Before an American physician and pathologist coined thalassemia , there was already blood in the Mediterranean. There was bloodshed around the Mediterranean for thousands of years before anyone ever thought of hemoglobin and the severe anemia that particularly affected the people of Italy, Greece and Turkey. Coined from Greek words 'sea' and 'blood', thalassemia seems like a lethal tribute to the clear blue waters of the Aegean and the Mediterranean. I saw a photo of a child fished from the sea recently. The tiny parcel was in the arms of a man kneeling in a boat, as if he were an offering to the gods. Not to the Gods of the EU but most naturally to some pagan gods who would welcome the lifeless little fellow still wearing a red beanie. Should the kiddo have a name, it remains as slack a question as his swollen, dangling body. We conveniently go by numbers when asylum seekers and refugees flood the seas, shores and gates of pristine first world exclusivity. So we a...
My attention span is a pinwheel. Spun around distractions, it just crab walks away from clarity. I said I will write everyday in December. I didn't. I can beat myself and pity myself and remind myself that I always screw things up as if I were my own long term partner in a tedious relationship surviving on the lowest common denominator: mutual bitterness. Alas, no. Today I feel particularly tolerant. I have a few things to say to myself. This blog, with its irrelevance, may not speak much to others. I'm not promoting products or a lifestyle. I am not giving advice or hope. I'm not an astrologer and Tarot could be a word in Tagalog. I'm here for the heck of it. I come and go as I please. Like the home I always imagined but never had, this blog is airy and there is a hammock icon on which you click, off you end up in Apotheka beach, Chios. Mais non. Because internet knows the world is full of wandering attentions, it provides knowledge in point form. 10 things you nev...
I'd abandoned this blog, as one does, because it is mine to abandon. I'd abandoned many a thing: half eaten oatmeal, lovers, cats, ideas for films, luggage here and there, promises and boxes of delicate negligibles in other people's basements. For someone who gathers and keeps (if only in her heart) people, beasts, pebbles, her grandfather's watch and illusions, the abandoning is a necessary function. I retract. I retrieve. I transit. I cradle the thought that if I could... I would have had I... Abandon comes with a side of undone capable of surviving minor tragedies. Agnès Varda est morte. Long live Agnès Varda. I'd met her on the stairs of a venue I can't quite remember (the MaRs building or Isabelle Bader Theatre?), during Toronto Film Festival in 2004 when she was traveling with Cinévardaphoto , a three part reflection on photography. It must have been a press screening because there was a handful of us when she suggested we go outside. Accompanied by tw...
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