Don't Paint the Tigers

The six-month-old cub is so rare it is thought there are fewer than 20 others like it - all in captivity.

The female tiger, which has been named Fareeda, was born to two white Bengal tigers. Fareeda's brother Shahir and sister Sitarah both bear the typical black tiger stripes in common with 99 per cent of their species.

Fareeda, who was hand-reared by keepers at Cango Wildlife Ranch, near Cape Town, South Africa, is part of a unique breeding programme to keep the White Bengal species alive.

Keepers at the ranch were delighted when Fareeda and its siblings were born on Christmas Day last year, but even more surprised to see Fareeda's rare lack of markings.

Odette Claassen, 52, from Cango Wildlife Ranch, said the keepers had to wait six months before they could be sure Fareeda definitely did not have stripes.

She said: "Some cubs develop stripes in their first few months but after six months it's clear that Fareeda is truly one of the rarest of her kind.

"When she was born Fareeda had noticeably pale colour it did cause a stir of excitement amongst the staff.

"But we knew there was the possibility of the cub's very light black and ginger stripes darkening over time existed.

"Most white Bengal tigers are bred in the US from a single male captured in the 1950s, but Fareeda is the first to be born in Africa, which is very special.

"She has a lovely nature and loves playing with her brothers and sisters, although she has nipped me a few times when she wants a feed.

"White Bengal tigers are not albino, they have distinctive blue eyes, and they used to be found in Northern India before they died out.

"My hope is that one day Fareeda and her kind can be returned to their native habitat and that is why it is so important to educate people about tigers and keeping the breeding programmes going."

favorite song of the former decade

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Someone just dared me to do an interview like this:

CITY WATER

CITY WATER

by Trystan Trazon

What's left of this town but a dusty street

Where the sun don't shine anymore?

The paper mill's down,

We got nothin' to eat,

And the daytrippers all left the shore...

There's smoke pourin' out of the window,

There's a fist rising out of the floor,

There ain't no one but me

Far as these eyes can see

And I feel that I've seen this before,

Yeah, I feel I've all seen this before...

Early bird, your bread is rising,

Sniff the dime-a-dozen rose!

Spring has left!

Your song is slipping!

Too late to look down at the streets below...

The city you so well remember

Is tumbling like a cem'try stone,

The sky is black!

We're bound to breathe it!

But we won't drink the city water anymore --

No, we won't drink the city water anymore.

August, 2005

Roger Ebert just posted this compelling photo of "a hooker sitting in a window"...

Photo by Rosalind Solomon

Remain, Retreat, Revamp & Revisit

Streaming two different films simultaneously on my laptop, which seems only appropriate on such a cold and equinoxical Monday night. The first being Lars Von Trier's "Melancholia," which I've been intrigued with since the trailer came out this May. I'm finding it difficult to get past the prologue when images like THIS are played in underscore to the opening of Tristan and Isolde...

This film, if you culture vultures remember, is the one that got Von Trier in scalding water when he went on that deliciously offensive tangential tirade saying that "he sympathized with Hitler." Keeping that totally warm, fuzzy and humanizing sentiment at bay, I am surprised by how much I am enjoying this. I keep putting on pause as if to brace myself for doing a cannonball into a dunk tank of pirhannas... I have a feeling that is about to get pretty psychologically laborious.

I'm also watching a totally fascinating documentary portrait of the New York Times fashion photographer Bill Cunningham New York, which makes me want walk down 7th avenue in orgami motifs and abandon all sense of boring, upscale fashion principles. Unfortunately, half of my pants are perforated with holes from the barbarous amount of walking that I do in this city. An accessory designer friend of mine, Ken Marcelle, told me yesterday at a BBQ that I had a utilitarian sense of fashion, which threw me off, since I don't want to be associated with that word, like, EVER. Nor do I want to give the impression that I'm somehow ABOVE the pursuit of personal aesthetics, even I tend to save my looks for when I am out performing gigs at night.

On that topic, I've become increasingly motivated to create my own performance pieces, free from the criteria of other collaborations I've been involved with as of late. There is a limit to what I'm willing to reveal about the work that I'm generating now, but this desire is new, exciting and induces within me a sense of danger and ecstasy that I haven't felt in awhile. The only way that it will ever come together is to take a less careful, cerebral approach to what I do... as Chuck Close says: "Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work."

That said, as I'm developing the themes and atomic complexion for what these new forms will take, a part of that will be making a record of what I consume - what repulses me - what I am trying to adapt into this new and empirical recognition of what it means to be human.

It's been YEARS I activated this blog. Since the summer of 2007, the world has changed. The internet has changed. My personal constitution has changed. I only have recently overcome the fear of googling myself, thinking that it will bring to light things that I'd rather not know in total neglect of the fact that other people have unadulterated access to it. Last August, when I finally worked up the courage to type my name into a search engine, I noticed that this blog was the first to come up since my personal website was taken down.

Now that TrystanTrazon.com is being renovated, I really hope to use this a companion to the site. The intention here is less to fastidiously control my sense of self-narrative and projection and more to SHARE what I deem interesting... what I am seeing, thinking, remembering, consuming... should you or any inquiring mind care to know. As Nora Ephron said in her interview with Terry Gross, if it takes longer to write than a half an hour, it's not a blog... it's something else.

And on that note of something else, I am clocking in.

Love & Other Reasons Firefighters Become Insomniacs,

T.TRAZON

After 4 long years, I have decided to resuscitate this blog....

... and also, to skip the imperative post where I have to explain WHY.