I saw the air fly......

I saw the air fly 

In 1994 an ex-wallstreeter started up his company, Cadabra. After a lawyer misheard this as ‘cadaver’, Jeff Bezos renamed the company Amazon.com

Ballard caught its essential flavour when, at the end of the Blair years, he wrote about a politics of “fleeting impressions, [and] an illusion of meaning floating over a sea of undefined emotions”.

guts for garters 

everything seems okay until suddenly it ain’t

Blue de travail clothes dye 

“In America, blackness was about the erasure of your identity in Africa, and the creation of your identity in opposition to whiteness. So blackness has had to be about a constant reinvention of ourselves, even in relation to ourselves” Alvaro Barrington - painter of mixed Haitian and Grenadian heritage. Educated in Hunter College in USA and Slade School of Art, UK

Japanese wives sometimes refer to their retired husbands as sodai-gomi (wet fallen leaf)

We were simply not ourselves

Adam and Eve, Orvieto cathedral, Umbria, Italy

Wanda Jackson was a sweet girl....

‘Wanda Jackson was the sweet girl with a nasty voice’. 

Hej skat in Danish translates as ‘darling’, ‘treasure’, but also ‘tax’. 

Wartime measures that became permanent: passports during the First World War to monitor movement and prevent spies; income tax to help fund the Napoleonic war

There is no word in Latin for ‘interesting’ or for ‘shrug’ in French 

“Nobody knows anything” William Goldman

Iron foot Jack 

‘……My neighbour liquored up now, starts his big car, races the engine, and heads out again filled with confidence. The radio wails, beats something out. When he has gone there are only the little ponds of silver water that shiver and can’t understand their being there.’ Marriage Raymond Carver

Whittling wise words from a cleft stick, he always made things seem better; his carpentry fitted and could bear weight.

Let me hang up........

Let me hang up in a while. 

“She was just here for us and with us,” he said. “I watched her body fly.”

He said let’s do something even if it is something wrong  

The ‘beautiful family’ with two young daughters in 802; the young married couple in 804; the single father in 801 who coached his son’s baseball team. In an instant, their apartments were gone. ‘I know where my mom is,’ Rachel Spiegel said as she stood in a cloud of smoke and dust

A good poem has no full stops

Lying notch back to the head-high sun, two fathoms out 

A place of broken clouds and flat fish  

In Italy the matches are joined together. You would like this. And they have a special name for them but I can’t say it. You would like this as well. 

Her personality is assessed on the quality of her garden: simple but optimistic

‘When you invent the ship you also invent the shipwreck’ Paul Virilio

The many dog-eared pages wait patiently for his return

Artwork. Jannis Kounellis, Fondazione Prada, Venice Biennale 2019

I met a girl……..

I met a girl who sang the blues, And I asked her for some happy news, But she just smiled and turned away. American Pie

Spencer Silver, the Inventor of Post-it Notes, is dead at 80

“I remember someone saying, ‘Joe, now you caught the car.’ I said, ‘No, I think I got the bus.’ I’m the dog that caught the bus.” Joe Biden 

“Our brains can’t see, or hear, or taste. They sit in the dark, making up a world informed by electrical stimuli from our sense organs. The act of perception is an act of prediction, of estimation. What we consciously perceive is our brain’s ‘best guess’ at what the outside world is like.” Laurence Scott, Picnic Comma Lightning

Photographers of interest: Brooke di Donato - uncanny domestic  Ben Zack - colour, style Thomas Wrede - scale, simulation 

‘A good toolbox is not the same as a toolbox full of good tools: two dozen top-quality hammers will not do the job. Instead, what you need is variety: a hammer, pliers, saw, a choice of screwdriver and more’ Tim Harford FT

Soundcloud.....

Poems from the Soundcloud

Pressure creates diamonds.........

Pressure creates diamonds but also cracks ice and bursts blood vessels.

Susan Sontag ‘where the stress falls.’

The bridge of hesitation 

If you are not at the table you are on the menu

The empathic position is not, ‘I know how you feel’, but rather, ‘I don’t know how you feel.’

Words need to be weighed carefully, like currency. Often ‘small change’ is the most valuable and helpful, when given at the right moment. 

Poetry is words touching each other 

Asking whether the monarchy should be abolished is akin to whether of not we should dispense with pandas. Hilary Mantel said: “some people find them endearing; some pity then for their precarious situation; everyone stares at them, and however airy the enclosure, it’s still a cage.”  

She was a bone setter; he made mirrors 

Before the celebrations

An inch wide…….

An inch wide and a mile deep

Hemingway’s celebrated explanation of how people go bankrupt: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

The Magic Circle’s motto Indocilis Privata Loqui means being ‘not apt to disclose secrets’.

The primary aim of magic as a performing art: the creation of a juxtaposition between the conviction that something cannot happen and the observation that it just has.

Love spells cast in Surrey in the last century; a witch in a bottle from Sussex found in 1926; and a lemon made in 1891 to bring about the death of a certain Mr William Smith, a greengrocer in Naples. All are displayed in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, alongside Chinese wax figures stuck with pins, shamanic crowns and Sarawak spirit wands.

Ancient Greek has no word for blue

‘Sic transit gloria mundi’ is a Latin phrase that means ‘Thus passes worldly glory’

‘Over The Rainbow’ was the most popular piece of music in 1939, and has become shorthand for that bittersweet sense of being in tough times and walking towards better ones. Yip Harburg’s heartfelt lyrics speak of hope, but so does Harold Arlen’s music – and when the tune jumps a whole octave within the elongated “some-where” it flies over the metaphorical rainbow of seven notes to land on the eighth. And it’s that leap that really feels like the essence of hope: half rooted in reality, half up in the sky. Half present, half future. Part Kansas, part Oz.    Matt Haig Guardian  

Old head lonnie

Old Head Lonnie

Misinformation thrives online because users tend to aggregate in communities of interest, which causes reinforcement and fosters confirmation bias, segregation and polarisation.

To counter a belief in a hoax or conspiracy, it’s helpful to ask a hesitant individual, “what information would help you accept, for example, a Covid vaccine or that a moon landing actually took place?”

Chronos, a time that is quantitive, is something that we worry about and fear, that there is not enough of it or we have squandered it. Kairos is about the opportune moment, a living time, a wander, a daydream. We are not losing time but making it. This is the important one. 

The British Invisible Mending Service in Marylebone, London - textile repairs

John Keats epitaph: ‘Here lies one whose name was written in water’

Aqua Alta.......

Aqua Alta - high tide in Venice

lèche-vitrine / licking windows (window shopping in France)

In parts of medieval Europe the official New Year beginning on 25th of March,‘Lady Day’ which was believed to be the date when the angel announced to Mary that she was carrying the child Jesus. As early as 1520, Venice adopted the 1st January as the start of the New Year and other European countries followed at intervals, though England did not catch up until 1752.

His room was like a child’s pocket, full of marbles and treasures

A father, who was not a playful man, and a mother who had an extraordinary capacity for happiness

Winter journey

His nature was really like a sheet....

“His nature was really like a sheet of paper that have been folded so often in every direction that it is impossible to straighten out.” Sodom and Gomorrah Marcel Proust 

“How are you doing?”

“In a word, fine; in two words, not fine.”

In America people don’t drive their cars, they wear them 

‘History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes’ Mark Twain 

Hard to say...

Dark hairs glove my hands and finger backs, over growing the pooling liver spots and splinter scar. 

14 characteristics of fascism by Umberto Eco 

1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”

2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”

3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”

4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”

5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”

6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”

7. The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”

8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”

9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”

10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”

11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”

12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”

13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

There are decades......

‘There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.’ Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

‘One can travel the world and see nothing. To achieve understanding it is necessary not to see many things but to look hard at what you do see’  Giorgio Morandi 

Alabama chrome - duct tape on cars 

Southbank Centre Nevin Aladag: Fanfare | Southbank Centre

Slightly more useless 

“It takes four or five years at least for European children to construct disgust in their own excrement.…….In 16th century Paris, the size of a dung heap outside of a peasants door was a visible sign of wealth.” Robert Muchembled ‘Smells’ 

“If you place a glass sphere on the Venetian floor it moves because nowhere is ever still or straight.” Venetians engineer Franco Planon

Video art - collections about to be released.    jsc.art     daata.art

Lungenkranke - lungsick 

A Fisherman Told Me...

“A fisherman told me that his cousin never used to get seasick at all. But then he had kids, and suddenly he did. I thought this was fascinating. It made me wonder whether seasickness isn’t somehow connected to things that tie you to land....perhaps it functions a bit like homesickness in that way.” Lamorna Ash

Other transmissible contagions: fake news, forgetting, fear, jokes, rumour and gratitude.

Ways to say goodbye

Where have I been all my life? 

The house becomes a place of tiny skies, a patchwork of views that cannot be joined. Looking out, in all directions the weather is more noticeable than before and less relevant.

The sofa faces west ...

The sofa faces west. Through the window the rain runs down the hill to the A41. It is cold, sometime in February. The storm is coming, trees are tense, a shutter loose.

Inside, the music streams Joel Virgel, The Platters, and Gillian Welch, a mood of love and regret - somethings are meant to be. Time lingers and hangs about waiting, surrounded by partially read weekend papers and slowly cooked joints.

It is a Sunday gathering. Things are about the change.

(written days before news of the coronavirus in China)

Drawing by the Artist's Mother...

This drawing was created on a wet Sunday in the early ‘80s. It is a profile portrait of myself as a 19-year-old seated in front of wooden French windows and florid wallpaper, drawn by my dying mother. Using a scrap of paper and pencil, as a young art student I had an idea to reverse Whistler’s painting of his mother Arrangement in Grey and Black. Instead it would be a portrait drawing of the artist by his mother. 

A silly idea, it did however produce something valuable and surprising: a drawing that captures the trace of her hand, her looking eye and response to a son who left far from home for a university life in the south. 

It is both a terrible and a wonderful drawing. Though technically poor, it is decisively accurate, simple and concise. Ignoring the background entirely, she clearly struggles with the chair, fitting the lines and form together as an approximation, laid out as if on the floor or left hanging in the air. No matter. Her attention is on the face, the thing she knows best. It is large, the profile tracing the nose and generous chin covered in diagrammatic and hastily marked stubble. The glasses sit confidently on the nose. There is a watchful eye and an unlikely smile, and the hair, auburn, something she always liked and commented on, heavily shaded. The collarless shirt, sprouting thin symmetrical arms, is carefully buttoned with interspersed dots, whilst the legs, less important, tentatively hang from a faint set of braces, sweeping down to pointed feet that were in fact naval deck shoes. My body floats, framed, suspended in time and space, as was the case. 

Looking at it again, as I regularly do, 38 years later, it is clear that this was not just a drawing, or even a role reversing act, but a paper certificate confirming existence, a life about to be lived and a life about to be lost, both at a pencil greying threshold, waiting for something to happen. It has become a loving goodbye, a wordless letter. 

Where leaves rhyme...

Where leaves rhyme with bananas and tables become donkeys

If you know what you want, you are half way to attaining it 

‘Art is the supreme game which the will plays with itself.’ S.Sontag

The sound of covering pan lids, unstacked plates and the weighted bell, all clear-aired reminders that the city is on the move again. 

There are two Roman words: sfizio meaning a “whim”, or literally something that you don’t really need. But it has come to mean a delicious thing, usually fried in oil, that you absolutely must eat. The second is sargarozzare, which is defined as “to consume or throw back with joy, and with no intention of stopping.”

Rachel Roddy Tales from an Italian Kitchen 

‘Well, what Tony should have been thinking, I guess, and what we should all be thinking - although we can’t live that way - is that life is really short. And there are good times in it and there are bad times in it. And that we don’t know why we are here, but we do know that 20 miles up it’s freezing cold, it’s a freezing cold universe,  and here we have this thing called love, which is our only defence, really, against all that cold, and that’s a very brief interval and that, when it’s over, I think you’re probably always blindsided by it.’ 

David Chase on the final episode of the Sopranos

Art makes....

Art makes physical a view point, feeling or response to the world, or sense of ourselves within it. It can also be a material play, creating meaning through haptic conversation and dialogues with stuff, which then echoes existing works using a similar language.

BRASS NOTES

tomorrow’s fine

tell me later

all is well 

looks like it

can’t wait

and you

These ’notes’ are proposed to be situated in the arboretum, to be found or encountered. They are curious and differ from other lists of names, dates or phrases of valour or loss seen on the plaques and monuments across the site. They are notes of short, affectionate reassurances and confirmations taken from fragments of personal phone calls, texts or letters, which suggest continuity and stability. Deep etched into brass blocks, such partial conversations between lovers, husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters and friends become memorialised - something slight that was said, written or typed, now permanently holds a poignant significance.  

Each short phrase is purposely everyday and prosaic, ones we all regularly use to reinforce love and share news and experience, where ‘we will speak later’ is captured evidence of I’m still here and everything is fine. They are endings to other expected beginnings. However, when this fails, when death happens, we are left with the fragments, an eternal silence of no response. There is no more. 

We carry such texts in our pockets and in boxes, lost for words. 

Tomorrow is fine, can’t wait, and you.....

Proposal for the National Memorial Arboretum