Today is World AIDS Day, a day for remembering the unfortunate spread of this horrific disease.
Around Weimar there are utility boxes which local artists decorate—sometimes with simple art, sometimes with messages. About a month or so ago, the utility box located at the Weimar Bus Station was repainted with an HIV/AIDS message—something for people to stare at whilst waiting for their buses. While I wish the color contrast for the statistics was sharper (light yellow on tan is a sure sign of an elitist fine arts education), the message is not so in your face as to be offensive, but rather a reminder that HIV is a problem and that it affects some parts of the world more than others.
Be Safe.
Sometimes I think back.Back to the days when herpes was an awful thing, before we knew what those purple lesions were. Back when Africa was shining skyscrapers and safaris, before it became a death trap and morass of hopes.
The World is, in many ways, a more terrible place than it was. I often wonder what might have happened if only there had been any political will to chase this disease down and prevent its transmission. I also remember how the gays prevented the closure of the bath houses and the attendant unprotected sex for years, as if passing a fatal disease was a personal right.
I knew the “Patient 0” in Ithaca for AIDs (I worked with him, drank with him, went to “the” gay bar with him- he brought it back from NYC and spread it through the gay and – what’s the word for married men who cheat homosexually and pretend that’s not infidelity?- world of a small but granola college town. He was such a great guy- it was such an awful, terrible, not understood- and very fast!- way to die. He passed it to so many people. It was like a wildfire. It’s hard to believe it has been 26 years. So short, yet it feels like AIDs has been here forever. Yet people ignore it in their behavior…
hey adam, did a massive blog reading catch-up. i’m so sorry that our paths couldn’t cross in denver. estes park was a bittersweet experience. i wished we had been there under different circumstances so i could have taken the time to window shop and soak in the beauty of the mountains. i laughed out loud at the yellow/tan=fine arts education. i hope that you had a good holiday, and i speak for the whole molica clan in saying that we can’t wait for your next rendezvous to btown.
i hope i get to see milk while it’s in the theaters, but probably won’t get to see it. i did see the documentary “the life and times of harvey milk” and it made me very angry/sad.
ps- i never know how to feel on WAD anymore. to me, every day should be WAD, because i can’t believe that there are people still out there practicing unsafe sex and not using clean needles. after losing several people i know to a 100% preventable disease i’ve become a frothy mixture of numb and angry.
There are several more of these pictures in weimar, in fact, this was the last one we painted. The other walls are a bit offsite, but you can have a look on our blog (http://colorviolence.net/blog/luke/walls/)
A word on the contrast thing: the color options from edding don’t have a wider range, but the important thing is that the font is readable at all.
i might add the source and significance of the stat, but we were painting against the weather (which went colder every day).
But I’m glad you liked it in general 😉
@G: It is a terrible disease and it shouldn’t be spread–but for reasons I won’t go into here, I think closing gay bathhouses only serves to make the disease spread faster. (Basically men are pigs and men are going to seek sex anywhere they can, which is why you should keep your kids out of certain parts of the Tiergarten; closing bathhouses pushes people out into the street where you can’t confront them as easily with safe sex messages.)
@jen: Sorry I missed you! If all goes well, we should be able to cross paths in February.
@eins78: I actually saw the initial transparency as it was put up–you took a lot of time to put together the imagery and graphic and it’s incredibly well thought out. The color contrast on the graphic/text though… it is really hard to read. I hope it stays up a long time!