Office Block Persecution Affinity



I do so much want to join the above organisation but I suppose it doesn’t really exist does it. It is simple walk-through ethnography and all that sound of buildings coming down amongst us might just give us permanent tinnitus. It will of course open up the sky but then again no one actually bothers to look at the sky these days. Well these guys do and I have joined them – and bought the book – and started a special folder called “clouds” in my photo directory – and learned to love the rain. I return of course to thoughts of hanging upside down on the railings of the bridge across the common where we used to live, looking at the clouds and imagining them as islands in the pacific. I thought maybe I was a pilot on my way towards Japan. Which reminds me that General Tibbets has just died.

And then this in turn leads me to the following set of pictures (which you may wish to avoid should you be of a delicate constitution – The “Tubed Pedicle” picture gave me a twinge of squeam, which is unusual - you know who you are.)

Click here if you feel up to it.

Friday Randomness

On a rooftop in this city, an early hour, watching the flickering lights down below, the bridges and remaining tall buildings – you become a memory, silhouetted, leaning against the fence, trying to be cool and attractive in your black clothes and handmade shoes. I hear the Cathedral bells and wonder why they ring at this time. Maybe being here is something special and this feeling makes our gods happy, like being in that express lift, going up to the eighth floor for more views and more posing. And all these pictures in my head just can’t be teased out into photographs to keep for ever. All we want is to remember this without having it forced through glass and electronics into some distilled little box of bits on some dusty disk somewhere.

We dart like fluid otters, over the rafters, above the ceilings of the run-down flats, dodging the occasional ambiguous bullet that pin-pointed a love-affair of some sort. And looking down, they are together, entwined in some aquatic, zero-gravity embrace, one arm each around the other, one arm each relaxed and weighted towards the floor, the gun still in one hand, maybe smoking, maybe dripping to lovingly applied oil to the floor. I see the cloth it came from, still on the table, above the open drawer. And the firearms licence .. and more ammunition, falling from it’s box, rolling to the floor, coming together with the oil, to make a sculpture for all of us. We pass on with time, still flowing over the dusty obstacles that hide in these unknown spaces, lit only by gaps between wood or through broken tiles. Up to eighth floor, through the heavy door onto blank concrete, narrowly fenced with brick to take us close to the drop that would obviously kill us should we want it to.

I am back on that high bridge, resisting the pull of the drop to the mud below but drawn to the view of so many houses and so much detail spread out below me. All those lives in those places, shouting and loving and laughing in so many combinations. And just me up here to see it. The city sounds mash together into some sort of deep white noise, the sound of traffic and trees in the wind, ice cracking, the noise of birds. I remember this from years ago, when I was so small and the city seemed so big. And then I moved out of town, out to the silent countryside and yet still there was that white noise, the echo of creation, and English deity, the green man making the fields and hedges from nothing, crying with most of us at the ending of the giant southern woods and the burning of the northern forests. And here is the fog again, covering up this new city and the trees the same, leading us into not knowing where up and down are, taking away our balance and dragging us over the edge to a bitter descent to that layer of dust breeding in the alley-ways below. There is dust everywhere, spreading and mutating into something living and intelligent, something that will take us all over. Dirt and dust will do for us – will have us buried like the ash-corpses of a modern Pompeii, lost until some playing child of another species finds a calcified finger pointing the way to safety to the rest of the human race dead and rigid behind and below.