SFO Protest against Trump’s Muslim Ban at San Francisco International Airport.
Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.
Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you’ll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.
W. H. Auden, “Refugee Blues”, Selected Poems
Oakland Women’s March, 2017.
So here’s the thing about photographing a protest: you’re already lying. The minute you lift that camera, you’re making choices about what matters, what’s worth preserving, what truth, if there is such a thing, you’re selling. It’s a hustle, like everything else. But sometimes it’s a hustle worth committing to.
Oakland, March 2017. The streets are thick with bodies and rage and hope and those hand-lettered signs that always break your heart a little because someone actually sat down the night before or that morning with a Sharpie and poster board and tried to compress their entire fucking worldview into three words. “Nevertheless, she persisted.” “My body, my choice.” “Girls just want to have fun-damental rights.” Some clever, some desperate, all sincere in that way that makes you want to look away and also never stop looking.
I’m moving through the crowd with a camera, which means I’m both there and not there. Participating and not participating. Observer and observed. It’s the photographer’s original sin, the distance required to frame the shot is the same distance that keeps you from fully being in the moment. You’re hunting. Always hunting for that intersection of light and meaning, that face that says everything, that gesture that captures what ten thousand words couldn’t.
There’s a woman in a pink hat, of course there’s a woman in a pink hat, there are thousands of them, an entire sea of them, but this one stops me. Something in her eyes. Not anger, exactly. Determination? Exhaustion? Both? The camera doesn’t care about my uncertainty. Click. Move on.
The sound is what they can’t see in these photographs. The chanting that starts somewhere in the middle of the pack and rolls forward and backward like a wave. The drumming. The car horns from drivers stuck in the gridlock who’ve decided fuck it, we’re with you. The helicopters overhead because of course there are helicopters. Authority never sleeps, even when it’s pretending to.
I keep thinking about other marches, other crowds, other cities where people gathered to shout into the void and hope something shouts back. Selma. Stonewall. Tiananmen. Cairo. This isn’t those places, not yet, maybe not ever. But the principle is the same: when you feel powerless, you mass together to remember you’re not alone. It’s tribal. It’s ancient. It’s maybe the only thing we’re actually good at.
A kid on someone’s shoulders, holding a sign she probably can’t even read yet. What is she learning today? That dissent is possible? That her voice matters? Or just that crowds are loud and her parents are tired and this is what Saturday looks like when democracy feels like it’s circling the drain?
The photographs flatten it all. Make it manageable. Digestible. Here’s a face. Here’s a sign. Here’s a moment of solidarity frozen in time. But they can’t capture the smell of too many people in one place, the shuffling of feet, the way your back starts to ache after two hours of standing, the strange electricity that runs through a crowd when everyone simultaneously realizes: we’re a lot of fucking people.
Oakland‘s always been good at this, resistance, noise, showing up when it matters. Something in the DNA of the place, in the ghosts of the Black Panthers and the port strikes and every other time someone said enough. These streets have seen this before. They’ll see it again.
I shoot and shoot and shoot, knowing that most of it won’t matter, that most of these images will get lost in the deluge of everyone else’s images, that the march will be over and Monday will come and then what? But you do it anyway because not doing it feels like surrender. You document because that’s what you have. You bear witness because someone has to.
As the crowd starts to thin, as people peel off toward BART stations and parking garages and whatever comes next. Faces I’ll never see again. Signs that will end up in recycling bins. A day that mattered tremendously and maybe not at all.
Somewhere in these frames I hope there is proof that when things felt darkest, people still showed up. Still made signs. Still believed their presence meant something.
Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.
William Faulkner
Reinvigorating Community: a gathering to affirm the Stanford University’s and the nation’s founding values through reflection, music and dance with the St. Lawrence String Quartet, Talisman A Cappella, and the Chocolate Heads Movement Band.
People don’t come to church for preachments,
of course,
but to daydream about God.
Kurt Vonnegut
Stop Sign, Davenport, CA.
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding
The first time doesn’t exist in my head, it’s just gone, one of those origin stories you lose in the noise. But there’s your laugh, like gravel and light, cutting through those parties at my parents’ place. There’s me, just a kid, watching some play you’d put together, and you, you, asking what I thought. Not humoring me. Actually giving a shit about the answer.
High school. I’m in some grad student’s production, probably terrible… maybe not, and you corner me afterward. “You’re going to have a life in theater,” you say. Like it’s a fact. Like you’ve already seen it. I tell you you’re out of your goddamn mind. No way. Not happening.
Then there’s the phone call. You need someone to drive your wife to a doctors appointment at the Palo Alto Medical Clinic. So I do. And she introduces me to every single person we pass as her boyfriend. Just chaos and affection and absurdity, all at once. She was awesome.
Your Brecht seminar. That’s where it happened, where I fell hard for the machinery of it all, the gears and pulleys of how stories work, how they move. Grad school meant hours in your office, thousands of stories passing between us like contraband, like secrets, like currency.
The last time you saw me perform, you just grabbed my arm, pulled me close, said it was like watching the ghost of my father. The same stage where you’d directed him decades before, when he was even younger than I was then. Full circle. Generations folding in on themselves.
And then the end, my end: years where I just couldn’t. Too much loss, too little left in the tank. Phone calls every few months. Dinner once a year if we were lucky. I wasn’t there. Not the way I should have been.
Carl Weber. Charlie. You’re in everything I make, everything I’ve done, everything I will do. Past tense, present tense, future conditional, you’re one of the through-linse. One of the things that holds.
The universe is real but you can’t see it.
You have to imagine it.
Once you imagine it,
you can be realistic about reproducing it.
Alexander Calder
Look at this thing. Sitting there outside the law school like some kind of predatory bird that decided mid-flight to just fucking freeze, arrested in steel, suspended in its own impossible geometry. You want to talk about truth? Here it is: twenty tons of it, painted that arterial red-orange that Calder loved because it didn’t apologize for being seen.
The Falcon. Le Faucon. And it’s not some delicate mobile twitching in the breeze like the precious little darlings everyone associates with Calder’s name. No. This is the other side of the man—the side that understood weight, permanence, the brutal honesty of iron forged in a French foundry where guys with actual dirt under their fingernails bent metal to his will.
You walk past this beast every day on your way to tort law or constitutional theory or whatever the hell they teach in there, and maybe, maybe, you glance at it. Maybe you don’t. Because that’s what happens when you institutionalize art, when you plant it on a manicured lawn and pretend it’s decoration. It becomes wallpaper. Background noise. The sculptural equivalent of Muzak.
But Calder didn’t make wallpaper.
He made this thing that sat outside his studio in Saché for fifteen years. Fifteen years. It watched him work. It watched him die. And then someone had the good sense to bring it here, to California, to this place where future lawyers would theoretically learn to parse truth from bullshit, which seems fitting, because that’s exactly what this sculpture does. It strips away all the academic horseshit, all the interpretive frameworks and post-modern whatever, and just exists in space with the kind of confidence that comes from knowing exactly what it is.
Calder said you have to imagine the universe before you can reproduce it. And what he imagined wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t comfortable. It was angular, aggressive, alive in the way that predators are alive, efficient, purposeful, absolutely itself.
That’s the falcon. That’s the art.
And most people will walk right past it checking their phones.
Alexander Calder Le Faucon (The Falcon)
Stanford Law School, part of the Cantor Arts Center collection
Working the wave organ… site specific rehearsing of a fragment from a lost Euripides tragedy: Iota’s Euripides Fragment No. 91
It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.
Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us, 1951
Dress Rehearsal for Chocolate Heads’ performance to celebrate the re-opening of Roble Hall for Stanford University’s Department of Theater and Performance Studies (Stanford TAPS)
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men, v, 1925
Playing the role of poet Robinson Jeffers in his home Tor House in Carmel, CA with David Schendel directing.
That public men publish falsehoods
Is nothing new. That America must accept
Like the historical republics corruption and empire
Has been known for years.
Be angry at the sun for setting
If these things anger you.
Robinson Jeffers, Be Angry At The Sun, 1941
Aleta Hayes rehearsal of the Chocolate Heads Class in Roble Studio.
The natural order will emerge only if we let go of the fear of the disorder, we trust each other.
Judith Malina