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Show 124 Meanwhile I'd been collecting rolls a and rolls of film of Willie and the Dialecticians and Karl, and from the little reading I did I knew that I wasn't supposed to take the film out of a Nikon and send it out at the drugstore, no the right thing to do was develop the film and print it myself because I wasn't x taking pictures with some Kodak Brownie but a real artistic xaxxxxaxix instrument. Willie told me of a place down by the Bay on the West Side, which was where the other black ghetto was, the first k being in the x center of town and reaching up to Twenty-third Street (though there were those who contended it reached as high as Twenty-fourth, ikax those of us living there knowing that wasn't true, documented by our own presence and the fact that the niggers in our neighborhood were upperly mobile), a place down by the Bay that offered cultural programs and stuff and said he knew a few friends who went down there after playing basketball where some artists let them draw or paint or do xx whatever they wanted for free. Some kind of mixxxaxaxxxxxiixix art-missionaries bringing art to the poor. So I took a bus down to the Bay and walked around until I saw a big house of amalgamated garrets and bricks and wood and various shingles of multi-colors and a big sign over the porch that said XMiixxsxxxxxxx CULTURE HOUSE - You Don't Have To Be White Or Rich To Dig Art. Of course xixaxi everybody in ixaxx charge in there was xEbaxaex white, white ik like the Doby Gillis Show poetry readings with Maynard C. Krebbs, in fact there was something playing i on the hi-fi in the big front room where I stood, not expecting to have to talk to anybody about anything because I wore my Nikon right up front and figured the photography human would just find me, something playing that sounded like.poetry with funny music behind it, instead of Elvis Presley or Frank Sinatra or whoever the rest of the white race was listening to. Then I saw something which is difficult to explain because it was like being a brand new baby and seeing something for the first time that was my life, my mother, my future, and every possibility of physical and mental everything, only it was a female something, slender and white with straight black shoulder length a hair and blue eyes like marbles and something, whatever something that turned me for the very first time in my life out of thought, out |