The factory minarets are a beautiful shade of powder blue. I have been photographing a manufacturing plant of some sort. I always suspected I belonged in an industrial town. Something with a non-functioning railroad and lots of big, fat white cylinders with tiny stairs curving upwards on one side. Ideally, many of the construction projects will be left unfinished. Different levels of nostalgia and romanticizing would collide into one cinematic life, the whole way through.
Something is constructed over old, ruined things as heavy machinery bulldozes through them. The poky movements of the enormous yellow Caterpillar make me wish I had one and knew how to use it. My regular way of ruining things, while effective, would pale in comparison to a method involving heavy machinery. It would also be the closest I can ever get to being a dinosaur.
While I might consider my return to Tangier a triumphant one, you can never be sure if the city will welcome you back with open arms. Old street buddies get fired or disappear, secret beaches are buried under new roads, adopted street-cats turn up dead, the men who used to respect you make a last ditch effort to wed you and the men you fell for are still just not that into you. But aside from the details, the blueprint is the same and you can always find it, but maybe have to search the pockets and if the pockets are empty, you might have to fiddle with some buttons and if you’re still left with nothing, you’re probably just not her type. Move on!
I recently declared a silent war on prevailing notions of the Tangerine spirit, and have decided to challenge these false ideologies with my own, true ones. There is nothing more worthwhile than arguing against one subjective experience for another, more correct one. What have these years taught me, if not how to vocalize “the spirit of the city” with brevity and zeal; to retrace my steps and draw a map that would lead others down the same shwaari3 I once trod, and as long as everyone stands reaaally still, they would, soon after, “know what I mean.”
In an effort to balance out these last three years of idealism, I hope to disenchant the enchanted by debunking the myths and then immediately re-affirming them. If I am successful, I will then re-shape the image of the city in my own image; if I’m lucky, the whole summer will feel like one long refusal, comprised of many teeny-tiny refusals. In the spirit of negativity, everything I write and photograph will house within itself a negation of something I once said, or something someone else said before me.
Something is constructed over old, ruined things as heavy machinery bulldozes through them. The poky movements of the enormous yellow Caterpillar make me wish I had one and knew how to use it. My regular way of ruining things, while effective, would pale in comparison to a method involving heavy machinery. It would also be the closest I can ever get to being a dinosaur.
While I might consider my return to Tangier a triumphant one, you can never be sure if the city will welcome you back with open arms. Old street buddies get fired or disappear, secret beaches are buried under new roads, adopted street-cats turn up dead, the men who used to respect you make a last ditch effort to wed you and the men you fell for are still just not that into you. But aside from the details, the blueprint is the same and you can always find it, but maybe have to search the pockets and if the pockets are empty, you might have to fiddle with some buttons and if you’re still left with nothing, you’re probably just not her type. Move on!
I recently declared a silent war on prevailing notions of the Tangerine spirit, and have decided to challenge these false ideologies with my own, true ones. There is nothing more worthwhile than arguing against one subjective experience for another, more correct one. What have these years taught me, if not how to vocalize “the spirit of the city” with brevity and zeal; to retrace my steps and draw a map that would lead others down the same shwaari3 I once trod, and as long as everyone stands reaaally still, they would, soon after, “know what I mean.”
In an effort to balance out these last three years of idealism, I hope to disenchant the enchanted by debunking the myths and then immediately re-affirming them. If I am successful, I will then re-shape the image of the city in my own image; if I’m lucky, the whole summer will feel like one long refusal, comprised of many teeny-tiny refusals. In the spirit of negativity, everything I write and photograph will house within itself a negation of something I once said, or something someone else said before me.
