au Vuillard

Das Intime in der Kunst:
Wo die schöne Tapete und das Kleid
sich gegen das Gesicht verschwören.
Nicht  die Möbel, nicht die Tasse Kaffee,
nicht die graziösen Bewegungen eines Tänzers werden ins Licht geworfen,
sondern das wehrlose Gesicht,
oder die müßigen Hände,
die vielleicht einmal tätig waren
und jetzt entweder absichtslos auf dem Sessel rühren
oder gelähmt und farblos ruhen.


Eine hohe Kunst ist es:
Spurlos verschwinden zu können.
Und ich denk an die zusammenstoßenden Muster
in der alten Wohnung in Petersburg
und an die blutleeren Hände,
die so herausragten,
und das ganze fließende Meer dann störten.
Ich warte, bis die Muster
sich an dem Gesicht und an den Händen rächen,
und glaube (nur kurz),
ein heiliges Antlitz im Irrgarten der Farben und Linien gefangen zu sehen.

Before Aeschylus and After Auschwitz

"Why is it that we end up talking about our writing more than we write?" she asked through a cut lip. The cup she was holding was chipped slightly on the edge and the white exposed ceramic was stained lightly with blood. She refused to throw this cup away, considering it to be a 'memento of carelessness'. "Why buy new and nice things only to have them broken by others?" she asked once. She took a sip from the other side of the cup and looked at her listener as if this were all part of a ritual, at once absurd and meaningful. Every movement was ritual, every act aside from the biologically necessary (or at least that which has been 'proven' to be), was religious in the sense that it involved a leap of logic and faith. Why write at all? Yet even the monologue has held its ground and will not leave. It's folded in on itself like a vaulted ceiling in a temple in the sky.
The trees seemed to breathe, slowly and rhythmically. She looked up as if to speak to the branches, then returned her gaze to her listener and waited.

"Oh boy": we heard the familiar voice, a refrain, not so much a complaint with a specific object, except that, perhaps in that moment, the sugar was all that mattered. "Oh boy, oooh boy". the Ohs grew longer and more desperate. People began to stare. They said nothing.

"Can you spare a nickel or a penny or a quarter or a dime or a dollar?" An auctioneer somewhere on Bloor Street, usually in Koreatown. He never looks you straight in the eye and his posture belies uncertainty. Perhaps he's not called to this. Perhaps he's not an auctioneer, he wonders as the people pass him.

This woman sings, always in Italian. She has not washed in days, though her dress shows signs of an aspired-for glory and glamour. She is a reincarnation of Maria D'Avalos. She drinks her coffee and for a moment seems to be in Toronto rather than Venosa. Maybe she is lost or dead.

Disjecta membra: "Spare change? Spare change? Spare change?" Incessantly, persistently. No legs. Occasional disjointed remarks: "Happy holidays!" in the winter. "Watch out while crossing the street" at other times of the year, should you say hello or otherwise acknowledge her. She smiles beautifully through her corner of Bathurst and Bloor face. She spends most of her life on this square metre. Most feel weighted down by her persistence, her routine.

So comfortable in these repetitions -- they all are. And yet when we see them we shudder a little without always knowing it.  A nervousness and mildly obsessive-compulsive quality under the surface lurks beneath for all of us, it is common property, and when we trip over the same step again, or worse, over another step in the same manner, we know that our stumbling is the constant, the repetition. Do we step out of it ever? Ah, but that's precisely where we always stumble!

herrliche Atmosphäre

olsen olsen

impressive audio-visual harmony

3 years ago, for memories' sake and old ghosts

Youtube must have some crazy algorithms.
It was three years ago today i saw Matt Eliott play, supported by Benjamin Wetherill (the artist I was there to see, really). They decided to recommend his "Something about Ghosts" to me today.

Ghosts everywhere. Over the top. Fits the song, actually. To my surprise at the time, the lesser-known supporting group 7 Hertz I found to be the most impressive, overturning all my musical expectations for that evening: Wisniowka

BW was still in good form but was trying out the new direction. He smoked the same B&H cigarette I used to smoke.
I miss that older incarnation, actually: how lonely the moon


Ghosts still here, 4 -- not just 3 -- years later, in fact.

Medusas Albtraum

Wie zu überwinden: die Angst,
sehend -- anschauend -- betrachtend
gesehen zu werden.
So viel wollte sie beschreiben,
als ob diese Momente und Geschichten beschreibenswert wären.
Und das sind sie.
Oder fotografierbar!
und das sind sie.
Aber die Angst,
gesehen zu werden
konnte sie nicht wegtreiben,
hat sie stattdessen weggetrieben.
Augen runterschauend
vor den Füßen, zu Boden gerichtet,
wie ein Urteil.
Die Füßen spüren nichts. Ungefährlich.
Zur Sicherheit aber wanderte sie den Blick
noch einmal, und noch einmal,
ständig weg, ständig weg vom Ziel.
Die Frau mit den langen Haaren
und dem Mitleid erregenden Blick,
die am Boden kauernd saß...
Angst vor dem Mitleid?
Nein. Angst, diese Leiden auszunützen
und dadurch zerstören.
Sind sie nicht heilig?
Was ist heilig?
Medusas Albtraum.

===

lass die heiligen Töne gehört, gekannt werden!
woher dieser Antrieb?
Sie -- sie sind irgendwo,
oder nur in der Luft?
Ich bilde mir ein, ich höre das Wort: "Vienna"

Statt Furcht
hat man Angst vor dem Heiligen

Überfluss! ist jeder Fluss

Zum Gedenken an Strauss/HvH

not root

At certain moments, carefully isolated like jewels in their settings, this city is mysteriously unifying: an image one had as a child, with a future seen and a past intuited in the sand, which one fancied, feared and was happy not to be a part of, in spite of its allure -- but here it is, encased.

No, this is neither New York nor Chicago, though I've often wanted to make the comparison with the latter. It is a strange amalgamation and I almost feel a loyalty precisely to this, to this magpie-city and its stranger-dwellers, whose ritualistic gestures I need not understand nor recognise (yes, they might as well be birds!). And for me, too, the glass-topped tables at this cafe speak softly, shuddering subtly at the sound waves given off from the music of the first half of the twentieth century. Let me sit here a while, please.

Well, but then Rousseau:
"That is how the figurative word is born before the literal word, when our gaze is held in passionate fascination; and how it is that the first idea it conveys to us is not that of truth."

---
I still feel a sharp, if short, pain at the sight of a dead bird.

But thank you -- for 13 years of colour and sound:

Yehuda Amichai

        The great prophets threw out half their prophecies
        like the half-smoked cigarette butts of a nervous smoker.
        I pick them up and roll myself some poor prophecies.


My great grandfather greets me in these lines.