It's been a hectic coast hopping week. We flew to Silverdocs to reunite with all the wonderful doc folks from previous festivals. After receiving a warm welcome and being astounded at the quality films and filmmakers in the program, we flew to LA for our premiere. Once again, we were give the warmest welcome by the festival (during the filmmaker retreat and afterwards) and
again floored by the diversity of the films and filmmakers in the fest. After our premiere and party, we went to bed around 3AM woke at 4, and climbed back on a plane to Silverdocs. Our plane was late. Our cab was slow. We arrived 15 mins before the awards ceremony and made it just in time. 20 mins later we found that we'd won the Sterling US feature prize. The pictures floating around the internet (yikes) can attest to the state of shock we were in. The jurors were Cian Smyth, David Kwok, and Margaret Brown – that October Country received the prize, and more so such deep consideration from this respected and talented group still has us reeling. Thanks again, again, again, to Sky Sitney and everyone who has given us love and support so far.
(However, all y'all who knew we'd won and hid it so well - we'll never trust you again!)
Family Update:
Since the announcement, my family have been following the reviews. They are all a little astounded that people are taking an interest in their lives, though my mother did say over the phone, " ...sometimes disfunction functions." Desi recently told me
that "According to the reviews, I'm the one who will make it out." (look out world when that happens) Daneal is doing well, keeping stable and has a blog about her life as a young mother:
http://homewithlife.blogspot.com/
Chris is doing on-line college courses and trying to find a job, despite his jail record.
All together, everything is stable and better than it has been in a long time.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
TRUE/FALSE
(photo by Ingrid Kopp)Confessions of a Film Festival Virgin
What a special kind of madness this festival was – arriving in the dead quiet airport – a 2 hour shuttle ride through what should have been Missouri but was only a dark road light by billboards for chain restaurants, chur, and adult bookstores. In town we meet and greet with only our films and a few drinks to open up communication. But it works and works well. The next day we get up, walk the bright and friendly town, go into darkness to watch the horrors and joys of life compressed and flickering, then come out to give praise and talk business. At night, after negotiating the shifting ground of the documentary film world and the flux of emotions brought on by the films themselves, we drink and happily deprive ourselves of sleep. By our last screening I was so raw from everything I’d seen that I could barely speak, let alone speak about our film. Seeing my family’s story among such work and appreciated by such a caliber of people split me right down the middle –it’s crazy to be so happy because your family is so sad. To complicate all this, there in audience were Genevieve and Logan who I haven’t seen 12 years and whose love I thought I’d lost. In the midst of all the loaded images, all the talking of film, there I was, held by Genevieve, warm and strong as ever. Thanks again to Paul Sturtz and David Wilson for an experience beyond anything I’d expected.
(March March Parade)The Award Goes To…
It’s pointless to give a “best” list since I missed half the films I wanted to see and became pals with most of the filmmakers whose films I did. Instead I’ll give my 1st annual Completely Biased Appreciation Awards to some of the folks I met:
First of all the Tough Love Awards go to Esther Robinson, Debra Zimmerman, Jess Search, Heather Croall,Matt Dentler, Kirby Dick, and Rachel Rosen who took on our film like social workers considering the future an at risk child. Many folks helped but these guys really outlined our probation period. Heather also gets the “Why Am I Hearing Chains In the Room Next Door?” special prize.
Family Ghost Awards go to Rick Minnich and Matt Sweetwood (Forgetting Dad)who are not afraid of confronting emotional ambiguity. Also to Kimberly Reed whose bravery and intelligence are matched only by her elegance. Her Prodigal Sons looks at the complications of memory, identity, family love, and violence with sharp sight and unflinching tenderness.
Teen Spirit Awards go to the Brits – Ingrid Kopp, Nick Abraham (The Posters From the Walls) and Jamie Jay Johnson whose Sounds Like Teen Spirit shows us a Europe whose borders are drawn in glitter –a substance that bridges the gap between heartbreak, victory, and national pride. This film made me sure that my inner child is a 13 year-old girl (not just an immature drag queen.)
The Laugh At A Hopeless Cause Awardd goes to The Yes Men Fix the World. It’s delightful as always to see Andy Bichlbaum in action, shifting his persona from a self effacing Clark Kent to would be Superman. Splashing close behind is John Maringouin and Molly Lynch’s Big River Man – which is also the only film from the 4th dimension I have ever seen.
The Quiet Dignity Prize goes to Jean-Pierre Duret, both for himself and the quiet dignity he reveals in his young subjects. Because We Were Born is without doubt the most beautiful of all the films I saw at the festival.
The “Damn son, How’d You Get So Good!” Award goes to Darius Mardur whose Loot has one of the most powerful moments I have ever seen in a documentary and whose charm and inclusiveness make it apparent at first meeting how he got his astounding story.
The Balance Your Profession With Your Cocktail Glass Award goes to Brian Brooks
For serious engagement with the filmmakers and the parties.
The Best Live Performance In Front of A Camera goes to Kimberly Chew, the newswoman who interviewed us live. Seeming to pull a private TV signal into her body she transformed from a soft spoken woman focused on her lines into a full blown television personality –an impressive and frightening skill.
(Before and after)
The Dance Floor Award goes to me - an honor bestowed by Jamie Jay Johnson, who has seen Miss Junior Ukraine in action, (and because jumpin’ around to New Order got me hit on.)
Finally the Life Together Award goes to Mike Palmieri, but I’m the lucky one.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
True/False
October Country is going to the True/False Film Festival.
Check It Out
http://truefalse.org/
More posts coming throughout the week.
In other news
October Country made the SF BAY GAURDIAN's end of the year critic's picks – Larry Rinder's top ten!
Donal's photos have been nominated for the Baum and Godowsky Awards.
Disjecta artspace in Portland will be presenting a October Country multimedia show in Nov. Curated by Sam Gould, including original and recent photos by Donal, film clips, stills and more by Mike, as well text and installation components.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Screening at Rooftop Films and for the family
We made it through a week of film meetings, film parties and conferences. All those introductions. All those quick eyes scanning badges. One area where filmmakers went behind a curtain to give quick pitches to funders resembled an STD clinic. A woman with a clipboard came out, a filmmaker went in. Soon the filmmaker came out either grinning (rarely) or with the defeated look of someone who was off to get that prescription filled and give all their partners the bad news. For us however,
it was a buzzing productive week. And we met some awesome folks.
Party highlight ! we got into a film society party at the Dakota- a very quiet, sincere occasion, a very tasteful cheery, if ornate apartment. No whiff of Brimstone anywhere. Everyone talked in low voices when mentioning Rosemary’s Baby, afraid the hosts would over hear, weary of that business, think us crass. Cheers to John and Yoko, and God bless message of peace, but with it’s gargoyle light fixtures in winding halls, iron gates, high dark walls and gothic rooftops, the Dakota seems rather to say give Satan (or at least Ruth Gordon, satanically gaudy) a chance.
"They're witches every one!"
The Screening
To top all this off, we had the work in progress screening of October Country, for an audience of 300 on a school rooftop in Manhattan, with the September moon above and graffiti images of immigrants workers, hip hop superheroes, peering children, and ghosts and skulls on the brick walls all around.A chill came on halfway through the film, matching Halloween on the screen. The reaction was as everything we hope for (how often does that happen?) But I stood answering questions, thinking how strange it was to be so happy when the lives in the film are so fucked. Thank you Mark Elijah Rosenberg and all at Rooftop Films for a night of the most mixed emotions I’ll ever have.
Home Viewing
On the train and it’s dark outside now, just my own reflection and the flicker of town lights through trees. As we head toward the Mohawk valley, the film becomes my family’s life again, the life they don’t deserve even though most of them make it for themselves. An abandoned brick factory glides past the window, flood lit and seemingly built on dark air. October Country here we come again.
mom and dad and ?
The film finished. Credits rolled. Not only did they like it. They’re proud of it.
Nothing could have been better, nothing more to say about it.
NEW PHOTOS
Daneal, age 4
alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5249409746991865122" />Desi
Desi
mom in the pool
archery target in the neighbors yard
Donna's T-shirt
cigarette machine
OCTOBER COUNTRY - a sample of the original photos and texts.
The Valley
Signs at the toll exit read “Welcome to the historic Mohawk Valley. To the historic Township of Herkimer.” This is the outstretched toe of Fennimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking country, and the towns that crouch along the banks of the Mohawk are sites of original colonies and revolutionary battles. Colonial graves are hidden in the woods. Barbed wire sags under blackberry thickets at the edge of the Reservation. Every country road has its tumbledown barns and skeletal silos, the rural gothic testaments to the dying agricultural economy. Industry hardly fares better. In the town of Ilion, the smokestack of the Remington Arms, the valley’s first and possibly last industry, stands like graveyard monument at the center of town. Though nearly all the life has been sucked from the valley’s dour brick factories, death continues rolling in bits and pieces along the Arms’ conveyer belts. How many lives has our local industry claimed? How many restless spirits has this factory produced.
Aside from weapons and a shabby bit of history what is there to sell here? Tough lives on tough, tired land. Motels and vacation cabins molder in lines along the highways like boxcars a train has abandoned. Tourists drive through but do not linger. The summers are short, the river water cold, and though every farmhouse and trailer park has a storage shed converted into a craft shop, there is a terrible shortage of real antiques. There is in fact a shortage of real past and real future. The kind of daily struggle that happens here makes own, cyclical present tense – a gritty unappealing one that goes unseen, unvisited. The Valley and the lives within it exist as ghosts.
But this is where I came from, where I left, and where my family still lives. We haunt each other. In the logic of haunting, memory, and photography, a fragment of time becomes unmoored from the greater flow and turns in on itself, producing phenomena that contain both presence and absence. The ghosts here in the valley are my ghosts, just as I am a ghost, there but unseen, in the pictures I take of them.
HOMES AND WHAT HAUNTS THEM
DON AND DOTTY'S HOUSE
GUN CLEANING
There has always been a gun in my father’s top drawer --–always unloaded, always locked. Throughout my childhood it was the unseen but primary marker of his territory. My mother may have covered his dresser with her lacy froth but the secret presence of weapon charged the air on his side of the bed. The slide of that drawer still invokes the scent of leatherpolish and gunpowder, still conjures the soundtracks and shoot outs from the cop shows he watched endlessly. By the time I was ten, watching him clean his pistol, watching the familiarity with which his hand moved across the barrel, around the grip, oiling and shining, I understood that he related the weapon to himself, to our livelihood, and beneath these, sometimes, to something troubling and outside my comprehension. That something was Vietnam. At 18 he joined the Airforce MP’s to avoid the Army. “to watch planes instead of corpses.” as he puts it. Before the war, he wanted to be minister in the Salvation Army, until they specified that a minister’s wife must also take the cloth (or uniform in this case, frumpy, navy wool.) Though very young, Mrs. Dorothy Mosher had aspirations toward pregnancy not the pulpit. It was 1966, if he were killed, she wanted a child. “ We were engaged when he went to boot camp, “My mother says, “They said we’d have a year together after basic training. Then he calls me from the base and he’s drunk and crying, (she laughs) saying they’re shipping him out in three months and do I still want to marry him?” In his first letters home, his voice is morally beleaguered but he clings to his faith, his drawings, and to her. At some point however, he stops mentioning God and sketchbooks. To this day, he does not willingly talk of this period. It was my mother who told me,”He wrote about stepping over corpses in the street. He didn’t believe in God any more after that.” He returned in ‘69 and though Vietnam had killed his goal of the ministry, his stateside visits had made him a father of a more earthy kind. He was 19 and had a wife and two children. Circumstances had made his choices for him, and a good portion of his identity had been invested in the Military Police; he pursued Law Enforcement to support his household.
TEMPLE CLEANING
Donna, my mother and I are working at the Jewish Temple. Cleaning toilets on their knees is the only time I’ve seen either of them kneel in a place of worship. Employed at the backside of the sacred, they bestow a very material sanctity, anointed with Pine Sol and elbow grease. The temple is a large place, the center of the valley’s community, and contains a kitchen, a dinning hall, two baths, the temple proper, and an extensive library. Luckily Mom and Donna have a fast, tag team rhythm and, as with all the homes they clean, they know the place more intimately than their employers.
If cleanliness is next to Godliness this job should make saints of us. Unfortunately it’s dirty work. I have to wonder how the concept of sanctified space would fare if those who worshipped here were faced with the temple’s onslaught of dust, drain clogs, soap scum, and pubic hair on bathroom porcelain. By the time I’ve done a mirror and sink in one bathroom, my mother has completely finished the other. Dirt alone can bring out aggression in this otherwise gentle woman. She goes after grime with vigilante energy, as if she could bring order to her world by making it gleam.
Since I’m slow at the grunt work, she hands me a fluffy rag and sends me off to do the genteel job of wiping the pews. Donna moves the vacuum in tight rings around the altar. The noisy head of the machine passes in and out of colored light that falls from the stained glass windows. A radiant projection of the Hebrew letter Shin slides across the hard plastic surface, extinguishes suddenly in the shadow of the dust bag, then ignites, like the flame it stands for on the indoor/outdoor carpet.
“It’s such a pretty place,” My mother says as she locks up, “ I wish I knew what all that stuff meant.”
DONNA' S HOUSE
The TV is on, volume up. Beneath the screen, a gang of Barbie dolls is tossed in a tag team heap, wrestling with Pokemon action figures. Scattered about are crayons, stuffed animals, barrettes, textbooks, socks, - a flurry of girlhood. Yelling, whining, flattering, my nieces Daneal and Desiree compete fiercely for their mother's attention. Denied, they turn their frustrations on each other and soon resemble their toys, tangled in a multi-limbed pile. My sister Donna sits smoking and doling out exasperated disciplines, engaged with my mother in a bout of friendly, NY style bitching. There is a stack of bills stained with coffee rings by her cup. Her check book is open and there is a direct relationship between the dollar amount she scratches out and the number of profanities that stream from her lips. Her fiancé Roger plunges deep into an oversized recliner, becoming impressively oblivious. The dog runs joyfully over the coffee table and sofa, landing in Roger's lap, spilling chips, soda, and just a bit of blood. After even a short visit, you leave this house with several hand drawn presents, a cheek coated with sticky kisses, and maybe a wound or two.
Stop by on Sunday and you find a passageway blocked by a lumber pile, stuffed animals sprawled beneath beams and plaster like earthquake victims. Visit on Wednesday, the hall is clean and raw. The house is being redone constantly, wall by wall, here, there, as time, whim, and money afford. Projects blossom around purchases - first comes the TV, then the companion furnishings, carpeting, coats of paint etc. Decorating schemes are pulled live and kicking from women's magazines. Décor is egalitarian business here; the kids like a color, they get it, with no regard to notions of taste or utility. Daneal's room has gone from a nicotine “eggshell” to a blue so saturated it seems to both emit and absorb light. If the color is hardly conducive to rest, well, that’s the most negligible function of a 12year old's bedroom anyway. Not to be outdone, Desiree's room has just been spackled with broad strokes of purple and lavender. The effect is more that of a storm at sea than the intended lilac blossoms.
Donna has always had a domestic streak. Even at her teenage, runaway wildest, she sat at the kitchen table, leafing through decorating catalogues while practicing suggestive postures; her body stuffed into blue spandex; her feet bound into shiny, vinyl stilettos; hair teased into a metal-head blend of windblown romantic and fright wig - a hairstyle that resembled, exactly, the feathers dangling from her roach clip earrings. At 14 she was misdiagnosed with Hodgkins Disease. Thinking she has three years to live she went of the deep end and has been in over her head ever since. Foster homes, teen age pregnancies, abortion, abusive relationships. Name it, she's done it, and always come through with her wit, if not all her wits, intact. I see the random creation of her home (and therefore photograph it) as the culmination of the haphazard choices she has made with her body and identity. "It's coming along," she says, rolling her eyes at a half-painted, sheet rock wall. Contrariness has always been Donna's choice mode of expression. She’s got her tough bitch reputation to defend, and often seems to go about motherhood as if forced to baby sit. But she’s pissed as hell if you don’t acknowledge the work and money she puts into the house and girls.
The girls are playing a game with the dog, shrieking as high as possible till the poor beast howls along. “Welcome to Hell, “ Donna says, carrying the bills to the counter and weighing them down with a framed picture of Eddy Van Halen live in Syracuse. “Want coffee?”
DANEAL'S ROOM
Daneal’s walls are covered nearly floor to ceiling with a ragged, glossy lining of boy band pin-ups. A grid map of perfectly hopeless top 40 lust. No matter where she looks, boys look back. Their faces in all purpose expressions –innocent and friendly, tough and slick –that seem to say, “It’s just for you.” Their hands outstretched in gestures of imploring groove. Their smiles so wide, so white, they must glow in the dark.
Laying on her umade bed, Daneal and her best friend Dorane are locked in a competitive, descriptive clamor: “Sky blue eyes, no baby blue, dark, he’s mysterious. No, sunny blonde. No, sandy! So cute! He’s not dating her anymore, it was painful but just look at his smile on the new cover of_____ he’s over it, and he’s really nice, he’s got shiny cheeks, his nose is just right for his face, he’s like that all the time - in every picture he looks the same.” Their frenzied jabber continues till Daneal kills the game by lowering her voice, turning up her thudding upstate accent and saying “like your ever even gonna meet him.”
Dorane retaliates, “They keeping you back for fighting?”
“Nope,” Daneal says, “ almost, but I don’t fight anymore, I don’t have to, everybody knows I’m a bitch and I always win.”
Dorane says nothing. The silence that follows is like confessional note being passed between them. They always get their asses kicked.
Since it’s almost Halloween I ask them if they’ve ever seen a ghost. Doraine tells me of the south field hermit, a small, white, transparent man who lives under a bridge. She has also been chased by a white car with no driver. When using a Ouija board, the communicating spirit spelled out his dislike for her in profanities, then the table shoved itself into her stomach. Really! They tossed that board in the burn barrel and it came back the next day. Not to be outdone, Daneal tells me of the ghost in the house. “Her name is Mary. She didn’t die here, she visits. You can hear her footsteps at night.” Daneal leans forward and asks, lowering her voice as if afraid of invoking the spirit, “Do you think she could be Bloody Mary?”
For those unfamiliar with the legend, you speak the name “Bloody Mary,” three times in a mirror and she appears. Her face is bloody and scratched. The girls say she can reach out and scratch those who call her. I imagine them speaking the name before the mirror, watching their own faces for signs of adult beauty beneath pimples and plump cheeks, terrified that Mary will come but beauty never will.
I put a regional twist on the game, telling them that “Mary” died, mangled by machinery, on the Remington Arm's assembly line and she now visits every house in the valley where factory work has or will cause a death. I’m inclined to believe my own dark bit of local color, as I look out the window. The Arm’s smoke stack rises through the woods, expelling clouds of thick steam over the grey trees,
The girls assure me that they have no plans of working in “that skanky place.” Daneal snaps on the TV and the talk turns instantly back to boys. Men actually. Big ones. Pro wrestlers. Who better than these oiled hulks to drive away lingering ghosts? I have to marvel at the broad tastes of these girls who switch minute to minute from trim teen idols in designer sportswear to keg-chested men in briefs so tight they are virtually sexless.
Not that the girls care for the sport. Though they scream and beat the mattress during the rounds, the moves that fascinate them happen outside the ring, in the soap opera interludes - The love lives of these violent men with good in their hearts and bad women on their arms. Daneal relates a particularly offensive scandal: “He was getting his legs broken in the ring, and she was tag teaming in a hotel room, you know what I mean?” Actually, I wonder if she knows what she means. Swinging a hockey stick, she demonstrates the moves she would use on the “traitoring bitch,” taking out the ceiling lamp in the process, showering glass over the floor and bed. Potential punishments are on everyone’s mind as we sit in the sharpness and the darkness.
SPIRIT POSSESSION
I didn't know when I took these photos that Daneal had suffered molestation, that she had seen her mother being abused by her father, that her ideas of body, sex, and love had been twisted before her adolescence set in. When I snapped these shots all I knew was that she hated her body till she danced, especially to Britney Spears. For the length of a pop song she is without a painful past or a drab present. With every angular move, every turn and spin, she is rich, slim, and full of teenage power.
GUN CLEANING
There has always been a gun in my father’s top drawer --–always unloaded, always locked. Throughout my childhood it was the unseen but primary marker of his territory. My mother may have covered his dresser with her lacy froth but the secret presence of weapon charged the air on his side of the bed. The slide of that drawer still invokes the scent of leatherpolish and gunpowder, still conjures the soundtracks and shoot outs from the cop shows he watched endlessly. By the time I was ten, watching him clean his pistol, watching the familiarity with which his hand moved across the barrel, around the grip, oiling and shining, I understood that he related the weapon to himself, to our livelihood, and beneath these, sometimes, to something troubling and outside my comprehension. That something was Vietnam. At 18 he joined the Airforce MP’s to avoid the Army. “to watch planes instead of corpses.” as he puts it. Before the war, he wanted to be minister in the Salvation Army, until they specified that a minister’s wife must also take the cloth (or uniform in this case, frumpy, navy wool.) Though very young, Mrs. Dorothy Mosher had aspirations toward pregnancy not the pulpit. It was 1966, if he were killed, she wanted a child. “ We were engaged when he went to boot camp, “My mother says, “They said we’d have a year together after basic training. Then he calls me from the base and he’s drunk and crying, (she laughs) saying they’re shipping him out in three months and do I still want to marry him?” In his first letters home, his voice is morally beleaguered but he clings to his faith, his drawings, and to her. At some point however, he stops mentioning God and sketchbooks. To this day, he does not willingly talk of this period. It was my mother who told me,”He wrote about stepping over corpses in the street. He didn’t believe in God any more after that.” He returned in ‘69 and though Vietnam had killed his goal of the ministry, his stateside visits had made him a father of a more earthy kind. He was 19 and had a wife and two children. Circumstances had made his choices for him, and a good portion of his identity had been invested in the Military Police; he pursued Law Enforcement to support his household.
TEMPLE CLEANING
Donna, my mother and I are working at the Jewish Temple. Cleaning toilets on their knees is the only time I’ve seen either of them kneel in a place of worship. Employed at the backside of the sacred, they bestow a very material sanctity, anointed with Pine Sol and elbow grease. The temple is a large place, the center of the valley’s community, and contains a kitchen, a dinning hall, two baths, the temple proper, and an extensive library. Luckily Mom and Donna have a fast, tag team rhythm and, as with all the homes they clean, they know the place more intimately than their employers.
If cleanliness is next to Godliness this job should make saints of us. Unfortunately it’s dirty work. I have to wonder how the concept of sanctified space would fare if those who worshipped here were faced with the temple’s onslaught of dust, drain clogs, soap scum, and pubic hair on bathroom porcelain. By the time I’ve done a mirror and sink in one bathroom, my mother has completely finished the other. Dirt alone can bring out aggression in this otherwise gentle woman. She goes after grime with vigilante energy, as if she could bring order to her world by making it gleam.
Since I’m slow at the grunt work, she hands me a fluffy rag and sends me off to do the genteel job of wiping the pews. Donna moves the vacuum in tight rings around the altar. The noisy head of the machine passes in and out of colored light that falls from the stained glass windows. A radiant projection of the Hebrew letter Shin slides across the hard plastic surface, extinguishes suddenly in the shadow of the dust bag, then ignites, like the flame it stands for on the indoor/outdoor carpet.
“It’s such a pretty place,” My mother says as she locks up, “ I wish I knew what all that stuff meant.”
DONNA' S HOUSE
The TV is on, volume up. Beneath the screen, a gang of Barbie dolls is tossed in a tag team heap, wrestling with Pokemon action figures. Scattered about are crayons, stuffed animals, barrettes, textbooks, socks, - a flurry of girlhood. Yelling, whining, flattering, my nieces Daneal and Desiree compete fiercely for their mother's attention. Denied, they turn their frustrations on each other and soon resemble their toys, tangled in a multi-limbed pile. My sister Donna sits smoking and doling out exasperated disciplines, engaged with my mother in a bout of friendly, NY style bitching. There is a stack of bills stained with coffee rings by her cup. Her check book is open and there is a direct relationship between the dollar amount she scratches out and the number of profanities that stream from her lips. Her fiancé Roger plunges deep into an oversized recliner, becoming impressively oblivious. The dog runs joyfully over the coffee table and sofa, landing in Roger's lap, spilling chips, soda, and just a bit of blood. After even a short visit, you leave this house with several hand drawn presents, a cheek coated with sticky kisses, and maybe a wound or two.
Stop by on Sunday and you find a passageway blocked by a lumber pile, stuffed animals sprawled beneath beams and plaster like earthquake victims. Visit on Wednesday, the hall is clean and raw. The house is being redone constantly, wall by wall, here, there, as time, whim, and money afford. Projects blossom around purchases - first comes the TV, then the companion furnishings, carpeting, coats of paint etc. Decorating schemes are pulled live and kicking from women's magazines. Décor is egalitarian business here; the kids like a color, they get it, with no regard to notions of taste or utility. Daneal's room has gone from a nicotine “eggshell” to a blue so saturated it seems to both emit and absorb light. If the color is hardly conducive to rest, well, that’s the most negligible function of a 12year old's bedroom anyway. Not to be outdone, Desiree's room has just been spackled with broad strokes of purple and lavender. The effect is more that of a storm at sea than the intended lilac blossoms.
Donna has always had a domestic streak. Even at her teenage, runaway wildest, she sat at the kitchen table, leafing through decorating catalogues while practicing suggestive postures; her body stuffed into blue spandex; her feet bound into shiny, vinyl stilettos; hair teased into a metal-head blend of windblown romantic and fright wig - a hairstyle that resembled, exactly, the feathers dangling from her roach clip earrings. At 14 she was misdiagnosed with Hodgkins Disease. Thinking she has three years to live she went of the deep end and has been in over her head ever since. Foster homes, teen age pregnancies, abortion, abusive relationships. Name it, she's done it, and always come through with her wit, if not all her wits, intact. I see the random creation of her home (and therefore photograph it) as the culmination of the haphazard choices she has made with her body and identity. "It's coming along," she says, rolling her eyes at a half-painted, sheet rock wall. Contrariness has always been Donna's choice mode of expression. She’s got her tough bitch reputation to defend, and often seems to go about motherhood as if forced to baby sit. But she’s pissed as hell if you don’t acknowledge the work and money she puts into the house and girls.
The girls are playing a game with the dog, shrieking as high as possible till the poor beast howls along. “Welcome to Hell, “ Donna says, carrying the bills to the counter and weighing them down with a framed picture of Eddy Van Halen live in Syracuse. “Want coffee?”
DANEAL'S ROOM
Daneal’s walls are covered nearly floor to ceiling with a ragged, glossy lining of boy band pin-ups. A grid map of perfectly hopeless top 40 lust. No matter where she looks, boys look back. Their faces in all purpose expressions –innocent and friendly, tough and slick –that seem to say, “It’s just for you.” Their hands outstretched in gestures of imploring groove. Their smiles so wide, so white, they must glow in the dark.
Laying on her umade bed, Daneal and her best friend Dorane are locked in a competitive, descriptive clamor: “Sky blue eyes, no baby blue, dark, he’s mysterious. No, sunny blonde. No, sandy! So cute! He’s not dating her anymore, it was painful but just look at his smile on the new cover of_____ he’s over it, and he’s really nice, he’s got shiny cheeks, his nose is just right for his face, he’s like that all the time - in every picture he looks the same.” Their frenzied jabber continues till Daneal kills the game by lowering her voice, turning up her thudding upstate accent and saying “like your ever even gonna meet him.”
Dorane retaliates, “They keeping you back for fighting?”
“Nope,” Daneal says, “ almost, but I don’t fight anymore, I don’t have to, everybody knows I’m a bitch and I always win.”
Dorane says nothing. The silence that follows is like confessional note being passed between them. They always get their asses kicked.
Since it’s almost Halloween I ask them if they’ve ever seen a ghost. Doraine tells me of the south field hermit, a small, white, transparent man who lives under a bridge. She has also been chased by a white car with no driver. When using a Ouija board, the communicating spirit spelled out his dislike for her in profanities, then the table shoved itself into her stomach. Really! They tossed that board in the burn barrel and it came back the next day. Not to be outdone, Daneal tells me of the ghost in the house. “Her name is Mary. She didn’t die here, she visits. You can hear her footsteps at night.” Daneal leans forward and asks, lowering her voice as if afraid of invoking the spirit, “Do you think she could be Bloody Mary?”
For those unfamiliar with the legend, you speak the name “Bloody Mary,” three times in a mirror and she appears. Her face is bloody and scratched. The girls say she can reach out and scratch those who call her. I imagine them speaking the name before the mirror, watching their own faces for signs of adult beauty beneath pimples and plump cheeks, terrified that Mary will come but beauty never will.
I put a regional twist on the game, telling them that “Mary” died, mangled by machinery, on the Remington Arm's assembly line and she now visits every house in the valley where factory work has or will cause a death. I’m inclined to believe my own dark bit of local color, as I look out the window. The Arm’s smoke stack rises through the woods, expelling clouds of thick steam over the grey trees,
The girls assure me that they have no plans of working in “that skanky place.” Daneal snaps on the TV and the talk turns instantly back to boys. Men actually. Big ones. Pro wrestlers. Who better than these oiled hulks to drive away lingering ghosts? I have to marvel at the broad tastes of these girls who switch minute to minute from trim teen idols in designer sportswear to keg-chested men in briefs so tight they are virtually sexless.
Not that the girls care for the sport. Though they scream and beat the mattress during the rounds, the moves that fascinate them happen outside the ring, in the soap opera interludes - The love lives of these violent men with good in their hearts and bad women on their arms. Daneal relates a particularly offensive scandal: “He was getting his legs broken in the ring, and she was tag teaming in a hotel room, you know what I mean?” Actually, I wonder if she knows what she means. Swinging a hockey stick, she demonstrates the moves she would use on the “traitoring bitch,” taking out the ceiling lamp in the process, showering glass over the floor and bed. Potential punishments are on everyone’s mind as we sit in the sharpness and the darkness.
SPIRIT POSSESSION
I didn't know when I took these photos that Daneal had suffered molestation, that she had seen her mother being abused by her father, that her ideas of body, sex, and love had been twisted before her adolescence set in. When I snapped these shots all I knew was that she hated her body till she danced, especially to Britney Spears. For the length of a pop song she is without a painful past or a drab present. With every angular move, every turn and spin, she is rich, slim, and full of teenage power.
HALLOWEEN
The long streets, sparsely lit. Piled leaves scattered by the gusty wind. A photograph may capture their color, their motion, but not their sound. They rise with a crisp, dry hiss, fluttering, beneath the streetlights, then fall, to scuttle crab-like across the pavement. Desiree crunches waist-deep into a yellow, curbside mound. She emerges with oak leaves, like petting hands, clinging to the fur of her costume. Originally, she was to be a handmade pumpkin from Ladies Home Journal, until the release of 101 Dalmations when the half-sewn yards of green and orange felt were replaced with a pre-packaged, spotted hide. On a porch she stops, shying away from the gnarled, toothy face, the claw holding out the candy. She takes into consideration her mother’s words, “It’s not real, honey, it’s a mask.” But tonight, phantasm outweighs adult authority. She won’t even take the candy I collect for her. However, after watching me enjoy it without painful death, or sprouting hair and fangs, she charges the next house, undaunted by skulls, flashing Frankenstein heads, and a clothesline’s worth of cotton sheet ghosts.
Daneal is wearing a “sexy kitty” costume. Her posture slides between 12 and 17 as she swings her treat bag in time with hips she doesn’t quite have. Her eyes are sharp, trying to guess the boys behind their masks, so she can flirt, snub, or at least know which walk to use as she goes by. She is so intent on maximizing whatever sex appeal she has, so focused on her growing powers, that she seems to be calculating them on a moment-to-moment basis. She leaves us when she sees a group of older, unchaperoned girls. She crosses the street to show off her costume. The girls give an ambivalent nod of acknowledgement. Daneal’s bright voice, carried by the damp air, chatters away as if she does not notice their disengagement. But she does not linger. She returns, smiling and listing the girls' merits, with discomfort twitching behind her whiskers.
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