by JOHN ROSS

by John Ross

I.
EAST COAST SWING (April 1-30th): New Yorkers bask in the hallucination that they dwell at the epicenter of the universe. 9/11 only confirmed that they are the chosen most of the Chosen People. "We are standing here at the center of the universe" Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer addressed a few hundred affordable housing protestors outside 47 3rd Street between first and second avenues at what used to be called the lower east side when my grandmother Mamie Jew (that's the name they gave her at Ellis Island when she got off the boat) tied up here.

BY JOHN ROSS

MEXICO CITY (Jan) - Following last October's discovery of an enormous (four meters by three) monolith during excavation on a lot wedged between the Templo Mayor or Great Temple, the refurbished citadel of the Aztec gods, and the Metropolitan Cathedral just off the great Zocalo plaza in the heart of the old quarter here, tens of thousands of Mexicans descended upon the site determined to catch a glimpse of what the press had dubbed "La Diosa" (the Goddess.) Police had to be summoned to contain the onlookers.

Blindman's Buff #153
BY JOHN ROSS

I.
"Southern trees bear
A strange and bitter fruit -
Blood on the leaves
And blood at the root"

by JOHN ROSS
Blindman's Buff #152

ALBUQUERQUE (March 12th) - The snow was frozen to the gutters and a gritty wind blowing hard out of the north this past Valentine's Day when I kicked off this odyssey at an anarcho outpost down by the railroad yards, La Semilla, in Albuquerque. Two hardscrabble hoboes eyed me through the chain link fence when I walked out into the front yard to bust a joint. Could they come inside and get warm, the white guy asked. He was from New Jersey and the black man with him from Brooklyn. That's what he called him: "Brooklyn."

By: John Ross
December 12, 2006

San Francisco

A funny thing happened to me on the way to Mel Gibson's Mayan Apocalypse. Awaiting the 49 bus at Mission and 24th, the BART plaza suddenly erupted in down-home Meso-American aboriginal ritual as a troupe of neo-Aztec "concheros" began to stomp and whirl to the heart-thumping whomp of the drummers, dancing their juju and offering fragrant copal to soothe the four corners of the universe.