Friday, September 23, 2011

Wings












the sideways glance


by the eye of the brook I stood and watched the birds do the shuffle
they made waves in the waves of the air and formed clouds against the tree lines
it was play for the sake of survival and I was very down with that
for some time now the cat in my yard had slain all birds that came
I found bits of bone and the dark confetti of dead feathers here and there
I remember finding a whole errant wing bone with plumage intact
and I remember that someone said to me
that aint it a shame when a bird can't fly anymore
you take away that bird's wings and it'll just die
and I remember looking at her, whoever she was
and she walked away because I did not know her
and there was no conversation beyond that point
I looked after her with the same expressionless expression
I thought to myself, hey now
a clipped bird is a tragedy, yeah
a bird that can't fly is a shame, that's true
but all that's left of this bird, right here
is its wings


s. sparling

two bone daddies on the rug by the fire



What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.

John Berger, from and our faces, my heart, brief as photos

it's story time again


The Wonderful Window By Lord Dunsany
The old man in the Oriental-looking robe was being moved on by the police, and it was this that attracted to him and the parcel under his arm the attention of Mr. Sladden, whose livelihood was earned in the emporium of Messrs. Mergin and Chater, that is to say in their establishment.
Mr. Sladden had the reputation of being the silliest young man in Business; a touch of romance—a mere suggestion of it—would send his eyes gazing away as though the walls of the emporium were of gossamer and London itself a myth, instead of attending to customers.
Merely the fact that the dirty piece of paper that wrapped the old man’s parcel was covered with Arabic writing was enough to give Mr. Sladden the idea of romance, and he followed until the little crowd fell off and the stranger stopped by the kerb and unwrapped his parcel and prepared to sell the thing that was inside it. It was a little window in old wood with small panes set in lead; it was not much more than a foot in breadth and was under two feet long. Mr. Sladden had never before seen a window sold in the street, so he asked the price of it.
“Its price is all you possess,” said the old man. “Where did you get it?” said Mr. Sladden, for it was a strange window. “I gave all that I possessed for it in the streets of Baghdad.” “Did you possess much?” said Mr. Sladden. “I had all that I wanted,” he said, “except this window.” “It must be a good window,” said the young man. “It is a magical window,” said the old one. “I have only ten shillings on me, but I have fifteen-and-six at home.” The old man thought for a while. “Then twenty-five-and-sixpence is the price of the window,” he said. It was only when the bargain was completed and the ten shillings paid and the strange old man
was coming for his fifteen-and-six and to fit the magical window into his only room that it occurred to Mr. Sladden’s mind that he did not want a window. And then they were at the door of the house in which he rented a room, and it seemed too late to explain.
The stranger demanded privacy while he fitted up the window, so Mr. Sladden remained outside the door at the top of a little flight of creaky stairs. He heard no sound of hammering.
And presently the strange old man came out with his faded yellow robe and his great beard, and his eyes on far-off places. “It is finished,” he said, and he and the young man parted. And whether he remained a spot of colour and an anachronism in London, or whether he ever came again to Baghdad, and what dark hands kept on the circulation of his twenty-five-and-six, Mr. Sladden never knew.
Mr. Sladden entered the bare-boarded room in which lie slept and spent all his indoor hours between closing-time and the hour at which Messrs. Mergin and Chater commenced. To the Penates of so dingy a room his neat frock-coat must have been a continual wonder. Mr. Sladden took it off and folded it carefully; and there was the old man’s window rather high up in the wall. There had been no window in that wall hitherto, nor any ornament at all but a small cupboard, so when Mr. Sladden had put his frock-coat safely away he glanced through his new window. It was where his cupboard had been in which he kept his tea-things: they were all standing on the tablenow. When Mr. Sladden glanced through his new window it was late in a summer’s evening; the butterflies some while ago would have closed, their wings, though the bat would scarcely yet be drifting abroad—but this was in London: the shops were shut and street-lamps not yet lighted. 
Mr. Sladden rubbed his eyes, then rubbed the window, and still he saw a sky of blazing blue, and far, far down beneath him, so that no sound came up from it or smoke of chimneys, a medkeval city set with towers; brown roofs and cobbled streets, and then white walls and but- tresses, and beyond them bright green fields and tiny streams. On the towers archers lolled, and along the walls were pikemen, and now and then a wagon went down some old-world street and lumbered through the gateway and out to the country, and now and then a wagon drew up to the city from the mist that was rolling with evening over the fields. Sometimes folk put their heads out of lattice windows, sometimes some idle troubadour seemed to sing, and nobody hurried or troubled about anything. Airy and dizzy though the distance was, for Mr. Sladden seemed higher above the city than any cathedral gargoyle, yet one clear detail he obtained as a clue: the banners floating from every tower over the idle archers had little golden dragons all over a pure white field.
He heard motor-buses roar by his other window, he heard the newsboys howling.
Mr. Sladcien grew dreamier than ever after that on the premises, in the establishment of Messrs. Mergin and Chater. But in one matter he was wise and wakeful: he made continuous and careful incuiries about golden dragons on a white flag, and talked to no one of his wonderful window. He came to know the flags of every king in Europe, he even dabbled in history, he made inquiries at shops that understood heraldry, but nowhere could he learn any trace of little dragons or on a field argent. And when it seemed that for him alone those golden dragons had fluttered he came to love them as an exile in some desert might love the lilies of his home or as a sick man might love swallows when he cannot easily live to another spring.
As soon as Messrs. Mergin and Chater closed, Mr. Sladden. used to go back to his dingy room and gaze through the wonderful window until it grew dark in the city and the guard would go with a lantern round the ramparts and the night came up like velvet, full of strange stars. Another clue he tried to obtain one night by jotting down the shapes of the constellations, but this led him no further, for they were unlike any that shone upon either hemisphere.
Each day as soon as he woke be went first to the wonderful window, and there was the city, diminutive in the distance, all shining in the morning, and the golden dragons dancing in the sun, and the archers stretching themselves cr swinging their arms on the tops of the windy towers. The window would not open so that he never heard the songs that the troubadours sang down there beneath gilded balconies; he did not even hear the belfries’ chimes, though he saw the jackdaws routed every hour from their homes. And the first thing that he always did was to cart his eye round all the little towers that rose up from the ramparts to see that the little golden dragons were flying there on their flags. And when he saw them flaunting themselves on white folds from every tower against the marvellous deep blue of the sky he dressed contentedly, and, taking one last look, went off to his work with a glory in his mind. It would have been difficult for the customers of Messrs. Mergin and Chater to guess the precise ambition of Mr. Sladden as he walked before them in his neat frock-coat: it was that he might be a man-at-arms or an archer in order to fight for the little golden dragons that flew on a white flag for an unknown king in an inaccessible city. At first Mr. Sladden used to walk round and round the mean street that he lived in, but he gained no clue from that; and soon he noticed that quite different winds blew below his wonderful window from those that blew on the other side of the house.
In August the evenings began to grow shorter: this was the very remark that the other employés made to him at the emporium, so that he almost feared that they suspected his secret, and he had much less time for the wonderful window, for lights were few down there and they blinked cut early.
One morning late in August, just before he went to Business, Mr. Sladden saw a company of pikemen run-fling down the cobbled road towards the gateway of the mediæval city—Golden Dragon City he used to call it alone in his own mind, but he never spoke of it to anyone. The next thing that be noticed was that the archers on the towers were talking a good deal together and were handling round bundles of arrows in addition to the quivers which they wore. Heads were thrust out of windows more than usual, a woman ran out and called some children indoors, a knight rode down the street, and then more pikemen appeared along the walls, and all the jackdaws were in the air. In the street no troubadour sang. Mr. Sladden took one look along the towers to see that the flags were flying, and all the golden dragons were streaming in the wind. Then he had to go to Business. He took a ’bus back that evening and ran upstairs. Nothing seemed to be happening in Golden Dragon City except a crowd in the cobbled street that led down to the gateway; the archers seemed to be reclining as usual lazily in their towers, then a white flag went down with all its golden dragons; he did not see at first that all the archers were dead. The crowd was pouring towards him, towards the precipitous wall from which be looked; men with a white flag covered with golden dragons were moving backwards slowly, men with another flag were pressing them, a flag on which there was one huge red bear. Another banner went down upon a tower. Then he saw it all: the golden dragons were being beaten—his little golden dragons. The men of the bear were coming under the window; whatever he threw from that height would fall with terrific force: fire-irons, coal, his clock, whatever he had—he would fight for his little golden dragons yet. A flame broke out from one of the towers and licked the feet of a reclining archer; he did not stir. And now the alien standard was out of sight directly underneath. Mr. Sladden broke the panes of the wonderful window and wrenched away with a poker the lead that held them. Just as the glass broke he saw a banner covered with golden dragons fluttering still, and then as he drew back to hurl the poker there came to him the scent of mysterious spices, and there was nothing there, not even the daylight, for behind the fragments of the wonderful window was nothing but that small cupboard in which he kept his tea-things.
And though Mr. Sladden is older now and knows more of the world, and even has a Business of his own, he has never been able to buy such another window, and has not ever since, either from books or men, beard any rumour at all of Golden Dragon City.
EPILOGUE
Here the fourteenth Episode of the Book of Wonder endeth and here the relating of the Chronicles of Little Adventures at the Edge of the World. I take farewell of my readers. But it may be we shall even meet again, for it is still to be told how the gnomes robbed the fairies, and of the vengeance that the fairies took, and how even the gods themselves were troubled thereby in their sleep; and how the King of Ool insulted the troubadours, thinking himself safe among his scores of archers and hundreds of halberdiers, and how the troubadours stole to his towers by night, and under his battlements by the light of the moon made that king ridiculous for ever in song. But for this I must first return to the Edge of the World. Behold, the caravans start.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

the way she work












the colour crazy




el color loco

I've worn the ring of short-term memory for years
it bridals my finger in the snip snap of fragility
and for the extensive loss of human anatomy
I had to cut the finger from my fist
to regain some percentage of my mind

now they call me the shocker
cause it's two in the pink and one in the stink
for I make the sign of penetration
a key to unlock every door in the human canal
and some others still call me the marksman 
for I can yet draw bow strings that lilt
sending the sweet messenger of death
on swift salty wings

that's right, I shoot arrows of semen
poison like a rip tide that's come to take you away
and do you know the rip tide and where it takes you?
far below the ocean ceiling and out into the sea
a sanctuary of earth's precipitation 
the culmination of all tears 

you gotta paint me baby
paint me like a mastodon in the moonlight
like a shag wooly mammoth in the silvery air
cause I got types of humans after me
the kind with rough hands and shallow spines

want to turn me into the thing I fear the most

that is to say


a pile of bones in the yellowing grass

 s. sparling



music to make you shuffle




music to make you drink




exotic landscapes











Saturday, September 17, 2011

days of roses



Oh my lady, Marie. Oh my lady Marie Aly




 To you it is all a tale to tell, every stroke is a paragraph in a short story of magic and humanity.




The use of colour and expression is mind blowing. A technique simplistic in appearance
But complex in its holy madness.




I find myself endeared to each and every piece of Ms. Aly's that I discover.




You'll fall in love too if I let you. So I will!
Check out a selection of her work here: The Goodness


Skate Better










music to make the world end


Wednesday, September 14, 2011

fiberglass man


are you irked yet?


how about now?


by the blind eye of Odin, Stockholm based artist, Anders Krisar
certainly knows how to fuck with the human body


demonstrating an uncanny obsession with the human body
Krisar has come out with a series of works dedicated to recreating the human form
from highly unorthodox media. 
From creating death masks out of pharmaceuticals
to mashing together the human torso from fiberglass and silicone
god help this twisted creature.

Nyuck Nyuck Nyuck


I don't really know what to say about Austrian street artist Nychos.


He's a colourful disembowler and butcher of various anatomy.


Crazy crazy crazy, sure, it's crazy.


But fuck you if you don't love it.

find a more detailed article about our anatomically
inclined friend here: Nychos

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Shamonic









"The dying sun will glow on you without burning, as it has done today. The wind will be soft and mellow and your hilltop will tremble. As you reach the end of your dance you will look at the sun, for you will never see it again in waking or in dreaming, and then your death will point to the south. To the vastness."

~Don Juan

music to... make.... you....





herb house