I can't sleep…
What you eat represents your social status, not your love. The poor eat simply to end their hunger. But when you can buy more than food, your hunger doesn’t end. You hunger for approval, for something special, for exclusive experiences.
— Chef Paul, Hunger (2023)
Movie Review: ‘Hunger’ movie review” A well-done exploration of the politics of fine dining served with stellar performances” (The Hindu.com, April 14 2023)
“A child scrapes the leftovers from his meager lunch at a refugee camp in Kutupalong, Bangladesh. More than a million Rohingyas, originally from Myanmar, are living without basic amenities in government camps like Kutupalong.”
Source: Sushavan Sandy, Nurphoto, Zuma Press, February 21, 2017, wsj.com
I contacted a well-known artist to discuss the possibility of drawing lessons. As a child, I used to draw all the time. It absorbed me completely. At some point, writing replaced drawing and what had once been second nature (drawing) became foreign. But the urge to draw had remained. I missed its simple and primordial pleasures…
When she asked me why I wanted her to teach me drawing, I replied, “Sometimes you just want to sit back and be led.”…The artist peered at me thoughtfully for a moment. Her blue eyes were clear and perfectly lined with kohl. Finally she spoke, with the hint of bemusement. She said the students who came to her were always full of hunger. They were seventeen-year old aspiring artists and eighty-five-year-old retired businessmen. People of mourned, mislaid, or unmined creativity. Their yearning was like the white puff of a dandelion. All she had to was blow gently and watch their creative spores lift, scatter, and take seed.
~ Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation
Notes:
Tuesday.
I’m leaning back in the chair. The bodies on the teleconference are shifting, their paper shuffling is booming on the mic. The update continues, I’m fading, drifting. I look up at the clock and it tugs me back, way back.
It’s hidden inside, in a dark space, deep in a corner on the edges, frayed but biting.
~ 1967
I was a child. You were a child. A Boy.
The schoolhouse had two classrooms, three grades in each room, one row for each grade, four to six students in each grade. Three rows of heavy steel, four legged desks, each having a pocket for school things. We were in the First Grade.
He was oversize in first grade, having been held back. Tall, thin, with hunger hanging from his bones. His brother was already categorized as a Juve, his Father an alcoholic, in and out of small jobs and a Mother desperately trying to keep it all together, and losing.
Faded jeans, not from stone washing, but from hand me downs from his older brother, or from a flee market sale. Everything wrong-sized, tattered and carrying a whiff of moth balls. Laces on too-big shoes loosely tied. Hair long, unruly and badly in need of a sheer. Continue reading “Jimmy”
