Before I start, please be aware that all photos can be viewed in a fuller size by clicking on them individually.
This is the next part of the Unbearables' Rollo Whitehead Memorial Reading for the 100K Poets for (spare) Change. A reading for change sounds, well, nice, but sort of nebulous. What sort of change? And by whom and to what purpose? Now a reading for spare change makes delicious sense. Poetry doesn't pay its own way. The justice or injustice of this is not the point, the point is that a person reading poetry for change on the street might earn enough in an afternoon to pay for a few beers, of which there was an insufficiency at A Gathering of the Tribes. This was a problem because it was hot in the gallery, as was much of the poetry, by the way. Though some people went out and got themselves beer, I was committed to taking photos, so maybe I should've been committed. But I like these people and they deserve to be documented. So what if it was warm enough that the videographer - of whom I failed to take pictures - kept falling asleep at the camera. After he set up the tripod and the videocamera, it was all pretty much automatic, so I doubt that caused any problems. Ron was sitting next to him, swaying back and forth in time to the rhythm of whatever was being read, except when he was swaying to his own rhythms. He kept nudging the videographer who'd give a surprised jerk and look around to see if anyone noticed he'd been sleeping. You might see a blurry bit of the back of his head in some of the photos. It's not motion blur.
Beyond the heat and the conversations drifting into the gallery from the room behind it, there was a lot of interesting things being read, and some of it was very good. No surprise there. The Unbearables remain because they do enough work worth reading/hearing/seeing. "The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report" what was going on that afternoon. It's great to know that the new collection, The Unbearables Big Book of Sex (Autonomedia Press) is out and available in a few places, notably the excellent St. Mark's Bookshop in New York City (you can probably order it online) and that it contains my first published fiction.
There are a lot of photos here. I was going to do more than two posts but I got lazy and other projects are creeping in, so keep scrolling. I hope to get a chance to caption them. Who knows, maybe Ron will send me copies of some of the poems read and in my spare (change) time I will revise this entry, or create a new one matching the image of the reader to the reader's words.
Enjoy the photos. I enjoyed taking them.
If you want to help me out by identifying people in the photos, send me an email at - streetphoto{replace the stuff from bracket to bracket with an AT sign, you know shift-2}jommelli.org with the number of the photo and the name of the person or people in it.And if anyone has a photo of the late, lamented Rollo Whitehead, you are truly lucky.
