Five Days with Karen in Connecticut

Dale Wittig 
Mansfield & Vernon CT 
26 - 30 September 2017

1.Pond near Sister’s Place  

2.Handful of Money  

3.Vultures in the Field  

4.Vultures soaring over Field  

5.Chess with John  

6.Betty & Karen looking over  

7.Betty enjoying our Game  

8.Wild Turkeys in Graveyard  

9.Turkeys in Tolland Cemetery  

10.Mist on Pond

EFRAIN

recorded & photographed 
by José Medina 
for BiLatinMen 
Los Angeles CA 2013

I should have paid more attention to this very athletic, handsome and amply endowed young man when he first appeared among the free previews four years ago.  I don’t know how he slipped by.  As far as I know, he only performed in this one short video, barely ten minutes long, and posed for a couple dozen photos.  My guess is that it wasn’t how he wanted to make his living, even temporarily, though he seems comfortable enough doing it.  At one point he asks the cameraman, standing in for the viewer, if he likes to suck dick?  Te gusta mamar la verga?  It doesn’t sound like it’s the first time he ever asked a guy this question, or that it’s just a sentence that the director asked him to repeat (though it may be.)  He says at the beginning of the video that he’s twenty four years old.  He doesn’t say from whence he came, but he’s clearly from Mexico, and probably not just newly arrived (he speaks English as one would after several years of residence.)  Maybe he was just earning enough money to get him home.

Leadbelly

Gordon Parks
written by Ernest Kinoy 
Marlin Texas 1976

It’s not a film that has been widely seen, though more attention has been called to it of late and I’ve seen it a couple of times on television.  It was the last of Gordon Parks’ movies to receive theatrical distribution (not wide distribution but distribution none the less.)  Roger E Mosley portrays the ill fortuned Blues musician.  The story is episodic, concentrating on his early adulthood and times in prison.  It doesn’t make excuses for the real man’s violent temper and bad choices, but it doesn’t fall into the usual clichés found in biopics of great black musicians with their redemptive story lines and unbelievably helpful white folk.  Parks didn’t go out of his way to demonize the whites.  He didn’t have to, he just had to be honest, which he was.  Parks understood as well as anyone that in the USA the mass imprisonment of blacks is slavery by other means.