carackus

Faces (41)

2012-01-30T08:10:00.000-08:00

(41) His eyes were reduced to two blackened half crescent shapes by the light's angle, a dark tired line underneath his eye sockets, his cheek bones diminished to two shadowy stains hidden under a sloping layer of fat that grew from his neck to his chin, crawling to cover the remaining top of his head, only a goatee of graying hair outlining the last contours of his jaws.

Night Poem: 231112

2012-01-23T15:46:00.001-08:00

Midnight outside the Tesco Express on the Kingsland Road

Les Pensées (42)

2012-01-23T09:31:00.000-08:00

Artaud danced along the room moved by the uncontrollable motion of love, until he crushed unto both his knees exhausted and in the realization that his greatest passion had just eluded him.

Night poem: 180112

2012-01-18T14:49:00.000-08:00

In a yellow memoryless room
Beneath the ghosts of underwater voices, the
Coackroach creak of my neighours
Cars come not as a river tonight, but
Stopped and hollow as screams against the window

An empty wine bottle
And a dead radio
A vase to piss in
And loose thoughts on civilisation
And of progress

Then above me, the voices fall silent
Somewhere beyond their howls lies sleep
And in the morning darkness
And in the evening there is the room again
Yellow and alone

Faces (40)

2012-01-16T11:54:00.000-08:00

(40) His scruffy red hair, once a darker blond, had formed lumps like bewildered snakes. His pockmarked cheeks had deformed from the scourging sun. His nose poked at everyone, crowned by a jewel of a wart that dangled at the tip. His eyes shyly turned away.

Faces (39)

2012-01-16T08:10:00.000-08:00

(39) Her rosy cheeks shine in the dim light, her blond, wavy hair on fire with star dust, a tired line under the joyous mischief that hides in her dark eyes, the same mischief dances on her smiling lips, the wool of her sweater tickles my chin, the inducing smell of coconut tea.

Les Pensées (41)

2012-01-15T11:26:00.000-08:00

Artaud sat on the waterside and admired the play of light and shadow on the water surface before him, reflecting the naked limbs of two girls swimming toward him. One looked pure and divine, the other pensive and keen. Artaud picked a flower and threw it in the water, following it with his gaze as it drifted away on the ripples following the two girls pass him.

Faces(38)

2011-12-20T12:29:00.000-08:00

(38) For the first time, her smile was light, her glance flighty, and her dimples had never before flickered so gaily on the shiny surface of her happily bulging cheeks.

2011-12-11T13:54:00.000-08:00

How lonely! Tonight beneath this
electic light
There is nothing but the cry of
passing vehicles
And an emptiness where no clock strikes

What a desolate banshee cry!

If you were here we would drink the bars of kingsland road
And in brotherhood, raise a glass...

Christ! D H Lawrence is dead. I only realise now the weight of those words
Auden
Dylan Thomas
Miller and Verlaine
All Dead!

The evening is buried
All sense stopped
And i try to call but..

When i think of everything that has ended in the last five years...
When i think of cool evenings in Buenos Aires
Or by the shore of the hudson, the salt tinged air and tango music and
my father driving away alone into the rain of kingsland road

And this cripling lonliness

If you were here i would
talk about the night poems we wrote on the roof
In the west village
The electric buzz of cockroaches
The river of traffic

When i think of Harlem Night Song, Langston Hughes
The fairy lights amongst the trees at Columbia University
Of buying bubble tea, hiding in libraries, or sleeping on college fields.... Oh! The bookstore on the corner of 115th, gone!

The light across the roofs of cornelia street, the sun dying -
Searching the corners of the room and dancing
Curtains sailing pinkly in the evening light
A stranger's piano
Carrying a painting the length of the 1 train the night after the bar

You gargling vodka the night before getting your tooth filled
Arriving in greenpoint on a summer's evening - children screaming from the park
Beer on the terrarce of Enids
Carrying furniture from an apartment on west end ave
Arriving home to find everything
So beautifully arranged on Prince street

Buying pizza near a plaza in mendoza
Stopping to picnic with our bikes and looking out across the fields

The henry miller museum

All cut short. Sudden as a breath.

Les Pensées (40)

2011-11-23T10:49:00.001-08:00
Artaud had always loved the thrill of illicit pleasures so much that he confessed his shameful thoughts, to himself, then to everyone, until he had no more secrets to expose and he could only provoke other people with outrageous fantasies, until everything had become so normal that it bored him, and he could only find some final satisfaction in extracting the confession of a remote stranger, to whom he listened with the most sincere empathy and endless patience, reminiscent of an abandoned capacity to get excited by his own little common secrets that he had lost forever.

Opening idea 1

2011-11-20T15:34:00.000-08:00
It began before the whispers of children and before a wine glass would smash an end to everything.

It began before her footsteps led a trail through new snow, ending in a pool of emptiness and warmed earth where she had lain.

It began with a train journey from New York City.

"Remind me what we are doing here?" she had asked.

Grand Central Station: late afternoon. The rush and echo of commuters against the marble walls. Camera flashes and chandelier light, the crackle of a tannoy and the steadiness of his reply:

"running towards who we really are."

"running away." she says in her Mother's voice. He shrugs.

"if that's what you want to call it, but i don't believe that's true."

Les Pensées (39)

2011-11-20T06:08:00.000-08:00
Artaud was reminded of Kurt Vonnegut's quote that we are who we pretend to be. Having pursued truth all his life, Artaud reflected now that he was no one.

Les Pensées (38)

2011-11-12T05:40:00.000-08:00
A bright glare of light filled the room in the early brisk morning. Artaud felt uninspired.

The Diaries of Arnon Grunberg (14)

2011-11-09T04:56:00.000-08:00
Arnon started walking. He walked into the dark night and the bloated circle of colored lights. He was alone, but he barely noticed that he was while he kept on walking. It could have been snowing, or it might have been drizzling, or perhaps it was a clear winter night, he didn't remember. He did remember the blackness of the evening, the coat of dimness that isolated him and embraced him in one present gesture, and the brightness of the sparkles around him that amazed him. His eyes were drawn in all directions, drops of rain stirring a puddle of mud, and never lingered at one spot for more than a second. He couldn't form any prolonged ideas but only short impulses of thoughts. This state of mind itself fascinated him. It was not his nature to be caught up in such a stream of consciousness that constantly renewed itself. Arnon was more used to his own thoughts prolonging themselves and separating him from the distancing reality that surrounded him. The relation between Arnon and the world was vaguely undefined, absent perhaps in the eyes of some, at least not in a constant form that let itself be renewed easily. In what form the relation with the outside world existed then? Arnon thought of the world as a friendly enemy, a benign poison dripping into the hollow bowl of his soul until one day it would spill over and he no longer was himself. He kept on walking, alone, into the night.

Het Uur van de Wolf, Heb je nog steeds vrienden?

Les Pensées (37)

2011-10-18T07:23:00.000-07:00
Artaud held her hand, looked into the depth of her eyes fixated on his, and was pleased to watch her gentle smile, but he sadly mistook her unwillingly calculated New York utilitarianism for loving kindness.

Faces(37)

2011-10-15T06:08:00.000-07:00
(37) Her pointy, little chin dangled from the broad, heavy branch of her round cheeks, from which two owly eyes peeked out into the evening, her nose a leaf floating in the wind, while the moonlight reflected on her white forehead.

Faces (36)

2011-10-14T01:30:00.000-07:00
(36) His nose runs down along a long slope ending in a broad, fleshy bulb, his mousy eyes pushed up by the high white cheekbones to the top of his frowning, dark eyebrows, the whole face resting upon the hooked bones of his chin and jaws.

Serendipity (2)

2011-10-05T12:06:00.000-07:00
it's a bright day, she smiles at me, she clinches to my mouth, a thoughtful answer, I look at her little straight thumbs in her lap, her brown wrinkled fingers forming a circuit of electricity, then she runs off, disconnects, but she comes back again, reconnects, and cuddling with a smile she says she loved the bright day we spent, and makes me happy on a dead motionless day with cold flowing love.
when the dark night remains, we sit inside a bar, outside a crying sky of aloof stars, a howling silence of murmur and simple conversations, of particles dancing between us, she sits and stares, her upper jaw of smiling teeth, she is full of inner love, she never stops punching back thoughts, i clinch to her words, my defenses low, but she folds her arms crossed in the rain, as we walk home, before her dearly flat chest, shivering and avoiding contact.
words and eyes, her long, thin limbs, a slim chest, all in a warm, brown gloss, she is a spider on the wall, a brief silence of admiration in which i can breathe and blink, of beauty and admiration, of the constellations of her web, i follow her rushing limbs, her flickering dark eyes that are like a falling star across the wall of the universe on the night's sky.
i can no longer distinguish between the sadness and joy i feel, between the light and dark i see, but the beauty of a moment of hope that crawled by in the hours of a long afternoon, blindly, now past us.

Serendipity (1)

2011-10-01T17:03:00.000-07:00

Faces (35)

2011-10-01T07:45:00.000-07:00
(35) Her hat slipped to her crown, the rim aligned with her eye brows as her forehead shortened, as she tilted her head back, her chin pointed up, and her eyes narrowed to a sharp glance, but her face never lost the gentle glance of her friendly cheeks.

Les Pensées (36)

2011-09-28T19:49:00.000-07:00
Artaud smiled with resignation. Nor suffering, nor happiness was any more his share. What remained was a deep ache, a colorless and unfulfilled longing, some mistake for a passionate love.

Les Pensées (35)

2011-09-28T18:18:00.000-07:00
Artaud placed his knees gently on the pebbles and sat besides the dark green, cast-iron little table. He took her foot and pressed his soft, cold cheek against the hard, warm shin of her left leg. Only now did Artaud feel the calm of sanity sooth his thoughts.

Faces (34)

2011-09-27T14:27:00.000-07:00
(34) Her broad forehead was reflected in her wide smile, revealing a long row of perfectly white teeth in her tiny head, while her sclera was shining brilliantly, and her facial muscles danced like fluttering wings of laughter.

Les Pensées (34)

2011-09-09T09:10:00.000-07:00
Artaud sat on an iron terrace chair and felt the heated metal press against his muscled thighs. He stretched out his feet to rest his heels on the stone wall, one foot crossed over the other, the brick edge cutting into his Achilles tendon.

Night Sketch: Freeze Frame with Looped Sound: a study of the night from the window of 118 Eton Hall - Looking Left

2011-08-31T13:23:00.000-07:00

The harsh blue-white neon of the BT tower
against the dark purple of the night
Beneath that: 4 windows
In the centre both are splashed with the liquid light of TV blue
These are bookended by the warm yellow of lamplight
The building falls away from this
Windows are darkly mapped against it

AUDIO TRACK: A plane engine moves like a skateboard. The Dull mutter of passing strangers. Footsteps. Keys rattling in a man's hand (LOOP)

Night Sketch: Study of the night from the Window of 118 Eton Hall - Looking right

2011-08-31T13:17:00.000-07:00

Fill the top two thirds purple
A pink wanting to be purple
Beneath that: tree shaped blacks
A tangled thick hedge of black
Closer to the window: two afro-dark trees
Squares of light and the blinking white-red of a new born plane
taking it's first uncertain steps

Night Sketch: At the Window of 1 Highbury Place as the Day Fades

2011-08-31T13:12:00.000-07:00

The trees are rushing with the last of the day's wind - busying themselves in last minute chores before the night draws in.

The view from the window is a study of the world in shades of green.

A wall runs up the garden - deep and brown and diagonal. Beside it a pink four headed rose is raised.

The blue of a neighbour's shed appears.

Water Colour Sketch of Chapel Market and the Holloway Road: July 13th 2011

2011-08-31T13:08:00.000-07:00

At the Job centre on B---- Road near the Angel an old man asks a tracksuited teenager for a fag. The boy says no. Then changes his mind.

A man: Mid 20s (difficult to tell with the English working class, could be mid 40s) screams abuse into a mobile phone. He then moves as if to smash the phone against a wall but doesn't. We are walking through a tunnel of scaffolding on the Holloway road when this happens.

An estate agent - late teens. He is trying to grow a mustache.

An African woman screams into a phone on Upper Street. Unknown African language. Her aggression, as with the man earlier, is extremely boring.

At the Hope Workers Cafe: Wooden tables - dark polished. Arsenal banners. Polish staff. All builders and baked beans. Also water colours of local area.

Packington street has been closed off. Metal fences block it at both ends.

A cat lies asleep on a step leading to the blue front door of an apartment building. He is curled loaf-like, head drooped, fur dirty-white.

Les Pensées (33)

2011-08-28T07:08:00.000-07:00
Artaud pressed his nose against the window and stared at the dry streets where a single pedestrian trailed his lap dog curiously sniffing the concrete, and realized his life was a sequence of unfulfilled expectations.

Faces (33)

2011-08-26T10:59:00.000-07:00
(33) A round, scrubby and gray head bobbing on top of a fat, pear-shaped body dressed in a black rekel and topped with a black shtofener that tip-toed delicately on his crown of ruffled straw hair, revealing the side of a black yamaka, and two payots veering up and down along his worried sleeps on the rhythm of his scurried pace.

Les Pensées (32)

2011-08-25T07:29:00.000-07:00
Artaud looked at the skeletons that kicked their feet out before them, swinging their arms backward in a single balanced and coordinated motion of what seemed to be living bodies, but so soulless, heartless and without opinions that they thought of it as simply very professional.

Faces (32)

2011-08-19T15:29:00.000-07:00
(32) Her black hair was combed backward and touched her shoulders like a dry curtain that dragged over the stage, on which her thin chin tapped dapperly from left to right, as her head turned with her round tip-tilted nose and its wide nostrils, her dark eyes and half opened mouth, which reminded me of a domino stone's spots.

desperate men poetry

2011-07-31T06:06:00.000-07:00
welcome desperate men
men who cannot love
men who love despite
whose stomachs curl around
fish in troubled water
for shallow bites
men who hunger
yet who crave
no more than to hear
a word
men whose lips
are without a kiss
men who sink
who do not float
dark minds
with a pure heart
who take the spite
of guilt and innocence
of man
in discolored resignation
welcome men
welcome
who passed this gate
men with simple thoughts
simple tables
their guts done
and men
whom no one love
men in spite
welcome

http://youtu.be/Aztulcg9ipM

black raven king

2011-07-30T19:34:00.000-07:00
into ruffling fragments
the trunk breaks
and out of the bush of leaves
the flapping of wings escapes
slowly the body majestic
of a raven carries up
and drifts off
into the gray sky
out of the shadow cover
i elevate
yet thrown down
i drop like a stone
even if my limbs stretch
my suffering is joy
like the wild wind against the trunk
the torment beats
a spirit ravishing
broken plates
in this body, this trunk
i follow the pair of wings
that fly toward the sun
my heart wants to follow
but everything breaks into pieces
i see myself, i hear myself
but i don't want to loose it out of sight
by wanting to possess it
i cannot know
by not knowing
i possess it
the raven paradox
of torment
my loving raven

Les Pensées (31)

2011-07-30T12:01:00.000-07:00
Artaud deeply moved by every breeze of air swirling around him, felt the radiance of equal beauty glistering, yet everything was a distant glance, everyone observed from afar, every thought a remote reflection that kept him from grasping the beauty around him and the glance was replaced by a dull sadness.

Faces (31)

2011-07-30T09:39:00.000-07:00
(31) Her lips were modestly thin, she bit her mouth bashfully, as she breathed in the cold evening air. A gentle white light fell on her face, I could just see the thick red curling line that ran across the soft pink flesh of her inner underlip, showing the imprint from the rim of her glass from which she had drunk a dark Italian red wine.

Les Pensées (30)

2011-07-29T14:15:00.000-07:00
Artaud stared at the orange hoops formed by the folds in her knee high skirt, which ran around her waist, and realized that she could decide his course of life and that she never would, and he resigned willfully to the destructive indifference of the waves of emotions.

Faces (29-30)

2011-07-29T04:35:00.000-07:00
(29) The curly wave of her lips that encircled her smile and her gay glance dancing on the motion of her words, softly spoken, gave her face a certain roundedness that softened me. (30) She pressed her hand to her forehead straight above her brow ridge, though she sat in a shadowed corner. Her eyes flickered from the sting of inner light, the surface of her eyeballs lay elevated above her broad cheeks, her swollen lips were tightly pressed together, radiating her inner agony.

Day Poem 072611

2011-07-26T12:52:00.000-07:00

12.14pm - The Kitchen
Through the bleak ocean of day an aircraft begins its final plunge kettle-whistling from beyond the cloth damp clouds. In the near distance you hear lorries brake-hissing, wheezing at the lights. And a train rushes its body at the length of track - each shivering sharp clackity-clack curlicued by the creak of an ancient stair. And the clock rattles off the time till 12.15pm.

Faces (28)

2011-07-24T10:04:00.000-07:00
(28) As he smiled, the creases in his fleshy cheeks split into carved cuts, and his eyes sank deep into the remaining cracks until only a distant pitch-dark pit was still visible, while drawing large circular lines across his face that sparkled by the rosy light and the dark curls of his beard and hair.

Les Pensées (29)

2011-07-24T08:53:00.000-07:00
Artaud walked down Park Avenue as he did almost every morning, until the light hit his eyes as it had done yesterday and the day before on the corner of 34th street, and realizing so, he unlikely turned east along 32nd street, unlike yesterday.

Portrait of Russian Author Daniil Kharms

2011-07-19T01:11:00.000-07:00

Daniil Kharms with Pipe | Water colour on Post-it note, 2011

Les Pensées (28)

2011-07-16T17:29:00.000-07:00
To Artaud happiness and joy meant little.

Night Poem 062211

2011-07-15T15:24:00.000-07:00
Here at the edge of
Highbury Fields
I hear machines
gasping in
the night
soft lost voices
rising in hushed questioning
tones and flowing out
into the night

BE STILL BEASTS!

Turn from thr type writer clack
of the banker wife's
high-click heels
turn from the hurling
drunk
and from the sirens
and from the plunging
dark
that seeps inkily through
the hours until the
wide bright world of morning
Flow gentle on
the night's river
be still
and greet the sea of morning as a
friend

Night Poem 071511

2011-07-15T15:07:00.000-07:00
The window shakes
and a train passes and
the night boils with the sound of voices and with the
whip crack laughter of strangers and
with the ghosts of sunken nights
of murder and of
anxiety and of
loneliness and of
joy
and of the calm of sleep
and confusion

The Holloway road creaks under the weight
of so many welcomed bodies
and carries each calmly into the
waves of the sea of night

Flipbook Story (2): Cafe Noir (2)

2011-07-15T14:40:00.000-07:00

Faces (27)

2011-07-11T16:24:00.000-07:00
(27) The root of her nose lay well ahead of her eyebrow. Her fleshy neck softly rounded her jaw line. Yet, these notable features did not define her face harshly, as the rest of her face was so full of gentle form that she tremendously appealed to me with the kindest beauty.

Les Pensées (27)

2011-07-10T19:42:00.000-07:00
Artaud looked down at the street through the cracks of the white blinds in the window, and only saw the flickering spots of head lights that jumped from one to the other black line like a child dancing over the crosswalk, and realized that from the outside in, a view through his window on his life must look not much different.

About You

2011-07-06T02:08:00.000-07:00
About you

This role requires a high level of disillusionment. Candidates must demonstrate a keen sense of feeling disconnected from their work and be able to demonstrate distaste for working with others under fast paced and trivial conditions. You must have at least 3 years experience of corporate disenchantment to apply.

About the Position

You will be required to carry out a series of tasks using a computer beneath strip lighting. Normal hours, which do not apply, will be from 9am - 6pm.

Knowledge of MS office is preferable.

Please note that due to the high number of applications we expect to receive, we will not be able to contact candidates directly regardless of whether their application has been successful or not.

Les Pensées (26)

2011-07-04T20:20:00.000-07:00
Artaud decided not to undertake anything today and let himself be simply carried down the stream of his emotions without action until finally the evening would come and he could go to sleep and forget about the uneventful happenings of the day.

devil's day

2011-07-04T19:38:00.001-07:00

Lo Tech - Matchbox Pinhole Camera Photography

2011-07-04T00:01:00.000-07:00

Photos of photos taken with a matchbox pinhole camera. We took the instructions to make this little guy from here: matchboxpinhole.com

Sweets balanced on the windowsill

Self portrait. Tried a 5 minute exposure in a bathroom mirror.

Argentinean Soda Bottle. (Looking up)

Mandolin

Our Apartment (This was once Walter Sickert's Studio)

Letter Box.

Phone Box

Tree in Highbury Fields

Bottle of Essential Oil

Double Exposure of a pond on Hamstead Heath

Faces (25-26)

2011-06-25T06:47:00.000-07:00
(25) Not a harsh angle in her face but gentle curves, like rivers in a landscape carved out by soft force, the cavity of her cheeks eroded over thousands of years beneath the cheekbone, a captivating smile, her tiny black eyes like lanterns drawing nothing but kindness along. (26) The corners of his eyes and his smile flowed like the waves, all connected by invisible strings and moved by the muscles stretching from the ears, and modeled around the nose that bend like the stern of a ship across the facial front.

The Highbury Painters Group: June 2011

2011-06-21T13:50:00.000-07:00

Photos from the Highbury Painters Group monthly meeting.

1.
London Street Scene: Man hunched at Betting shop having lost on the horses

2.
Water Jug with Basil

3.
The Artist is Christ

4.
Bolivian Street Scene: The Church at Potosi

5.
Portrait: Eyeless in Highbury

Flipbook Story (4): Know It All (1)

2011-06-19T17:53:00.000-07:00

Flipbook Story (3): Turkish Apricots (1)

2011-06-19T17:49:00.001-07:00

Flipbook Story (2): Cafe Noir (1)

2011-06-19T17:30:00.000-07:00

Les Pensées (25)

2011-06-16T18:32:00.000-07:00
Artaud hardly looked where he was walking, he followed the stream of faces toward their source at the end of the long road, hollow, bony faces, fat, full faces, only every now and then, but rarely, a charming flower bobbed by.

Flipbook Story (1): Friends (1)

2011-06-13T15:59:00.000-07:00

Flipbook Stories are mini comic books passed from friend to friend, each friend adds 1 page of text or drawing, passing it on to the next friend. Friends only. Add your email in the masthead in the back, send a picture of your page to me, and the last person mails the flipbook story back to me again, for a show of merdisme.

André Derain's Fauvist London

2011-05-02T13:14:00.000-07:00

André Derain (French, 1880–1954). London Bridge, 1906. Oil on canvas.
André Derain (French, 1880–1954). Charing Cross Bridge, 1906. Oil on canvas.
André Derain (French, 1880–1954). Saint Paul's Cathedral Seen From the Thames, 1906. Oil on canvas.

Night Poems: 2 Night Haikus

2011-05-01T16:16:00.000-07:00

1.
A passing headlight
finds leaves lost against the night.
And a pissing drunk.

2.
The clothes-wash crashes
on the silent shores of night.
Look! Clean underpants.

Bowling with Sisyphus: Suicide or Revolt?

2011-04-30T17:11:00.000-07:00

Vague thoughts on Cory Arcangel's 'Beat the Champ' installation at the Barbican in London

As you enter, the installation curves away to the left with panel after panel of computer bowling games projected against the far wall. The games are ordered chronologically with the first dating back to the 1970s and the last 2001. Each game has been rigged to play on a loop with each bowler launching the ball into the gutter at every throw.

My first thought was of Sisyphus and his own particular bowling game doomed by the gods to failure. Arcangel has had all his games rigged, committing each computerized bowler to share Sisyphus' fate.

What does it mean for each computer bowler to be condemned to a failure inescapable despite technological advancement? What of the gamer seeking meaning in the computer console? Is Arcangel's message entirely pessimistic? Are we, in a desperate search for meaning, doomed to repeat the failures of past generations in spite of seeming progression? In realising the impossibility of escape, is it correct to argue, as Carmus does, that "The struggle itself...is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." ?

As I left the installation room, walking back from later to earlier computer programs, I noticed a bowler from an old Atari game quietly knock down one of the pins. I'm still not certain that this was actually part of the show - all games were supposed to be rigged to fail. Did one rebel? Was the seed of revolt more powerful that that of suicide?

Philosophies of Insomnia 2: Eli Siegel

2011-04-22T03:43:00.000-07:00

1)
Love and Jobs
At rest
On her breast,
He lay.
And he thought
Of his job
Next day.

From Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems (Definition Press)
© 1957 by Eli Siegel

2)

Letter From William Carlos Williams to Martha Baird - November 3rd, 1951

My dear Martha Baird:

I cannot adequately thank you for first writing me and then sending me the copies of Eli Siegel's poems. I am thrilled: your communications could not have come at a better time. I can't tell you how important Siegel's work is in the light of my present understanding of the modern poem. He belongs in the very first rank of our living artists. That he has not been placed there by our critics (what good are they?) is the inevitable result of their colonialism, their failure to understand the significance, the compulsions, broadened base upon which prosody rests in the modern world and our opportunity and obligations when we concern ourselves with it...

...You say Siegel is alive and working. Greet him for me and tell him of this letter. I congratulate you on the intelligent direction of your work and the heart behind it.

3)

4)

The Philosophy of Insomnia
By Eli Siegel
(Extract)

There was a person who told me he was troubled by insomnia, among other things. Sometimes he got angry with people. Sometimes he felt he was the most persecuted and most intelligent person in the world. Insomnia was one manifestation of the dislocation he had made between what Aesthetic Realism calls Self and World. He'd been having insomnia for a long time. His family doctor told him it came from a recondite kidney ailment. A neurologist of the advanced Freudian school told him he couldn't sleep because he had the death instinct. A psychoanalyst, somewhat less advanced, said he wanted to kill his mother.

In my work, one way of looking at the self has been through sentences. A person has been given two words, standing for matters crucial in his mind, and been asked to write a sentence with them. I gave this man the words magnificent and bed. The sentence he wrote was: “I am magnificent in bed.”

He unconsciously saw himself as most important in bed. He had trouble with his brothers, his father, his mother, the foreman where he worked. In bed, he said to hell with all of them. The tendency to be a king or queen or emperor or (more conservatively) a lonely duchess in bed, is tremendous. The loneliness of bed is used against the things seen and endured in the street. When you're in bed, the world is yours. This person had seen bed as a place where he could get back at everyone who had ever annoyed him.

Philosophies of Insomnia 1

2011-04-18T14:00:00.000-07:00

1. Halfway up the Holloway Road

My thoughts come in squat brick-like chunks. Each as incoherent as the next, but each showing promise! They could lead to something? Could they lead to something?

What am I saying?

I am frog marching myself toward the Holloway road, shoes clicking fast against the pavement, collar up, hands pushed hard into broken pockets. There is no sound except my heels. No, that's not quite true: There is the wave crash of distant cars and the passing threat of motorcycle engines.

Is insomnia something to be feared or celebrated?

I should be doing some of my best thinking now, in this free time gifted to me - a time oceans from the clock time of commerce. but here the clock sounds off the seconds like a broken piano. The key is struck and I feel rather than hear its tick. Thud. Like a falling body. Deep behind the eyes.

Some houses flicker with the blue of tv screens. Why am I walking? Why not wrestling with this thing in the safety of my own bed?

How awful that I can't drag anything close to poetry from this private time, when whole sleeping worlds seems to belong to me and me alone. Shouldn't that be everything? I embrace the feeling a moment, lifting my head high a step or two. But then my body asks: what are you doing halfway up the Holloway road? Why cast adrift like the walking dead? Where are you?

In three hours it will be morning. Light's lines will trace across the walls and everything will begin again.

The Diaries of Arnon Grunberg (13)

2011-04-10T19:06:00.000-07:00
Arnon entered Lucien on first and first and asked for a stool at the bar. He looked at the menu without much appetite, then finally ordered the foie gras maison with the cheapest red wine at twenty eight dollars per bottle. It was the first time that Arnon felt comfortable in a social environment for months. He had concluded that his preference to stay at home and read, was a mental condition that he needed to break through, and diligently he had made reservations at nine. He drank his first glass and poured a second, drank a second and poured a third. There was no reason to his thoughts, he was not thinking, just realizing that he had not been thoughtful in many weeks. There was no purpose to his existence, cause there was no thought worth considering. This was the New York life that made New Yorkers unwillingly distressed, irritated, hasted. You traveled two hours south to Washington and life let you breath again. Arnon pondered only how this city with so much stimulation and diversity, managed to create such a uniform lack of thoughtful relevance. Was it the immigrants who came from poverty, sacrificed themselves to offer their children a better future, and like a maelstrom of ambition, they dragged Arnon down with them into their gutter toward just the same empty future. The thought itself made Arnon hate immigrants. He poured a fourth glass and measured the bottle to be half empty. The room seemed to detach itself from the street and the building in which it was located, and started floating in the night, tables started dancing, voices started conversations and faces looked at Arnon with a friendly smile. The waiter offered him not only a broad grin but complemented him with a pear liquor that went down smoothly with the foie gras without purpose or thought.

The Diaries of Arnon Grunberg (12)

2011-03-19T05:27:00.000-07:00
Arnon sat down at the bar of the Mexican restaurant. He was the only customer. Three men with slick black hair combed backward and tanned faces were preparing shift. It was noon. Arnon had walked out onto the street, breathed in the spring air that had broken through, and realized the tension that had gathered in his chest. It wasn't the city, it wasn't the people, but there were certainly some who annoyed him without end.

His tolerance, or his capacity to wash away the bitter taste of the infringement of human bodies out there in the world, Arnon revolted against. Not now, he whispered and took a gulp from his Brooklyn ale. Was it really that simple? The muscles of his body relaxed, he floated away from the mediocracy, the lack of meaning, from the sense of obligation and responsibility as they called it. This awful sense of obligation that those poor people kept struggling against.

It wasn't exactly sure what they gained from it. Arnon tried to reconstruct the conversation. Jokingly, my father would kill me, she replied. The odd reasoning of man while they throw themselves in the abyss, losing their lives, their dreams, their being. And in place of the exaltation of freedom of their youth comes a flat saturation of content, they call happiness.

Faces (24)

2011-02-26T05:48:00.000-08:00
(24) The soft curves of her face drew me in, with a few controlled strokes of a brush I could draw her gentle face except for the sharp splatters of her irises, that lay deep in their sockets, observing me with care.

Faces (23)

2011-01-30T17:29:00.000-08:00
(23)She swallowed her words, which cluttered in her mouth and shaped her highly cheeks full and round, like a broad bridge across her face, while her black eyes had turned sweet and inwardly, light like a little star barely visible and without constellation.

Mini Manga: Never A Loner ^^

2011-01-20T12:36:00.000-08:00

The Diaries of Arnon Grunberg (11)

2011-01-17T06:59:00.000-08:00
"Don't you grow tired by your own disquiet?"
"Sometimes," only to add at the last moment,"perhaps."
Such a settled question, Arnon thought. Only an old man, whose years have worn down his body, sees struggling and making efforts as a burden. To the vigor of a youth, being challenged feels like an elevation of the mind, to which he looks eagerly forward.

"But then you also run from deadline to deadline."
The interviewer's questions started to irritate Arnon, realizing that this man's decay was printing itself on his mind and thus polluted his lust for life. The interviewer seemed to suggest that it was all too much, that this restless inspiration needed a break, take some time off, lay in bed and do nothing for a whole day but fetish itself in lazy dinners.

"Yes, but everything that has a pattern, is easy, and I don't forget."

While Arnon heard his own voice say the last lines, hearing himself, he realized already did the gray haired, saggy face with the coarse scraping voice affect him. He reflected on the absurdity of the answer, embarrassed by the apparent habit of himself that he displayed in public. This pattern of routines was what tired him, not the exerting demands.

Prometheus Bound

2011-01-15T15:43:00.000-08:00

Les Pensées (24)

2011-01-05T17:54:00.000-08:00
Artaud had always remained Artaud, or in other words, he never had really been Artaud.

Identity in Stasis

2011-01-02T13:40:00.000-08:00
John was a member of the Luo tribe, according to his passport he was Kenian, though with a permanent residence in the United States, where he practiced as a Harvard trained general practitioner and he had lived the last ten years of his life in Boston. He was one of the proudest members of the Luo, and the tribe was at least as proud of him. When I met him, Obama was president for two years, while John was elaborating on his theory of self identity and advocating the importance of the tribe. He had not asked me about my tribe, he knew of course, there was no such entity in western society. I wasn't sure if he had immediately guessed my Dutch origin, but I was pretty sure that he was not aware of the tensions between the westerners, the southerners, the easterners and the Frisians, in the Netherlands. I of course am a member of the Heracleitian tribe of thought, and I do not believe in the concept of identity, or it would be in my persona as an anarchist deliberately trying to disturb all my pre-existing attachments and ideas like a Nietzschean lion. The main argument I tried to make against John's was based on Marxist principles however, where identity is the superstructure of my class origin, which is determined mostly by technology and ownership of capital, but this is a very typical belief for someone of the middle classes, and a very white and western notion, which he refuted of course.

The Wild Animals Rose Up

2010-12-19T10:07:00.000-08:00
The wild animals rose up and complained about the lack of respect, in a furious row, they beat their chests and pulled out their hair, about the unfairness of their treatment. Blind hatred ran through their bloodshed eyes, as their masters who had unleashed them, kicked them in their guts, back to the muddy ditch. They spit foam filled words, lost in the rage of their voices. I stood by and observed their helpless anger. The calmer lot of them, had climbed out of the gutter years ago. Here were left the riffraff who felt entitled to the thrones and bones of greater dogs above them, but they got stumps instead, which served them better. I was completely indifferent to the pack of rats that crawled in their filth, not capable perhaps, not trained, not guided with strict enough leashes. Their words were incoherent, but words to them were intelligence already, entitlements. All the dogs feel entitled. All the lots kicking down the doors, and when they get hit in the face, and lay on the wet asphalt, crying, they are filled with anger once more. Beating a drum, their fear their reason, their beliefs their words, and each time again, they find them selves locked out. They feel the hand of compassion and slam it, cause they don't need it. When they search to get up, they find the steps too high, and with indignation they curse the lack of hands reached out to them.

Night Poem: 120910

2010-12-09T19:49:00.000-08:00

Dogs against the tethered heat of night with
voice raised rage in the reflection of the room against the
dark frame of the night.

And whose demon screams
pitched thick through ink roll hot as a breath
and heavy

tear the night fitful

Faces (21-22)

2010-11-29T18:16:00.000-08:00
(21) The black stripes on her forehead were not her own natural eyebrows. She had drawn two lines too high above her eyes, in half circles. She looked wildly with a mimicked expression of lamenting surprise, her mouth open, her lips pursed in astonishment, as if a complete stranger had just slapped her in the face in public, while she scurried past me with a cup of coffee in her hand, busy, crazy. (22) Her face was lighted by a white-blue light that elevated her eyes, the same translucent color as the palms of her hand, the brown shadow breaking on her high round cheeks, her large, curling ears freed by a pony-tail in which her long black hair was tied, as if she was being upheld like a puppet by its string, as her fingers tapped gently on the screen of her iPad, which lay on the table before her, her face prostrated over it, pushing her shoulders above her neck.

20:44 PM

2010-11-23T17:47:00.000-08:00
I finally got it! I finally have found it!

What?

'What' she said with an inquisitive tone. I wasn't really listening though. Tom, I said, I finally have it! Tom wasn't here though, he was 5258 miles far away, but I was talking to him. He only looked at me, silent like in dreams. He didn't say anything, but I answered 'the hidden link you had mentioned!' I exclaimed. I wrote down the time, it was 20:44 hours on Tuesday, November twenty third, two thousand and ten.

Maybe I should write it down I thought, which I did. The floor was empty, I noticed this unimportant feature of my room, because I was writing, and that's what Tom did, that's what I had read, the unimportant details of a random impression when he was a child, I think in England. I saw the clouds drift by, the clouds of years, without thinking anything, but the skirts of his mother.

The Long Reach of her Legs At which Ends I Lay

2010-11-23T17:02:00.000-08:00
She chuckled with an exotic tick of her teeth, as her elongated legs stretched far under the table, distancing themselves from her firm torso, her bottom well rounded. She gave the briefest replies, she snubbed me, hardly even looked at me at all, she must have been making an effort to not see me in such a small room as we were in together. The infinite length of her legs, the gigantic size of her calves alone, extending her thighs like stilts, and the soft curve of her buttock, washed away her bitter smile and I remained infatuated with her physique, reflecting in her dark mirroring eyes. I still wanted to fall at her feet on my knees before her and started to wildly kiss the inner loins of her crotch, clamping myself to her womb like a desperate maniac. She has a long bush of wildly growing black curly hair, giving her the overpowering impression of a diva, blowing me away by her utter arrogance, not sparing me for the least bit, smashing me to pieces, obliterating me in the corner. She must have totally despised me with a divine fierceness, she was chewing me raw and spit me on the ground like rotten meat, yet I was still undeterred to fly at her like an idolater, throwing my arms in embrace around her brown neck with the love of a child and kiss her full erotic lips, even if she wiped her mouth which breathed the same air which I had just exhausted from my trembling lungs. She lived in New Jersey, but that also did not matter to my veneration. I clamped my thin fingers around the hard bone of her ankle and listened to the numbed drumming of her blood, climbing up her legs the long road to the clouds surrounding her head.

4.02PM

2010-11-15T16:38:00.000-08:00

It's Thursday and it's waiting to rain. Sometimes it waits minutes, sometimes days. In the meantime there's the grey. A thick, pressing dirty grey. An abandoned quilt.

How many words do the Eskimos have for snow? How many do the English have for grey? Not enough. It seems absurd to call the air grey although it tastes grey, it smells grey. It's heavy, every breath sucked slow through teeth like old soup.

The room is still and so silent it seems to buzz. Once upon a time a clock would tick, embarrassed at the quiet, but they don't bother anymore. It sits plastically above the door, mounted and mute and showing 4PM. If grey had a time it would be 4PM. A desert of time.

Lying on the bed you concentrate on breathing. Your jumpered stomach lifts and falls back and your breath gets caught up with the wind - not a violent wind, a soft suburban wind - so that it's difficult to tell where one stops and the other begins. Despite the gentle breeze outside your room is unusually warm. Just warm enough to be uncomfortable, not enough to make you remove clothing, but sufficient to keep you thinking about it. If grey had a feeling it would be this.

A sound rises from the street and enters through the small window above your head. If grey had a voice it would be this: two millstones grinding slowly. The weight of two worlds pressed close but trying to part from one another. The sound circles. Every so often you hear it stop and then the high peel of a child's voice lets you know you're listening to plastic tires running against tarmac. You picture a tractor. An orange tractor. The sound starts up again. On the clock the largest hand has slipped forward two minutes. It did this quietly and without emotion or fuss. It's 4.02PM.

The sound of daytime TV rises from the living room where your father sits slumped on the sofa. The muffled sound of deep baritone voices chased by canned laughter. It is strange to hear laughter trying to enter the house, squeezing its young body through the tiny holes of tired speakers. Late afternoon is no season for laughter. The bitter-sweet horror of bright summer days that march forcibly into November. How do they record a laughter like that?

This morning you read online that a building was burning somewhere on the other side of the world, somewhere in China. The building was having construction work done and the flames had started at its base before climbing the scaffolding and raging toward the sky. People had left their windows and hung from scaffold rails despite the rising heat and waited to be rescued.

You turn and look out of the window. The child's mother leads him back into the house. She has him under one arm and the tractor hangs from the other. On the far side of the road a man is opening the boot of his car and seeing the mother and child he waves. She throws him a smile because her hands are full and he shrugs knowingly because he understands what it's like to shepherd children. You imagine the three of them hanging from scaffolding and you know he would jump first.

The doorbell chimes. Unexpectedly. It's 4.17PM. Who would come out here at this time? You hear your Father stir but he doesn't get up. The TV has stilled its voice now, it has leveled to the steady drone of commerce. Somewhere in an office that will never catch fire a woman approved the hushed noises you now here. She had listened to them at her computer and felt nothing. What horror. The nightmare of feeling nothing and understanding that everything you live for is based upon passion. Perhaps she took a breath and told someone superior she believed in this 'take'. It just felt right. Through boredom or lack of time somebody said ok and here it is now. A part of your world. The ad space would have been bought ahead of time and that would have factored into the speed of approval. But it does feel right doesn't it? These human noises, these vowels and growls that blur toward nothing couldn't have been said any other way could they? And now its gone and a second spot rumbles into earshot. Another life, another held breath.

Your father doesn't move and you can sense the half pressure of a finger wanting to press the plastic-smooth white of the bell again. You swing your feet off the bed and onto the carpet. Carpets are suburban fake luxury. Carpets don't go to cities and they shouldn't enter bathrooms but on the occasions they do, what horror.

Cityscape: All I Really Know About My Neighbor

2010-11-15T05:21:00.000-08:00

Les Pensées (23)

2010-11-15T05:14:00.000-08:00
Artaud looked outside at the blood red brick facade against the fierce blue sky. A car blew its harsh horn breaking the air that cracked wide open, a second horn follows in canon with an interval, more distant. Artaud listened without a thought to the more distant claxons, sirens, and rumbling engines in absolute silence.

Fiction

2010-11-10T17:20:00.000-08:00

I press flowers he said under his breath. Well, why not. Why not.

It's some time in June. One of those days of lazy heat that breaks through in the moments just before summer, a day loaded with the promise of things to come. He had walked out past the shops and the main road and turned into the lanes; a network of old-world but somehow human tracks. More human than the solidness of the dual lane carriage-ways that bend and twist from city to sea.  You felt someone had carved through rock to make these things, forcing the weight of their body against the earth. The grass is tall and yellow at their edges and bends with each breeze. Patches of shadow thrown by Oak trees at intervals of ten feet or so. The last time you came here was a Saturday in 1997, the weather was about the same and you were on a bike and there were four of you. With four people the road felt crowded, over-populated but cheerfully so. It was over-populated with the right people. But of course, the lanes are empty now, it being mid-day, it being mid-week.

How is everything mathematics and yet the first hint of order causes such hell? The line of the desks, the elevator lights rhythmically counting off floors, the computer keys. No, that wasn't completely true. Somehow, in being a millimeter out of synch, uneven rifts and gullies had been created between the keys that tossed light to places you could call beautiful: Little oblong shadows on mornings when he was alone at the office and would sit bathing in the calm and order and allowed himself to make believe he was in control of everything he saw. No-one calls that early in the morning. A brief glance through emails reveals that of the twelve unread, eleven are either personal messages from friends or spam. That's true beauty. That with the little wave of joy that rises and engulfs your entire body. In the distance a coffee machine snores, squeezing water through all those ground beans.

Being professional requires bending your body to other peoples vision of the world without them ever needing to demonstrate why their vision is right. Being professional is knowing your place and so not knowing your place leads to a horror you can't describe without wandering into the world of the B-movie slasher.

A tractor passes slowly. The farmer looks down from the high bucket of his seat and frowns. Did he actually frown? Did he look for a dog? No dog, he would have thought. The woman in the street with a pram and no baby, the man stood outside a bar without cigarettes. Little trip wires. It's the uncanniness of it that sets the alarm bells on edge. What are you doing in an empty road in the middle of the day? What could you possibly want? Other minds begin to process the images. A man alone on a road in a wax jacket on a Tuesday. The wind pushing his hair to inhuman places, the eyes half shut against the light. The world needs answers, needs justifications. What do you know that we don't?

Action Portrait of Anselm Kiefer as a Psychological Fuck in Winter Landscape

2010-11-09T19:16:00.000-08:00

The Diaries of Arnon Grunberg (10)

2010-11-07T12:24:00.000-08:00
Arnon sat at the bar and ordered another Brooklyn lager, supporting his head and leaning with one elbow on the counter. The trivial absurdity dawned on him of only being able to drink Heineken when he still lived in Amsterdam. Although he hated the bourgeois fetish with feeling good, its obsession with consumption and with being entertained, at least a man should be able to choose his own beer, Arnon thought. Heineken controlled what type of beer you drank in Amsterdam. He had escaped that controlled environment of Amsterdam, where life took place under a bell jar, and never took on a scale bigger than individual man, the way it did here in New York. Here, a man felt in control over his destiny in the grid of the city, here you could believe in an illusion still. The scale of reality pushed a man up to the thought to be still physically part of the life around us. Standing on the top of the Rock and looking out over the sky scrapers, seeing their golden domes, the glass facades, rising so high above manhood, that what remained were only dots. The people below look just like ants, and they counted for no more than ants. And yet, looking at the world from the top of this ferry wheel, one felt like a god, not subjected, but in control of the spectacle. How different, to stand on the Wester belfry in the Jordaan and feel the heavy heaven of rainy clouds fall upon the city, every moment capable of washing away the sinful souls, opening up to give way to a Biblical deluge. Here on the island there was no one to look down on Arnon.

Conversations (1-2)

2010-11-06T17:23:00.000-07:00
1.
'So when they ask what the survey is about, what will you say?'
He pulled the dog, a chocolate labrador with a glistening coat, along by its burgundy colored leash, while his left hand reached back for his girlfriend's hand. She reached for his with her woolen mitten.

2.
'It is still very much up in the air.'
Her hair waved before her, covering her face. She pressed a cellphone tightly to her hear, and with short decisive steps hurried past me and an archaic chrome colored telephone booth on the side of the pavement.

Les Pensées (22)

2010-11-06T17:19:00.000-07:00
Artaud deliberately stepped flat into the puddle of rainwater at the curb's edge on the corner of the street, the water splashed up, breaking into small drops, and splattered onto the dry cotton of his pants. Artaud realized that death did not matter.

Les Pensées (21)

2010-11-04T11:40:00.000-07:00
Artaud stepped through the drizzle as if the rain beat on his face like the gentle rays of sunlight, he looked up and admired the modest and gray sky, and felt the wet relief of the water touch his face's skin like a soft brush, like the fingers of a lover rolling down his chest.

Petite Merde (6): The Loving Family of Mr Dirty Hands

2010-11-04T11:37:00.000-07:00

Petite Merde (5): The Republican Debt Cathedral

2010-11-03T11:53:00.000-07:00

Dull Boy Jack (1)

2010-11-01T16:54:00.000-07:00
Tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks, frozen at their computers, eyes fixated on screens, hands chained to keyboards and elbows glued to tabletops, lips pressed to taciturn lips, tongs bitten off, teeth ground down, I observed my coworkers at their computers, their eye bulbs and fingers in full concentration, no trace of the Neanderthal instinct of the genes that shaped their eyebrows and yokes, nothing of the evolutionary traits that selected out of the genetic variation these limbs hanging from torsos and heads. I imagined a group of apes in a thick forest gathering fruits, and looked around at the jungle of gray and beige office furniture in which we sat fated for most of the days of our lives.

4.17PM

2010-11-01T16:49:00.000-07:00

Clean out refrigerator
Remove washing from line - if it rains
Call Jill
Shopping: we needs basics, eggs, milk, bread etc...

Timothy! He doesn't hear. It shouldn't rain I don't think but it has clouded over. I don't know. I can't hear myself think with this thing on. He should come in now I think.

As she opens the door it screams so loud it makes her wince. He should have fixed it. Said he was going to take a look. Timothy! The child stops peddling and turns to look at her. Didn't you hear me calling? What if he didn't? That's actually something we should talk to Dr. Stevens about. He doesn't read as well as I thought either. Come on, inside. God you're getting heavy. And you're not to go too far on this thing alright? Not to go further than mummy can see from the window ok? He doesn't even scream or cry like other kids. Hello Roger. A devout christian out of work. Why do Christians wave and smile with such pantomime desperation? As if they need to prove just how much more they're enjoying it. Drop that there. David will pick it up on his way in. Or I'll tell him to. Inside I said.

I Am The Heart and Fractal Eternity

2010-10-31T15:51:00.000-07:00

Les Pensées

2010-10-31T08:29:00.000-07:00
Artaud opened the letter, unfolded the single sheet of paper and read a delusional paragraph elaborating on the difference between the English and American literary epic of the ordinary man. Artaud looked at the obliquely pasted stamp on the envelope and saw it was marked Buenos Aires, October 29, 2010.

The Lucky Man

2010-10-31T08:25:00.000-07:00
A week after he had come back to the city, he had sent out precisely one application for a position that he had been contacted about and that just seemed a perfect fit, Felix received an offer to start his new job the very next week. He had not been searching long for a new home. In fact, the first broker he contacted showed him the first apartment, which turned out to be a steal, they shook hands on it, and Felix signed the lease that very same day. Although Felix was an independent and critical man who believed that one should only love a woman if she was the right one, he had filled out the profile on the dating website and had met two women whom both seemed to be the love of his life, and because he couldn't choose he didn't. In the afternoon, Felix on his way to Grand Central, had taken the subway. There was an empty seat where Felix sat down and as he stared to the ground between his feet, he saw a silver dollar. He picked the dollar up, looked around at the half empty car of indifferent bobbing heads and put the coin in his pocket. The next day, Felix woke up with the sun shining in his face. He got dressed, walked out the door to get a coffee at the corner store. As he approached the corner, the lights turned to green and he crossed. He entered the grocery store, where Maria, the girl behind the counter greeted him with a smile. Felix! I just made fresh coffee! As he walked home, his neighbor was selling some of his belongings in front of his home. Felix walked up to the neighbor: David, how are you? They chatted while Felix eyed the books. At the top of the pile lay Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, which Felix had wanted to start reading, but he had not bought the book cause he thought it to be too expensive. Oh I absolutely loved the book, said David, but why don't you take it. No I can't charge a neighbor, take it, I am happy it is of use to anyone.

Laundrette

2010-10-30T07:00:00.000-07:00

Shot on the south coast of England in Winter 2004.

The Office in the Window

2010-10-27T14:37:00.000-07:00

Imagine: you draw a knife through an anthill and with the same knife gently push the two slices apart. Now every tunnel and half opened 'room' looks across a gulf of space into other passages, into other 'rooms'. Or if ants aren't your thing, imagine apartment blocks cut through by a street, the apartments lined and as mathematically poised behind shields of balconies as members of opposing armies.

And scouring this cross section with its jumble of plants and lounge chairs your eye falls quickly upon something that doesn't seem to fit. A square of life that shuns domesticity, a balcony of plantless neutrality: in short, an office. Behind a sensible black desk a slightly overweight, slightly greying, slightly well dressed man stares intently at a screen that loosely frames some excel spreadsheet or other. He scrolls up. Stop. He scrolls down. Stop. And now he makes a little note on a pad or sheet of printer paper. He checks his watch. Stretches. He seems pleased with that because now he's out on the sterile balcony for a fag.

That's when she appears. Sliding her balcony door open with a yawn, she pads out into the late afternoon sun, a dog under one arm, phone pressed in half shrug against her ear. About his age by the looks of her, about forty five or so. By complete coincidence she mirrors his pose exactly: close to the rails, one hand on hip. But she's a floor above. That's the tragedy. The smoke from his cigarette wafts up and past her. She doesn't seem to notice it. And then he's back in front of the computer, he makes a little note on a pad or sheet of printer paper etc. etc...

Under the Moon's Light

2010-10-25T16:57:00.000-07:00
When I looked at the moon, under the moon's brightly lit visible neck, I saw Jupiter, planet of man, the king of gods, Jupiter, a man of thunder and lightning, his force contracted in the night under the watchful eye of the moon, distant and barely interested, with a sliver of cold indifference, so manly cool, under a blue cloth of secrecy, covered in the moon's cloak, Jupiter does not love, so when Natsume Soseki loves, Jupiter loves, they stare up, fold their necks in creased upward stares, eyes looking away, as they ponder, the moon is so blue tonight.
And in that blue light, Venus shines, shines with a light brighter than Jupiter, there Venus, planet of beauty and fertility, female goddess of the mountains, sister of the earth, Diane of wild animals under the shadow of thick pine forests, I admit, woman's light is so much brighter than that of man. But most bright of all, more bright than man, more bright than the beauty of a woman, I stand and stare at the moon, my sister Selene, sister of words, sister of dawn, sister of earth, sister of animals, greater she is than man, she is Luna that I love greater than man, greater than woman, can I resist her eyes that do not look away, that do not say the moon is so blue tonight, Selene paces so gentle while the world sleeps, and she whispers I love you.

You Know It's a Fantasy, Don't You?

2010-10-24T18:20:00.000-07:00

Faces (20)

2010-10-24T06:38:00.000-07:00
(20) A slender man, half long black hair combed backward behind his ears, glistening in a slick reflection of the lanterns, has buried his face in the womb of his elbow, his under arm leaning against the dusty rear window of an old sports utility vehicles, his hand dangling down by the gravity of despair, his other hand holds a phone to his ear. His face bows down to the street, the world around has collapsed into the one dimension of the voice on the other side of the line. His shine black curls wave left and right on the gentle shaking of his head, which is lost in nothingness, all of space, all of the city, its architecture reaching to the yellowish night, the bellowing of voices walking by, rising and dying out, the gospel of merry happiness of Saint Marks Place, is absorbed in the silent tears that fill a man's eyes, leaning against a rear window.

Faces (17-19)

2010-10-23T07:20:00.000-07:00
(17) Her face did not just consist of layers, but of separate rolls, oil black blurbs hanging by a string from her jaw, her double chin a rubber tube, her cheeks two rotting apples, her eyes peering out like the outer shells of a pair of mussels, her forehead frowned like the shifting sand on the beach, her ears two disconnected joints, her hair nothing but a scuffled wig. Her hands like fatty claws just hang out of her sleeves, as she spoke with a defeated voice. (18) The tiny skeleton of an old lady, her head protracted from her neck, welded to her fragile shoulders by a single joint, her arms kept their balance like a wooden puppet, she moved in jerks. Her white scruffy hair was deceiving of her astute and kind voice. (19) Her face was marked by round shapes, her jaw and forehead formed a perfect circle, the bridge of her nose was retracted and hollow with wide nostrils, emphasizing the two round openings of the nose channels, while her large black eyes stared with a soft roundness, covered by the semicircles of her dark eyebrows, resting on her loving, bulbous cheeks.