Posts by ChrisW
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Hard News: Public Address Word of the…, in reply to Sacha,
It's like the tears at the back of your throat after your house burns down
BravoI might have said - where's the photo of said prize opened and all?
but have to agree, that's an impressive word-picture of a taste experience! -
Thanks Jackson – Marti Friedlander's Self-Portrait arrived yesterday as early Christmas present, and I’ve much enjoyed a good browse and reading the Writers and Artists section in particular.
The cover photo she explained as her first self-portrait, an impromptu effort in a hall mirror – but my first thought on seeing it askew like that was ‘Huh! – the great Marti Friedlander has trouble levelling her camera, too!’ But then thinks no, the camera if anywhere near the centre-line in a mirror selfie has to be the reference for level in the negative – this has been cropped and rotated as a matter of book cover design. So it’s satisfying to pick up among her many clearly expressed opinions that she enjoys bringing out alternative images in her negatives, that the 1970s PhotoForum dictate that a negative must always be printed whole is “rather idiotic”.
She has an incidental reference to being persuaded by Hamish Keith to agree to the use of one of her photos of Ralph Hotere as the basis for graffiti artist Askew’s tribute to him earlier this year – as featured on Capture: Art on the Street – askew again, multiple connections, very satisfying.
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Thank yous one and all on my Travels Without A Map photos - I guess that would be Jackson, Nora and Lilith especially. No map needed cos it was so close to home!
Wonderful prize, to be much and long appreciated, thanks again.
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Ka mau te wehi!
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Returned for an overnight stay in the middle of Istanbul and found myself in the middle of a festival of food, music and happy Turks, running each night of Ramazan/Ramadan in the Hippodrome. The message in lights strung up between minarets of the Sultanahmet Camii (Blue Mosque) translates as LOVE, BE LOVED. Pretty hard to argue with that.
At ground level in the courtyard of the mosque – about 30 bookstalls and miscellaneous others set up for the month. The lights caught a white bird soaring in the lift off the main dome – a gull, nevertheless intensely evoking the white dove of peace I’d seen earlier in the day …
... over Ay. Minas, the Greek Orthodox cathedral of Heraklion, Crete. It did not hover, I missed the photo, this one instead with cloud perhaps as substitute. There’s a lot of Greek-Turkish history for reconciliation. These seemed a hint of positive signs, 2006 and counting.
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Botulism.
So many of the above seem to be of the moment rather than the year, alternatively old if not perennial, but botulism seems one to savour, so to speak, for 2013.
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Striking to see ti kouka/ Cordyline australis in Istanbul, planted as an exotic enhancement of the inner courtyard of the Sultan’s palace Topkapi Sarayi.
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On the riverbank, Samolus repens flowering
shows it's no longer Spring, but a good spring tide
refreshes the saltmarsh and suppresses the competition. -
Legal Beagle: John Banks: what next?, in reply to mark taslov,
one thing I’m struck by in China is that ... the nation has largely, as far as I’m aware, resisted pressure to avail itself of its national assets. I’m not sure asset sales fits comfortably within any traditional definition of corruption, but New Zealand ...
avail = divest
That's the word!
Works both ways, I'm afraid - the NZ National Party with Banks' support is availing itself of our national assets, as in selling them off to its core supporters. A serious corruption of our system if Genesis Energy is substantially sold off as well, notwithstanding ...
Only a few days left to vote in the referendum.
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Capture: Travels Without a Map, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Look upon my Works...
Once a traveller in an antique land,
I say: Five large headless trunks of stone
sit on a mountain-top. At their feet,
propped up on rubble by people lacking a sense of style,
the battered fallen heads arrayed in line.
That on the left is said to be of Antiochos I Epiphanes,
King of the Commagenes, but no one’s heard of them these days.
And on the pedestal no words appear:
One has to guess he’d be pissed off to know
he gets mistaken for an inconsequential Antiochus
of the Syrian Seleucids from two or three hundred years before;
and this to mark his tumulus at the summit of his mighty kingdom,
to glorify his memory alongside his peers
Tyche, Zeus, Apollo, Herakles.And why did not the hand that mocked him
trouble to find some decent stone to last two mere millennia?
No words inscribed, but from the corner of his eye
a smoother path amid the weather-etched marble,
past the absent nose broken in the harder fall,
I fancy tracks the tears of centuries
backed by the cry of rocking stones of ages:
What a drag it is getting old,
repeated, twice over.
