Jill Rants and Raves

you were famous once

At a party recently, a friend was introducing me to others she knew. One woman looked at me intently. 'Oh, yeah. Yeah. You were famous once' she said. Yeah, that's me, I said. Once famous. Twice shy.

Yesterday I was reading about a show of Irving Penn images, an astonishing collection of photographs taken in the early 50's of tradespeople, small business people, crafts people, individual artisans and blue collar workers; boxers; dance teachers; nurses. The collection, called 'Small Trades' was shot entirely in natural light in front of an unevenly painted back cloth under an open tent which could be erected in any situation. The images are riveting and I felt that familiar longing, an insatiable hunger to be back behind a camera taking photos that matter to me, and the desire to just stand the subject, naked of colour and embellishment in front of a dirty grey backdrop, looking directly at me, bringing just what there is, nothing more.

I never made a good living as a photographer, wasn't working in the commercial or advertising worlds, worked for nothing most of the time, on the promise of payment at some undisclosed time in the future, did favors for emerging authors, had no mentor, sugar mama or philanthropist, spent more on film and processing than the check handed to me with a sly apologetic smile. Even my books, award winning, well-selling photo books, described as brilliant, ground breaking, iconic - left me with fame but no steak.

But I have discovered that if you are going to be broke, you may as well share your life with those who truly appreciate you and whose understanding of fame is approximately zero. Dogs.

And now that I feel that desperate yearning to 'produce' once more, I also know that I am so troubled by what I see, what I know, what I feel about what happens in our animal shelters that I can't focus my lens on anything else. There are nights when I wake sweating, fretting about the years wasted, the time spent on everything but that which made me famous. Have I given up on my life apart from this passion?

When I sleep I dream of a space with a concrete floor and light flooding in and a bed with white sheets in the middle of the room, one leather couch (which I traded for a long time ago) a kitchen and bathroom and a place to photograph taking up the space. A light filled space overlooking a meadow, and coffee in the morning and a birch tree swaying. And my cats and dogs around, peeing outside, meandering along the gravel paths, leaning on a door frame, stretched on a rug, watching something they see in their minds eye.

And then my mind is filled with what I saw yesterday. Kennel upon kennel of dogs going nowhere, sitting in their own feces, the kennels divided into two to double up intake space, kittens waiting for death in plastic vari-kennels in the corridors, a 3 pound chihuahua shivering in terror huddled in the corner in a metal cage, he had pissed in his water dish and the towel he sat on was soaked, and he snapped at my hand as I moved towards him. The 9 month old Great Dane pup was 80 pounds of emaciated skin and bone, too afraid to move forward in her cage, the pitbulls one next to the other next to the other like a line up of the usual suspects, the stench of shit and piss, a cat lying dead in a humane trap sitting on a table, and the 'surgery' room filled with animals readied for euthanasia. The kennel attendant with tired eyes and wearied by his task muttered as he led us through the chaos 'disposable, they're just disposable, cats and dogs, in our society', as he contemplated his endless task of swimming against a tide, a flood of animals discarded. 

I sometimes wonder if it all was about getting to this point, where ego and pride have no place. Where I am only really happy when the days involve making a difference in just one life, a life that will not turn to me and tell me that I was famous once. But I still have that longing to look through the lens and see the picture I want to take. Are these two things so at odds with one another that I will never resolve this?

© photos by Jill Posener. Do me a favor - enjoy 'em, don't steal them. ta!

animal shelters - something very wrong - part 238

I carelessly typed in a Facebook update. 'Something is very wrong' I wrote, as if by giving voice to this cry for help, I could calm the simmering roiling muck which was keeping me awake at night and giving me a sort of acid bath in the pit of my stomach by day. Yeah - I know, it's called anxiety. Just pop an Ambien Jill, you might say, or drink yourself to sleep, or just 'set some boundaries' (I hate that phrase almost as much as I hate ' I want my dog to have just one litter of pups').

We are who and what we are and I have come to understand that who and what we are is set pretty early on and we get our whole lives to try to make sense of that unique jigsaw and try to get it to fit into a societal template - which more often than not involves amputating parts of ourselves. Unless of course you are part of the 90% of the world living in poverty in which case the self indulgent therapizing we do here in the other 10% is not an option. Shall I use a recycled paper bag, reclaimed plastic bag or a reusable canvas tote (printed with some environmental cause logo) for my groceries? Most of the world is asking 'What groceries?'

But I digress. And that is one of the jigsaw pieces I have a hard time fitting into the template. As is my inability to sit still for long, my dread of being inside a building for too long, my sense of being suffocated by any number of harmless things. And my fear of hypocrisy.

I know that some, maybe many, think my pre-occupation with animal issues, and specifically animal shelter issues is a distraction from 'real' problems.

And it's true - my fixation about animal shelters, about how we might be able to alleviate just one of the problems in my community does keep me awake at night.

Here's the thing - in Alameda County - where the People's Republic of Berkeley sits in a sort of 'lost in space' trance - there are municipal tax payer funded animal shelters in Oakland, San Leandro, Dublin, Hayward, Fremont, Alameda and Berkeley. There are non-profit humane organisations that have shelters - the East Bay SPCA in Oakland, the Dublin SPCA and the Berkeley Humane Society - just miles from one another; there are animal rescue groups with names like Home At Last, Island Cat Rescue, Hopalong Animal Rescue (which merged with Second Chance), Furry Friends, to name but a few; there are feral fix programs run by Fix Our Ferals and a myriad of welfare and advocacy groups like BadRap and PAWS (Pets Are Wonderful Support); individual 'rescue' groups, breed specific rescue groups, senior dog rescues, feral cat taming programs and....that's just Alameda County. Head to San Francisco County, Contra Costa County or Marin County and you can start all over again....Marin Humane, San Francisco Animal Control, San Francisco SPCA, Contra Costa Animal Services, Martinez  Animal Shelter, Pinole or Antioch Animal Shelters, Rocket Dog, Wonder Dog, North Bay Canine, Milo Foundation...is your head spinning yet? It's the American way - choice. Or confusion.

And if the animal is found one block into El Cerrito in Contra Costa County - over the border from Albany in Alameda County - it is supposed to go to Pinole Animal Shelter where they built a new smaller shelter a few years ago - essentially a holding tank - so many just get held for the required 72 hours and then get transported to Martinez animal shelter for euthanasia. If the animal is lucky enough to stray into Albany and gets picked up, it will go to Berkeley Animal Shelter where - unless it is a psycho killer - it will still be there one year later waiting for someone to think 'huh, that's my dream four-legged companion'.

There are 58 counties in California and every one of them has a different form of animal control (and care - depending on which county you are in). Some are run by civilian management (San Francisco, Berkeley), most are run by Police departments (Oakland, Antioch) or Sheriffs departments, some are under the control of a board of supervisors (Contra Costa County), some are contracted out to a non profit (Peninsula Humane, Marin Humane) and all are responsible for enforcing local and state codes, operating some sort of rabies control program, picking up stray, dead, injured wildlife and domestic animals - unless the animal is on a freeway in which case you have to wait for Caltrans to do so - sometime - and 'sheltering' those animals until owner redemption, adoption, rescue or death. Non profit agencies are not supposed to take in stray animals and almost every agency resists taking owner surrenders even though in these harsh financial times that means an increasing number of animals. And 'shelters' often charge money for taking them.

And if you walk into a municipal shelter in tears trying to surrender your animal to a shelter because your landlord just threw you out, or your husband just beat the dog one too many times - they will ask you what city you live in and if you don't live in that city - they send you away with animal in arms and tell you to go somewhere else. It might be the only shelter open that day and you are in a crisis. Not from the right city? Tough.

Am I the only one that thinks there is something seriously wrong with this picture? A woman walked into Berkeley Animal Shelter one Sunday afternoon. She had found a small, sweet 10 pound papillon mix dog running loose on one of Berkeley's busiest streets. The sign separating Berkeley from Oakland was somewhere close by and the city of Emeryville is a few blocks away. The dog could have run from Oakland into Berkeley or she could have been a Berkeley dog, or an Emeryville dog or a dog from freakin' New York City. The closest animal shelter, just a mile away is Berkeley. The Oakland shelter is five miles in the other direction. The woman brings this shaking beast to Berkeley but when she describes where she found the dog the staff member pushes her and she gets flustered and gives an answer which he pounces on - ah, that's in Oakland (by 25 feet). 'You have to take the dog to Oakland Animal Shelter.'

The woman leaves in tears. With a dog she has saved off the streets in her arms. She will not take it to Oakland. She is heading to work in the opposite direction, she is late, she was trying to do a good thing, the staff member makes her feel belittled, as if she is wrong, and a small, probably unspayed female dog is not safe in a shelter, but in the arms of someone who now feels desperate.

A family from a different city buys a sick pup from a flea market in Richmond, then panics because the pup is vomiting. They want to surrender it to a shelter on a Sunday. They go online, find the nearest shelter to them and drive there. They are turned away, but they have no money for a vet. They come back after dark and dump it in the night-box. Are they bad people? No, they are desperate people, uninformed people, they may simply have made a bad decision. Sometimes they are truly fucked up individuals. What does it matter? Take the damn animal into the shelter.

You think I'm just a crazy animal person? Think again. I care that a person who is trying to do a good thing is not given the support she needs. The animal needs to get off the streets and into safety. Well, relative safety, depending on which animal shelter it is turned in to. And people in our community need to feel that they can be part of a solution.

There is plenty of evidence that - the person turned away will return later and dump the same dog in the night kennels after hours, or drop the dog in a park, or just let it go where they found it, or call a friend and say 'take it' thereby depriving a potential owner of finding their dog.

NOTE TO ANIMAL SHELTERS - take the freaking animal in. Then you can decide what to do with it. And another note. If you are a non-profit animal shelter who is not supposed to take strays - take the frickin' animal in and then transport it. Fuck the jurisdictional lines. What outcome do you want? Fewer animals stray on the street, fewer unwanted litters of pups, fewer dead bodies littering the freeways? Take the animal in. Even if it ends in a euthanasia. Take the animal off the street. 

This blog is way too long, and it isn't even written very beautifully.

what we need is an LBJ and don't all yell at once

There is some irony in listening to 60's and 70's left wing radicals (who are now running the government, who now believe that government is our 'friend') cast the current crop of anti-government protesters as 'lunatic fringe'. How quickly we forget how it feels to believe passionately that your government is the face and tool of control, the terrorist in a three piece suit, the government media complex, the puppet of the International Monetary Fund. How quickly we have shifted territory to the other end of the playing field. And now it's the turn of liberals to mock the 'disrupters', the 'tea-baggers', the ragtag bands of conservative activists who think Sarah Palin is the answer but don't seem to know what the question is.

Those of us who believe in a universal health care system as much as we believe in a public education system, a public police and fire system, in a transportation system built and maintained by the state, in a defense system built and maintained by the state, in a nationalised mail system, in protections for the environment, in protections for the forests, waterways and energy resources, in a federal taxation system - those of us who believe in those things find it incomprehensible that this issue is the line in the sand.

There is a huge irony in the fact that because the right wing controls much of the talk radio airwaves, this issue is what has brought kitchen table debate into the public village square. If only we could have had this level of public discourse before the war on Iraq. Now there's a thought. 

And the greatest irony is that we have a President who clearly came to Washington with a mandate for change. You know, 'change we can believe in' (remember that?) and who doesn't seem to have the guts to exercise power. What real, genuine reform has ever been brought about by consensus? The forces for the status quo will always pour treacle on the advancing armies of change - votes for women (achieved in 1920  with the 19th amendment to the Constitution after a long and frustrating struggle), the Civil Rights Act (when as late as 1964, southern lawmakers were still defining blacks as a lesser form of humanity), the Social Security and Medicare reforms - and the progressives simply have to use the power given them at a particular moment in history to force a society to change course.

It was President Truman in 1945 who brought the idea of a nationalised health plan - Medicare - to Congress, and he retreated as attacks mounted accusing him of socialism and socialised medicine. It wasn't until 1965, when the much maligned LBJ signed into law the Medicare and Medicaid programs as part of his 'Great Society'.

There is much to complain about in the national health plans in England, Canada, Germany, France etc - but just as those countries no longer send mentally retarded people to the death chamber, they at least have a system that can be improved on. Unlike the good ol' US of A. I know, I know - apples and oranges, yet not really. The priorities of a nation can be judged, and we have the right to judge America on its' obeisance to corporate medicine, to judge lawmakers bought and paid for by big pharmaceutical companies, to judge the pressure exerted in Washington DC by those who profit from insuring or refusing insurance to those in the village square.

A public option. Think of it this way - you want to send a package to your cousin Florida from your home in Wisconsin. You go to the US post office and get a price, you go online and check out UPS and Fed Ex and then you do the most amazing thing. You choose. Freakin' amazing.

Regrettably, this Prez was always going to break your heart on the big stuff. He isn't enough of a dirty Chicago politico to understand that when you are gven the power, you don't just hand it back to the opposition.