I have acute hearing. I hear voices in passing. Here are a few. Feel free to add your own.

Ritual Coffee Roasters, San Francisco, 6/12/08
“I’d rather own a cat, because when a cat gets sick it just dies…”

Club Cocomo, San Francisco, 7/08 (Boy tries to get girl)
“You’re the hottest smart girl I know…(music)
…I can’t tell you what I do in Iraq.
Since 2004, I’ve gone to twelve funerals…I go to counseling every week…I want to talk about it with you but I can’t.” (Boy does not get girl)

Castro, San Francisco (the Gay neighborhood)
“I LOVE balls of furry!”
“What?”
“Balls of Fury! it’s hilarious! Christopher Walken, OhMyGod…”
“Oh, the movie, yeah, anything with Christopher Walken IS Hilarious!”
(I’ve seen it, it’s not)

Downtown Seattle: Group of gutter-brats (homeless or grungy or drugs or all and tattoos and piercing) gathered on a street corner waiting for signal to change, but not crossing when it does.
“It wouldn’t spread if you’d quit scratching it…next thing you know it will be in your ass.”
I hurry and cross.

University Ave, Seattle: Grungy kid is sitting against a bike-rack which he is handcuffed to, surrounded by “friends.” Sitting on sidewalks here is illegal.
“Come on guys, this isn’t funny…well, it is…but it isn’t…Come on…”

Added 8/14/08:

Luxor, Egypt, Internet café. April, 2007 (An Egyptian guy, young, is on the internet cafe’s terminal next to mine. Web-cam chating with what looks like an Eastern European woman, young, speaking in seduction-English. I start transcribing the one side I can hear )
“…I want to climb into computer with you.
…nobody can take you away from me…you, with somebody else?…you can dance my grave first, no way. (her lips stutter in the sensual 3 frames per sec) They can’t stop me, if they kill me, I don’t care. I love you more than anything in this life (pixel pixel) what? I wish I had you with me 5yrs ago…why?…I will wait for you. I was 19 too. so it might be different. you are the one I give my life. you have the map inside your brain, inside your heart. can you see my heart from here…sensitive, what I ask for. what will i do if somebody else takes you away from me? if you decide this, I have no other choice. I love you, I need you, there’s nobody who take your place…I believe in you the rest of my life. I don’t care. Can you see me? this is why I did happy days. can you hear me? you no go crazy, shit. no don’t worry, I’m not sick 14hrs a day. I’m just sorry for her, but I can’t take this on ‘cus…what? because I have to go to gym everyday. I need visa in passport, new visa, this means the future for us. believe m she is 15rs old, I’m very happy, she’s a friend, not a woman friend. Nubian. Vacation, famous in a museum…
uh, I don’t think so, no way, even if I went to village tomorrow. we call it wezakarrah. Because she drinks zakari all the time…ok. I just want to kiss you…really, how old is he?..because I am speaking to you…nothing. A man go crazy in a relationship like this…baby…please don’t tell anybody about this sick child…no, I tell my wife soon…but now we have really big room and the teacher leaves soon…several things can happen, she can become my best friend, and I don’t understand, she may leave this, it is not my fault. she’s angry now, pissed off is proper…she is…I promise you if she leave, she won’t be back again, ever…what is going to happen? …I’ll be in jail and die.
I want you. So what do you think…do you agree to be with a crazy man, like me…would like to help you, next year you’re 18 and you’re leaving. I hate the house, I hate the no sleep, I hate it. At night I talk to you and am very happy, you are my life, it’s great. I will never give you up, no matter what you do…can you hear me?…
…can you hear me?”
(connection ends)

Yukon 7/08 Whitehorse
“…he was out in the yard eh, just shootin’ at that thing with a BB gun, it was hilarious!”

Turning on the news yesterday I couldn’t help notice that LA is on fire…again. All my life it seems LA has been on fire–in one way or another. Floods, fires, mudslides, celebrity antics and the slow disaster of constant traffic—a theme park of natural, and un-natural, disasters. I’m not too worried when I see Southern California’s flirtation with the apocalypse continuing, because I know it’s prepared. I’ll never forget, growing-up in North Hollywood, all the preparedness drills we went through in school.

An aid worker I met based in Gaza sent me this, titled: “Children playing a game called ‘Fatah and Hamas’”:

Here’s one I shot in Jursalem:

Would love to do a thing on childern and play violence. The problem I have seeing a kid with a gun is that they will both eventually mature.

For the anniversary of the 6-Day War, I’ve placed some images on Flickr from my trip to Israel and Palestine last March.

Holocaust museum, Jerusalem, March 15th.

She fell before the exhibit of the Treblinka Death camp where 870,000 Jews lost their lives. Not a dramatic fall, just standing one moment, gone the next. “Open up! all asleep!” The German commander would yell after listening at the gas chamber door, said the video interview playing over a model of the camp; it was the job of this old man — no, boy — speaking to us on the screen to pull out the bodies. Elijah Rosenberg. “Someone would examine the teeth,” he said, opening his mouth to demonstrate, “pulling out any gold.”

The woman — no, girl — who collapsed onto the museum floor before the first death camp was very young, only 18, but in Israeli army uniform. A pack of brown clothes and red eyes sobbing and shuffling through the museum. “Every moment someone would collapse in a faint,” said one video survivor of the Warsaw ghetto firestorm of 1943. The TVs are not just monitors, they are also mirrors, reflecting the viewer’s image — we have become ghosts of the present watching history.

“Why do the trains go full and return empty?” half a boxcar in front of us, “it makes no sense,” asks a Polish resident long, not long, ago. The tour buses, huge padded coaches idle outside the museum; they come full, and leave full.

Israel, East Jerusalem, March 14th.

They did not huff. They did not puff. The Israelis simply tore the house down. The Palestinians did huff and puff, threw a rock and some words, but they were no match for the police carrying our M-16’s.

From the neighbor’s rooftop I watched the destruction below. An Arab man cried next to me. Across the valley was the opposite: construction, of Israeli settlements. They say there should be a road where we stand, and where the house once stood, and where 17 more should fall. Though there is already a road on each side.

In yet another house I had coffee, a hospitality in every Palestinian home. I am wired after so many visits, the walls buzzing, shaking in fear. I am always welcome, the children offer me candy. The TV was on when I entered, Bush was talking, but there was no sound. They clicked it off.

Palestinian living rooms have a fondness for silk and plastic flowers. Unnatural colors, brilliant, florescent, like ones you find at grave sites left by a devout but busy family.

Their order has come. They tremble the paper at me, it is written only in Hebrew. They have less than a month to leave the house. The flowers will survive, they survive anything, that is the nature of plastic. They house will not. Maybe they can be laid on top after the walls become jagged tombstones of their former selves.

A child, one of three in this house smiles at me, I smile back. Her nose is stained a strawberry-red color, I figure she had been eating some. I looked at her dad. “She fell,” he said. Some wounds you need only to wipe the blood away, one more wash and she will be clean again. It will only remain hurting somewhere in her memory. She will discover that other wounds take longer to heal. And sadly, that some wounds never heal.

The destruction crew, in an odd display of care, stretches red caution banner tape around the fresh rubble next door. It flutters angrily in the wind after the last soldier has left.

Greetings from Israel, the Disneyland of monotheism. But all the characters have guns. Big guns. Nothing like a Rabbi with a sidearm playing kickball with his students.

Visited the church where Jesus was crucified, buried and resurrected. Recorded beautiful singing by competing Christian groups, each claiming parts of the complex for themselves. Since they can’t get along, an Arab holds the key to the main doors. Now to grab some lunch and head to where the ‘last supper’ was held. It’s Sabbath, so maybe a nice felafel.

Going over the wall on Sunday.
Your roaming HV producer.