Raafi Rivero | images and ideas

Dollar Bills

The place is called 69, and one can only assume it’s named after its address on Bayard St. The decoration scheme is as simple or as complicated as the many one dollar bills taped to the walls. There must be hundreds of them, signed by their former owners in red or black markers. Some are posted in groups of ten or fifteen and bigger drawings take the place of scrawled signatures and tags. 69 is open until five a.m.; the late night clientele represents the city in all its shades. Karin jokes that the menu “barely qualifies as Chinese food” — the waiters are surprised when asked for chopsticks. The mood is as dark as the people who finish the night in the wee hours, wheezing like last call in the latest bars in the city.

Five Grand

He wore black shorts to match a black t-shirt and loose black du-rag tied around his head. He wasn’t so much leading his blind friend down the street as he was allowing the slower walking pace to give his jokes more breathing room; maybe he needed to think something over. The streets are about game, and if they could speak they would have told me that this guy had one. I’d crossed paths with him twenty minutes earlier. “What’s up Papi?” he asked then as he high-stepped down the middle of the street, an icebreaker. It was another street, and he seemed hyper-alert of my presence. This time he lobbed boasts into the Florida sun at intervals that matched his friend’s languid pace.

“Are you a freelance photographer or something?”

I nodded, having just snapped a picture of his friend, and amused by how easily the words freelance photographer had fallen from his lips. He crossed in front of me, perhaps to avoid the lens, and I lowered the camera anyway, a dance.

Was he really avoiding the camera? Had I let him off too easy?

His blind friend stood indignant, monologizing on the corner where I had snapped the photo. “Pictures?” he said. “Make sure to let him know that my appearance fee is five thousand dollars.” He looked around as if to an audience. “Shit,” he said, “I charge five thousand for my picture. Make sure he knows that.”

city living

In New York City, people find a way to make it work. This is from the bathroom AND closet of a friend’s apartment. There’s a second level loft here, a tiny kitchen, and iTunes. Home is where you lay your head, and in the east village you don’t forget that.

Main Street on 50

Chillicothe, Ohio might be the prettiest small town in America. There is a Main Street, and a set of railroad tracks that divides the town along class lines. Pairs of teenagers troop down the streets intermittently, looking for something to do. When I arrived, Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing was tolling from the bells of the black church. There is a plant that lets out at five, and a steel mill just beyond the Greenlawn Cemetery. It’s the closest place I’ve been to the small town from Back to the Future. There’s even a broken clock tower.

There’s also an erie silence to the place. Many of the small shops were closed, and I wondered had the steel run out in the nearby hills? How could such a pretty town be so sleepy? I walked around for a couple of hours, but the only businesses I patronized were the Shell station, and the $.50 Pepsi machine at the supermarket. Photography, like mining, can be destructive. You take, take, take, and then you move on to the next place that has something to offer. For that, I owe something more to Chillicothe. I’m probably not the only one who does.

Summer Practice

A few weeks ago I found myself passing through Winchester, VA, a town for whom, I suppose, the Winchester gun company is named. The town has yet to be graced by the presence of a Starbucks, and it took me a few attempts to find someone who could direct me to a wireless internet connection. “Starbucks?” a helpful woman smiled quizzically, “we don’t have that here.” She directed me to a nearby mall.

Before I found my way online, I ended up on the beautiful campus of John Handley High School. The girl’s cross country team was just starting Summer practice. The coach, who was by then very pregnant, sat on a grand Jeffersonian staircase and chatted with a friend while her charges circled the track. I don’t often count myself among those who miss being in high school, but there is something enchanting about the feel a new school year. Or, maybe, you just had to be there.

Cross Colours

This past weekend I met up with about a million of my closest Carribean friends for the West Indian American Day parade two blocks away on Eastern Parkway. I wrote about the same event five years ago. By the energy of the crowd, however, it was hard to tell any time had passed at all. If you don’t mind distorted grumbling sounds, you might enjoy a short video of the event captured on the ol’ digital camera.