Thursday is time for preparation for this weekend’s trip up to New York City. We will be participating in the Nuit Blanche Festival (Bring to Light) in Green point. http://bringtolightnyc.org/projects/58.php Time for laundry, time for a Radio Shack run, time for menial tasks like showers and shave. We did our laundry at a local place called “Suds ‘n Duds” which of course has a bar and lots of washers and dryers. This is the first time that I have ever visited such a place and I have been rewarded with finding the one dryer that doesn’t require coins! We just kept checking back with it and checking back with it and it just kept running. Finally a woman clued me in that it will just keep running if I don’t stop it. Score.
During the wait I took a look through the newest YES Weekly. To my chagrin I deduced that I had sent my photos from Carnival to the wrong person entirely. I had been copying down emails, names and connections in such a way that when I did not get all the information it staggered everything so that I had emailed all of my photos to the next person on the list! Oh well. I did spend a fair amount of time culling them together…we’ll call it speed practice. Anyway with the day in its latter stages it was time to return back to Elsewhere and a semi-empty space. With a bulk of the group (staff and volunteers) heading out to Atlanta for the Flux Festival. The only people left in the Building were Jeremy, Brandon and Nora. Brandon and Nora had just arrived earlier that afternoon and were now wandering around with that dumbstruck face that everyone gets upon first arrival. Saturday we will be receiving another new arrival named Michelle.
The building is strangely and eerily quiet without the constant bustle of carpentry, painting, crafting and Seamstressing and general banter of the staff. All the lights are low and new interactions are brewing amidst the sending and receiving of more emails.
A lot of the time spent doing community research has fundamentally revolved around internet location of data and making summations about different people’s relationships to one another. Without paying for a location service-of which I am morally opposed to- it is a lot of leg work as there is a lot of info out there but it forms a picture about the network of community and artistic interworkings as well as the free flow of history in an imperfect weave. My next personality to track own is a man named Clement Mallory who is a poet about my age and who works with kids on a constant basis most notably a program called Poetry Basketball. I believe I have found his contact info for Facebook so I need to make that connection.
Friday, October 1, 2010
Thursday, September 30, 2010
09/29/2010
United way said no. Respectfully of course. The one thing that we have to remember and also truly understand that people lead busy lives and things aren’t usually planned and orchestrated on a time frame shorter than two weeks. We also have to remember that this is what we are going to do regardless. This is the time we have, this is what we want to do and we will always play for those who are able to come today and try to plan better in the future.
Living history continues to flow as we attended a community meeting to seek people and ask question hoping for help at the Beloved Community Center which had been recommended to us as a good place to visit given it’s involvement and commitment to the community.
You can visit them here:
http://www.belovedcommunitycenter.org/
As we sat in the meeting room I looked at the photos on the wall. As I looked closer I could recognize images that I have been looking at over the past few days. Images of the Klansmen with guns, various protesters gathered together in song, images I had seen on you tube frozen in pixilated commemoration.
One of the founders of the BCC happens to be Rev. Nelson Johnson
I have seen photos of the Reverend on Nov 3. 1979 as bodies lay by the roadside.
I have seen photos of the Reverend in 1985 in reference to the incarceration of Kwame Cannon.
I have seen photos of the Reverend in photos in the 1990’s and 2000’s and now in the flesh. Living history. It’s a little queer. It’s a little good. Queer and good go well together. Its something you didn’t expect. You kinda hoped for, and it doesn’t leave a bad taste in you mouth.
I believe we are getting somewhere. Our next meeting was with Juan Obando who is a newly transplanted artist who is teaching at Elon College nearby. He seems really friendly and receptive to our ideas about this program. Juan, Jennida and I converse over Hamburgers. Elsewhere is hippy food. Hippy food is good but Hamburgers are god!
Now more admin stuff. Emails and correspondence.
Living history continues to flow as we attended a community meeting to seek people and ask question hoping for help at the Beloved Community Center which had been recommended to us as a good place to visit given it’s involvement and commitment to the community.
You can visit them here:
http://www.belovedcommunitycenter.org/
As we sat in the meeting room I looked at the photos on the wall. As I looked closer I could recognize images that I have been looking at over the past few days. Images of the Klansmen with guns, various protesters gathered together in song, images I had seen on you tube frozen in pixilated commemoration.
One of the founders of the BCC happens to be Rev. Nelson Johnson
I have seen photos of the Reverend on Nov 3. 1979 as bodies lay by the roadside.
I have seen photos of the Reverend in 1985 in reference to the incarceration of Kwame Cannon.
I have seen photos of the Reverend in photos in the 1990’s and 2000’s and now in the flesh. Living history. It’s a little queer. It’s a little good. Queer and good go well together. Its something you didn’t expect. You kinda hoped for, and it doesn’t leave a bad taste in you mouth.
I believe we are getting somewhere. Our next meeting was with Juan Obando who is a newly transplanted artist who is teaching at Elon College nearby. He seems really friendly and receptive to our ideas about this program. Juan, Jennida and I converse over Hamburgers. Elsewhere is hippy food. Hippy food is good but Hamburgers are god!
Now more admin stuff. Emails and correspondence.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
09/28/2010
Our Project proposal went very well. No we just have to start contacting everyone we know and can think of to get the ball running. Jeremy has provided us with a huge list of contacts that have been accumulated and we spent all night coming up with a basic synopsis and letter of interest to individuals and organizations as well as an expanded artistic mission for those who seem like the might need to know more or might be interested in helping shape the art project part as well as the community kid facilitation. Here is that letter:
Greetings,
I am writing to you because my partner Jennida Chase and I (Hassan Pitts) are interested in inviting SHEILD (you, your teens and their mentors) to participate in a youth-based, community-oriented event at the Elsewhere Collaborative Living Museum in downtown Greensboro on October 9, 2010. This event is aimed at providing a workshop environment in which young people can play and explore the possibilities in making music, sound and art. We are hoping to assemble local artist, musicians and community members to help facilitate and interact with the youth during this guided experience.
We propose to bring in approximately 10 to 15 “at risk youth” who are in their early teens around the age of 13 to engage in a hands on sound and music workshop. This workshop’s main intent is to foster the idea of broadening perspectives and finding new and innovative ways to express oneself and shape one’s experiences.
The young people will have the opportunity to interact with artist, musicians and community role models during dinner and a guided exploration of the creative possibilities of experimenting with sound and music.
My partner and I are collaborative artists currently in residence here at Elsewhere. We believe in pairing our own creative practice with community engagement and outreach. We are hoping to provide a context in which youth can engage in an activity within the space of Elsewhere’s Living Museum and amongst mentors that already exist here in Greensboro, which we hope will facilitate creative learning and the potential for effecting positive change. Last year, both Jennida and I completed our MFA’s from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. Recently, we have spent time teaching in VCU’s African American Studies community outreach project ‘Peep This Film Camp’, an outreach who’s aim is to teach documentary filmmaking techniques to ‘at risk’ youth as a way to empower and give voice to people who may have not found theirs yet. We hope to continue this idea and expand on it while we are here in Greensboro.
If you think SHEILD or your participants have time or interest in joining us for this event. We would be HONORED to have you and your teens and their mentors to participate! If you have questions, concerns or ideas, we would love to talk to you more in depth about this project.
It is logical if not paramount that we get members of the community and existing social and community organizations involved as they are the permanent structures already in place and will continue to play a roll in these children’s lives. We don’t want to seem like we are coming into the community with all of the answers, in fact we don’t, we just have a different way of delivering the same message, and if the message isn’t very clear or falls on deaf ears, I want this to be as fun, and entertaining for these kids and give their care givers a break for a couple of hours and enjoy a meal. Change the scenery for a little bit. And besides, Elsewhere is a Kid’s Dream. Kids and Artist are not that far off in this regard.
Greetings,
I am writing to you because my partner Jennida Chase and I (Hassan Pitts) are interested in inviting SHEILD (you, your teens and their mentors) to participate in a youth-based, community-oriented event at the Elsewhere Collaborative Living Museum in downtown Greensboro on October 9, 2010. This event is aimed at providing a workshop environment in which young people can play and explore the possibilities in making music, sound and art. We are hoping to assemble local artist, musicians and community members to help facilitate and interact with the youth during this guided experience.
We propose to bring in approximately 10 to 15 “at risk youth” who are in their early teens around the age of 13 to engage in a hands on sound and music workshop. This workshop’s main intent is to foster the idea of broadening perspectives and finding new and innovative ways to express oneself and shape one’s experiences.
The young people will have the opportunity to interact with artist, musicians and community role models during dinner and a guided exploration of the creative possibilities of experimenting with sound and music.
My partner and I are collaborative artists currently in residence here at Elsewhere. We believe in pairing our own creative practice with community engagement and outreach. We are hoping to provide a context in which youth can engage in an activity within the space of Elsewhere’s Living Museum and amongst mentors that already exist here in Greensboro, which we hope will facilitate creative learning and the potential for effecting positive change. Last year, both Jennida and I completed our MFA’s from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. Recently, we have spent time teaching in VCU’s African American Studies community outreach project ‘Peep This Film Camp’, an outreach who’s aim is to teach documentary filmmaking techniques to ‘at risk’ youth as a way to empower and give voice to people who may have not found theirs yet. We hope to continue this idea and expand on it while we are here in Greensboro.
If you think SHEILD or your participants have time or interest in joining us for this event. We would be HONORED to have you and your teens and their mentors to participate! If you have questions, concerns or ideas, we would love to talk to you more in depth about this project.
It is logical if not paramount that we get members of the community and existing social and community organizations involved as they are the permanent structures already in place and will continue to play a roll in these children’s lives. We don’t want to seem like we are coming into the community with all of the answers, in fact we don’t, we just have a different way of delivering the same message, and if the message isn’t very clear or falls on deaf ears, I want this to be as fun, and entertaining for these kids and give their care givers a break for a couple of hours and enjoy a meal. Change the scenery for a little bit. And besides, Elsewhere is a Kid’s Dream. Kids and Artist are not that far off in this regard.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
09/27/2010
Well today was trippy as it was drippy. It rained most of the day. Jennida and I spent a lot of the morning discussing the psychic funk we were both sharing. Over the course of one day the perspective on the city that we were both experiencing had changed drastically. The weather didn’t help at all. Going from Hot and sunny to cold and rainy while you contemplate a history of death and causal effect that still looms over a whole city. And amidst this we still have to propose our project on Tuesday for Elsewhere. We are toying with our original sound performance idea but turning it into something more youth oriented. After reading about and watching “Greensboro’s Child” one thing became very clear, how do we balance our need to create art with a certain social and community understanding? That life flows around us and the things that contributed to our current manifestations as human beings flow from the positive and negative effects of history. Not the history of dead things but the history of living peoples, actions and incidents. It remains clear that when a child is put onto a dangerous path there will be positive and negative hurdles- too many negative hurdles generate more negative hurdles until you cannot hurdle anymore.
But first Jennida just needed to get out of the building, and then it turned into a venture of traveling to the site of the ’79 tragedy. Fates converge and it just so happens that some students form UNCG made an audio walking tour for the “88 seconds that refuse to end.”
http://library.uncg.edu/dp/walkingtours/
These tours can be downloaded or streamed for your walking pleasure.
Ok, so geek out moment#1:
So close to my locative arts musing! Only you can access it from anywhere in the world. Zit is site specific but can still be served to the consumer in the comfort of your own home. Also the tour is 40min. long and kept lagging, due to rain, or interference, bandwidth, I don’t know.
Geek out moment #2
It is really eerie to have watched the original source material so much that I do know what the original buildings and facades look like as the narrator describes what was there but isn’t there now.
Pervout moment #1
How awkward is it to have to admit to someone that you are taking an audio walking tour of a killing of five people and it is in your back yard lady, oh I guess you really wanted to be reminded of this today.
Geek out moment #3
Apparently I am doing research since I am thinking about all these things simultaneously in a city where I have come to do work on art that might have something to do with the ideas of the importance of place, memory, passage of time and the threads that run throughout. How adult of me.
Needless to say that this walking tour is excellent in its breadth of information and perspectives. It is as current as 2006 as far as current events and knowledge and “presentness” will allow. It provides a capstone of sorts in which to frame a tragedy and where we are today both as the city is concerned as well as the community in which the murders occurred.
We now have a plan.
This is our initial proposal:
CONCEPT:
Investigate and respond to an area/location and its people.
The proposal is for a 2-part project dealing with investigation/examination of this location and its surrounding culture. We propose an interaction with the elsewhere collections which possess their own history and memory which is located within a city with a collection of its own memory and history.
We plan to digitally explore, document and catalogue details within the elsewhere collections through motion and focus; then stage a community engagement night with dinner and fun, to create the soundtracks for these video fragments.
DATE PREVIOUSLY DISCUSSED (via email): 10/8
COMMUNITY ELEMENTS:
We propose to bring in approximately 10 to 20 “at risk youth” around the age of 13 (12-15 or there about) to engage in a hands on sound and music workshop. This workshop’s main intent is to foster the idea of music and art being something creative and expressive and a metaphor for a way to shape and fashion your dreams and your experience.
The young people will have the opportunity to interact with artist and community role models during dinner and a guided exploration of the creative possibilities of sound and music.
In addition to inviting other Elsewherians to participate, we would also like to invite a few other sound artists/musicians to help interact with the youth and document the event.
RESULT:
We intend to combine the two parts of this project in a final collaborative art project where the collected audio gathered from the created soundtrack/music as well as small snippets of interviews from the children to be paired with the visual elements assembled by us. It is our belief the audio content of any visual is ultimately what gives the final piece its character and voice. We will be essentially asking these young people to give voice to this project and help guide the final interpretation and shape how others will read the piece. It is our intent to help foster a discussion of possibility.
The inclusion of sound is generally believed to guide the understanding of any visual element. We would love to include the voice of a young demographic to guide the reading of the collected visuals.
This collection of short videos will be made available online (via Youtube) and perhaps available for screening here and through participating organizations. A copy will also remain at Elsewhere for it’s own collection.
POSSIBLE NEEDS:
---Technical help (use of some equipment for event)
-Perhaps sound recording equipment
-The house speaker system
-Use of projectors
-Help documenting the event
---Possible involvement from other Elsewherians.
---To provide dinner for the event
---Possible housing (that night) for other sound artists/musicians from out of the area.
But first Jennida just needed to get out of the building, and then it turned into a venture of traveling to the site of the ’79 tragedy. Fates converge and it just so happens that some students form UNCG made an audio walking tour for the “88 seconds that refuse to end.”
http://library.uncg.edu/dp/walkingtours/
These tours can be downloaded or streamed for your walking pleasure.
Ok, so geek out moment#1:
So close to my locative arts musing! Only you can access it from anywhere in the world. Zit is site specific but can still be served to the consumer in the comfort of your own home. Also the tour is 40min. long and kept lagging, due to rain, or interference, bandwidth, I don’t know.
Geek out moment #2
It is really eerie to have watched the original source material so much that I do know what the original buildings and facades look like as the narrator describes what was there but isn’t there now.
Pervout moment #1
How awkward is it to have to admit to someone that you are taking an audio walking tour of a killing of five people and it is in your back yard lady, oh I guess you really wanted to be reminded of this today.
Geek out moment #3
Apparently I am doing research since I am thinking about all these things simultaneously in a city where I have come to do work on art that might have something to do with the ideas of the importance of place, memory, passage of time and the threads that run throughout. How adult of me.
Needless to say that this walking tour is excellent in its breadth of information and perspectives. It is as current as 2006 as far as current events and knowledge and “presentness” will allow. It provides a capstone of sorts in which to frame a tragedy and where we are today both as the city is concerned as well as the community in which the murders occurred.
We now have a plan.
This is our initial proposal:
CONCEPT:
Investigate and respond to an area/location and its people.
The proposal is for a 2-part project dealing with investigation/examination of this location and its surrounding culture. We propose an interaction with the elsewhere collections which possess their own history and memory which is located within a city with a collection of its own memory and history.
We plan to digitally explore, document and catalogue details within the elsewhere collections through motion and focus; then stage a community engagement night with dinner and fun, to create the soundtracks for these video fragments.
DATE PREVIOUSLY DISCUSSED (via email): 10/8
COMMUNITY ELEMENTS:
We propose to bring in approximately 10 to 20 “at risk youth” around the age of 13 (12-15 or there about) to engage in a hands on sound and music workshop. This workshop’s main intent is to foster the idea of music and art being something creative and expressive and a metaphor for a way to shape and fashion your dreams and your experience.
The young people will have the opportunity to interact with artist and community role models during dinner and a guided exploration of the creative possibilities of sound and music.
In addition to inviting other Elsewherians to participate, we would also like to invite a few other sound artists/musicians to help interact with the youth and document the event.
RESULT:
We intend to combine the two parts of this project in a final collaborative art project where the collected audio gathered from the created soundtrack/music as well as small snippets of interviews from the children to be paired with the visual elements assembled by us. It is our belief the audio content of any visual is ultimately what gives the final piece its character and voice. We will be essentially asking these young people to give voice to this project and help guide the final interpretation and shape how others will read the piece. It is our intent to help foster a discussion of possibility.
The inclusion of sound is generally believed to guide the understanding of any visual element. We would love to include the voice of a young demographic to guide the reading of the collected visuals.
This collection of short videos will be made available online (via Youtube) and perhaps available for screening here and through participating organizations. A copy will also remain at Elsewhere for it’s own collection.
POSSIBLE NEEDS:
---Technical help (use of some equipment for event)
-Perhaps sound recording equipment
-The house speaker system
-Use of projectors
-Help documenting the event
---Possible involvement from other Elsewherians.
---To provide dinner for the event
---Possible housing (that night) for other sound artists/musicians from out of the area.
Monday, September 27, 2010
09/26/2010
What a contrast today has been from last night. One part hangover, one part dreary, rainy day, one part sobering, emotional history lesson and one part morose, morbid exploration.
We met my parents for brunch around noon. We drove around the downtown area looking for a place to have an egg style meal, eventually finding an Irish pup that was well known to my iphone for a killer brunch. But then again not much else was open either. So over steak and eggs we listened to my parents talk about things in my past as well as things of an educational and historical nature (both my parents are educators so that’s par for the course.) Both my parents are now retired, my mother, a devoted K-12 teacher and my father a sociology professor turned administrator turned sociology professor. Most of my moving around prior to my college years was due to my dad making career-building moves through the educational system of higher education in order to make sure his kids could afford college. Partly because Jennida hasn’t heard some of these stories and partly because I suppose the older I get the more time my parents have had time to reflect and collect the memories of my childhood and witnessing how their decisions have affected their family’s life, they share them more freely.
After brunch we visited the International Civil Right’s Museum in Greensboro, which has just opened this past February. There have been signs around Greensboro to email bdemerson@sitinmovement.org for your nomination for class of 2011 inductees. So you should all do this now. I’ll start off with my complaint first so I can get over my high horse. It seems to stop so prematurely and only hints at how the civil rights struggle has paved the way for things like the Berlin wall, the fall of soviet Russia, Tiananmen Square, South Africa and others, but does not really go into them at all. So the Civil Rights Museum functions as a museum of dead things, not living peoples and culture- see the Native American Museum in DC for a good example of a living museum of culture.
On the positive side I was floored by the power of the presentation as soon as I walked through the door into the hall of shame. I must assume that my history on this planet as one who has experienced a certain many things in this life also carry a psychic thread back into time that made me so effected, but also the presentation and sound design was very compelling as you hear about how hoses were turned on people protesting and how the force of water is enough to rip flesh, you also hear the sound of water penetrating your ears. I saw images that I have not seen in many years, certainly larger than in any textbook or TV. We certainly received more civil rights history in our whirlwind tour actively passing though these walls than I had ever received passively sitting on my parents couch. In both cases I would have my parents commentary and side notes.
The Civil Rights Museum actually resides in the Woolworth’s building where the first lunch counter was sat in on and desegregated. The museum also still maintains a large majority of that lunch counter.
While we waited for the tour to start, my father asked one of the docents as to weather there were any materials or exhibits about the massacre of 1979 in Greensboro. The woman replied no, and that she was not sure if the city was ready for it. Not ready for it? Not ready for it! What could be so awful that could not be broached thirty some years later? Now this is where the living museum thing comes into play. How many of us can honestly say that they have witnessed personally “history?” History being the thing that gets written about and recorded of all to learn about? Not very many of us. We all have lived though certain times and we can say we were able to watch the Berlin Wall fall and what that must have felt like to watch, or the day Kurt Cobain died, but not the people involved. Not many of us.
In 1979 members of the Nazi party killed five protest marchers and the Ku Klux Klan, caught on live TV doing it, and walked away. Tried in court three times with out consequence. Look it up. OMD made a song about it. I’ll provide links but I’ll let you do the legwork. Needless to say I spent the rest of the day and night in a fluster scowering the internet for information, documentation, footage and interviews trying to uncover the events and circumstances surrounding this tragedy. What I learned, and what I watched was frighteningly…current.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensboro_massacre
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BV07Z5C2kHg
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/151.html
http://allacesmedia.com/greensboroschild/
So yesterday Carnival. Today Funk!
We met my parents for brunch around noon. We drove around the downtown area looking for a place to have an egg style meal, eventually finding an Irish pup that was well known to my iphone for a killer brunch. But then again not much else was open either. So over steak and eggs we listened to my parents talk about things in my past as well as things of an educational and historical nature (both my parents are educators so that’s par for the course.) Both my parents are now retired, my mother, a devoted K-12 teacher and my father a sociology professor turned administrator turned sociology professor. Most of my moving around prior to my college years was due to my dad making career-building moves through the educational system of higher education in order to make sure his kids could afford college. Partly because Jennida hasn’t heard some of these stories and partly because I suppose the older I get the more time my parents have had time to reflect and collect the memories of my childhood and witnessing how their decisions have affected their family’s life, they share them more freely.
After brunch we visited the International Civil Right’s Museum in Greensboro, which has just opened this past February. There have been signs around Greensboro to email bdemerson@sitinmovement.org for your nomination for class of 2011 inductees. So you should all do this now. I’ll start off with my complaint first so I can get over my high horse. It seems to stop so prematurely and only hints at how the civil rights struggle has paved the way for things like the Berlin wall, the fall of soviet Russia, Tiananmen Square, South Africa and others, but does not really go into them at all. So the Civil Rights Museum functions as a museum of dead things, not living peoples and culture- see the Native American Museum in DC for a good example of a living museum of culture.
On the positive side I was floored by the power of the presentation as soon as I walked through the door into the hall of shame. I must assume that my history on this planet as one who has experienced a certain many things in this life also carry a psychic thread back into time that made me so effected, but also the presentation and sound design was very compelling as you hear about how hoses were turned on people protesting and how the force of water is enough to rip flesh, you also hear the sound of water penetrating your ears. I saw images that I have not seen in many years, certainly larger than in any textbook or TV. We certainly received more civil rights history in our whirlwind tour actively passing though these walls than I had ever received passively sitting on my parents couch. In both cases I would have my parents commentary and side notes.
The Civil Rights Museum actually resides in the Woolworth’s building where the first lunch counter was sat in on and desegregated. The museum also still maintains a large majority of that lunch counter.
While we waited for the tour to start, my father asked one of the docents as to weather there were any materials or exhibits about the massacre of 1979 in Greensboro. The woman replied no, and that she was not sure if the city was ready for it. Not ready for it? Not ready for it! What could be so awful that could not be broached thirty some years later? Now this is where the living museum thing comes into play. How many of us can honestly say that they have witnessed personally “history?” History being the thing that gets written about and recorded of all to learn about? Not very many of us. We all have lived though certain times and we can say we were able to watch the Berlin Wall fall and what that must have felt like to watch, or the day Kurt Cobain died, but not the people involved. Not many of us.
In 1979 members of the Nazi party killed five protest marchers and the Ku Klux Klan, caught on live TV doing it, and walked away. Tried in court three times with out consequence. Look it up. OMD made a song about it. I’ll provide links but I’ll let you do the legwork. Needless to say I spent the rest of the day and night in a fluster scowering the internet for information, documentation, footage and interviews trying to uncover the events and circumstances surrounding this tragedy. What I learned, and what I watched was frighteningly…current.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensboro_massacre
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BV07Z5C2kHg
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/151.html
http://allacesmedia.com/greensboroschild/
So yesterday Carnival. Today Funk!
Sunday, September 26, 2010
09/25/2010
Carnival is here and I am put the finishing touches on my installation. Camera in hand I proceed to capture the ensuing events. How could I not? In the middle of it all my parents came in to town and Jennida and I had dinner between the kids crowd and the adult crowd. It was good to see them and it proved to be a good break from the festivities as I was soaking wet with sweat (clean mind you) as I had been wearing a white plastic jumpsuit all afternoon as I took photos of the kids playing the various games and encountering the cabinet of curiosities and the boardwalk on the ceiling. Jennida roamed the floor with a sound recorder capturing sound of the festivities and taking some photos as well. After dinner we picked up where we left off. I grabbed my recorder and proceeded to record ambient sound traveling from the first floor to the third and back. Each floor had its own unique flavors and ambiance, but the floor is old and porous so sounds from below and above bleed freely throughout the spaces like afterthoughts.
Finally I switched back to photo mode and proceeded to document the goings on and practicing my grip and grins. After all, Elsewhere needs evidence of prosperity, productivity, community and faces!
I also made conversations with many of the visitors both supporters and passer-byers. I feel like the camera sometimes serves to help me distance myself from people just as much as it also helps me to bring me closer to people. People are always running from or to the camera.
All in all it has been a very hectic, exciting, dramatic, and alluring evening. That’s a carnival!
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