The faucet marks the headwaters of the narrative idea, where water gushes from metal, runs for a while and ceases to run. Pathetic waterfall, smoothly styled so that we might try to forget the small twilight runoff it offers in lieu of the great hard sun-pressure of promise.
In the city, a clock is out-of-its-depth in multi-leveled time. Impaired by inaccuracy, it swings in despair with the alternating indecisiveness of a pendulum, taking its shadowy users for a non-representational ride. Robert Louis Stevenson once noted that to live without a clock would be to live forever. But everybody has a clock, and our lives are short
In the city, nature appears as a mechanized artifact. This fan is a bent flower, held in a wire-weary bubble of electric fragrance.
Many-arched, many-eyed classicism, unfound in the city, plummets into architectural sarcasm. "A very vexed question," wrote Italian Futurist painter Carlo Carra, in 1918, "is that of art getting the uppermost of man."
The cars and trucks that come to the city start healing over at the outskirts, listing more all the time as they head hard for the urban epicentre. It is desire that undoes them, these thin, egg-like skins of metal, growing even more flimsy and diminutive as they are inexorably tied into the knot of immediacy.
The tree, using the everywhere ink-wind, brushes itself onto a knobby, towel-like page of city air.
The sun over the city is an insect sun, a burning centipede, oaring its way across the sea of firmament. The solar insect's heart is a celestial fire opal, an admirable brooch for the lapel of day, were it not wriggling with legs a million miles long.
The lightbulb is a circus tent. The filament is a tightrope act. The artist is a a small Greek column, crumbling in the heat of the expectations we hold for him.
One side of this Manichean tree is an inference of spring, while the other side is still a tightly frozen claw. This is an inducement to keep reading from left to right, like any good whacked-out citizen of the western world.
These are rusty fields of meaning. They thrust up like powdery, flaking hydro towers; they stretch in neural nets made of streetcar cable, over our heads. They offer a dreamy cognitive membrane that makes your hair stand on end by its very lassitude.
Notice this upsetting verticality on the bias: a failed imperative leaning, like the Pisa Tower, into something weaker, inflected, something more momentary than the loud aspirations of its original thrust. Say a prayer now for resolve.
This is a slow, longlived graffitus, what French writer Francis Ponge calls "age-old brushery" or "high brushery"; this is the cosmic hair of drawing, of scratching, incised upon the stone-cold shoulders of a moist old building.
Pylons burnt by blur at their tops, self-cauterized by their epic, over-reaching dreams. On the other hand, the virtual pavilion left behind by their granular un-finish is sweet (see the German, Halla: a temple, a building open on all sides, see Albert Speer's giant flashlight-columns at the Nazi Nuremberg rally of 1934, see architect Rob Krier's open pavilions with tent-flap sides).
I saw a fire on a balloon. It streaked to the ground like a candle. "We must talk about the truly disgusting and, for us, troublesome state of things and we must find a way of defending ourselves" (Theo van Doesburg to Joaquin Torres-Garcia, 1929).
This curvaceous book--a tablet with type, suitable for a circular library--swings under your eyes, whisks away its message before you can cry out. It says, "Please come visit me in the madhouse sometime next year" (James Lee Byars to Josef Beuys, 1973)
What is this biscuit doing out of its box? You could buy these maple cookies once (maybe still can, I haven't bought a cookie in years), but they were generalized maple then, not provincialized. Strange, if all the leaves that fell were stamped with the province they fell in.
I've come to hate all smirking robot, with their tiny, glowing heads and their overwrought limbs. "And so, dear Stefano, I will give you guns. And I will teach you to play extremely complicated wars, where the truth will never be entirely on one side. You will release a lot of energy in your young years...." (Umberto Eco, "Letter to my Son" in Misreadings, Jonathan Cape, 1993, p.125).
It's just an idyll thought: it's all about this cranium tree, low-browed and dense, black with boudoir lace sweeping down and under the bare thighs of space.
The wings of the guitar flap in freedom. Its cheeks blow sideways in the wind-tunnel of its own tumult.
The weary chessboard of the city; isn't it time to sand it all smooth again? It's all breaking apart anyhow, heaving like your stomach after too much bad food.
The Great Wall is a great zipper, gleaming coldly through black satin seas of political time, temporarily fastening together two edges of toothed landscape. Romanian-born American writer Andrei Codrescu writes about "tugging at the big zipper of history, unzipping the Nylon curtain and the leather wall...."