Passeerdersstraat
2006.01.18
2005.10.02
2005.08.26
Brixton club
Mixed marriage
"This Web-site is one part of two visual narratives based on a small selection of images drawn from the Daily Herald archive and produced in association with Channel 4 Online. The sites - Journeys and Arrivals & Integration - selectively trace moments of post-war immigration from within what was once the British Empire."
2005.08.21
California Mojave Desert ?
2005.08.06
2005.07.18
Papua
sendini_children.jpg / Papua / Photo Gallery © Mission Aviation Fellowship / www.maf.org.au/photos/slideshow.php >
2005.07.17
Caribbean
2005.05.21
New York, ca.1910
2004.10.22
Peking Opera
2004.10.17
Urumchi
2004.10.14
Slab City, California
Slab City, near Salton Sea, Imperial County, California
Located on the former Camp Dunlap Navy base east of Niland California, Slab City is the adopted home of snowbirds and misfits drawn to the unregulated life of squatting in the desert. Slab City received its name from the concrete slabs which remain from the former base buildings. The slabs make convenient parking spots for rv'ers, and during the winter over 3000 people call this place home. There is no cost for parking at Slab City and no public services, although water, propane and and atm are available in nearby Niland. (Slab City © polarinertia.com)
- At the entrance to Slab City, a 'free' area where snowbirds and burnt out hippies make their home, is Salvation Mountain. We were immediately greeted by Leonard Knight, it's creator. He guided us on an energetic tour of his work, and gave us free postcards. He's kind of a desert hippie, religious zelout, and folk art craftsman all in one.
- California has tried to sell the land, but no one wants it, so few officials pay much attention to it anymore. No one even seems to mind what Leonard Knight, 68, a retired mechanic from Vermont, is doing. For over a decade, he has been pouring buckets of wet clay down the side of a ridge in Slab City. He lets it dry, then paints biblical verse and multicolored images of children and flowers on it. The mural is three stories high and can be seen a mile away.
Leonard Knight (www.bearclover.net)
Welcome to Slab City (www.mailtribune.com)
Life at Slab City (www.sierranevada.edu)
Slab City by the Salton Sea
Salton Sea. Photos by Kurt Easterwood
2004.10.11
Pile of stinking shit
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick:
I think everyone who does gay and lesbian studies is haunted by the suicides of adolescents. To us, the hard statistics come easily: that queer teenagers are two to three times likelier to attempt suicide, and to accomplish it, than others; that up to 30 percent of teen suicides are likely to be gay or lesbian; that a third of lesbian and gay teenagers say they have attempted suicide; that minority queer adolescents are at even more extreme risk. The knowledge is indelible, but not astonishing, to anyone with a reason to be attuned to the profligate way this culture has of denying and despoiling queer energies and lives. I look at my adult friends and colleagues doing lesbian and gay work, and I feel that the survival of each one is a miracle.
Geoff Parkes reminds us quite passionately of the media impact of public events such as the Sydney Olympics:
What happens to those of us who cannot see our futures in the smiling faces of the athletes, or the corporate boardrooms behind the games, or in the families (and family models) that flocked to Homebush in their droves? What happens to those of us who are not given the education or upbringing that every child deserves - a family, of whatever dynamic, that loves and cares and nurtures us and provides us with the skills to survive in a harsh, and often unjust world? What happens to those of us who are forced to attend religious schools, where hellfire and damnation are preached, still!, on a regular basis to we who celebrate our love for others in a non-heterosexual way? What happens to those of us, like my cousin, who have their artwork destroyed by their school principal who condemns the work as shocking and unsuitable because it dares to deal with issues like sexuality, drug use and suicide? What happens to those of us who are left behind, swept under the carpet, pushed into our hiding places by a society that appears to believe that one's greatest chance of fulfilment lies in a middle-class suburb on a Sunday afternoon with partner, kids and four-wheel drive in tow?
And every time someone kills themselves, we keep asking ourselves why, when the answer, like a pile of stinking shit, lies directly beneath our nose.
Sodomology
To that end I have demonstrated that the invention of the myth of Sodom and Gomorrah as a site of divine genocide in response to homoeroticism has been primarily a Christian enterprise. (Michael Carden sodomology.org/)
