A blue island in a red desert









































"Once there was a girl on an island. She was bored with grown ups, who scared her. She didn't like boys, all pretending to be grown ups. So, she was always alone. Among the cormorants, the seagulls, and wild rabbits. She had found a little isolated beach where the sea was transparent and the sand pink. She loved that spot. Nature's colours were so lovely and there was no sound. She left when the sun went down.
One morning, a boat appeared. Not one of the usual boats, a real sailing ship, one of those that braved the seas and the storms of this world. And, who knows... of other worlds. From afar, it looked splendid. As it approached, it became mysterious. She saw no one aboard. It stopped a while, then veered and sailed away. She was used to peoples' strange ways and was not surprised. But no sooner back on shore ... there! (sound of singing). All right for one mystery, but not two!
- who was singing?
The beach was deserted. But the voice was there, now near, now far. Then it seemed to come from the sea, an inlet among the rocks, many rocks that she had never realised looked like flesh. And the voice at that point was so sweet."
- who was singing?
"Everybody. Everything."

Story from Michelangelo Antonioni's sumptuous 1964 colour film 'Il Deserto Rosso'.
I wrote this passage down in my journal after watching Il Deserto Rosso last year, the use of the vignette in the narrative, it's contents, imagery and tone all reflected similar thoughts I had about a series I am working on at present. I enjoy taking the time to take down something in my own hand, to go back and reread.
Also, I think the people's handwriting will be completely illegible in twenty years.

Light Thickens


Yasujiro Ozu
The Only Son
1936

Tacita Dean
Disappearance at Sea
1996

- For many, Donald Crowhurst is just a cheat who abused the sacred unwrittens of good sportsmanship. But for some, it is more complicated than this and he is seen as much a victim of the Golden Globe as the pursuer of it. His story is about human failing, about pitching his sanity against the sea, where there is no human presence or support system on which to hang a tortured psychological state. His was a world of acute solitude, filled with the ramblings of a troubled mind.
Tacita Dean, 1997


The film Disappearance at Sea is part of a series of Tacita Dean's works under the same name focusing on Donald Crowhurst and the Teignmouth Electron, and the effect the sea had upon his mind.


The Only Son was Ozu's first talkie - exploring the mother/son relationship, and perhaps also the idea of 'big fish in a small pond' and vice versa. Ryosuke moves from a small town to Tokyo with his tutor,  to continue his education, but both are small pebbles cast into the swelling sea of people in Tokyo, and their efforts result in little success, Ryosuke teaching in a unremarkable night school, and renting cheap shabby rooms for his wife and child, and his tutor now running a tonkatsu restaurant in the lonely outskirts of the city.

At Sea



Clinton Watkins
Cont Ship #1
2005



Joseph Cornell
Jack's Dream
c. late 1930's




























The abandoned Teignmouth Electron is discovered: Donald Crowhurst's trimaran in which he attempted the Golden Globe Race, that would result in his eventual insanity and suicide.

via, via, via

The image from Jack's Dream by Joseph Cornell comes from a fascinating blog by the name of the art of memory, in particular a collection of atmospheric imagery of the ocean, film stills featuring the sea, illustrations of ships, fog lights and horns, misty rigging and alongside paintings and photographic works of waves. I stumbled across it looking for film stills from L'avventura (Antonioni, 1960).

My interest in islands and the sea grows continuously. Ships are, in a way, similar to moving islands. So much mystery surrounds both, and both can maintain an almost continuous isolation as long as one is deprived of the other.

Codex Seraphinianus


"Location of the city of Mazeolium unknown, except for existing somewhere within the vast Cherry Tomato Archipelago. Note the fully operational Rovers, after a successful transition from sister city, The Village."

A maze from the Codex Seraphinianus, Luigi Serafini's encyclopedia of an unknown world, written in an undecipherable language.

"...the book lies in the uneasy boundary between surrealism and fantasy, given an odd literary status by its masquerade as a book of fact."

"Some people with whom I have shared this book find it frightening or disturbing in some way. It seems to them to glorify entropy, chaos, and incomprehensibility. There is very little to fasten onto; everything shifts, shimmers, slips."

Available at Elam's Fine Arts Library, and I may just have to request the copy held at Konstfack in Stockholm.

The Amber Room



hidden behind unassuming wallpaper, plundered by Nazis, then disappeared in the chaotic aftermath of WWII. the mystery of the Amber Room - where did it go?

The Intrepid Shamus


The Raymond Chandler Mystery Map of Los Angeles. Locales frequented by Philip Marlowe, the way LA used to be, as described by Raymond Chandler. Painstakingly researched, it resides somewhere between fiction and reality, with Chandler's Los Angeles overlapping the city in it's present state, revealing buildings and locations Chandler attempted to disguise and camouflage, nestled amongst iconic sites like Union Station and The Chinese Theatre.
I am in awe of the cartographical detective who created this.
Hollywood, Bay City, Los Angeles.

A delightful bit of instant mythology



Rolling Stone review from October 18, 1969, by T.M Christian.

To view text click to enlarge.
Due to the first column and paragraph one of column two being blurred, I have transcribed them below:

"They began months ago, the rumours of an event that at first seemed hardly believable but which in the end was accepted as all but inevitable. After all, with 'Garage Jam', Super Sessions', 'The Live Adventures of...', Blind Faith, Joe Cocker's LP, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, 'Jammed Together' and 'Fathers & Sons', it had to happen. Set for release later this month, the 'Masked Marauders' two-record set may evoke an agonizing 'tip-of-the-tongue', lobe-of-the-ear recognition in some, or cries of 'No, no! It can't be true!' in others. But Yes, yes it is - a treasured, oft-xeroxed sheet of credits (which, for obvious contractual reasons, will not be reproduced on the album), and the unmistakable vocals make it clear that this is indeed John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan, backed by George Harrison and a drummer as yet unnamed - "THE MASKED MARAUDERS".
Produced by Al Kooper, the the album was recorded with the impeccable secrecy in a very small town near the site of the original Hudson Bay Colony in Canada. Cut in late April, only three days were required to complete the sessions, though mixing and editing involved months of serious consultations on both sides of the Atlantic. Word has it that the cover art was intended as a "send-up" of Blind Faith, but none of the principals were willing to comment on the situation."

Available on Deity Records.

moonlighting

OCCASIONAL POETRY OCCASIONAL POETRY

"Poetry's living connection with the real world and its occurrences in public and private affairs is revealed most amply in the so-called pièces d'occasion. If this description were given a wider sense, we could use it as a name for nearly all poetic works: but if we take it in the proper and narrower sense we have to restrict it to productions owing their origin to some single present event and expressly devoted to its exaltation, embellishment, commemoration, etc. But by such entanglement with life poetry seems again to fall into a position of dependence, and for this reason it has often been proposed to assign the whole sphere of pièces d'occasion an inferior value although to some extent, especially in lyric poetry, the most famous works belong to this class."

-Hegel


Stumbled across this phrase a while ago, drawn to the excellent pun potential. I like how it can mean 'of an occasion' or 'something done part-time'. So enigmatic! So misconstruing!

Perhaps the title of my next show.

The mystery of the two cups of tea

While Florence Broadhurst was celebrated for her brilliant fabric, wallpaper designs and patterns, her 1977 death remains shrouded in mystery. Speculation was rife that she had fallen victim to a serial killer who murdered elderly woman However others believed Florence's killer was known to her, due to the presence of two cups of tea found near her body, suggestive of a rendezvous.