Saturday 31 January 2015

Que locura!



in
the 
mental 
hospital 
the  soldier 
is a sickening
sight 

hypno-
tic 
shots
of drugs
deprive
him
of
                  his madness
 stop 
him
taking
his
own life
crying
out
for     
 yours


Que locura! What madness!

The above etching is from Francisco Goya's collection Los Desastres de la Guerra 'Disasters of War'


Thursday 29 January 2015

Wau! Is it Wurst?




The above cartoon, which I have just drawn, was prompted by an advert from the city's public cleansing department in today's paper.

The advert showed a mountain of dog waste disposal bags and stated that 60,000 portions of picked-up dog excrement are collected every day from the provided bins here in Vienna.

From personal observation of the city's paths and a couple of recent  unfortunate incidents involving the soles of my shoes and the soft smelly brown substance I can vouch that there are still a good number of doggie-doo miscreants taking advantage of the long hours of winter darkness in this city of countless hotdog stands, 1.8 million humans, and their innumerable canines.

The joke in the cartoon is that the Viennese word for a sausage and for a piece of dog shit is the same word.  It is Wurst.

It is Wurst is an expression commonly heard here, and it means in effect: Don't worry, there's nothing to be done about it. Nevertheless it is gratifying to learn that an increasing number of dogs and their owners are making an effort to keep the streets clean and hygienic. 

CAPTION:  60,000 DOG EXCREMENT
  BAGS FILLED DAILY. THANK YOU.   


Wednesday 28 January 2015

Winter concert in b-minor



at last  ------ the last movement        ------- the final glissade _______ from the strings

into  
intention 
 of silence 


and non-
silence 
(via explosions) 


(earlier sequenced)
and echoed 
in bronchi

now underscored


my 
concrete 
memory 
of an audience 

clapped   ......../............) ...........! .............`....   out 



Joyce & Svevo, a collage



The text at top left states: 
'His affinity and friendship with Italo Svevo (born Ettore Schmitz and defined by Joyce as a "neglected writer") would prove very significant: the two met in 1907 when Svevo, who was travelling to London to attend to the Veneziani family business, was looking for an English teacher. Svevo is regarded as one of the models for Leopold Bloom, particularly in his Jewish aspects. Joyce was also inspired by Svevo's wife, Lilia Veneziani, and he referred to her long tawny mane when describing the water flowing in the river Liffey, that runs through Dublin, in Anna Livia Plurabelle, one of the chapters of Finnegans Wake.' 

ps- 
It is worth noting that Svevo described Joyce's influence on his writing as "the Resurrection of Lazarus", for it restored his faith in his literary skills. His masterpiece La coscienza di Zeno (Zeno's Conscience) owes much to Joyce. 



Monday 26 January 2015

Auschwitz Liberation Day



On the 27th January, that is to say tomorrow, it will be exactly 70 years since Ukrainian troops opened the gates of the Auschwitz extermination camps and liberated those inmates who were still alive. 

The 70th anniversary of the end of Auschwitz (more than a million people perished behind those infamous Arbeit Macht Frei gates at the behest of the leaders of an educated and cultured people) should remind us that we must remain watchful.  

The anal outpourings of certain politicians, those with ambitions to deprive us of our hard worn liberties using some convenient pretext or other, should be constantly sifted for clues as to the real agenda. History has a habit of repeating itself. 

A few days ago the minute hand on the Weltuntergangsuhr or Doomsday Clock ticked forwards a couple of minutes.  The time is now  three minutes to midnight. 

There's a link to the official Auschwitz website HERE.

The photo (with caption) below shows the Vienna Holocaust Memorial, which in reality is grey,  in the city's Judenplatz. Any charred paper effect is my licentia poetica.




The text reads: 
This memorial commemorates the 65,000 Viennese Jews who were murdered during the Nazi regime. It was created on the initiative of Simon Wiesenthal (1908 - 2005). The reinforced concrete cube by the British artist Rachel Whiteread (b. 1963) represents an introverted, non-accessible library. Countless editions of the apparently same book stand for the large number of victims and their life stories. 


Tuesday 20 January 2015

Opening Gambit



Overwhelmed with emails:

learning German can be fun:

Schachspielbrett.



Monday 19 January 2015

Another close shave




heavenly smooth
 pro glide
 fusion flexed
ball razor
max/ing closer contact
all directions
and dimensions
 seafresh gel
to lather
sleepy face
to clearly face
the day
that dawns in  steamy
glass
before the mug
 of wake and
smell the instant 
news
the front page
photo brings from far away
Manila in the Philippines
for there 
the clean shaved man
in sun brite yellow pacamac
 gently showers
 his love 
like rain
 into their hearts
 and minds 
and souls 
to illustrate 
his point.


- the above is a tribute to Pope Francis (78) on the occasion of his visit to the Philippines in January 2015

Sergej & Lusine Khachatryan with Narek Hakhnazaryan


Sergej (l) and Lusine (r) Khachatryan  


The most passionate and enthralling concert it has been my pleasure to attended for some considerable time. The applause was immense. I even bought a cd in the interval. 

The programme performed at the Vienna Konzerthaus on 15th January 2015 by Sergej Khachatryan (violin), Lusine Khachatryan (piano) and Narek Hakhnazaryan (cello) included the following works: 

Ludwig van Beethoven - Klaviertrio D-Dur op. 70/1 "Geistertrio"
Sergej Rachmaninoff - Klaviertrio Nr. 1 g-moll "Trio elegiaque"
Arno Babadjanian - Klaviertrio 

But the real reason I am mentioning this concert here is because of the on-stage appeal made by Lusine Khachatryan to alert us to the fact that 2015 is an important year for Armenians. 

The month of April will mark the 100th  anniversary of the beginning of the Armenian holocaust (or whatever various politicians want to label it). 

It is an interesting aside to me, as a Welshman,  that the Welsh Assembly and Scottish Parliament recognize the event as a holocaust or genocide, but the Westminster Parliament in London refuses to label it as such. Such is the world of politics. 

For my small part, I was duly moved to find some relevant quotes which I present below: 

"The Armenian massacre was the greatest crime of the war." Theodore Roosevelt

"In 1915 the Turkish Government began and ruthlessly carried out the infamous general massacre and deportation of the Armenians in Asia Minor."  Winston Churchill


The Saviour of Europe - 'Der Standard' front page

"There is no reasonable doubt that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons."  Winston Churchill

"When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race, they understood this well, and in their conversations with me they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact."  Henry Morgenthau 

"Undoubtedly religious fanaticism was an impelling motive with the Turkish and Kurdish rabble who slew the Armenians as a service to Allah, but the men who really conceived the crime had no such motive. Practically all of them were atheists, with no more respect for Mohammedanism than for Christianity, and with them the one motive was cold-blooded, calculating state policy."  Henry Morgenthau 

"In the province of Armenia, Abdul Hamid and the Young Turks had deliberately set themselves to the simplification of the Armenian difficulty by exterminating and deporting the whole race, whom they regarded as infidels and traitors."  David Lloyd George 

"After all, who speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"  Adolf Hitler 



Sunday 18 January 2015

all alone on a concrete memorial




a l l  a l o n e is a concrete poem in the form of an X by Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925 - 2006).

The Memorial for the Victims of Nazi Military Justice  by Olaf Nicolai was erected in Vienna in 2014. 

The poem must be viewed by climbing onto the sculpture. A notice warns visitors that there are no handrails and that lying snow will not be cleared away. 


Religion and Open Shape




Having some time to kill, as the once harmless saying goes, I wandered about. My stroll took me through the MQ complex in the city. 

Suddenly my gaze fell upon a work of art displayed in the Art Box in the public space; a thought provoking installation by Austrian-born artist Uli Aigner, called Open Shape (curator Elisabeth Zeigt). 

An information leaflet was available. I took one, and perusing it I found an apposite quote from the year 2005 by Bruno Latour:  

It is an entirely different thing, for instance, whether one regards religion as something slowly drifting away into a faraway fairytale land or whether one sees it exploding in front of one's own eyes as something that makes people die in the present - and (will do so) in the future. It is a vast difference whether nature is a giant reservoir of power with an unlimited capacity for storing refuse, or whether it suddenly turns into something that interrupts any kind of progress - something that cannot be appealed to or got rid of. 



Saturday 17 January 2015

On the fifth day . . .


God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems . . . God blessed them and said: "Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water . . . "   Genesis Chpt. 1





In whose image created He them? 


Thursday 15 January 2015

Cartoon Theory


CHARLES DARWIN . . .

. . . JOINS THE CIRCUS 

HIS DEATH IS MOURNED

BUT HIS WORK . . .

. . . GOES ON


. . .  ATTRACTS NEW READERS 




Monday 12 January 2015

* * * !!! Charlie for President !!! * * *


Balloons 
of all colours
Full of air, And 

a Clown 
to lead us 
all officially!
  

Sunday 11 January 2015

JE SUIS CHARLIE





to combat guns
and suicide bombers  . . . 
  a bandolier of pencils



Thursday 8 January 2015

"Je suis Charlie" / Meeting Space / Peach





Peach

Would you like to throw a stone at me? 
Here, take all that's left of my peach. 

Blood-red, deep;
Heaven knows how it came to pass. 
Somebody's pound of flesh rendered up. 

Wrinkled with secrets 
And hard with the intention to keep them. 

Why, from silvery peach-bloom,
From that shallow silvery wine-glass on a short stem 
This rolling, dropping, heavy globule?

I am thinking, of course, of the peach before I ate it. 

Why so velvety, why so voluptuous heavy? 
Why hanging with such inordinate weight? 
Why so indented? 

Why the groove? 
Why the lovely, bivalve roundnesses?
Why the ripple down the sphere?
Why the suggestion of incision? 

Why was not my peach round and finished like a billiard ball? 
It would have been if man had made it. 
Though I've eaten it now. 

But it wasn't round and finished like a billiard ball. 
And because I say so, you would like to throw something at me. 

Here, you can have my peach stone. 


D. H. Lawrence 
1885 -1930 Vence



Monday 5 January 2015

Prescription



Huddled winter colds;

wrap up, drink plenty of fluids.

Time for  hot toddies.