuries, depression and so on and charge tons of bucks for it...who are the fools who fall for this?
I also felt disappointed that only a handful showed up at the studio and that the film was shown but in such an amateurish way in a off beat station (they do show Amy Goodman on it, the off beat newscaster with a monotonous drone voice) and filmed off the wall projection with the mikes trained on the speakers...I can imagine the quality on the TV at home for that one.
they will rebroadcast it and use the DVDs direct...so that gives me a chance to redo the film again...and give them a more decent copy.
One woman actually called me to say she watched the film and was thrilled to death....a friend of mine.
amigo, la vida es ridiculoso....
carlos del Portlando
I woke up feeling like shit...it was 85 in my apt for some reason....took a good long shower and got back to my sense....then I was scanning this newspaper all about so called healing centers and using animals for wisdom, from horses to eagles to birds maybe even plants...all such bullshit it made me feel noxious....
it was only when I made myself a good breakfast, of toast, scallion and mushroom omelet, chipotle sausage, and black coffee, that I came back to my sense and felt the ground....and watched Cspan which deals with real problems in the world, no hocus pocus.....
most of those workshops with words like shaman, promised to cure cancer, spinal injuries, depression and so on and charge tons of bucks for it...who are the fools who fall for this?
I also felt disappointed that only a handful showed up at the studio and that the film was shown but in such an amateurish way in a off beat station (they do show Amy Goodman on it, the off beat newscaster with a monotonous drone voice) and filmed off the wall projection with the mikes trained on the speakers...I can imagine the quality on the TV at home for that one.
they will rebroadcast it and use the DVDs direct...so that gives me a chance to redo the film again...and give them a more decent copy.
One woman actually called me to say she watched the film and was thrilled to death....a friend of mine.
amigo, la vida es ridiculoso....
carlos del Portlando
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