raptor

Cameron: Tim Barrus in His Art Studio

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 15:18:09 -0400

Cameron: Tim Barrus in His Art Studio

tim barrus: ma lutte pour survivre I so fail with them. Their...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 23:55:45 -0400

tim barrus: ma lutte pour survivre

I so fail with them. Their assignment was to write something about how they actually felt about their doing sex work. Total disaster. They loathe writing anything. Minor rebellion. It wasn’t going to happen. As a teacher, I’m shit. I don’t relish being a teacher either.

But they would do video. I relented. When they put me in a corner, I will relent. One of my eyes is going really, really bad again. I want to cut it out. So I do understand feeling like writing is a chore. It is sweat and work for them. In my head, I do connect the ideas of at-risk, who this means, and what it means, that it means, usually something as stretched at the seams as the idea of what language is.

They’re really good at posing.

On corners.

It is a language, too. It is the language of the street.

The video, ma lutte pour survive.

The last time I saw such staggering it was into the sun. To be dead, he would become his numbness. It’s like dope. It’s an opiate. You need more and more or it’s a sickness. He has fell strangely to this ancient earth. Not unlike a meteorite whose essence has gone black as burn.

My struggle to survive. It is very difficult, and scary to them, to go anywhere on a feeling level. Going to sex work on a feeling level is a bit threatening. Maybe the most threatening thing they could do in this lifetime.

“When someone is inside of me, I feel like I am nothing. I don’t really want it. I need the money. I need to eat. I don’t like living on the street, and I have done that, you know, many times. When they cum in me I shit it out asap. Then, I give myself a wine enema. Maybe it will kill the virus. This whore I trade and share tricks with told me it does.”

He’s one of the younger ones. What continues to amaze me (it shouldn’t) is that people just can’t see them. We see what we want to see. I’m staring at a kid who has been the equivalent of a used but rag.

“So it hurts. Someone you don’t want inside of you hurts, and feeling empty hurts too.”

Eyes to the floor.

Long silence.

If I can get to ONE of them, it’s worth it. Just to look inside himself. There’s no agenda in terms of what he might find.

I have no illusions. They’ll go back to sex work. The kid looking at the floor has to eat. I get it.

“They never want to pay,” he said. “Never.

“No, they don’t,” I told him. “Been there, done that.”

This kid is at-risk for both addiction and suicide. I know these boys. They will overdose. I am sure they have ferreted away stashes. The bus terminal lockers have always worked for them in the past. When you’re homeless, you stash things you do not want to lose or have ripped off.

“I think the video does speak to the hurt,” this boy maintained.

He clenches his jaw.

This is not a bad kid. Anymore than god is an old wise men who lives in the fucking sky. If god is real, he’s a major bitch.

I got an email from someone (I do not keep track of these people because they are not players in any of this) at the CDC today. He constructed a very staunch argument that they help kids.

I did not laugh too hard. Adolescents who are, indeed, at-risk (just my experience because I’ve never met one) do not exist who know what the CDC even is. The what.

They think it’s code like IMAO.

The CDC is suits. Authority. When are people going to understand that living the life is ABOUT avoiding authority, or evading it completely.

Their video, ma lutte pour survivre, is about living the life. The hotels, the street, the prowling, the drugs, the cash. Even the clothes. They’re adolescent boys. Of course, the clothes. Whore drag can be demure as invisible. They look like any other boys.

From that, the artists think, we draw our own conclusions. I doubt that we can. We will fall back on our stereotypes as well. They are not alone in their difficulty at surveillance of that inner life. They want the bad things to go away. Their crushing depressions wear me down.

My bones are dying. In my body. All of them. Many have been replaced. But the rest of them are but rust. It’s a bitch to hurt and tend to them. When I say tend, I mean listen. To the breaking and the boys.

Sometimes I want to turn their depressions off. Like a cell phone.

I speak to their depressive weight. A gravity. I put it in a chair in a very dark motel room. It is a devil with horns and a jagged cock like a dog.

It comes to me and sucks me off as I despise it touching me at all.

I tell it to get out of my life. Sometimes — with their collective depression — it works. Sometimes not. Even when I cut off its head with a Japanese warrior sword. It returns.

Mutual antipathy. My entire life is mutual antipathy. In fact, I do not really care what you, or what anyone thinks. I fail to see where what the mainstream culture thinks is in any way all that important. What you think is Antarctica to me. A freezing. Everything goes white. I gave up on the lot of you years ago when I was doing sex work myself. It’s not in me to focus on you in any way. I cannot do it.

One kid is looking at his life inside out. “Alcohol in your rectum won’t kill the virus,” I tell him.

“Oh. Okay.” Just one more thing he fails at.

“If you’re mixing up different strains of virus, it’s probably really, really bad.”

He makes more money if he agrees to get fucked without a condom. If the CDC thinks it is being effective, why do boys like this acquire HIV four times the rate as any other group. We fail them. When is the CDC going to understand that such poverty is what competes with anything and everything they and I might in our ignorance have to say. If the CDC wants to reach them, find them safe places to grow up. It can’t. It won’t. It would never work. The CDC would create many rules, and the boys would run. They run anyway. If the CDC suits wants to get serious, get rid of the suit, roll up your sleeves, and get ready to clean up, and make better everything from the failure of relationships, to shit, vomit, blood, poverty, hunger, disease and dreams. Get down to the fucking ground, Buba.

AIDS-free generation. Get real, people.

The CDC promoted testing. It put treatment on the back burner. Testing without treatment is a morally bankrupt policy coming from, who else, the suits. The real basis to this tilted stress is economic. No one wants to pay for HIV drugs, there are waiting lists, the waiting lists are getting longer, and so we create the fantasy that testing is a means unto itself. It should just be what it is. And people who are told they are exposed to HIV, should be offered treatment. At the very least. A kid, any kid, deserves to live in a safe space where he can be a kid.

The suits (Bill Gates is one) will say: we don’t actually deal with actual people. We have all the money so we deal with suits like us.

The suits coming down to earth — the CDC, or the Ford Foundation — is a metaphor, okay.

They have no idea whatsoever what these kids deal with on a moment to moment basis.

“I was never very good as a whore.”

“Sex worker.”

“I don’t get how you can feel so empty when there’s a cock in you.”

“I don’t get it either. I just feel more empty than I usually do.”

“So when your dad was fucking you, it made you go numb so you could believe this wasn’t happening.”

Falls to the floor in a ball of sheer giving up. Giving up can be a sickening thing dependent on the process any of us develop. Going numb protected him.

But his dad was not fucking him anymore — this boy was living in a safe house and in a week from now — his father gets out of prison.

He is convinced his dad will find him to punish him for disclosing. For putting the old man in prison.

This boy has done all of this before. Then he vomits.

The kid is on the floor weeping.

The dogs do NOT like this. They run to him immediately.

His face is wet with kisses.

I have hired my dogs. They are professionals. It stuns me they pitch right in. No one has to do or say anything.

Rare as rubies.

So is the stuff these boys cobble together. Their art. I call it art.

I figure we can give them that. Fuck writing. The reality is that they have to go at their own pace in this, and I will take whatever they are ready to give me. Often, it is an undefinable ghost called hope, and just as often, it is the moon.

Tim Barrus: Wikipedia Is Inaccurate

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 11:23:33 -0400

Wikipedia is easily hijacked by camps of their so-called editors who cherry-pick their facts as they confuse fantasy and vendetta with reality which at Wikipedia is anything the haters say it is.

A Safe House Is…

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 14:41:19 -0500

A Safe House Is…

Tim Barrus: I love these ideas.

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 12:28:56 -0500

Tim Barrus: I love these ideas.

Photo

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 02:24:00 -0500

tim barrus: i was the same age as his son i never had to work...

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 11:50:53 -0400

tim barrus: i was the same age as his son

i never had to work the streets/ when people use the word WHORE they think HOOKER as the cars go by/ but no/ that was not how i turned tricks/ you had to know how to call me between tricks, i was on the phone/ and did a lot/ a lot/ of running around/ i never thought anything about who all these men were/ until one took me home/ and fucked me in the bedroom of his son/ who was the same age i was/ i kept looking at the son’s athletic trophies as his father fucked me/ at some point, i didn’t run to tricks any more/ i walked/

Tim Barrus: Human Trafficking Barely Makes the News

Sat, 23 Jun 2012 10:21:51 -0400

American media gives print and column inches to whether Oprah will return. Surprise. Yes, loved ones, Oprah will return.

Three days ago, the European Union outlined a wide-ranging strategy to fight human trafficking which is rising across the region. The new strategy comes as EU officials are concerned about a possible spike in trafficking during the current European football championship.

To people who get how trafficking works, this is a joke.

They know this: traffickers are having no problems getting their merchandise to the slave block. The football paradigm is disingenuous.

The European Union posted the testimony of several victims of human trafficking on its website.

One of them was a young Ivorian woman named Agnes who recounted her arrival to France as an orphan. She says a French woman offered to let her go to school in exchange for caring for her children. But Agnes says the woman never honored her promises. She escaped two years later, with the help of neighbors. France has very tight custody laws regarding who owns what. Most of them were written three hundred years ago.

Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom outlined a new EU strategy to tackle the problem.

“We must have a common aim in the European Union. We must stop this form of modern slavery. We have identified in the coming five years more than 40 concrete initiatives,” Malmstrom said.

I know this: what we need are more initiatives.

What we need to do is remove the property of organized crime to where organized crime is kept a long way away. What we then need to do is confront the dynamics of trauma.

The EU strategy includes improving ways to identify and help victims, prosecute traffickers and coordinate among EU members states in eradicating human trafficking. Brussels wants countries to establish police units specializing in human trafficking and create cross-border investigation teams.

In the US, there is no such awareness. The Obama DOJ wants to increase the number of DEA agents assigned to Northern California so it can bust pot farms. You know, real crime, and mix in some Mexicans where there is no trafficking.

I shrug. It’s always a matter of priorities. It’s a situation where trafficking children is more legal than growing weed.

According to European and United Nations statistics, roughly 21 million people are trafficked worldwide, about a quarter of them children. Women and girls are the main victims, with many victims of sex trafficking. Others are forced to work long hours for little or no pay.

There is no awareness that a single male child has ever been trafficked.

The number of 21 million would preclude that alone.

My own guess is that one in every thousand trafficked is a young male victim.

Many victims who have been trafficked but have been subsequently released by authorities who HAVE made arrests, are reluctant to give testimony in cases where traffickers are being tried.

They know this: organized crime takes a dim view of having their property confiscated. People who have been trafficked can also know the routes.

“They are working in the streets. They could be cooking your food. They are selling sex many times a day in shabby brothels or apartments. They are building our houses,” Malmstrom said.

Human trafficking is particularly in the spotlight during the current European football championship. The EU’s border control agency Frontex is stepping up its watch against human smuggling, particularly of prostitutes. But overall, the EU faces a tough challenge. Malmstrom notes human trafficking is growing across the region - but the numbers of convictions against traffickers have dropped in recent years.

There is little hue and cry from organizations of prostitutes (the UN has been buying many of them off by arranging all expense paid trips to UN conferences in places like Barcelona) who often condemn human trafficking in their public agendas, but most remain committed to a legalization of prostitution.

Which would both help and hinder human trafficking.

If prostitution was legal, trafficked prostitutes would be beyond law enforcement’s reach. But all prostitution would be freed of the shackles of the pimp who provides what can be very expensive protection. The need for that protection would be removed. It is well-known that often pimps are also trafficking.

Selling slaves is simply a quid pro quo of commodity. So is selling sex.

In all of this, no one even proposes going after tricks.

American men are especially exempt.

Among reports that cannot be verified, human traffickers have been losing young boys who have simply disappeared, the US State Department has released a new report. The report makes no attempt to estimate the impact of HIV in any of this quite mobile population of 21 million. You would think that some kind of transit OUT might be five kids here, five kids there. Out of 21 million. But no.

There is no hope for it. 21 million is a huge amount of people. The UN estimates that out of that 21 million, less than a hundred thousand people see freedom through release by law enforcement. It’s terrorism that gets the real money.

I would argue that 21 million people, not one of whom is being treated for HIV although they come from epidemic-countries, represents an instability that is, indeed, a threat to sovereignty. Sacred sovereignty. How is sovereignty like custody. Sovereignty defines who owns what.

Let us look at one part of an above sentence. All you little wannabe writers out there, get your pencils out. This is a test.

Consider this: “has released a new report.”

Wow. I’m impressed.

The US State Department probably figures that is all it can do.

That is not all it can do.

The US State Deprtment doesn’t hesitate one second to apply pressure wherever it thinks pressure should be applied. Again, it’s a matter of priorities.

I would argue that the real reason the US remains lukewarm to the idea that children who are being trafficked can be “untrafficked” and put in situations that are safe from traffickers, is because children being trafficked are seen within the context of US law as property. If the US wants to do more than issue reports, it could begin by ratifying conventions the United Nations has adopted. Some of them thirty years ago. But in the past 30 years, the US has been very busy expanding empire.

This will come as a surprise to some people, but “custody” means ownership. There is no such thing as children’s rights in the US, and the US has not ratified any of the UN conventions that would imbue the children of the world not to be considered as property. Not a single one. The only other country with such a dismal record is Somalia. And they don’t even have a government on a continent where many of the traffickers are governments. Like Nigeria.

The issue goes to sovereignty and the US hates being told what to do.

Last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton released the 2012 Trafficking in Persons Report.

“U.S. adds Syria to human-trafficking blacklist, which ranks 184 countries on their efforts to combat human trafficking, including the United States.

While the U.S. has long been a global leader in the fight against modern-day slavery, this Congress has thus far failed to pass a critical piece of anti-trafficking legislation: The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act.

This bill renews the landmark TVPA of 2000, which made human trafficking a federal crime and established the Trafficking in Persons Office to combat trafficking internationally.

Fighting slavery has always been a rare point of bipartisan cooperation in Washington. As we approach the anniversary of our nation’s founding — a nation “conceived in liberty,” in the words of President Lincoln, Congress should come together again to rid the world of slavery, once and for all.

It ain’t gonna happen. But we can always issue a report card, give offending countries a grade, and then sit back and say we’ve done our part. We’ve done all we can do.

The US State Department would like you to think that in some moral imperative it applies pressure to countries where human trafficking is a dime a dozen and out in the open. One of the countries that is the worst offender remains Pakistan. There is pressure on Pakistan.

Military pressure.

If one reads actual day to day reports, it becomes obvious that the subject has never even come up with Pakistan. A country that now prohibits US access to Afghanistan via any of its roads and check points. Pakistan is not behaving like a friend and ally.

No fucking shit.

The children trafficked from Pakistan would probably agree. There is a market for Pakistani boys that stretches from Karachi to Washington, DC.

It has been rumored that there is an underground railway.

I have only heard gossip. I wouldn’t know. It’s probably not true. There is no hope for such a thing. There would be no model to go by because those disappeared 175 years ago, and Harriet Tubman is dead.

There is little hope that governments will be offering either assistance or HIV testing or trauma recovery to anyonbe who has made it out of human trafficking.

Informal but somewhat organized groups of prostitutes whose operant paradigms are off the grid anyway and who understand how organized crime works (and its relationship to the issues of addiction: read, Vancouver, Canada, which is a major route for traffickers), could conceivably offer more assistance than the US State Department offers anyone anything.

But there is no hope for it. Hope is elusive.

I know this: Oprah will be back.

Tim Barrus: Show Me Your Life: Umthombo is a South African NGO...

Sat, 19 May 2012 14:14:38 -0400

Tim Barrus: Show Me Your Life:

Umthombo is a South African NGO in Durban that deals with homeless, South African children, many of whom are at risk for HIV. We give small video cameras to at-risk street children who show us their lives.

art inquiries: cinematheque@europe.com tim barrus official blog:...

Mon, 07 May 2012 01:50:53 -0400

art inquiries: cinematheque@europe.com

tim barrus official blog: le-too: http:le-too.tumble.com

Tim Barrus: What is guerrilla art. What is performance art. You...

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 13:33:26 -0400

Tim Barrus: What is guerrilla art. What is performance art. You arrive. It’s all a stage. The other actors are all around you. Do you see some people staring. Do you engage them. Who do you ignore. How does your costume protect you. Is it really you doing this. If not, who is doing this performance. What is context. What is the background. What is the relationship between the background and the foreground. Is street art guerrilla art. What is the relationship between the unexpected and guerrilla art. Dada is the inclusion of the totally unexpected. Stuff that would not seem to fit because it escapes the box. How is Dada like guerrilla art. How does Dada hold up in video. What is art.

The History of Cinematheque Films * * *** Timothée Bârrus:...

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 14:38:00 -0500

The History of Cinematheque Films

***

Timothée Bârrus: Founder, Cinematheque Films,

Director: Show Me Your Life

THERE IS NOTHING AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ABOUT MY WORK: TIM BARRUS OFFICIAL WEBSITE:

http://le-too.tumblr.com

http://www.real-stories-gallery.org

http://showmeyourlife.tumblr.com

EMAIL: Cinematheque@Europe.com

Timotheebarrus@gmail.com

Cinematheque Films: The Studio Arts Education, and Show Me Your Life students (Real Stories Gallery): Students are allowed access to fair use art materials and mixed media in the teaching of iconic manipulation in photographic, video and film production. Representations and facsimiles posted here are presented as teaching tools and instruments employed to instruct students in the techniques and application of mixed media art and collage. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows art-teaching entities the fair use of such materials in classroom and teaching-research applications. Cinematheque Films collects data from students as to which materials work best, and is conducting just such a research application process for at-risk students.

http://after-the-last-collapse.tumblr.com

http://le-raptor.tumblr.com

http://tristansmoon.tumblr.com

http://le-digirati.tumblr.com

http://vook.tumblr.com

http://timbarrusphotography.tumblr.com

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raptor

Cameron: Tim Barrus in His Art Studio

tim barrus: ma lutte pour survivre I so fail with them. Their...

Tim Barrus: Wikipedia Is Inaccurate

A Safe House Is…

Tim Barrus: I love these ideas.

Photo

tim barrus: i was the same age as his son i never had to work...

Tim Barrus: Human Trafficking Barely Makes the News

Tim Barrus: Show Me Your Life: Umthombo is a South African NGO...

art inquiries: cinematheque@europe.com tim barrus official blog:...

Tim Barrus: What is guerrilla art. What is performance art. You...

The History of Cinematheque Films *** *** *** Timothée Bârrus:...

Video

Video

Video

Video

Video

Video

Video

Video

The History of Cinematheque Films * * *** Timothée Bârrus:...