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, November 2, 2014

Five Minutes in Kreuzberg

Hagebutte III - Dog Rose III by Karin Goeppert






FIVE MINUTES IN KREUZBERG

The lunatic’s howling in the street again. He loses his shit
two or three times a week, right around
dusk, whose ambiguous border-line is his full moon.

If it were an optical event, some kind of structure or series
of colors, his anger might be visible from space, like the Great Wall,
like a million large female bottoms mooning the moon,
like a carnival of mayhem on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Yesterday afternoon a woman making banshee noises, demanding  
equal time. Not in trouble, troubled. Maybe she and the howling man take turns.

I’ve read that Saul Bellow, presumably on the advice
of his shrink, used to march out into the woods
for a little primal roaring after lunch. A fashion in psycho-analytic
circles of the day: dozens of writers, painters, poets out in the forests
of Connecticut or Vermont screaming their shrunken heads off.

In Europe the intelligentsia would drink a digestive after
a heavy meal and take a nap or have sex with mistress/lover/spouse. Progress, anyone?

Vacation finally peters out as I run back
into the arms of my routine, a marathoner, falling across the I’m finished line.

Imagine the Stockholm Syndrome applied to daily life. We embrace
our captors—i.e., ourselves—identify with their struggle to keep us on schedule.

You’re not as time-managed as a digitalized metronome? You must be a sociopath.

A Thracian wedding has spilled over into the street: dancing to
wild music, music Orpheus might have been torn apart to, the bride
gift-wrapped and smiling while males in double-breasted
pin-striped suits, sensitive to the sinuosities of the music,  
execute delicate steps and clap their hands. Does the prospect of good food—
e.g., sumptuous Levantine wedding banquet food—bring out the Dionysian
in people? Possibly, but who cares, because I’m

hungry for a kebab (deepest Anatolia). Or Scharwama (succulent).
Or gyros in pita bread (Greek). Mango sauce and creamy yogurt (fattening). A fistful
of onions, cumin, tart herbal sprinklings (everything). Dragon breath garlic too: do I
offend thee by breathing in thy face? Please deal with it (thank you). I must be (crazy). 






Imaginary Traveler by Omar Faruk Tekbilek

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