Not everyone was seized by latent panic, and infuriated and freaked out by the hirsute, aging hippie flashing his cam in their faces.
These two chaps (Middle Eastern, I think - so they should have feared police profiling that night), saw me aiming at them and assumed the joyful, hilarious and affectionate pose you see in the photo.
Oddly enough, the man on the left is wearing a shirt printed with Edgar Allen Poe's sweetly strange, necrophiliac lament, "Annabel Lee". Poe used opium and laudanum and this piece has a lugubrious, dreamy flavor redolent of these inspiring substances. In the first few stanzas, we hear how intensely the poet and Ms. Lee adored each other - and how she died of a "chill".
The final stanza says:
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
Did our friend realize what he was wearing? Is it racist/classist/Eurocentric of me to assume that he didn't? Well, so be it. He didn't! There. I said it. Sue me.
Excellent write up, Alan.
ReplyDeleteI love your style and literary content.
This is a great picture essay, contrasting innocence/affection and the reality of the event.
Thanks for the introduction to Poe's character and style.
Perhaps, the Mid-Eastern friend, was in a similar state of mind.
That enabled him the child-like innocence, and the free spirit, to alay fears of being profiled.
What if he was an avid reader of Poe.
Perhaps, the moon for him, did beam.
Brought him, a trip to NYC, a much awaited dream ... come true.
love it!
ReplyDeleteps this is your neighbor, karyn.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you enjoyed the photo-essay, Anonymous. There's more to come. Thanks so much for your comment.
ReplyDeleteAnd you're right. He must be a Poe fan, beamed to that throbbing fleshpot called Times Square in an unclean (but child-like) opium cream-dream. He was, after all, only a few steps from the whore in the first photo. Perhaps he and his buddy hooked up with the enraged one and her shapely colleague and spent a night tasting the grisly pleasures of tough love, Big Apple-style.
Thanks, neighbor Karyn. It loves you too!
ReplyDeleteps "grim mistress" is the best handle I have EVER heard. (And it fits you so well, I might add.)
ReplyDeleteWell may be he did read Edgar Allen Poe, may be he didn't... may be he thought cool tee & got it... You did capture a good picture though! and as you said a respite!!
ReplyDeleteAnnabel Lee must sound real weird in Arabic. Maybe it's Allahbel Lee.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I think the other fellow is his lover and he bought him the shirt as a statement of erotic obsession.
Glad you liked the pic, BB (Brahmin Babe). Thanks for commenting!
I love the picture.. but i have to disagree with you, i really think he knows what is written on his T'. (even i know... i totally love old E.A.Poe)
ReplyDelete-Melody
Glad you like the photo, Melody.
ReplyDeleteBut remember, you belong to "Western" culture, where Poe is an icon in any of the Indo-European languages.
Not so in the lands of Islam.
So I doubt he has a clue what that shirt's all about.
Thanks for your comment. I really appreciate it.
I hear increasingly about the horror of passing through airports with a Gulf passport and a conspicuously Muslim name. If the flight is domestic and one is instructed to turn up an hour early, he must be there three hours early or miss the flight; if it's international and one must be there two hours in advance, he must be there at least four hours ahead. And this, mind you, is a wannabe cosmopolitan who adores Broadway stage plays and especially musicals. ("What do you do for entertainment in Saudi?" "There's nothing to do for entertainment in Saudi. We hop on a plane and fly to London.")
ReplyDeleteAn Indian friend of mine, non-Muslim and with beautiful brown skin, has similar problems. In fact, he is profiled in many venues. So looking like "the other" is enough to trigger the nastiness.
ReplyDelete