(Poem #1779) You

(Poem #1779) You
Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head,
so I went to bed, dreaming you hard, hard, woke with your name,
like tears, soft, salt, on my lips, the sound of its bright syllables
like a charm, like a spell.

Falling in love
is glamorous hell; the crouched, parched heart
like a tiger ready to kill; a flame's fierce licks under the skin.
Into my life, larger than life, beautiful, you strolled in.
I hid in my ordinary days, in the long grass of routine,
in my camouflage rooms. You sprawled in my gaze,
staring back from anyone's face, from the shape of a cloud,
from the pining, earth-struck moon which gapes at me

and I open the bedroom door. The curtains stir. There you are
on the bed, like a gift, like a touchable dream.
-- Carol Ann Duffy

Roses

Ordeal by Roses (Barakei) #32, 1961


the bleeding roses 1930

passarola

Blimunda
Origem: Wikipédia, a enciclopédia livre.

Blimunda Sete-Luas, personagem da obra Memorial do Convento, é filha de Sebastiana Maria de Jesus, uma mulher condenada pela Inquisição por ser cristã-nova. Na obra, Blimunda enceta uma relação íntima com Baltasar que vai contra os padrões da época, uma relação baseada na partilha, na fruição do amor pleno, sem compromissos ou culpa.
Esta personagem possui extraordinárias capacidades de vidente e um dom particular - a ecovisão - que lhe permite ver no interior dos corpos os males que destroem a vida – a hipocrisia e a mentira – mas também as verdades mais profundas que corroem o mundo e os homens.
Esta faculdade fora do comum permite-lhe ajudar na construção da máquina de voar do padre Bartolomeu de Gusmão, a passarola, sendo fulcral para o efectivo voo da mesma dado ter sido Blimunda quem recolheu as “vontades” vitais que permitiram que a máquina se erguesse do chão.


Poema à boca fechada


Não direi:
Que o silêncio me sufoca e amordaça.
Calado estou, calado ficarei,
Pois que a língua que falo é de outra raça.

Palavras consumidas se acumulam,
Se represam, cisterna de águas mortas,
Ácidas mágoas em limos transformadas,
Vaza de fundo em que há raízes tortas.

Não direi:
Que nem sequer o esforço de as dizer merecem,
Palavras que não digam quanto sei
Neste retiro em que me não conhecem.

Nem só lodos se arrastam, nem só lamas,
Nem só animais bóiam, mortos, medos,
Túrgidos frutos em cachos se entrelaçam
No negro poço de onde sobem dedos.

Só direi,
Crispadamente recolhido e mudo,
Que quem se cala quando me calei
Não poderá morrer sem dizer tudo.

José Saramago
1922-2010

California

Eric Zener
Paintings by Eric Zener. California.

flirting with technology

"Each of the works in this new show were finished in under two days. Shown for the first time in Europe, the pieces include landscapes of Hockney’s native Yorkshire, and portraits of his siblings, friends, and associates. Like the series, their titles are playful, such as “Less Trees near Warter.” Hockney is flirting with technology, and taking advantage of its increased efficiency. It is not unusual for Hockney to work through different modes of technology; as a photographer, he has used a Xerox machine, iPhones, a Polaroid camera and even fax machines. Now that PhotoShop has advanced to where Hockney can use it to create highly detailed “paintings,” with the people and places in the artist’s life as his subjects."

Read more here

Mexico is bleeding

His site

Récord de muertes en México:
asesinan a 69 personas en un día

World Cup

found here

Fools rush in

poetic of numbness and stupefaction

"The German über-photographer Andreas Gursky was the perfect pre-9/11 artist. He excelled at portraying the border-to-border, edgeless hum and busy obliviousness of modern life, what Francis Fukuyama ridiculously declared “the end of history,” George W.S. Trow called “The Context of No Context,” and Rem Koolhaas dubbed “Junkspace.” Not only did Gursky seem to be critical of all this, but his handsome images of trading floors, hotel lobbies, raves, and landscapes were charged with a visual force and intellectual rigor that let you imagine that you were gleaning the grand schemes and invisible rhythms of commerce and consumption. His amazing picture of a convenience store brimming with goods, 99 Cent II, Diptych (2001), which recently became the most expensive photo in history when it was auctioned for over $3.3 million, fizzed like cherry cola but packed the formal power of a Monet.

Unfortunately, as smart and deft as this artist still is, that fizz has gone flat, the power has run low, the former buzz has become a drone. The times have changed, but Gursky is still trying to render purring pre-9/11 space, where commerce ticked along without an undercurrent of fear. But his rigor and criticality have been replaced by grandiosity and theatricality; figures feel frozen; compositions are stagy; structure devolves into carpetlike pattern. Gursky’s new pictures are filled with visual amphetamine, but now they’re laced with psychic chloroform. He’s such a serious artist that this amphetamine is singular enough to sometimes offset the deadening effects so that his pictures occasionally impart a poetics of numbness and stupefaction."
taken from here

His Sang o’ Sangs is a’ that

The Bonniest Lass

by Robert Burns

The bonniest lass that ye meet neist,
Gie her a kiss and a’ that,
In spite o’ ilka parish priest,
Repentin’ stool and a’ that,

For a’ that and a’ that
Their mim mued sangs and a’ that,
In time and place convenient,
They’d dae it themselves for a’ that.

Your patriarchs in days of yore
Had their handmaids, and a’ that,
O, bastard gets, some had a score,
And some had mair, for a’ that.

For a’ that and a’ that,
Your Lang syne saunts and a’ that,
Were fonder o’ a bonnie lass,
Than you or I for a’ that.

King Davie when he waxed auld,
His blood ran thin and a’ that,
And found his cods were growin’ cald,
Could not refrain from a’ that.

For a’ that and a’ that
Tae keep him warm and a’ that
The Dauchters o’ Jerusalem
Were wailed for him and a’ that.

Wha wadna pity the sweet dames
He fumbled at and a’ that,
And raised their blood up into flames,
He couldna quell for a’ that.

For a’ that and a’ that
He wanted pith and a’ that,
But as tae what we shall nae name
What could he dae but claw that.

King Soloman, prince o’ devines
Wha proverbs made and a’ that
Baith mistresses and concubines
In hundreds had for a’ that.

For a’ that and a’ that
Though preacher wise and a’ that
The smuttiest sang that ere was sung
His Sang o’ Sangs is a’ that

So still I say a clever chiel
Should kiss a lass and a’ that
Though priests consign him tae the de’il
As reprobate and a’ that.

For a’ that and a’ that
Their cantin’ stuff and a’ that,
They ken nae mair wha’s reprobate
Than you or I for a’ that.

faint with love

Your breasts are better than wine, and the scent of your perfumes is beyond all ointments. [SoS 1:1- 2]

Strengthen me with raisins, refresh me with apples, for I am faint with love. (2:5)

stills that look like movement

Paul Himmel (b. 1914). As a newly buoyant New York City emerged as an International Art Centre in the 1940’s many of the great photographers of the latter part of 20th Century were embarking on their careers. Paul Himmel was among those closely allied to this cultural firmament. His pictures became very well known through Steichen’s important exhibition in the 50’s „The Family of Man“.

In 1935 Paul Himmel and Lillian Bassman were married and they both enrolled at the New School, under the legendary Art Director Alexej Brodovitch. His first Fashion Shots were published in Junior Bazaar. Soon he was one of the few photographers working for both Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. There are no negatives surviving of this time. The photo-journalistic mode at which Himmel excelled was quickly going out fashion in the 50’s and he was becoming more and disillusioned with commercial photography. Thus, Paul Himmel started his own projects: His series on Boxers - Circus and Ballet. Interested in movement Paul Himmel’s book Ballet in Action was published in 1954. George Balanchine one of the great leading choreographers rightly saluted Himmel’s achievement of succeeding in ‘the almost impossible task of getting stills that look like movement....the sense of and the sequences of movement are present.“.

His innate feeling for dance as much as the sophistication of his photographic technique (he used very long exposure times) was a distillation of the very essence of dance, conveyed in poetic and graphically powerful images. Himmel continued on this path and started experimenting more with grain structure, that he radically transformed into a series of silhouetted and elongated forms abbreviated almost to the point of abstraction. The critics though seemed not to be interested in this work, which ran counter to anything in contemporary photography. Also his next body of work, printing black and white negatives on colour paper, solarizing the result with couloured light, to achieve much of the intensity and starkness of much of the Pop Art then current, did not seem to interest the critics.

By 1969 Himmel was disenchanted with photography and gave it up to become a psychotherapist. Reconsidered today, much of his oeuvre appears remarkably prescient and it is fortunate enough that enough has survived finally to vindicate and demonstrate a most valuable contribution to photographic history. 1996 Paul Himmel was highly celebrated with his first one-man exhibition at Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York followed by a retrospective at the James Danzinger Gallery, New York. In 2003 his work was shown in New York and for the first time ever Lillian Bassman and Paul Himmel showed together at Gallery f5.6 in Munich.

yeux de rivière

Le crystal automatique

allo allo encore une nuit pas la peine de chercher c'est moi l'homme des cavernes il y a les cigales qui étour- dissent leur vie comme leur mort il y a aussi l'eau verte des lagunes même noyé je n'aurai jamais cette couleur- là pour penser à toi j'ai déposé tous mes mots au monts de-piété un fleuve de traineaux de baigneuses dans le courant de la journée blonde comme le pain et l'alcool de tes seins


allo allo je voudrais etre à l'envers clair de la terre le bout de tes seins à la couleur et le gout de cette terre-la


allo allo encore une nuit il y a la pluie et ses doigts de fossoyeur il y a la pluie qui met ses pieds dans le plat sur les toits la pluie a mangé le soleil avec des baguettes de chinois


allo allo l'accroissement du cristal c'est toi...c'est toi ô absente dans le vent et baigneuse de lombric quand viendra l'aube c'est toi qui poindras tes yeux de rivière sur l'émail bougé des îles et dans ma tête c'est toi le maguey éblouissant d'un ressac d'aigles sous le banian


Aimé Césaire

*****

The automatic rock crystal

Hello hello one night more and yet not worth searching for It's I the cave man there are cicadas that make their life dizzy as they do their death there is also the green water from lagoons even drowned I'll never have that colour to think about you Ipawned all my words a river of bather dolls' sled in the current of daytime blond like the bread and alcohol of your breast


hello hello I wish I be at the light inside of earth the tip of your breast of the colour and the savour of that very soil


hello hello one night more there is the gravedigger's fingered rain it's rain thay puts its foot in it on roofs rain ate the sun with chinese chopsticks


hello hello crystal growth it's you...it's you o gone with the wind and bathing young lady of earthworm when dawn comes in it's you who'll break your eye of river upon the moved enamelled islands and in my head it's you the dazzling maguey* of an eagles' backward beneath the banian**


Translated by Gilles de Seze


*Flower from the agave family
**Indian fig tree

furtive eroticism

In the early 1970s Lillian Bassman, among the most important fashion photographers of the 20th century, made the decision to dispose of her career, quite literally. Artists do this all the time without the intent — giving themselves over to excess, retreating to ashrams — but Ms. Bassman’s approach was aggressive and determined. Disillusioned by the costuming of the late 1960s, she had had enough of fashion and expressed her disdain by destroying decades’ worth of negatives and placing others in a trash bag in the coal room of her Upper East Side carriage house. Her era of furtive eroticism was over, and there was no point in scrapbooking it.

—”Femininity, Salvaged” by Ginia Bellafante, New York Times, July 16, 2009

Fado e ketchup

"Um pequeno país, no cu (cauda) da Europa, a República dos Cagados, inviável economicamente e inexistente culturalmente.
Rife-se !"

Pichagem numa parede de Lisboa.
Que jorre o ketchup ou que nos afundemos em fado.

Glossolalia

Glossolalia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Glossolalia is commonly called "speaking in tongues". For other uses of "speaking in tongues", see Speaking in Tongues (disambiguation).

Some uses of 'Glossolalia' (including here) refer to Xenoglossy, speaking in a natural language that was previously unknown to the speaker.
Glossolalia or speaking in tongues is the fluid vocalizing (or, less commonly, the writing) of speech-like syllables, often as part of religious practice. Though some consider these utterances to be meaningless, those that use them consider them to be part of a holy language.

History of everything

"Sigmar Polke grew up in East Germany. After moving with his family to West Germany, settling in Wittich, he studied glass painting from 1959 to 1960 at Dusseldorf Kaiserwerth and then transferred to the Academy of Art. With fellow student Gerhard Richter he formulated a Pop inspired "Capital Realist" anti-style of art, appropriating the pictorial short-hand of advertizing. The anarchistic element of the work Polke developed was largely engendered by his mercurial approach. His irreverence for traditional painting techniques and materials and his lack of allegiance to any one mode of representation has established his now-respected reputation as a visual revolutionary. Paganini, an expression of "the difficulty of purging the demons of Nazism" - witness the "hidden" swastikas - is typical of Polke's tendency to accumulate a range of different mediums within one canvas. It is not unusual for Polke to combine household materials and paint, lacquers, pigments, screen print and transparent sheeting in one piece. A complicated "narrative" is often implicit in the multi-layered picture, giving the effect of witnessing the projection of a hallucination or dream through a series of veils."

Segredo

Guardas no teu regaço as lágrimas dos meus segredos

Sleep of reason, 4th series(Orange)

I love this series, please take a look

Amarração

A instalação “Amarração”, de Pedro Cabrita Reis.

Lê-se no site da EDP o seguinte:

"A escultura faz-se utilizando materiais simples e comuns que nos habituamos a reconhecer como fazendo parte da vida quotidiana e que tanto podem provir de uma origem industrial como de um estaleiro de construção.
Concebida especialmente para o Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, “Amarração” é uma obra que nos sugere algo entre barco e cais, retomando assim uma relação de proximidade entre o Tejo e o Mosteiro, quando à praia que aqui existia, chegavam ou partiam navios e marinheiros.
Numa relação vibrante com o monumento, esta nova obra mostra-nos como em arte se torna possível o encontro de tempos históricos diferentes, podendo-se usufruir desse modo e com inegável riqueza, da visão de um artista contemporâneo que nos revela, de um modo particular, a magnificência desta obra única do estilo Manuelino."

Gosto desta escultura, que agora se encontra, algo perdida, nos jardins do CCB.
Quem quer amarrar um barco em terra, subir escadas que não levam a sitio nenhum ?

O site do artista

Education vs violence

memories (failing memories)

seen here
a lot more here