Detours to Atlantic Avenue

Posted by Cliff Fyman

In which the night-time driver of a Manhattan cab transforms overheard conversations with his passengers into a collection of poems ...

When she first spotted my cab I had been starting to park on a snowy side street
          at 2 a.m. to buy a cup of coffee
and she surprised me opening the door
and said I could still buy that coffee
she’d wait but I said that’s okay
and we mapped a course to Gowanus
then skimmed across a conversation of the world’s religions
and how her parents down south wanted her to remain a Baptist but she wanted
          to explore Buddhism
as the snow fell and how a bad thing sometimes is a detour that helps us escape
          something worse
till we find our way
which was just like this detour
she said through the side streets till we came into the clear at Atlantic Avenue.

Picture Post #36 A postcard from Taroudant

---

'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'


Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

A postcard from Taroudant, Maroc

One piece of advice offered is to lower the gaze, to not allow it to dwell, as if the eye serves distraction.

The woman seated in front of the painting is possibly homeless. Her posture dissolves with the two figures on the wall, characterised by their carved-out eyes, and urge us to imagine where this woman can put her gaze.

Eyes and hearts, their combination invites a myriad of symbolic attributions. One of them is that a woman with her eyes can reach the man in his heart. The carved-out eyes suggest that women, even when veiled, still look (and distract), which they should not... Or is the image saying something quite different, that the time for women to be veiled is consigned to history and that these days we can 'forget about the eyes’?

An eye is connected with light, and light with reflection. The ‘seduction’ begins with the question of where the reflection should pose its attention.

Picture Post #28 Messages Concealed in Jarring Details

---

'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'



Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

        Kung, Bamenda area, republic of Cameroon. 

    Picture credit 2015, Pierpaolo di Carlo

Looking back to the picture, nothing appears strange indeed. Perhaps, more often, we have seen pictures of people carrying loads of fruit, bread or books on their heads. A wallet seems so light and small that maybe this lightness is somehow surprising.

“No! The woman does not pose for the camera. Nothing extraordinary,” a linguist and anthropologist replies. “Common practice. Here, everybody carries things on their head. And, by the way, that is not a booklet - but a wallet.”

As with everything, we can pause and take some time for something. Imagine we would walk around with our wallet on our head. Could that happen?

Observing the picture, we might perceive a contrast between the modern, urban icon of the portfolio, and the rural, timeless idea of an African woman standing in front of her habitat. Why? When did we stop carrying things on our head? This picture seems to shape questions of comparison.

Does this picture tell more about us, than about her?

As with many otherwise trivial occurrences, something very ordinary conceals a door to a closet, and when we open that door we find a chaos of things that, before, we tended not to imagine. Nothing is strange, though there is no such strangeness as to believe that.

---

A practical note on the picture:

Kung is a small village of about 600 people, perched on a steep hill in the Lower Fungom region, northwest Cameroon. Like any other village in the area, Kung has its own chief and its own language - a true language that should not be confused with a dialect. The language has no written form, and is endangered, although one of the community's central motivations is to safeguard its speech, so that the population can continue to communicate with their ancestors who have passed away.