A collection of writings about place space writing and art …
Hokusai-The Tengu Goddess, Mystical Bird 1760
For a few seconds a stray sunbeam
Makes visible the dance of dance motes
Swaying, trembling, swooning then falling
I have been granted a glimpse
Of harmony in the floating world
For the moment I am deeply content
Eyelids heavy, chin dropping towards chest
I dream of angels in a distant Heaven
Languidly embracing in the shallows
Of a limpidly becalmed pool.
Dust — cakeordeathsite
‘In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.’
Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism as quoted in – ‘Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted’ found at: cakeordeathsite – nothing is true everything is permitted
The incantatory prose poem What I Believe from 1984 is a crystallised distillation of Ballard’s artistic credo. Here are all the signature trade-marks and obsessions: car crashes, deserted beaches and abandoned hotels as well as his extraordinarily odd musings on the real appeal of celebrities. It is, as always with Ballard, idiosyncratic, bizarre and strangely beautiful. The […]
What I Believe by J.G Ballard — cakeordeathsite
These days what’s the most we can realistically hope for but some form of ideal dystopia. Perhaps an isolated bunker in a distant land deep beneath the surface fitted with all the conveniences that seem so essential, naturally. We could sleep safe and soundly there and dream plastic dreams of our synthetic future as we […]
An Ideal Dystopia — cakeordeathsite
Brassaï’s close-ups of graffiti carved and painted on Parisian city walls were first seen in the Surrealist magazine Minotaure in 1933, however he would continue to photograph images of graffiti for the next three decades, culminating in the publication of the book, Graffiti, in 1961. With this project, ‘the eye of Paris’ as he was called […]
An exceptional artist and in my opinion an even better writer Leonora Carrington was the inspiration for many of Max Ernst masterpieces, notably The Robing Of the Bride (see A Week of Max Ernst: Friday) and was in many aspects the archetypal Femme-Enfant of Surrealist desire; a dubious honour that Carrington, as one of the […]
The German photographer Heinz Hajek-Halke concentrated almost entirely on montage techniques. Influenced by the great Dada and Surrealist innovators of the 1920’s and 30’s he experimented with solarisation and camera-less photographs. During WWII he turned to photographing small animals for scientific publications. The 1950’s however saw Hajek-Halke returning to experimental photography; he joined the fotoform […]
via Dreams of Desire 54 (Written on the Body) — cakeordeathsite
Although the nightmarish Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont (pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse) was first published in 1868/69, more than fifty years before Paris Dada began to re-form as Surrealism, it was such a major precursor and influence upon a number of Surrealist artists that it can be considered as the movement’s black […]
One of the acknowledged precursors of Surrealism, the work of French caricaturist J.J Grandville was featured in Documents magazine and is discussed at length in Walter Benjamin’s vast and fragmentary study of the urban redevelopment of Paris by Baron Haussmann, The Arcades Project (Passagen-Werk). He rose to fame in 1828 with Les Métamorphoses du jour, a book with […]
We get along better Far away from home In modern hotel rooms. They become us No horror here Not when you are This high up anyway The Thirty Third floor Down below maybe With it uncertainties And the people Walking between Fearful terraces Realm of coruscating Trapped sunlight Down there Out of place We […]
Naked Cities Journal 