Listening to the rain but hearing something else

[Ephemeral New York]

Television

Mr. Verlaine, guitarist and songwriter for the 1970's band Television, has kept a low profile since he became the unlikely guitar god of the punk era, playing not rapid-fire bursts but, in counterpoint with his band mate Richard Lloyd's guitar, sharp, sinuous improvisations more akin to free jazz than the Ramones. Patti Smith once described his sound as "like a thousand bluebirds screaming." 

Ben Sisario | The New York Times

I remember how the darkness doubled

I recall lightning struck itself

I was listening, listening to the rain

I was hearing, hearing something else

Life in the hive puckered up my night

The kiss of death, the embrace of life

There I stand 'neath the Marquee Moon 

Just waiting

I spoke to a man down at the tracks
And I asked him how he don't go mad
He said "Look here junior, don't you be so happy
And for Heaven's sake, don't you be so sad"

Life in the hive puckered up my night,

The kiss of death, the embrace of life.

There I stand neath the Marquee Moon

Hesitating

Well a Cadillac, it pulled out of the graveyard
Pulled up to me, all they said,  "Get in"
Then the Cadillac, it puttered back into the graveyard
Me, I got out again

Life in the hive puckered up my night,

The kiss of death, the embrace of life.

There I stand neath the Marquee Moon

I ain't waiting

I remember how the darkness doubled

I recall lightning struck itself

I was listening, listening to the rain

I was hearing, hearing something else

[BBC]

My heart in the summer

[ΙM-MAGIA]

Jacques-Henri Lartigue | Janine Lhemann, Royan, 1926

Shaun Tan: Our Tuesday afternoon reading group

Our Tuesday afternoon reading group  [Shaun Tan]

Shaun Tan 

Official website | The Lost Thing | Rules of Summer

Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award | State Library of Victoria

The Guardian | Los Angeles Times | The Sydney Morning Herald

Comments on Tales from Outer Suburbia | Shaun Tan

Reading can bring us together as a shared passion, but also reveal how highly individual we are. I could think of no better way to represent this than painting an oddball reading group comprised of very different creatures, who likely have very different perspectives, tastes and opinions. Yet they are bound together by the kind of universal ideas and feelings that books can offer; here taking advantage of the last of the afternoon light in outer suburbia. 

Ray K. Metzker: City Whispers

   Philadelphia, 1983 [Laurence Miller Gallery]

Ray K. Metzker 

Ray K. Metzker, Intimations | Laurence Miller Gallery 

[In] Metzker's early 1980's series City Whispers [...] anonymous urban dwellers glide through contrasting beams of brilliant light and impenetrable shadow. His 1983 image from Philadelphia of a walking man followed closely by a woman, adjacent but never together, demonstrates Metzker's exquisite ability to caress with light while dividing with shadow.

The earthly delights of Ray K. Metzker | Omar Willey, The Seattle Star

In City Whispers, people often sit, stand and move in areas of extreme light and extreme darkness. Often Metzker will use light to barely illuminate a figure in the darkness, much the way a cinematographer like John Alton would create a film noir. Other times, a group of riders waiting for a bus will stand near an awning and be completely bathed in a square of light, as though they were on a stage. Even in groups, Metzker’s Philadelphians are isolated, remote, sculptural figures.

Philadelphia, 1981 [Wonderful Ambiguity]

Philadelphia, 1981 [Slate]

I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do

 James Joyce sculpture by Milton Hebald, Fluntern cemetery, Zurich  [A Piece of Monologue]

James Joyce | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile and cunning.

[Wikiquote]

Between the shadow and the light: Ray K. Metzker

  Philadelphia, 1964 [Laurence Miller Gallery]

Ray K. Metzker

Laurence Miller Gallery | Jackson Fine Art | The J. Paul Getty Museum
 The Art Institute of Chicago | The Seattle Star 1 | 2 | Slate | Art Tattler

Fortress Europe's death toll in the Mediterranean

Lampedusa 2013, Photograph: Luca Bruno/AP [The Guardian]

The death toll in the Mediterranean rises while Europe looks the other way

Amnesty International

A year on from the Lampedusa shipwrecks, which claimed more than 500 lives, a new report by Amnesty International highlights how the shameful inaction of European Union (EU) countries has contributed to a spiralling death toll with thousands of refugees and migrants losing their lives in a desperate bid to reach European shores. 

Amnesty International’s report, Lives adrift: Refugees and migrants in peril in the central Mediterranean, details the findings of recent visits to Italy and Malta, including a research trip on an Italian Navy vessel. Interviews with survivors of shipwrecks, experts and authorities expose the reality of the dangers faced by those fleeing war, persecution and poverty, and the pitiful response of most European states.

“As the EU builds its walls higher and higher, refugees and migrants are increasingly taking to the Mediterranean in a desperate bid to reach European shores. Placed on rickety boats by ruthless smugglers, every week hundreds of them sway between life and death, between hope and despair,” said John Dalhuisen, Europe and Central Asia Programme Director.

“More than 2,500 people have drowned or gone missing in the Mediterranean on their way from North Africa since the start of the year. Europe cannot ignore the tragedy unfolding on its doorstep. More search and rescue vessels in the central Mediterranean, with the clear mandate of saving lives in the high seas and resources adequate to the task – that’s what the EU and its members must urgently provide.”

Conflicts and persecution in the Middle East and Africa, economic deprivation and the sealing of land borders in south-eastern Europe have pushed desperate people towards the sea.

See also:

• Fortress Europe: the precarious lives of refugees | 14.12.2013  

• Death by drowning: precarious refugee lives | 26.01.2014

• Systematically drowning migrants and refugees | 11.05.2014

• A watery graveyard for migrants and refugees | 25.05.2014 

• Hanif Kureishi: Europe degrading the immigrant | 31.05.2014

• Fortress Europe: incalculable cost in human lives | 12.07.2014