|
|
|
|
|
| |
Friday, August 15, 2003
I want the passion
which puts your feet on the ceiling
this fist
to smash forward
Osip Mandelstam
There is a bullet hole in a pane of glass: it's so neat that the glass has barely fractured. A small black hole rimmed by an outer ring of compact shattered glass, like a pupil surrounded by an iris, or a geological map of a volcano. It changes as you look at it; it could be many different things. The further away it gets from what it is, the more beautiful it looks. Washington DC, October, 2002: body slumps onto a car seat, back window splattered with brain, bone and blood > There is a woman with her back to you and she has a fine figure: tall, slim, and strong. She stands well, arms dropped to her sides, an iron pot clutched in her right hand, her head draped in a large silk scarf blown by a slight dry breeze. In front of her, her house, its front blown off, clothes and furniture crushed between smashed concrete and tile. The thing is, you can't see her face. But I like her posture: it suggests defiance. Jenin, May, 2002 > There is a man standing triumphant behind a flock of fine French flags. It's Le Pen, fists clenched, smile wide. France, April, 2002 > There is a man carrying a faint body out of an opera house. There is a soldier and a stunned crowd. Footage is grainy. Moscow, October, 2002 > There is a demonstration, a coffin, a bomb, a sign. I have the pictures, all I have is pictures. There is an intense pitch which becomes nothing but the inability to retreat. There are many random processes, more than there are coherent procedures. There is wasted time, there is a lot of wasted time. I waste time: my eyes scan the magazine rack and are greedy for the pictures and the words, greedy for the past and the future. I consume, I gorge, on fact and face and fate. I am dazzled, and hungry. Enough! I leave because I am brave, wade through a stale breeze, back onto the street. The world is full of things >
The weight of a small bird is sufficient to move the earth
Leonardo da Vinci
There is this sort of wry smile or this look of contempt or there is this determination and this quiet strengh or this fragile but fierce power. There are these strong, clear, beautiful eyes, full of tears. There is the measure and the mass of all pain inflicted and felt. There is disengagement and the need to disappear. There is a chain of events that begins with a simple misunderstanding and leads to conflict and disintegration. There is courage in blindness and weakness in hindsight. There is intuition and knowledge, the gift of one, the curse of the other. There is always something you couldn't say, or something you meant to say, or something you shouldn't have said. There are always things you do not expect from others: surprises, but disappointments too. There are standards, risks, elevations and deprivations. There is honesty, resistance, and a combination of the two that takes you forward. There is the impatience of sensation and expression, the violent impatience that breaks syntax and perception. There is ill-discipline and joy. There is the constant heat broken by the clear cold. There is conflict and resolution and the words that cross between. There are the lost points of a compass. There is the abandonment of navigation. There is the undiscovered island. There is the teeming archipelago. There is the lost tribe. There is desert sand free of footprints and tire tracks. There is the fog of battle. There are the fir trees of North Carolina: fog forest and trees. There is the ocean that devours, crushes the breath from your lungs, spits out bones and dreams. There is the ocean that captures the colours of climate, conquest and creation. There are the extremes of boredom and heartbreak. There is the extreme drama and delight of beauty: a face, a joke, a kiss, a good sky. There is a trip down the Nile, evening on a beach, an unexpected meeting. There is something untouched inside always. There is something to redeem if you dare.
Lost at sea. Yes it's a nice idea for a while, but fucking unnerving...Seeyou later. 12, 1 ish, your time.
This is the opposite of waste. But don't horde, don't hide. This is not the opposite of anything, this is the appetite for everything. This is the affirmation I promised all along. An oil tanker cut in two, a black tide, a gannet sinking in an oil-slick. Weather and waves break up oil. Silver seals dance all through springtime. Guillemots fly. The falcon ascends. If this is a time for fear then don't be afraid. This is: and rather than or. Strengh rather than power. This is how I would like to end and yet it is merely the point from which I will continue. The mass of bodies crossing a bridge during a city blackout provokes fear and apprehension when it should inspire elation, festivity, hope. This meltdown and this collapse suggests the possibility and probability of new connections and escape routes. The tender, temperate complexities of dream and reality. A boat to Stockholm, a hotel room in Hamburg, frying fish on Swansea sand, lost in Venetian backstreets. Don't lose these threads. Don't lose sight of this: the search for alliance, affinity, an imagination to curve with, compliment and extend your own. We're cowards about love: a disaster, or a spent currency, or too absolute. But we overload it: it's easy. When we speed, we cruise, city voyagers in a Hackney carriage, it doesn't demand extraction or capitulation. Eternal summer gilds us. When this ends, we are still alive, you and I. When we arrive this will end. We become part of the soil, the air, the rain, the sunlight. Or we drift, spread and bud like seeds. Right now, we're nowhere near, but we will get there. In the meantime, the world is full of things. Let's go exploring.
In one way or another, the animal is more a fleer than a fighter, but its flights are also conquests, creations.
Deleuze and Guattari
12:43 AM
Thursday, August 14, 2003
Missive from Chinese Turkistan
Mr. Watkins continues my global education, while I go green. Next year I leave the country.
> Its five past eight here, or five past six depending
>whether you use Beijing or Xinjiang time. Despite this Province
>being the size of Western Europe China refuses to budge on a uniform
>time zone, creating a myriad of transport problems for me, not to
>mention contributing to my general confusion.
> I'm in Kashgar, perhaps the furthest west city in China,
>a place where the silk road splits into its northern and southern
>routes east around the Taklamakan Desert. I've only been a few hours
>but its clear how different this place is from China. The city
>itself is typical in terms of its layout: Wide flat highways,
>avenues lined by white tile housing and clothes horse gated
>compunds, medium size block shaped towers of blue glass and steel,
>yet it seems to be in a completely different continent.
> While the streets resound to the constant refrain of
>horns the shop signs are written both in characters and the Arabic
>script of the Uyghur language. The Han Chinese population is sharply
>differentiated from the multicultural makeup of the majority of the
>populace, which also includes Kazaks and Kyrgz. I've walked down
>streets where brown skinned Asiatic Turkic men slowly pace down
>market streets, long wisps of white hair streaming from their chins.
>In narrow alleys pale skinned, round cap wearing figures sip their
>tea while kebabs cook on a raised trough on the street, watching the
>WWF on the television, a scene so reminiscent of Turkey I lost a
>sense of where I was. Blond haired boys play in the street, or work
>along side their fathers, hatchet in hand, building wooden toys.
>While Greek looking artisans, clad in dark clothes and flat cap
>hammer hot metal into teapots, tossing the waste shards in a molten
>pile a few steps outside the shaded wooden workshop. Its clear to
>see the remains of the trade route from Rome to Xian, the faces of
>numerous nomadic groups, the collected nations of the Chaghatai
>khanate in the faces of the people that stream around the city.
> Not that I've seen too much of the women's faces here.
>Islamic dress is almost mandatory down the crowded side streets and
>teeming bazaars. Women wear patterned skirts and long sleved tops,
>encrusted with sequins. While some bare their heads, most young wear
>a seethrough, light headscarf with rabbit ears of cloth tied at the
>back. Older counterparts are dressed with dark hoods that touch
>their shoulders and stretch down to their lower back. Some dumpy
>figures wear a hijab that makes a burka look like a plate glass
>window, a croched brown mesh cowl that does not even give freedom to
>the eyes.
> That said no one seems to the two women I am travelling
>with much hassle, perhaps because they were chaperoned by an
>englishman and myself. Also because the bare arms and legs of female
>Chinese girls is very apparent. People actually are very friendly
>here, with the traditions of hospitality and generosity that is
>similar to the middle east. As we tried to order in an Uyghur
>restuarant we had some problems for a while until one of the waiters
>said: "I'm sorry, I don't speak Chinese, but we can talk in
>English". I thought that was great, just like people in Wales
>Uyghurs will feign ignorence due to what they view as the colonial
>actions of the Chinese, whose settler population increases every
>year. However to us they seem to be very eager to makes friends,
>while trying to get me to buy a carpet.
4:53 PM
oh my Dubai
liquid city
Dubai is a coastal settlement, centred on a sheltered creek that feeds into the Persian Gulf. Its people initially lived by fishing, pearling and small-scale agriculture and this remained so until the late 1800s, when Dubai's then ruler granted concessions to traders, prompting many to switch custom from Iran and Sharjah. In 1903 the British shipping line used Dubai as a base, which brought it into contact with British India for the first time. The city grew as a trading outpost and continually improved facilities to entice and entertain traders. These are its fundamentals: trade and leisure. Dubai is a maritime city, a coastal emirate. It owes its existence to water, rivers, the seas and the oceans. It owes its success to sailing skill and technique, boat technology, navigation, and free trade (the circulation of goods and capital in fluid forms and networks). Dubai is self-conscious about its maritime origin and heritage: some of its most famous buildings share the same architecural motifs, mimicking vast sails or waves. Two impressive examples: the Burj Al Arab hotel (one of the tallest buildings in the world and the only 7-star hotel, it lies on an artificial island and bursts up into the sky in a great white swoosh of sail constructed with double-Teflon-coated glass fibre) and the National Bank of Dubai (this is more like a sculpture than a building: its convex glass front again resembles a vast, gleaming sail, this time rendered with a sheer and shimmering Futurist vigour). Another good example is the Dubai Creek Golf and Yacht Club clubhouse. One more crucial factor: in 1966 Dubai discovered oil, and this was the final catalyst in the city's ecomomic and social development. Added to the liquid routes and networks of commerce and trade was liquid gold. Dubai could now exploit and export its own wealth and remain the site and host for alien transactions. Dubai is a liquid city: its image is reflected in water, oil spills from its veins, trade converts solid assets into fluid capital. It is a purely post-industrial city, a late city with no basis in manufacture or heavy industry: oil extraction is its only concession to blue-collar labour. All else is transaction, speculation, and material luxury. Dubai's substance is contained on the software of a million laptops, the rest scatters on a sea breeze.
index to a future world
cultural hinge, taster, litmus test
quasar
Dubai is a city still under construction, a speculative and daring vision Sheikh Mohammed has begun to realise. Dubai is currently a projection of a future, exclusive Utopian city. Despite desperately low manual and menial wages, Dubai is inventing itself as the prototype city of wealth, luxury and surface detail. This is the city of work and play combined: an executive playground, a business quasar. It's not a decadent city, as such, it excells at ease and expense rather than debauchery. It's an Islamic city so laws are strict. Pornography and drugs are illegal and related crimes are heavily punished. Street vendors, car-washers and beggars are also outlawed, and the only vendors that do persist are DVD piraters. There is no cheap accommodation in Dubai, no youth hostels, no backpackers. There is no income or sales tax. Money circulates in Dubai like oxygen and blood. Life centres on little else. Massive construction projects begin constantly, artificial islands, beach resorts, luxury hotels, apartments and villas, all exclusive and expensive. Dubai is a future destination that has yet to arrive. Opulent houses and apartments on the Palm resorts have sold out before being built. Dubai lights the imagination of the world's richest: they want in on the Sheikh's vision of synthetic splendor. Dubai is a city that is styled: a city designed in its entirety, totally inorganic: a plastic Utopia. Traditional past-times and events are encouraged, such as falconry, camel racing and dhow sailing, but this is token and insignificant. The real culture is elsewhere: in the Gold Souk (a nest of streets dealing exclusively in gold) or the month-long Dubai Shopping Festival which attracts over 2.5 million visiters each year. The city spills out year by year: bands of new apartments, offices, restaurants, hotels, square metres of retail space, entertainment and lesuire facilities. Dubia deals in certain basics. Important to the appeal of Dubai in this future projection is the "greening" programme. Dubai being, essentially, a desert city, it holds little aesthetic appeal to its future visitors and settlers in this current state, so grass, palm trees and flowers are introduced and maintained by vast numbers of workers and a 24 hour watering programme. Dubai is the template for the perfect future city, no crime, low tax, and a cultural hierachy of finance and consumerism. The city stripped to its essentials.
future modes of existence perfected
style encased in style
luxury as law
I have a vision. I look to the future, 20, 30 years. I learnt that from my father, Sheikh Rashid. He is the true father of Modern Dubai. I follow his example. He would rise early and go alone to watch what was happening on each of his projects. I do the same. I watch. I read faces. I take decisions and I move fast. Full throttle.
Sheikh Mohammed
postscript: just discovered this: Dubai plans to build the world's first underwater hotel! Called Hydropolis, the hotel will resemble a giant submarine anchored in the Gulf, and accessed only by a tunnel via a waterside reception area.
12:19 AM
Wednesday, August 13, 2003
hot weapons
One Russian arrested two years ago in Italy had flown an Antonov 124 to Kiev and loaded it with 113 tonnes of rifles, rocket propelled grenades and ammunition for the Ivory Coast.
2:49 PM
Johnny Depp in action
KUALA LUMPUR, Aug. 12 (AP)--Pirates with automatic weapons opened fire on a
Taiwanese cargo ship near Indonesia's troubled Aceh province last week,
wounding the vessel's captain, a maritime official said Tuesday.
The attackers pursued the ship for an hour Saturday in Indonesian waters near
the northern tip of Sumatra island, said Noel Choong, head of the
International Maritime Bureau's Malaysian-based piracy watch center.
The pirates eventually disappeared without boarding the ship, which had been
carrying a large cargo of fish to Singapore, Choong said.
It was the eighth pirate attack in the area that has been reported to the
center since May.
Choong said authorities couldn't confirm whether the attackers might have
included rebels who have been fighting for an independent state in Aceh, an
oil-
and gas-rich province in northern Sumatra.
The ship's Taiwanese captain, Lo Ying-hsiung, was shot in the leg during the
attack.
No injuries occurred among the rest of the 31-member crew, that included
Taiwanese, Chinese, Philippine and Vietnamese citizens.
The 900-kilometer (550-mile) Malacca Strait, between peninsular Malaysia and
Sumatra, is one of the world's busiest shipping lanes.
The International Maritime Bureau has long listed the strait's entrance near
Aceh as a high-risk area where ships are commonly robbed or hijacked by
pirates armed with rifles and machetes.
12:47 PM
Tuesday, August 12, 2003
Tears of St. Lawrence: oh! beautiful
6:10 PM
Monday, August 11, 2003
That Sunday Times story about women undergoing foot surgery in order to wear "sexy power shoes" (re:"The brutal rule of fashion" below) is a sinister echo of the Grimm's Cinderella. Cinderella's wicked step-sisters ("beautiful and fair of face, but vile and black of heart") are prompted by their mother to literally disfigure themselves in a desperate attempt to fit Cinderella's shoe and defraud Prince Charming. This is from the, ah, "uncut" version:
Next morning, he went with it to the father, and said to him, no one shall be my wife but she whose foot this golden slipper fits. Then were the two sisters glad, for they had pretty feet. The eldest went with the shoe into her room and wanted to try it on, and her mother stood by. But she could not get her big toe into it, and the shoe was too small for her. Then her mother gave her a knife and said, "Cut the toe off, when you are queen you will have no more need to go on foot." The maiden cut the toe off, forced the foot into the shoe, swallowed the pain, and went out to the king's son. Then he took her on his his horse as his bride and rode away with her. They were obliged, however, to pass the grave, and there, on the hazel-tree, sat the two pigeons and cried,
"Turn and peep, turn and peep,
there's blood within the shoe,
the shoe it is too small for her,
the true bride waits for you."
Then he looked at her foot and saw how the blood was trickling from it. He turned his horse round and took the false bride home again, and said she was not the true one, and that the other sister was to put the shoe on. Then this one went into her chamber and got her toes safely into the shoe, but her heel was too large. So her mother gave her a knife and said, "Cut a bit off your heel, when you are queen you will have no more need to go on foot." The maiden cut a bit off her heel, forced her foot into the shoe, swallowed the pain, and went out to the king's son. He took her on his horse as his bride, and rode away with her, but when they passed by the hazel-tree, the two pigeons sat on it and cried,
"Turn and peep, turn and peep,
there's blood within the shoe,
the shoe it is too small for her,
the true bride waits for you."
He looked down at her foot and saw how the blood was running out of her shoe, and how it had stained her white stocking quite red. Then he turned his horse and took the false bride home again.
An allegoric shard, re: Sex and the City diktat: Rules of attraction reduce to self-abuse, deceit and, occasionally, despair and self-contempt. It becomes so that The Hollow hurts. The pleasure of being ruled by the shape and the cut of hardcore fashion criteria is physical pain. Wincing with delight and adoration, the body has to bend and crush and slice and re-arrange to the dictation of line, form, fabric, material. Suffer for style: punish, self-mutilate, impair and wear. This gorgeous fetish object seeped in blood, broken skin and splintered bone.
Shoes rule!
Shoes do rule: just ask the Salvador Dali caress. Shoes rule: Guy Bourdin will erase the girl, murder the girl to pore the shoes, covet the livid pink, red or black patent leather shoes. (And he hates them too: hates their domination, their symbolic power.) Enigmatic and arbitrary aesthetic codes: the secret language of the commodity fetishist. This world of erotic detail is
Hot black leather Louis Vuitton slingbacks, uPVC-white Miu Miu wedges, Gucci turqoiuse leather stillettos, large strap black Hogan sandles, Anya Hindmarch red and white stripe canvas flats, Laurence Dacade silver leather boots plus tassles, Free Lance metallic heels, Pied a Terre snakeskin flats, Marni leather sandles with chain detail, Jil Sander leather and mesh sandles with ankle tie, knee-high Gaultier lace-up boots...
Patrick Cox adverts, March 2003. Sophie Dahl photographed by David Lachapelle: sandal-strap and white leather heels focus a soft hi-gloss erotic glaze of flesh-tone metal lockers, wall tiles, towels and a tennis racket; Dahl lost in vague, vapid or virulent washes of desire that emanate from the feet up.
...Sergio Rossi mesh and patent leather sandals, Kurt Geiger B&W leather peep-toe shoes, Chanel Boutique crepe stillettos with wire accesories, Prada canvas art-nouveau pattern low heels, Jimmy Choo satin boots, Givenchy black leather knee-high boots with silver lock detail, sublime Sergio Rosssi satin and velvet sandals with crystals, Helmut Lang black suede boots with leather wedge heel, Casadei PVC thigh-lengh boots, virulent Charles Jourdin red patent-leather zip-up ankle boots...
shoes shoes fucking shoes ok oh just swoon
the altar: 133 Kensington High Street, W8.
My mind defiled, de-filed.
tossing bodies off boats...
1:05 PM
"I'm not GAM (Free Aceh Movement), I'm NKRI (Unitary Republic of Indonesia)
to the core," said Fatimah, 29, who is being detained in Lhokseumawe prison,
North Aceh.
11:50 AM
Sunday, August 10, 2003
a. Jaish Mohammed: a kind of wish-fulfillment actually fulfilled, just not quite at the right moment.
b. The brutal rule of fashion: The surgeon shortened Richards’s second toe by removing a piece of bone, straightened her little toe and cut off a bunion. Her operation took place in February so she could enjoy the summer in peek-a-boo sandals.
12:41 PM
Saturday, August 09, 2003
Orange moon. Stanstead flightpaths dot a deep August evening. Heavy air compresses sound, the street is like a vacuum. The street is, actually, gorgeous right now, in this heavy, heady twilight, all its rage implicit, sapped, beaten by the heat, bad boys stuck in doorways in vests. And full of slow-motion, sodden, sensual beauty: fit girls in a kind of element, drifting or driving through the sullen air, the soft air, the slow air. Like the opening scene in A Touch of Evil: deadly hot night, song drifting, skirting the glaze and glow of neon and lamplight, low roar of cars, high heels scraping the street. The song here is some kind of ragga karaoke event in the back room of a cafe, crowds milling on the pavement, sitting on railings sipping malt liquer and lager, smoking cigs and weed. The city contains itself, in this heat especially: creates its own extreme heat island, hotter than offical Met office predictions, its own coping strategies, its own routines, incubated in hot, thick air. This heat lives. It gestates new organisms, new lifeforms. New modes of behaviour. New codes. This heat seeps in. You sweat it out, and it sneaks back in through the pores. It gets into your bloodstream and your bones absorb the heat like concrete. Cells swell, veins suck and palpitate, skin purrs. Brainwaves buckle like railway tracks...! The air is like feverish sleep. Sink into city heat like the sea. I like this heat. It's exotic. It unwinds The UK. The old isle cracks. The sunny or cloudy or damp English summer dies not correspond: this heat is new. Pressure builds, is released, builds, is released: a layered pattern. A chaotic pattern of instinct and intention. You stop and then you move. The heat dictates your movements and your actions. The heat drives you and exhausts you. It creates an appetite for life and denies the satisfaction. It's a gift and a curse: mostly, a test. It says: how do you exist? And how do you exist now? Do you adapt, or do you die out? I eat: Ice Cream Mars, and other heavy-duty dairy or carbonated products, and think about the freedom of the sea and cliffs and sand. To wish away what's there: this oppressive, exciting heat. The heat you can only enjoy or cope with if you surrender to it, be absorbed, merge in. This is rare heat. It's special because it's not Kuwait heat, not California heat. This is heat that nobody prepares for, heat that is an event, heat that disrupts normal life instead of setting a context for it. This heat creates a holiday, even if you're stuck in work. Like the Foreign Office or the Treasury (can't remember which), forced to leave early because their air conditioning is faulty. This heat creates new conditions. A country becomes an unexpected place. Dogs aren't used to it so you have to feed them more water than normal. You're not used to it: perceptions shift into new zones. I love the heat: escape work, quaff a can of Lilt, sit on a step outside a brothel doorway in Soho, watch the beautiful, the idiotic and the mundane drift by, listen to beats bound and bounce out of an open window. Moments slowed and waded through. On a bus rattling through East End streets: shops, take aways, bars and clubs winding up for the sweaty, sexy evening. Heatwave life. Courted, coloured, contained and uncontained. The moon is orange, planes fly off to Europe, and the Pavillion packs out. Fireworks erupt in the night.
Smoke, cobwebs, street lights. I love this city. The movement and compression. The cohesion, the collisions, the cars, the clubs. Values and passions and possessions can never be a private affair: each choice demands capitulation, complicity. I just pluck things from the air. The smoke, it smears street lights: daubed across sombre mists, fading fires, it's only in the imagination, what you see after the fact. Lay yourself open and spiders crawl through cracks everywhere, with such unseen speed, such caution and determination. A mind preyed on, and caught. I fall into a trap. But the street lights are beautiful anyway.
11:45 PM
The crowd rose to their feet, mistakenly believing they had seen arguably the greatest performance ever. Photographers rushed across the infield to get a picture of the historic moment. Even Chambers briefly believed he had achieved the unthinkable
Poor Dwain.
4:37 PM
They call it a trap. But we should call it Bolton's first law of international power politics: keep the other guy guessing; wear him down. When he gives a little, demand a whole lot more. Then zap him anyway
This is my kind of perspective. Something will happen sooner than nothing. This is good, too: bit mad, probably all true. Latest here.
If I had known, I should have become a watchmaker (Albert Einstein).
4:27 PM
Friday, August 08, 2003
The mind would like to get out of here
onto the snow. It would like to run
with a pack of shaggy animals, all teeth.
Osip Mandelstam
Sprawling, sun-stunned. Wan skin, dilated eyes. Slowly burning, slowly bleaching, slowly tanning. I bask, like a big shark, tip at the surface, off-shore, calm. No, not calm. Sprawled, muscles supported by salt. Eyes lost in blue sky, slightly myopic, slightly eased. I burn in patches without even noticing. Nothing concrete or complete: all bits, flashes, surprises and shocks. Except now, as I wallow. Craner swimming with cormorants and gulls, fish and seaweed, leatherback turtles, moon and barrel jellyfish, dolphins and sharks. Circling me slowly, expanding orbits stretch out to sea and back onto shore. Float away from the crowds, the swell levels out, the riptide pulls me, drifts me nowhere, or into the line of oil tankers. The mind would like to get out of here, so I let go. There's just this cold flow of image and memory. The air is clear, or hazy, or frosty, or thick. A cliff that stands severe against pale sand. The calm sea roars in my ears, I submerge. Foam breaks up over sand. The sky is full of white birds. Details fall, and assemble. Motioned into a mosaic. No order to be made: empty spaces and blank bodies, they are given meaning, given direction, given detail, then it's different and...the sun or the rain...the clouds full of snow, clowds full of storms...petrels skim dark waves, rain rips across the horizon, cry of white seagulls, noise and little light. It's splendid. Stop to heat hands on the dying embers of fires lit and left among pebbles. Listen to the crackle of charred driftwood, loose kindling, like music <<< The sand gleams white and burns soft and hot between our hands. Together, uncles, aunts, cousins, mums and dads, watching Crab Island disappear, usually around tea-time. In wooden huts that curve along a concrete promenade, beneath car parks and tennis courts and dreamy, imperious houses, crisp mornings, curt evenings, we boiled water in a tin kettle, drank strong tea, scoffed buns with thick butter, didn't think about seeing beyond the horizon except on very clear days. Cracked concrete steps descend to sand, and glass: paradise of pampas grass, faded palms, spider plants. Stuck paper flags in mounds of sand, and found a Casio watch that didn't work. A concrete path along the bay that got so hot on hot days it scolded the tips of toes and heels. Doves, gulls and terns tore trash from the sand <<< starfish in rock pools, seashells and mineral deposits, features marked in limestone. Hidden coves found: clambering over wet rocks, slipping on seaweed, feet sinking into sand, sound sinking in dulcet tones, inside dank caves where water fell in frail cascades and sometimes we saw icicles. Arctic acres, inside - meanwhile... >>> Black sand cools at dusk. Channels set hard like peat. Streams cut through salt, shingle, seaweed, sand. Ropes and plastic bottles washed up from ships. Swansea dock spits out yachts and speedboats. A spell unwoven: degeneration. Tugs swarm, escort rough eyes into cold bondage. Dock arm extends, dark as tar, time-stained, expels and sucks in Balkan cargoes. Horizon hidden in the night except for light across the bay: amber, crimson, white. Pilot flames flare at exact intervals. Eventually retreat into cycles of daylight, sun and showers. Low tide at dawn leaves black sand beneath white sky <<< rattling scenes out on white walls, caught for prosperity: a manor house, rented near the sea, film marked: Pembroke, 1985. It rains, has been warm and murky since morning, windows stained black and green by shrubs and shade. Staring at summer storms all day, unblinking, absorbed. Light flickers on upstairs in a small bedroom, this story told: a kept woman, killed during a storm like now, who returns at these precise moments, the exquisite tragedy somehow laughable. "Let's draw dinosaurs. Give them names." Cut to: a walk across smooth, wet, dark pebbles, the sea a maelstrom, rough and green, romance of anglers lost at sea, and life in a lighthouse. ...always looking out for a pheasant on the grass in a beautiful garden. Tea on a table outside. "It was a lovely evening. The sun came out." <<< Marked out by the tides, the curve of the earth, one certainty: immersion, darkness, safety. The flood behind eyelids. Between the tides, exposed, shells crack under toes, shadows skim across rippled sand, our outlines yield, soften at the edges >>> You can get caught at the furthest point you can see from here. The causeway is exposed for about five and a quarter hours during low water. If the weather is calm it's a calculated risk. Shed in wind swept patches, dust-grey banks of rain cut across evening sun. The sea swallows rock pools and we get caught by the tide as the sky drops like ash. Stumbling over fescue and wild flower, stunned, a little stupid (as in, stupefied) we find an old war shelter, facing north. We gather anything that will burn and strike matches several times, and later sit in the flickering light of cigarette tips and the spit of flames blown by the breeze. Taut stars burst open between clouds. Foxes and rats hunt on slopes of weed. We watch clouds glide in at hard angles, and lose the moon. I am a black cat, did you just say that? >>> a place that teems with memory or destiny. A tawny owl haunts you across dunes, as you cut soles and toes on grass and glass, at the dead of dusk.
In a far away garden I swung
on a plain wooden swing - I recall
fir trees, mysterious and tall,
in my vague delerium.
10:22 PM
Tuesday, August 05, 2003
It's hoooot!
The tube system swelters. It's stricken by delays and all you can smell is sweat mixed with perfume, cologne, Faberge and Sure deodorant, make-up and hair gel perfection wilting before it's even 9am. People pack in at Liverpool Street to get off at Bank and Chancery Lane, they ram into carriages, people's backs and necks bend as the doors close, risking decapitation. Tubes move slow in the heat, constantly delayed between stations, stuck in the sooty, oppressive, rat-ridden blackness. This heat is an event. You could have just walked.
Meanwhile across the UK trains are delayed as railway lines buckle.
It's not that hot, not as hot as Kuwait or California. We don't understand oppressive heat. I die in this air conditioning. I'm actually cold right now. Not just cold: my brain feels chilled, I feel a dead wind running through my veins, my body feels hollow.
Most city riots occur when the temperature is between 27c - 32c. 32c is the upper limit, any higher than this and people are too hot to bother. The majority of urban riots occur in this bracket, from the LA to the 2001 Oldham riots.
London's murder rate peaks in the summer months. During the unusually hot summer of 1988, New York's murder rate jumped by 75%.
Well tomorrow I'm going to a beach in South Wales for 2 days, so goodbye you psychopaths.
10:39 AM
Angels die in pub fire
Hackney Gazette
9:48 AM
send me ghost stories
9:46 AM
Monday, August 04, 2003
AK Baby, Man Moving, Man Dropping
is the slogan on a yellow t-shirt currently being worn by a 12-year old Liberian rebel child, photographed for an i-D straight-up, 'Tribe War Issue', August 03.
First the drugs, then the bullets and then the battle. Jungle Fire battalion knew the routine and lounged on the abandoned market stalls, waiting for the marijuana and crack cocaine to kick in.
Rory Caroll, Guardian 04.08.03
In the war, everything was allowed. We were free.
Rebel fighter Jungle Lion quoted in Rolling Stone, August 03.
Politics, puppet regimes, neocolonialism...the US is inextricably tangled up in the fate of Liberia, but there's something else happening on the city streets directly tied to US precedents: the rituals, strategies and aesthetics of urban warfare. Liberian rebels don personas like LA gang members, indulge the same death-driven instincts and appetites, but live out post-social extremes.
Ammo straight from the executive mansion, lots of it.
Small Boy Militia members: General Death, Col. Bad Bad Thing, War Black, Bullet Bouncer ("Eating the heart protects you. You see, I'm stiill alive"), Lucifer, Dirty War.
(US dates to be announced.)
Kid loads his AK clip. Wild out: these boys love it. Trained in it, to it. They know nothing else. Each generation makes itself colder and more ruthless: desire to survive and surpass. Kill reflection, degrade instinct. Mass screwface, barren country.
7:18 PM
Saturday, August 02, 2003
In the Marais enchantment seeps up from the cobblestones, wraps around the wrought iron lampposts, suffuses the narrow alleys. You walk down a street, and a vendor conjures a bouquet of pink roses. Behind the stiff facade of a 17th-century building lies a garden drenched in the fragrance of lilacs. Then there is the Places des Vosges - with nine nearly identical mansions on each of the four sides, except for the grander King's and Queen's Pavilions, which anchor the southern and northern sides. In the soft morning light, the brick blushes faint pink. Linden trees pruned into a perfect geometry border a garden, which stands as the centrepiece of the square. Lovers lie on the grass entangled in each other's arms.
Atmospheric article about the posh boho Marais district in Paris by Cathy Newman in the August National Geographic, with gorgeous photographs by William Albert Allard. You can see some of these here. Particularly beautiful shot of the Rue de Rivoli drenched in a midsummer sunshower, rain steaming off hot concrete. Also: articles about Brazilian jungle tribes, the Atacama desert in Chile and coastal wildlife in Alaska, all with sumptuous pictures too. Nice mag.
4:45 PM
|
|
| |
|
|
|
