purple sky, seen from the ship

a goddess

from the British museum

If it wasn't for the museum with its plundered treasures
I would never have seen this beautiful Venus.
But she wasn't stolen by piratical peers;
Italian born and bred, she passed through dynasty after dynasty
then she was given to Charles I.
Poor beheaded king,
his collection was broken up and sold off
and she found her way into the museum,
where she crouches, more luminous than any other,
her mrble skin seemingly as soft as roses.
You long to run your palm over her luscious thigh
men and women melt at the sight of her
she is more desired than ever.
Goddess of desire,
in an age when everything is splayed out in front of us in gory colour
pulsating and suppurating
her creamy marble-ness is calming and profound.
She makes you belive in love in all its relentlessness
and all its pain
and that whatever hell love is
it is always worth it.

beneath the water

Hackney canal, filtered light under tunnel, digital sensor captures the world beneath the water that my eyes barely grasp onto, the water shivers and ripples as the black ducks glide along.

Last week they found a head near here, long sunk under these shallow green waters, a head bagged and packed. For many months I averted my eyes from the water, careful not look too closely into the depths since I knew the head was there. We all did. Weekly the police marine unit convened here, rubber suited divers plunging up to their waists in the murky canal, diving below to try and find missing body parts. Eventually it was all recovered, that which was once a person, poor murdered girl. Horror gives way to pity. The mysteries of London.

Berlin flats at night ...  as I climb the stairs I can see where they got the idea for Expressionism from ...

quiet world

...
Behold what quiet settles on the world.
Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars.
In hours like these, one rises to address
The ages, history, and all creation.
...

- Vladimir Mayakovsky

Intense colour.

all art is dialogue

all art is dialogue

release your imaginings

daily life is the laboratory of art

art is the laboratory of daily life

suspend your disbelief

art is desire, armed

history is now,and tomorrow

embrace the flux

©Gillian McIver all rights reserved 2002

Londonism

why i love shoreditch

http://madeinshoreditch.co.uk/2012/04/26/gillian-mciver-why-i-love-shoreditch/

rain

april rain, relentless, unwipable, the cold burns through the skin; weary of knitted things, hats, coats worn inside the house, two hats, sometimes and a scarf....

 

the north is brutal, cruel; fingers of cold like knives; sneering at the idea of spring, summer a joke. Amun-Ra has never been here, he doesn't waste his time; 

all  the cold, the rage, the brutality is presided over by frightful norse bastard Frey, or rude and nasty Thor, hammerlike rain thundering down on our heads while we're scurrying ratlike through London's streaming streets ...

 rain pouring through cracks in jerry built ceilings and black cabs' sadistic delight in careening close to the kerb and blasting us with cold filthy water.

 On days like these I want a machete to slice through the thick, low sky; cut a hole in it the size of Abyssinia and release the poor exiled oppressed sun.

freak

The ancient philosophers developed theories about beauty and its relationship to harmony and perfection. These theories weren't applied on the basis of how people actually looked, but how beauty invokes ideals.

But the fact remains that we members of the human species have a lot of “imperfections.” And classical ideals simply keep coming back to make us aware of it. We feel like freaks, “abnormal,” aware of what's “wrong” with us.

And yet, most attempts to describe perfection, ends up being much more creepy than our ordinary freakiness. To really describe humanity you have to describe the freak, not the “perfection.” What's constant through history however is how the freak – the normal person – aims toward physical perfection and in doing so, turns themselves into real freaks.

staffordshire bull

Sink

Sank sunk

eruption

erupting all out all over and all together now - the raw typewriter: me, on my phone , at work, at home, at the bus stop; the cooked camera: snap snap snap idly making even more images in a world that NEEDS NO MORE IMAGES.

the denial of literature and art and to be determined to make nothing but literature and art.

J

T