In this blog we will share with you our vision of beauty, balance, harmony.

As Mark Leach writes in his book Raw Colour with Pastels: “Sound is all around us, and it is musicians who refine that sound into something of beauty. As a painter, I have always felt that my purpose is to craft colour in a similar way, to see through the confusion and seek harmony and beauty.”

And we add: Words, fragments of sentences, spoken noise is all around us, and Ken arranges words in such a way as to capture beauty in the accidental, the ambient soundtrack of life.

Sunday, May 26, 2013

Well, May might even be cooler than April. At least this year.

Schlehdorf 38,5 x 48,5 cm





CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE DREAM WE LIVE IN

April just might be the coolest month. Not cold, cool.
The new flowers are braving it,
hanging in there in loops and twirls
of color and fragrance, too young, too inex-
perienced to do anything else.
The Indian restaurant sending out signals of
curry, cumin, some kind of fried nut—no,
I don’t mean that poor soul swaying on the
corner in rainbow colored rubber boots, chanting
his own private liturgy — I mean an odor of Triple Hot Chicken
Vishnu spread eagled on a blanket of basmati rice
flowing into our noses. People are almost naked.
We’re out for a walk in the neighborhood, Kreuzberg,
Berlin, following a topography of punk, of anarchy, failed politics, or
rolling a big package to the post office, and people are
almost naked — pale as vampires, the girls, fashionably
depraved, seeking love and pleasure from the oddest sources,
from hipsters minus hips wearing no-ass pants, no less, with slack unexercised
bodies and big time B.O. — and now turning into the park on a Sunday  
morning, virtuously masochistic in sweats and running shoes, I see half
of Africa, a Diaspora gathered in this not quite leafy not quite  
sanctum and they’re waiting stoically for someone either to deport 
them or purchase their dubious product, which you can possess in 
moderate quantities, but cannot sell to anyone, a very unsatisfactory 
arrangement. I’m breathing hard by now, thinking about anything
but what I’m doing: a crazy middle-aged man in such obvious
respiratory distress that some smart-ass young guy walking by
in zero-butt skin-tight jeans and wearing a goddamn pork-pie hat  
offers to call an ambulance. Fuck you, I think, I feel, but don’t say
just puff onward, and onward seems endless. In Winter
when the path-
ways and miniature meadows were thick with snow
and while crunching up some man-made mini hill, I
encountered a silver fox. In the middle of a city of millions.
Not a symbol of whatever, I swear. Not a poetic devise. An actual silver fox
staring me down with curiosity unhampered
by bafflement or alarm, his bear-like fuzzy ears seeming to twitch
slightly, and no doubt wondering, if that’s the word, and with
all due respect to Pathetic Fallacy (animal version thereof), who I was running from. 






L'Apres-midi d'un Faune - Joffrey Ballet
Claude Debussy
Choreographie: Vaslav Nijinski
Faun: Rudolf Nurejev



2 comments:

  1. April was cool, cruel. My Polish builder told me tat when he first came to Ireland 8 years ago he had three words/phrases in English: "Coffee", "thank you", and "fuck you" - the essential survival kit in a strange land. Will summer surprise you, coming over the Starnbergersee with a shower of rain?

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  2. Niall, I like to do a riff on an old standard when it's possible. See also for example "Mediterranean Woman". I can't seem to get away from an early obsession with Eliot. Ken

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