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Ignacious Mombola

So much of the news from Africa is depressing: famine, aids, wars, orphans, despots, you name it. It’s not just the mainstream media; I’ve been hit recently by a kind of “year-end giving blitz” when relief agencies scramble for your 2009 tax planning largesse. Lots of hungry kids with flies in their eyes. I’m told by my non-profit friends that this is because people only give to tragedy not joy.

I understand this. I don’t blame them, and I don’t think they overstate or outright lie just to raise money, at least as far as I can tell.

What’s lost in that reportage, and in mainstream imagery, is how crazy wonderful the people and place is. Since mid-July, I’ve spent a month in Africa, enmeshed in a couple of pretty serious issues but there’s a great deal of joy.

I don’t want to downplay the problems or fetishize smiling kids. But I get a little tired of how we often fetishize starving kids with flies in their eyes.

The following video is just some videographic ballast. Read More…

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Kaigwazanga Village, Malawi

I’ve been told that 95% of cinematography is pointing the camera at something beautiful.

I’d like to thank the people of Malawi for making my job easy.

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Obama Wets His Line in Montana

September 9, 2009

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So, I’m about a month late on this, but I’m just now sitting back into my desk chair in Billings and beginning to make sense of the past two months. That said…

I often find myself checking out the White House Flickr stream, partly because I like Pete Souza’s photography, and partly because Souza uses the same camera and similar lenses to me which makes me curious about his shots (and Flickr posts much of the metadata so the nerds can check out lens, aperture, etc.)

I also find that on the White House Flickr stream, one can find really candid and interesting photos. For example this one, where the Park Ranger at Grand Canyon is clearly holding the President’s ear while the Obama kids are bored out of their skulls, hunched over in the hot sun with that “dad, can we just go now” body slump. Read More…

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Adopt Me: on Madonna and adoption

When Madonna’s Land Cruisers came barreling down the dirt road towards the orphanage, the locals thought they were ready. They had printed up t-shirts with the “Adopt Me” slogan and an arrow pointed towards their face. They were ready to run down to the main road with their shirts on, line the road out to the orphanage, and wave at the cruisers as they sped past. Read More…

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African Sausage

August 10, 2009 Films and Projects
African Sausage

Find a patch of brush. Light it on fire. Catch all the mice as they race to escape the flames. Toss them into boiling water. Wait. Scoop their wet-soaked scraggly carcass out of the water pot. Jam a dozen between two sticks. Run out to the road. Wait for a passing minibus. Sell for 150-250 Kwacha (USD$1.00-1.75)

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Chakhala

July 31, 2009 Films and Projects
Chakhala, Malawi, Africa

In 1988, on a trip to Uganda, we carried a polaroid and were able to take family shots, village shots, etc. and give them the photograph right then and there. I can’t seem to find a Polaroid these days. And while everyone seems to get a kick looking at the LCD screen on the back of my camera, it’s not the same.

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Pakati

July 28, 2009 Films and Projects
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In Chichewa, a pregnant woman is described as pakati (between life and death) or matenda (sick).

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Just Another Day at the Beach: 60 Million Years Too Late

June 17, 2009 American Metaphors
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Science has a way of creeping up on you. It’s sneaky—like classical music can be sneaky. One day you’re thrashing to the Ramones and Nine Inch Nails and the next you find yourself in tears in the middle of your living room because you just heard Lazlo Varga play a cello in ways you never thought possible and the strings’ vibrations reached out and bent you into a kind of fetal position of perverse ecstasy.

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Crane Songs

June 15, 2009 Encountering the Wild
Sandhill Cranes near Nye Montana

From out in the fields I hear what has become a familiar spring sound, a loud rattling karooooo-oooooo of a family of sandhill cranes. A sound unique to this season, one that reaches out from primal history:

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Such an Uncomfortable Place to Hang Your Ass

May 27, 2009 Encountering the Wild
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When we were kids growing up in the Bible Belt, my mother used to threaten to wash our mouths out with soap if we told dirty jokes. Like a lot of kids in that era, in that place, my older brother and I used to try and juke her out by using off-color biblical references that involved the hint of slightly naughty words.

my brother: “Hey punk, who was the the most flexible man in the Bible?”

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A Small Natural Grave

May 25, 2009 Encountering the Wild
Flicker Egg on the banks of the Stillwater River

This Northern Flicker egg dropped at our feet while we goofing around with intertubes on the Stillwater River this Memorial Day. It seemed a fitting natural elegiac moment for a day given to remembering the dead.

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Wolf Kill, Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness (Winter Count #2)

May 5, 2009 Encountering the Wild
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He wasn’t very large by bull moose standards, with a fairly small set of antlers. He didn’t look healthy in fact. He was standing ankle-deep in the river, watching us, not moving, almost unsteady on his legs. Something about the way he was standing didn’t seem “right.” Of all the animals I do not want to tangle with, a bull moose, particularly a sick one, ranks near the top.

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Sioux Charley Trail, Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness (Winter Count #1)

March 7, 2009 Encountering the Wild
Sioux Charley Trail

4:30 A.M. Pitch black. Deep winter. Nothing but darkness and cold. Jack Ballard and I are making time up the trail before first light for an end-of-the-season deer hunt. The light from my headlamp swings back and forth, making me dizzy. I turn it off and move silently up the canyon. We’re aiming for a spot about three miles up and across the river…Out of nowhere it hits us — a howl comes straight out of the darkness.

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The Shear Delight of Wool

March 1, 2009 Encountering the Wild
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17a, a pregnant Romney, ambles into the chute and stops. Her fleece corkscrews out from her body sending out shoots of thick wool in all directions. Grace, my ten-year old daughter, buries her hands deep into the wooly fleece and smiles. She runs off to find Anabel Lombard, the ewe’s owner, to have her to hold 17a’s fleece once it’s sheared. Grace has never chosen a fleece before. She goes with her intuition; with the way her hands feel buried into the ewe’s wool, with the way the ewe stops, tilts her head back, and looks up at this girl leaning over the railing, as though asking to be chosen.

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