hopeless

I took photographs of insides and essences of things and places. I "did" projects. Working in a gallery made me abandon the idea of projects. I started taking pictures as a good excuse to go for a walk in the city. Photography as Golf. As soon as you are satisfied with your day's work, you find clubhouses at your disposal everywhere

Ready-made poetry from Hong Kong:

With a picture

Lighting which

inject a bored

Rhymes with an

exquisite twist,

you have got your

choice.

Some philosophers are a joy to read, even though you cannot tell anyone afterwards what it was that you read, what it was that you assimilated.

Thoughts are their friends. Talking with thoughts gives them joy, and when they meet them on the street ten years later they recognize them despite faces indescribably changed from turning on the axis of time.

Photograph of a stop sign

In front of the railroad station were a few steps. In the afternoon sunlight an old woman with a crutch was posed as if trying to climb the steps to the station waiting room. She had the crutch on the first step, she stood with both feet on the sidewalk, she leaned upwards, concentrating on the crutch and seeming to pour all her energy into it and into her body for the leap upwards to come.

She leaned, poised but unmoving, an athlete in a photograph.

I walked by her, up the stairs, and started to enter the station. "Such a beautiful sunshine, isn't it?" she said. "Yes, it must be the first this year," I responded, "Isn't it the sunniest part of Denmark up here?" She never answered the question. "Two twenty five," she said, as I looked at the timetable. I thanked her and went through the station building, wondering if I should help her up the stairs. I realized as I sat down in the train that she could just walk around the building if she wanted to get to the tracks.

She came onto the train just before it was to leave. But those minutes on the steps were not an approach to the train, she was cat in the January sun, assured of her survival for another season.

Baguettes in Montreal, part 1.

I traded by car for a night with Jed who had a bigger car than my Spitfire. He only gave me one key. The six of us drove off to Montreal at around midnight to get fresh baguettes next morning. I spent an hour driving around a block on a steep hill looking for parking. When we finally parked I lay down in the back and slept since I was the only one of us who could drive a manual shift car. A while later they all came back and gave me a bite. We drove homeward. We got stopped at the border. The girls got searched, but the police made sure not to close the door and commit statutory rape.

A radiator up in the mountains in Karpacz, Poland, by the Czech border. The hotel was big and handsome from the outside, lunch was miserable and the soup and the beer gave the toilet unimaginable value, but the water pipe to the toilet watered the floor instead.

"The real question is: What do different languages do, not with these artificially isolated objects, but with the flowing face of nature in its motion, color, and changing form; with clouds, beaches, and yonder flight of birds? For, as goes our segmentation of the face of nature, so goes our physics of the Cosmos....

( Benjamin Lee Whorf, "Languages and Logic")

Ecstasy, from Greek ekstasis, from existanai, to put out of place, derange, from ex, out of, out + histanai, to cause to stand.

"Whatever can see wants to be seen, whatever can hear calls out to be heard, whatever can touch presents itself to be touched. It is indeed as though everything that is alive - in addition to the fact that its surface is made for appearance, fit to be seen and meant to appear to others - has an urge to appear, to fit itself into the world of appearances by displaying and showing, not its "inner self" but itself as an individual."

( Hannah Arendt, "The Life of the Mind" )

Once we owned a restaurant which served but one menu - an appetizer, main dish, salad, and desert, plus bits and pieces of small stuff. The food was great.

An early evening a couple came in and sat in the "chambre separé", good friends. The man, having looked at the menu a bit, asked if there wasn't anything to choose from. Since there wasn't anything to choose, the man threw down the menu and announced that he wouldn't eat anything. The woman ordered and within a half an hour was in tears, our waitress refused to go up there for the rest of their stay.

Serving customers at an old-fashioned restaurant, bringing a boiling pot which becomes a waterhole in the center of the table, the whole flock eyeing it expectantly, open to attack from behind

Viktorie

in Cheb.
I met her at our opening, where she was actually studying the catalogue. I made an appointment to take a portrait of her, but suddenly we only had a couple of seconds out in the drizzle, she had to take me to the theater and we were late.

on Samsø
Her first solo exhibition, the first time she taught, her first view of the ocean.

in a Graveyard
There are Czechs and Germans buried there, I doubt that there are others. This cemetery is near her house, she is an expert in it, she can feel its changing moods and spirits.

in her House
A year later she had a big retrospective exhibition and became a well known artist. My last portrait of her.

Palm Tree by the Strand. We were all taken out to Brixton - home of war and culture - two days before, and I went back to recapture a lonely building I had seen. Out of the tube and a world of languages I had never before heard invoking gods known to but one at a time. Through the street hawkers and under the tracks and trying to find my building in the tropical sun and muggy and slowly approaching the calm of mid London and hours later, back where I came from, just behind where I had been holed up for two and a half days, a plant saluting perseverance.

Baguettes in Montreal, part 2.

The customs man asked me to open the trunk. The key didn't work there, so I told them I didn't have the key. The customs man looked at me. "What'll you do if you get a flat?" "Oh, we won't get a flat". He made us use our last few dollars in cash to get a mechanic to open the trunk. There was nothing at all in there, neither spare tire nor jack. "See, it didn't matter whether we had the key or not". On the way home we lived on chocolate bars bought with the gasoline credit card I had.

"The six South Korean athletes who recently failed drug tests were probably the unwitting recipients of steroid-spiced dogmeat and have been cleared to go to the Barcelona Olympics, sports officials said Tuesday. An official of the Korea Olympic Committee said the athletes have passed further tests 'and they will be going to the Olympics. The athletes did have some steroids in their bodies but they did not exceed the level allowed by the International Olympic Committee.' The official said it was likely the six had inadvertently taken muscle-building steroids hat had been mixed into kae-soju, a locally popular health-drink. Kae-soju is made by boiling a whole dog with herbs and spices."

Monika

in Cheb.
By a pillar from a ruin that used to be a bridge. She is starting to change her life.

with Short Hair
She took her three kids and moved as far out into the country as she could, close to mom and sister and brother. Four houses with 8 families, and a ruin of what used to be a manor. She lives up on the side of a hill. She ran out of gas, but could coast to work in town. Her brother helped cut her hair, loving conspiracy.

backyard
Four houses with 8 families, and a ruin of what used to me a manor. She lives up on a hill. In the spring come thoughts of cultivation…..Money for a new spade she used for food.

Relaxes
I came driving with a car full of food, she invited sisters and brothers and in laws and a bunch of children and we ate and drank and the next morning she drove the kids to school and then we cleaned up and I baked bread and she needed a nap.

Back Yard Aarhus. When I am cold and need desperately to visit someone and have a drink and a talk and no one is home and the only solution is to go home to myself, then a little look out of the staircase window. In the back yard is nothing, the most useless back yard I have seen for a long time, all I recognize is a metal pipe.

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Santa and the Blackbird

Too rainy for coal, but when I was finished frying - little grey slab of tuna all nice and red spice specks and onion - the evening had all gone also grey-colored dry and heavy smelling of lilac hanging on the last wet drops. I sat on an indoor chair at the damp table outside and heard the cars past the big birch down the street and the 'pchiik' of the woodpecker as we watched each other dine, my two blue glasses of wine and his copper spiral of peanuts and fat, and then the blackbird pecking stuffing his beak with but not swallowing one breadcrumb after another til he looked like he had swallowed most of Santa, only a bit of white fluff beard left for us to see, a reminder of next winter.

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