the industry of art (2)

Gradually. It gradually became. Not all of a. A sudden of all. Not more than suddenly. Somewhere. Something. But there at a precise moment. Convincing. It began as nothing but a shadow, a note and the line above it. For years. Decades. For decades unnoticed. But there at the precise moment. It combined hundreds of places and thousands of novels and sensations out of reach of the precise moment, it combined poems, some of it dreamt before the dog or a child took its tool, it combined French film noir, I more precisely remember from time to time a film with Jeanne Moreau, and the groovy slopes of the seacoast north of Boston. For years, decades, for decades it hadn't been there. Thoughts and talk and movements had made it nearly invisible. People sat at a larger dining table. They discussed how it began, how it had disappeared from the surface of being. The moment it began and the moment it ended have a shadow both. Two or three lines above it. More lines on top of that. Again, again, again. Noticed, unnoticed, noticed, unnoticed, noticed. Emerging from footstep with large shadows that climbed any wall within a second. More than a Tintoretto on the wall in what used to be one of my favourite places. It had been there before birth. The sign of industry. Meadows dissapeared. For a moment of, to my knowledge, indifferent difference abstract painting took its place. Now I see signs on the pavement of sudden beauty. A heap of cardboard boxes presented in such way that its volume became a monument. The curved line of a seagull, a red sign reading 2.6 and faded arrows on the curve near the highway. It gradually became a way of living. I am convinced now of the reason it should have. Genius of industry made it clear, made it visible. Lines on top of it. Precise. Sticking to the Kirchner woodcut a building worker stoops to the rhythm. Historians, amateurs and bourgeois people like Rubens and Veronese. I don't. I started to hate it four decades ago. Look at its surface: a genius for disaster.
Even without the meaning it once may have had.

voorwerpen op tafel

Voorwerpen op tafel en een voorlopig afgeronde hoeveelheid handelingen
waaraan tijdelijk waarneming toegevoegd zou kunnen worden.
Het servet naast een Powerlock rolmeter van Stanley, een schroevendraaier en het smalle mondstuk van een stofzuiger.
Ter rechterzijde, vlak bij het hoekpunt, een boekenstapel met bovenin Wij totale vlam van Peter Verhelst, onderin een vertaling van Questa storia, een midprice editie,
geflankeerd door een leeg flesje bionade. Hier, in deze regio, de rechterhelft van het blikveld, ook nog een pin,
een houtboor,
een photo optic lampje (zo staat het op het doosje)
en een pot primer acryllak met 750 ml inhoud. Goed voor plusminus 9 vierkante meter, staat er.
Waar iemand met de tafelrand zat te knoeien, kwam een boormachine terecht.
Vlakke voorwerpen: een vel papier, plastiekfolie, het doormidden gescheurde restant van een tafelonderlegger, de meetlat.
Broodkruimels, papiersnippers, stofdeeltjes en roestbruine tabak hebben de totale lengte en breedte van het tafelblad. Er is ook nog het antracietgrijze etui van een leesbril,
een asbak met één punaise en bierkroontjes,
een voorraad zwarte tape van Pattex, bekabeling,
een schroef,
het fototoestel
en de figuurzaag in een koffer die stuk is. Later stop ik de leesbril in het etui en het etui in een handtas.

donderdag 30 januari

boven: Dries is aan het woord. Stephen, verneem ik, leest Maxwell. Dit vlooi ik na op wikipedia. Maxwell's equations are a set of partial differential equations that, together with the Lorentz force law, form the foundation of classical electrodynamics, classical optics, ands electric circuits.
Stephen had me eerder al een en ander uitgelegd. Ik deed alsof ik het begreep, zo kunstig dat ik ongetwijfeld heel even dacht dat ik het begreep. Voor Stephen, legt Dries uit, leveren de oude, want intussen klassieke technieken van Maxwell een uitgangspunt om met nieuwe vormen te experimenteren.
onder: Vijf edities van Les mots van Sartre. Sartre publiceerde Les mots in 1964, Perec in 1965 Les choses, Foucault in 1966 het essay Les mots et les choses.
Jasper Rigole heeft zes edities van Les choses. De 10/18 editie uit 1965, met een foto van Dominique Bourgeois op de cover, is er een van. De eerste editie is die van Julliard, ook uit 1965, met het citaat van Lowry op bladzijde 8. Het exemplaar dat ik heb, maakte ooit deel uit van de bibliotheek van het Ministère de la Défense Nationale, had er volgnummer 66/1471.
De edities die Jasper Rigole heeft, dienen als steun voor de projector. Dries wijdt uit over found footage. De kern van het project is dat de kunstenaars die hij selecteerde found footage zo uitwerken dat het niet langer alleen als found footage te definiëren valt. Jasper, merkt Dries op, gebruikt found footage op zo'n schaal dat het meer is dan found footage. Meer een strategie, voegt hij toe.

boven & onder: Jasper Rigole

boven: Hou Chien Cheng heeft z'n presentatie nog af te werken. De huidige positie is in de zaal die vorige week door het werk van Berten gedomineerd werd.
onder: De muraille van Philippe van Wolputte. (detail) Zijn strategie, verduidelijkt Dries, is over het algemeen om niet gebruikte ruimtes te herdefiniëren. Hij haalt de deur van een kraakpand en plaatst een pijl die de doorgang aanwijst: opening.
Hier is een analogie met Berten en de speleologie van het hedendaagse, werk dat tijdens wandelingen ontstaat, vervallen ruimtes, economie zonder andere betekenis, in onbruik geraakte ruimtes.

onder: Jelle hield zich bezig met de presentatie van Meggy.

boven: We betreden het dak, bedekken de koepel boven de ruimte van Meggy met zwart plastiek. Het regent. Op het dak staan plassen.
onder: Akkefietjes, aan de muur geprikt naast het barmeubel.

the thing

It happens all the time and there's not too much to it. At the traffic sign I look at the traffic sign.
There is a car in front of me,
on the right the entrance to a cheap hotel, a young man steps along the pelican crossing.
The rotten sign sticks to red. To the left a girl who steps from a car. I hate to wait for nothing.
On the pavement tracks of sand go nowhere.

It happens all the time. Maybe the sign was not really there? Appartment blocks took the neighbourhood. Sky is limited to a soft touch of grey. I take a street to the left, at the end of that street
one more traffic sign,
again some cars in front of me and people asleep at the intersection. At first the neighbourhood looks deeply changed. A rotten layer colors the pavement. But nothing changed.

dinsdag 28 januari

foto boven: In de kubusruimte zijn Jonas en Veerle bezig. Op de vloer brengen ze het grondplan van een bunker aan.
foto onder: Berten formuleerde het idee om een uitgebreide selectie van het beeldmateriaal dat hij sinds jaren verzamelt in de boekenkast te tonen.

Hou Cien Cheng, bezig in de zaal voorin.

maandag 27 januari

foto boven: Jonas Vansteenkiste & Veerle Michiels
onder: (vlnr) Jonas, Veerle, Dries, Philippe, Stephen, Berten verscholen achter Stephen, Jasper, Annelien, Benjamin en Fabrice aanschouwen de in situ ingreep van Philippe.

onder: een werk van Benjamin Verhoeven

little grey hat

Would then the little grey hat be the thing that attracted,
I love hats, used to have one actually, a black one, large, gave it to a woman
gorgeous wearing nothing else but the black hat, or could it be
the black and long and curly hair seen from a distance as if it belonged to someone else,
naked arms curved on top of the hat, a necklace, jewelry, other luxury to be noticed, or
did it come from the swinging curves of other movement,
not the necklace,
less the hat I used to have, a black one, large, or did it come from the music maybe,
from the wine, from the porc in front of me, from the greens flavoured with olive oil,
exaltation, thrills,
from the music maybe and the exalted, joyous voices on the stream of a warm and exotic tune, or,
later maybe, people turning round and round, the handclapping, male and female voices,
the exalted excitement, truly exalted,
but without that little grey hat. The regular excitement, I must admit. But
without that little grey hat. This is horror, isn't it. The black girl growls, shouts. Someone with an intellectual gaze stares at the victim.
Partly because of the glasses, partly because of the black girl.

the ink

Ocean black. The dark of, the nearly unlimited dark of, the dark of ocean, unlimited. Ink from a dark ocean.
An endless stream of words and thoughts, letters, novels, poems, and all of that ink spoiled on a page in front of me. (1) The letter I receive from a lover
begins with
(a) Tantalus black
(b) the untouched shape of white paper
(c) a Shostakovitch string quartet
pure as it is, and (2) available
as caps, as pencil stumps, utopia, in a bottle, dried sleeves with or without frost, mental supplements adding the unspeakable,
reason, talk and an extra on how to learn more on what the other said, added to the catalogue.

Ocean black is ocean black.
Ocean white is ocean white.
Ocean is both black and white.

We have it red dots on black ink. Or from ocean darker than the one you had. Let me see. This black is turquoise. This one effortless offers the endless blank. This is nineteenth, this is twentieth. This is murder, this a poem. Walk through the unseen landscape. Cities burn and from what it left as if nothing happens.

cyclope kit for the blinded artist

on a poem by Robert Creeley

Agreement. But first tell me for once and all what’s left to agree on.
A reason. Yes the argument. An argument just as valid as none,
as I have been sentenced from womb to womb to live without the luxury of reason.
A painter, madam, would have portraid the suitcase I’m sitting on,
able, one eye closed, to see more clear with the other the creased napkin,
a certain amount of luggage streaming from it, shades, volumes, frames and colors
and quite often, but not unpleasant for that reason, darkness.
But a painter of prefab? From landscapes I see nothing else but the unending silhouette.
It has a smell of dust. A copyist could frame it, from a photograph,
and people with experience for argument again as such may frame that.
It lacks the smell of dust.
These kids, cute and wealthy, apparently have no idea of the thing I’ve been sitting on. A goddamn suitcase goddammit,
The so often stolen suitcase.
Again not too much of an argument is left,
apart from a certain amount of steps, shadows, the gold, a smell of dust.

toothpaste from memory

Why would I care to listen to a politician having his previews in a cooking program. I hate cooking programs, I don't have television anyway and I hate to see pictures in the daily paper daisies of any of these preposterous madmen posing in a swimming tool, biking, jogging and encouraging with tons of variation on that imbecile practice the poor eyesight of those who don't care on this or that or anything else to go blind before they even could have thought of getting a new pair of glasses. A stench deserted came from these rotten brains. Half a page in any of those daily paper daisies and I have enough of it. Look at these charming gents and lookalikes. Any other face, even that of Johnny Rotten, to me is a relief. At night I dream of Damien Hirsch halved, bloodhounds, Porsches.

Now, in my favourite restaurant, I must say, people take utmost care for the scribbling on the wall. Some read all of it five times in a row. Heaney's father digging, fresh from a well preserved edition,
adventures in the land of contemporary, anything a newspaper may add to the obscure field marks
on a found paper, toothpaste from memory, brickstones for heavenly quarters and, strange as it may seem, the daily excrements and its lack of volume.

donderdag 23 januari

boven: Le pcchh-pcchh, comme le dit Diana, en de étagère zonder.
onder: Etagère met. Onderdeel van de presentatie van Berten Jaekers. Alle elementen - een kapotte stofzuiger, de monitor, een in twee stukken gebroken plastieken bloempot, het restant van een torso - bevonden zich op de werkvloer van een petroleumbedrijf.

boven: Onderdeel van de presentatie van Berten. Het papier vond hij op de werkvloer. De tekst is van Berten. Op een van de papieren bracht hij een tekst aan.
onder: Een jonge meubelontwerper gebruikt de zaal achterin voor een foto shoot.

boven & onder: Fabrice en Diana, beiden uit le Savoie, gaan in de corridor aan de slag. Fabrice neemt de corridor, waar drie presentaties komen. Hij wil het graag vandaag afwerken. Op de foto het werk waar het hem eigenlijk om te doen is, een klanksculptuur.

from another room

Heavy sound comes from the framed sides of history. I hear a heavy sound.
It comes from a machine.
People in sleeves of grey are next to it. A sound of metal voices came from the floor.
It comes from a machine. The sound of wood.

From another room softer voices and soft steps enter hemisphere. Two artists
talk on the thing in front of them without noticing the heavy sound.
It comes from a word, from the industrial sounds on the handmade floor
and so it goes, again, again and again. The game. Weak steps. Noise. Ground.

dinsdag 21 januari

1. Een van de eerste handelingen van Berten Jaekers, in die zaalhelft waar Alejandra Hernandez, Delphine Somers en Yann Bronder eind vorig jaar een presentatie hadden,

nadat hij gedurende enige tijd bezig geweest was met het uitladen van planken en tal van andere elementen, die eerst in de andere zaalhelft tegen de houten tussenwand geplaatst werden. We waren het er over eens dat dat eigenlijk best een interessante of op z'n minst indrukwekkende presentatie opleverde.
Een snelbouwsteen stukslaan en de brokstukken zo uitstallen dat het een doordachte en ook zo bedoelde presentatie van ogenschijnlijk efemere of in elk geval onbelangrijke of ogenschijnlijk onbelangrijke elementen wordt. In Belém: een werk van Richard Long. Kijken. Is het als zodanig bedoeld of is het niet als zodanig bedoeld?
Ik heb weet van een reeks van meer dan 300 werken die niet als zodanig bedoeld waren, maar het werden zodra ik aan het fenomeen de bedoeling toevoegde.

Zonder bedoeling naar een krijtspoor kijken.

3. De eerste sporen. Er was een mailtje van Devi Codron. In de zaal achterin, waar een firma uit Lochristi gisteren de DAF weghaalde, is Jelle met een sokkel bezig. Er is een mailtje van Tatjana Pieters. Ze attendeert de lokale kunstscene op het stadsplan. Eind 2004 waren net wij met het idee op de proppen gekomen, nadat we midden jaren negentig in samenwerking met Experimental Intermedia, ook bekend als EI-huis, twee edities van een stadsplannetje realiseerden. Van 2005 tot 2007 volgde een slopende reeks vergaderingen met zowat alle tenoren van de lokale kunstscene, wat in 2008 in het stadsplan resulteerde. Hoeveel edities het kende, herinner ik me niet. Drie? Altijd bereid om meteen weer aan tafel te gaan zitten. Ruimdenkend aan tafel zitten. Geen partners uitsluiten, het niet beperken tot contemporane kunst, van het stadsplan een breed informatieforum maken, wat Tatjana benadrukt: off-spaces in het plan betrekken, het opengooien naar het totaal van wat gebeurt. Er volgt een mailtje van Daniël Termont.

4. Een werk van Jonas en Veerle. De foto maakten ze in Raversijde. Ze werken aan een project met Vrijstaat O. De bunker bevindt zich in Raversijde, aan de kustweg tussen Westende en Oostende. Veerle formuleert het idee, 5., om het grondplan van de bunker op de vloer aan te brengen. Ware grootte, tape.

6. Jelle werkt de sokkel voor de presentatie van Hou Chien Cheng af.

7/8. Berten Jaekers. Uitgangspositie en schets.

9. De sokkel. Geen matte lak, waar we het gisteren over hadden, dat de sokkel met lak afgewerkt kon worden. Het heeft een eerste laag primer. Met het blote oog zijn de onzorgvuldigheden niet waar te nemen: het gat waar een nagel zit. Wordt morgen afgewerkt.

resurrection of dodo

near it is
the resurrection of dodo
near to the table
in my favourite dining club

no 2000 goddamn years to wait
years without that long presumed sentence
dinner served sir
years without answer

looking at the fluid game and jokes of history
a female pope
Edward Gallatin came and went
and how beautiful the rhododendrons were

near it is
on that table in my neighbourhood
roasted
or served in the juice it has

not the first specimen of a new species
again its very last

drinking a beer

Here sits a man with a beer in front of him,
both man and beer of ordinary taste, yes, ordinary,
if I may say so, very ordinary indeed. A man,
look at him, there he sits, the beer in front of him,

a man who never ever drank one single pint before
but could be seen in restaurants eating codfish boiled or fried,
in addition frites and a dish of greens with it and a glass of solid wine.
Yet there he sits, with eyes that gleam as porcelain,

aware of nothing else but the pint in front of him.
Toasting on Rome that burnt? on shooting the infamous last of a fat and lonely bird?
Far from history and its phantasms
but not too far from the concept any moment idle may have had,

consuming the beer, pleased as I am to notice it as such, with utmost appetite.
It's not too late for dinner
but here he sits, in a bar, far from any window, eighthies sprout from the hifi,
windows occasionally frame a bus, the latest bird, a female head.

No reading, not even, much too ordinary as it now seems, the concept
displayed on a nearby table, far too early, of the latest news.
Here sits a man and the pint in front of him. His first pint in front of history. How ordinary.
Ordinary, say no more. A toast to the pleasures of history, to the boiled codfish,

to the frites with it, to the emptied glass on the table in front of aynone else, to the last bird
to be eaten. And a promise, one more beer to unfold the far and far and untold.

on a poem by Les Murray

It is the bookseller in his bookshop who points Les Murray. There, at the desktop in his bookshop, his face stired with the excitement of a pleasant breeze coming from too many pages to be read. Les Murray, he says.
No sir, I don't know any Les Murray. He points some heavy volume, takes it, lifts it from a wooden treshold. Les Murray, he says. It's a bilingue edition.
American? I try. No answer. He wouldn't know. No, he says. No American.
Anyway never heard of a Les Murray. An Irishman he is, I try. No, the bookseller says, reading the blurb, then diving inside the volume. Australian, he says.
Goddammit, never heard of any Australian named. What's his name again? Les Murray, he says. The bookseller points the cover. Les Murray. He hadn't heard of Murray himself. Dead or alive. Or both maybe?
I had one eye on a volume with Heaney, the other on a volume with Selected Poems and prose by Edward Thomas, a Penguin Classic, As featured in Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways, it reads. Now, speaking of Heaney, that's a true gent. I have a friend, the poet, he hadn't heard of Heaney but he read Digging aloud

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills

and as he read it, with his bariton trained on immaculate madrigals and ancient trivials, Heaney's verse became round and deep as from steep desire each female navel. So take Heaney, Thomas on top and make it Murray.
Lads to make a living and its usual sins and simple needs more than the average of everything. Stepping from the bookshop with a red bag loaded with poetry,
curving the car on the lane towards the railway station, I opened the Murray thing. Read The Burning Truck at the traffic light, half a dream from what it read:

It began at dawn with fighter planes:

Governments, rules, traffic lights. A desire to control the reading. People ruin governments, governments ruin people. When all is ruined, both people and government disappear. Government disappears as it obviously has no people left to ruin. But it just as often can't. Desire took on my breath. Driving alongside the shook down crockery I don't take a look at the ruins. Praise the Lord. Breakfast served and rotten corpses.

something

Well, oh, I got fired on sitting on that lazy arse.
Is it something, beautiful as it is,
or is it nothing else but a goddamn lazy farce.

Kain on his picture in the newspaper

He would say, in a tone as indifferent as possible, that he was terrible at remembering people's names.
That he had no brother. No one was known to be his relative. No stockaways in his brain.
He would say that he couldn't remember any recent killing. He didn't know of anyone named. Sorry, what was the name again?
That he actually didn't know what an axe was meant to be. He never harmed anything. Chrissake, not with an axe.
That it couldn't have been him because he hadn't been there.
That he didn't want to hear about it any longer.
Yes, he may have heard something, maybe. Read on it in a newspaper. It was said that a certain X had killed his brother with an axe. Nothing more irritating than such pointless trifles. He had had enough of it. On having killed. What is the name again?
That he couldn't remember. If he would have been thinking of doing something to anyone, or someone he even didn't know: not with the bloody axe. With a quote or two maybe, smiling that terrific smile he had.

But how tail a lie from a truth, how one wrong-doer from the other. For a reason far less unhealthy anyone could have done it, right?
Over a six hundred reasons to clean the untouched blade are left without argument. Flattering.
He sure got popular doing so.

Aankomen in Avignon: Remix3

57 kilometer van Avignon vandaan duikt het woord voor het eerst in het landschap op. Het staat op een van de borden die boven de autosnelweg hangen, wit op blauw: AVIGNON.
Ter hoogte van Sète kwam duisternis over het landschap. Ik kom van Valencia. In Valencia was een helse drukte. Ik vond een kamer in een goedkoop hotel net buiten het stadscentrum. De O van het woord HOTEL, verticaal boven de inkom, hing vlak voor het raam op het derde.
Het besluit om opnieuw naar Avignon te rijden, had ik een dag eerder genomen. Na Cadiz hing ik een halve dag in Màlaga rond. Ik had Declant Grant gegoogled, in een poepsjieke kamer op het zevende van El Parador, in Cadiz, een appartment met uitzicht op de baai en het oude stadsgedeelte. 's Ochtends cafe con leche onder de jacarandas op een pleintje. De display boven een apotheek gaf aan dat het 23° was. Declan had zes jaar voor de universiteit van Màlaga gewerkt, ontdekte ik, was daarna weer voor een Escuala de Idiomas gaan werken, het FGUMA. Van Sebastian Navas, een schilder uit de school van de Andalusische Transvanguardia, die ik net als Declan eind jaren tachtig in Màlaga had leren kennen, vond ik alleen een verwijzing naar een expo in Cala de Moral. In Màlaga, een dag later, traceerde ik de nieuwe locatie van Cafe con libros. Declan en Sebastian waren er niet bekend. Van Merche Rosado Subiron ontbrak elk spoor.
Op circa 60km van Avignon was er een péage geweest. Het was vroege avond, ik had alle tijd. Gedurende enige tijd reed ik achter een truck aan die naar Pilzno in Polen moest.
In de buurt van Nîmes is er een tweede verwijzing: AVIGNON ARLES, en de afstand die ik nog voor de boeg heb, 39km. Op de cirkellijn van die afstand zijn een aantal plekken die samenvallen met de aanwezigheid van Daniël Robberechts in het landschap, maar van het landschap van Robberechts, tussen aankomen in en zich verwijderen van Avignon, bleef weinig. Het is een puinhoop. De autosnelweg was er niet, om maar één ding te noemen. Ik ga van de autosnelweg af richting Remoulins. Afslag 23. Afslag 23 vermeldt Avignon, Remoulins en Pont du Gard. Een ogenblik eerder was er ter rechterzijde ook nog de mededeling AVIGNON cité des papes.
Ik beland op een RN met vijf roundabouts voor ik de schaars verlichte Pont de l'Europe bereik, over de Rhône, en meteen daarna de stadswallen van Avignon en de stationsbuurt. Boulevard Saint-Roch, Porte Saint-Michel, waarover D. R. het volgende schrijft (op. cit., blz. 59): 'het zuidoostelijke hoekpunt is de Porte l'Imbert, het zuidwestelijke de Porte Saint-Roch, maar die zuiderzijde bevat nog vier andere poorten: van oost naar west het Portail Magnanen, de Porte Saint-Michel...' Het station is vlakbij en vlak bij het station, aan de buitenzijde van de singel om Avignon, het Novotel, le Grand Hôtel en Hôtel Magnanen, waar ik vier maanden geleden overnachtte. Dit keer is de keet tout complet.
Een wandeling. Cours Jean Jaures en het antieke Chambre de Commerce. Op het plein, waar taxi's aanschuiven, is een schreeuwerig dispuut aan de gang tussen een zestal Noord-Afrikanen. Ik wijk uit naar Rue de la République en hier O'Neills, een Irish Pub, en het Hôtel Bristol, wat verderop het Musée Lapidaire in wat ooit een kerk was, L'Américaine, een kroeg, en vestigingen van H&M, Zara, Monoprix en Esprit. Op de hoek van Rue du Prévot is Le Nani dat zichzelf aanprijst als restaurant des Avignonnais, niet authentieker dan O'Neills, met nieuwerwets meubilair dat zo is afgewerkt dat het lijkt of het uit een vorige eeuw stamt. De plat du jour serveren ze er alleen 's middags, seulement au déjeuner staat er. Alors je prend. Je prend la brochette de boeuf, bien cuit, une pression, en noteer cultiver l'authentique in het schriftje. Yves Montand in een film waarvan de titel me ontglipt. De andere straat, waarvan Maison Nani het hoekpand is, is Rue Theodore Aubanel, ou Carriero Teoudor Aubanel. Er is een pleintje, een boom, een pancarte met het stadsplan van Avignon, le centre historique zoals D. R. het slopend beschrijft in Aankomen in Avignon. Terug richting Cours Jean Jaures eerst de rode verticale neon van het woord CINEMA in Rue Pourquery de Boisserin, een pancarte van het Musée Rigolo d'Art Contemporain in Rue du Collège d'Anney, een smal straatje waarin drie meisjes verdwijnen. Een ogenblik later de zakkenroller. Eerst bevindt hij zich vlak voor L'Américaine. Er zijn best wat mensen op straat, c'est l'heure de s'amuser quoi. Hij dwarst de straat, maakt opeens een bocht, komt naar me toe, lacht, doet alsof hij me iets zeggen of vragen wil, z'n rechterhand duikt omlaag, ik had het zien aankomen, maak een pirouette, de handtas verdwijnt achter m'n rug door en hij tast in het ijle, staat gedurende een fractie van het moment komiek als een hond over het voetpad gebogen, gênant, drie personen die het voorval opmerken, betrapt, hij heeft niet eens de mogelijkheid om te doen alsof hij wat anders van plan geweest was, kijkt gegêneerd om zich heen, grijnst.

near Penedés

Seven white doves in a naked tree. A landscape
dressed with tools of industrial activity.
Vineyards go up to the top of a yellow hill. Trucks thunder.

the industry of art

Industrial genius conceived it, the largest scale a work of art could have had, high on top of all and everything.
Art never got to anything else. It never was anything else but the industry of a bunch of dead souls good for nothing.
Beauty conceived for the pleasure of beauty? Forget about that. Paint to squeeze half of the dollar it has? Not me.
The biggest work of art is the highway. No beauty ever offered more generous pleasure. Distance, how comforting.
I look at it for hours and hours. Thousands of handscraftmen worked on it. This is the new pyramid. Why stumble in a row to get nothing else but a glimpse of the beloved but never to be trusted one.
Lines and arrows, these highways make a Cheops of absolute preciseness. The geometrical scheme offers shapes of lines and landscape all along it and of the deserted houses many where I used to live.
Hills and subtle slopes with grasses and olive trees complete it. The castles of boredom south
and boredom north,
boredom in the center of it and the sugarcubes of newscape tale on top of that. Look at it. This is the largest scale of art ever made. Even, on my account,
reduced to its most tiny thing: the olive tree. Graphic spasms encircle it. Mules carry the goods from A to B.
Gods always had a greed for the beauty of disaster, manmade. Eternal as it is, it is here and now, precious and trustfull.
Asphalt is the word. Spread that word. Make it truly that work of gods.

gods of ugly

From the hills engines ate a crop of stones. Stone-feathered birds
breed in a valley,
iron-edged towns with names suffering the conquest of nothing special,
appartment blocks, rectangular skylines, all equal.

The gods of Ugly rule the place. A landscape every second
and a thousand rules and names.
Rule one. Too many generations of idiots have conceived this inferior fight against all and everything.

landscape

Nearly endless a landscape of hills with naked olive trees all over it. Varying color schemes from reddish brown, ocre de rue, dark yellowish brown and softer hues, to a color of dust beneath stonegrey sky. Dust-colored rocks with a greenish shade to it, later a more bluish touch and a fringe of tiny shrub. Old cars, aged distance, clouds above it without other sign than being there.
I truly would have loved it as much as an empty page, if it had been that empty page. I already started to dislike it as we drove to those mountains, disagreeing with almost everything I was. I had taken myself for someone else sitting next to the other stranger in a small, blue Citroën driving north from Jaen to Cazorla through valleys with a strong smell of olive oil, then alongside the Quadalqivir where we took notice of a magnificent hemisphere and Salazar being nothing else but a rock, a river or a place surrounded now by a desert of industrial activities.

on the road

Forget all of the sunburnt town, me included, drop it in a public garbage can.
Dead cats on a highway. On the road again.
One of the girls I knew used to live in a shabby appartment near the intersection. She got paid for making love with boatsmen from countries she hadn't been to.
Once again in front of the appartment where she used to live I take to the intersection. Los montes de Màlaga have the unnoticed pleasure of distance. Forget about summer then,
Dolores would have said the same. In Tolox no one ever on a typewriter wrote more distant words.

shortcut

An ancestor is said to have taken seat on a hat.
Apparently he remained the only one of the fleet
not to have noticed a single thing indeed,
apart, later on, from the brains it didn't have.

Spain

Sitting at the wheel of an engine I drive through Catalunya.
Weird places. I don't know anyone here.
The landscape is offered as a marmelade of weird structure.
I feel sorry for the people living and working in those small neighbourhoods loaded with industry.
Entering the narrow streets I see nothing else but signs and arrows.
Signs indicate commercial activity. A certain Lopez here, a certain Lopez there.
There is a shop for the dogfood, a dentist, a shop eventually for the thing to wear.
Factories load the place with the unpleasant shapes of industrial sculpture.
Would anyone of the unseen love to be around at seven? I don't think so.
It is hard to know how people live and think. They love it, this shabby town
filled with oblivion and marmelade.
A sign at the roundabout points the highway. South or north.

funsmoke

It is not because of the town. It is not because of the hour. It is not because of this little here and now.
Someone trapped it hanging on the wall, someone trapped it hanging from a tree.
It has nothing to do with the time of the year, the gifts, the dust. Walking through the deserted streets of Faro won't add anything new to an autobiography crowded with cyclopes. The beggar,
she sits in front of the shop where Helena Diaz used to work, opens a hollow hand. Shadows follow.
From the many people she was the only one I had to meet, waving the sugar and its little track
as an aristocrate would have done it, or Jeanne, dressed for a funeral under the gloomy green of a jacaranda.

beach

The beach. A young woman stepping from unnoticed surroundings. She runs. That is she starts to run. We of course don't know who she is. She's there, on the beach, a dark-haired young woman wearing a green t-shirt. Seen from the lounge on fifth floor of Hotel Sol e Mar there's no one else on the beach. Far from the coast a small boat speeds on the slightly bluish surface of the ocean. It makes a slow turn towards the coast. The young woman runs along the surf. On the beach many traces of similar activity may be noticed, or not, and now hers is added, slightly diagonal towards the surf. The engine on the water, what we have depicted to be a small boat, without adding anything more specific, made a U-turn and disappeared behind a stone construction with something on it. No music is to be heard as the girl left no other message than her breezy thread. She vanished. Seagulls boil above the surf. On the beach a small engine appeared. It has two males inside. Much older now a woman follows the thread back to its forgotten beginnings. The engine with the males inside has reached the spot where someone who had been following the edge of the surf all of a sudden took a sharp 90 degree angle. Seen from the lounge on fifth floor the beach appears to be the unfolded map of a treasure game. Where and who we do not know. From the lounge on fifth someone with a British accent took notice of a man in black with a camera fastened to a small scale tripod. Partly a cyclopic structure, composition too is nothing else but a matter of scale. How the Titanic went, from a more general point of view, is only one of the elements.

ocean

Seen from the window on second floor, a carefully lighted room with a blue double on one side, there is nothing else but ocean. Endless going and coming of roaring water, waves curling from massive darkness. A beach deserted, traces of a vehicle on it, lines of water, massive darkness. High on the ceiling, nothing else, as if someone forgot to turn of the heater, a single light, one only. Clouds hang around.
From the ocean comes a turmoil of sound, from the sand a heap of buildings. One of the handmade works is an iron construction fed with birdshit.

the tourist with the blue hat

A tourist with a blue hat, sitting on the terrace at Largo do Carmo, goes through a magazine on Lisbon curiosities.
The institute for archaeological research on Largo do Carmo is one of it and now she's the other. A female with a blue hat. What's left of her to look at?
Apart from half a suitcase left in a double room: black hair, a coat darkened by rain, the blue hat, no face, a pair of glasses. Then, as soon as she speaks,
addressing a male in a dark blue coat who stept from the main entrance of one of the major curiosities on Largo do Carmo,
going through the magazine again, again examing the luxurious Baroque interiors of Madre de Deus and Sao Roque: a husband, the dog.

the meal

She will take notice of me and smile. A mild, a very mild smile. She indeed takes notice of me, she smiles. A sign took my attention - sopa: alho francés, peixe: bacalhau a gomessa, carne: frango de garil - and now I take hers. She points one of the tables. Any table unoccupied may do. She points the one next to the mirror. Do I want to sit in front of a mirror? She points the other one. As far away from the mirror as possible? Well, there's only those two tables available: (a) mirror (in front of mirror), (b) no mirror (not in front of mirror). Is it possible to sit in front of a mirror while struggling with a. What is it called again? The frango de garil. Is it what? No. Of course not. Impossible. This reveals a reduction as simple and gentle as one and one is three. Looking for the glasses, as soon as (b) is conceived, and now proceeding to the act of waiting untill she again takes notice of me, I consider, for a moment without the intention to go through the reading she offered, if I go for the fish or, adding as neutral as possible the other of both hypothetical possibilities, the. What is it called again? The frango de garil. Hence the many possibilities of what a frango de garil would be and on top of that two more possibilities: (a) ask her, (b) don't. Two more costumers enter the dining room and, as no choice is left to consider (a) or (b), take seats in front of the mirror. Then indeed she again takes notice of me. Fish. I order the fish. No fish, she says. She waves both hands. Fish no. They have. What is it called again? The frango de garil. Less hypothetical than it used to be. Resume. Proceed to further considerations. Consider the meat, consider the fish, codfish boiled, codfish grilled or in whatever way it has been served. At a nearby table seven locals are each of them focused on the plate in front of them. One has a dish with frites and egg on top of it. Not making it more difficult than it should be, unnecessary even to think of making it more impossible than it should be, I order the soup. And a beer. And the fried egg. And frites with it. And her smile all along it, a mild, a very mild smile. Shrimps? she asks. With or without the shrimps, that's as good a question as any other. With. It began with the fish and. What is it called again? The unshaven behind of a what? / / She opens a bottle of Bock pils and pours it gently in a glass. Look at this. Bread is added, in addition a round piece of cheese manufactured by Miguel Frade da Silva, specimen L-4513 it reads, and butter is added. Then the soup. French soup it said. Or, if I may say so, looking now at a thick, orange mass of what could be mashed pumpkin or mashed carrot or a mix of both, something in a more or less general way conceived as the thing it is said to be? May I suggest, without making it any more difficult than it should be, that this thick, orange mass of mashed pumpkin or mashed carrot or whatever it may be, is or at least looks far less French than. What is it called again? The unshaven behind of a what? Eusébio died and these people, look at them, talk on nothing else but food. A tiny little fly inspects the bottle. Expecting what, if I may ask so? Inspector Shrump. Don't touch the bread, Shrump. It does. One and one made three. It inspects the bread, it inspects the cheese, cheese manufactured by Miguel Frade da Silva, specimen L-4513 it reads on the paper attached to it, a paper with the image of a sheep on it, obviously the female shape. On a nearby table two glasses of Porto get served. The Russian couple in front of the mirror. Or, the couple from Warschau. Sitting next to the lookalikes inside. Porto got served and nothing more radical than joy radiates from their faces. Meanwhile I have been looking at the bottle of ketchup in front of me. I had no intention at all to touch it. The female, Russian, Servian or Polish, is a luxurious blonde. He is. What is it called again? The masculin type. They have finished the soup. A second plate gets served. She ordered the shrimp, he a steak or something. He first examines the plate with shrimps, sticks a fork in it. An olive, black and ovoid, jumps from the plate, gets to the floor. They both look at it.

wait a minute

Wait a minute. Here you are. Stired by music coming from a car
the jacarandas on Avenida Dom Carlos curve and dance.
From a window open the music floats to both sides of the street.

Two dogs trace the forgotten track and remember as they face, unvisible for both of them,
the jacarandas and its pleasant grace.
The smaller one, a dog pitched with black and red, takes it quiet. Philosophisms cool with age.

The other, bigger, more hairy, feels a deeper need. More deep indeed, sir.
Oh yes, deeper indeed, coming from the deepest deep, deeper indeed than any other deeper deep.
Philosophy, sir, if I may say so, took a staircase on my breath.

A dove came and with the dove a pair of shoes. Stepping from the ocean through silent wind
the jacaranda aged,
and girls, beauties I admit, studied the unforbidden. Poetry not even thought of then,
that of the fattest bird,
that of crimes undreamt,
that of the absolute and its fattest thruth
and the statues that came from that.

how to become someone

Years ago he used to sit in front of Cafe Central selling little fake jewelry with the face of Franco on it.
To anyone who didn't care to hear of it he would tell how great Franco had been. Life had a pleasant violence. For the handsome few it gave easy living. Life had been better then,
at least for him as he now found himself humiliated in front of an indifferent mass of tourists taking the little fake jewelry with the face of Franco as something far too easy to forget.
Sitting on the pavement, selling the latest of any of his souvenirs, gambling with wallets every once in a while,
from those who had no intention at all to listen to his silly story.

In Rua da Prata he has a clean job now, taking tourists in front of Nilo to the dining room,
eager to instruct the hungry and thirsty to the plates they serve.
It is fairly difficult, not to say nearly impossible, not to get tempted.

Later he hung around in bookshops and libraries and took for pleasure the unpossessable. Thoughts,
ideas and fancies.
Not for leisure only he grabbed all that he could take, from Greek philosophers a library effortless complete,
from Wittgenstein a line or two,
but to create a model for the genius he didn't have, the unthinkable, as one may guess, unable to get to the secret garden.

Then one day at Largo do Carmo advantage he took, protected by the musing of a lighthearted night,
of a couple of tourists having a beer on a terrace there under mountain-ashes curved, absorbed by less incidental appetite. With luggage unnoticed he ran
adding Perec to the best he ever read,
as a drunk cab driver would have done, peeling distance as far as possible through deserted streets.
Again, how to become someone, he must have thought.

Later, gently asked what he had read, he indifferently would admit that he read none of it.

Sintra

De Frederik Berglund villa aan Largo da Quinta do Relógio staat te koop. Vende 917 849 301, staat er.
Een bouwval, een ruïne. Moorse invloeden, zie foto. Muren aangetast door vocht, kapotte ramen, rottend houtwerk, klimplanten woekeren over de zijgevel.
Frederik Berglund heeft kennelijk wel de intentie gehad om wat herstellingswerken uit te voeren. Voor wat ooit een monumentaal trappenhuis was, staat een kruiwagen en rechtsop, waar in een vorige eeuw een terras was met het panorama op een uitgestrekte tuin, liggen kakelverse rioolkokers, bijeengeharkt steengruis en plastiek waarop intussen mossen en grassen groeien.
Onder de groene verf toont het roeste traliehek sporen van gele verf. Enorme bomen met bemoste takken en dik gebladerte dringen om het pand.

two statues

In the middle of Rossio, let's have a look at him,
what is he doing there?
a stonzefrozen corpus stands, dedicated to Pedro IV, born
it reads on October 12 in the year 1798
and getting darker, come rain come shine, year after year.

Next to la Brasileira, with a sincere smile on its face, a far smaller statue sits.
People sit next to it, ravishing blondes, latinos with a funny gaze smoking a fat cigar.
They touch its lefthand, resting on the table, just as often embrace it,
kids look at it, shout: look that funny man, and are just as often told who it was.
Girls take his hands, smile and laugh, families gather around him, quite often
imitating its sudden gaze, its dull color of greenish copper.
Wouldn't it be sick a bit? Didn't it drank a bit too much? Wouldn't it rather prefer
to walk and drink and smoke? Wouldn't it just for fun write one more poem?

boeken

De cafetaria van het Museu Coeleção Berardo heeft een nieuwe uitbater. De zaak is gerenoveerd. De zithoek heeft drie kringen om een centrale display heen waar wat boeken uitgestald liggen. Ik pik er eentje uit. Corpos e almas, romance, a work by Maxence Van der Meersch, een uitgave van editioral Minerva Lisboa 1953. De persoon die het boek kocht, kocht het in 1953, die datum staat in handschrift op de eerste bladzijde: 1953. Later, toen het boek los kwam te zitten, werd de rugnaad met tape verstevigd, een poging om binnenwerk en kaft samen te houden. Ik sla het boek open, zestig jaar na de persoon die het kocht of kreeg, bovenaan de eerste tekstbladzijde staat de mededeling PRIMEIRA PARTE, en lees de eerste zin: Prudamente Michel empurrou a porte do teatro anatómico. Era a primeira vez qui ali voltava depois haver feito o serviço militar. Een zekere Michel staat, voor het eerst sinds z'n militaire dienst er opzit, toen nog onder het autoritaire bewind van Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, voor het anatomisch theater en duwt de poort voorzichtig open. Dat is zo ongeveer wat er staat.
Onder Corpos e almas bevindt zich een kleinere, dunnere editie, iets van Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, een uitgave van RECLAM, op de titelpagina vollediger: Philipp Reclam Jun. Stuttgart, waaraan de persoon van wie het boek was, Isabel Frautos, of -is, met potlood het jaartal toevoegde, 1802, en de leerplichtachtige mededeling dat het om ein roman lirico zou gaan, een lyrische roman. Overal in het boek heeft ze met potlood notities geplaatst.
In het belendende vak begint het met Vingt ans après, tome III, van Alexandra Dumas, uit de reeks les meilleurs livres français van Ed. Calmann-Lévy. De titelpagina heeft de stempel van een zekere Arthur Penha Covilha. Naast het als stationsroman vormgegeven boek van Dumas een werk van Jean-Pierre Rioux, A revolução industrial, oorspronkelijk een editie van het Parijse Seuil, in 1973, één jaar na de Franse editie, in het Portugees vertaald en opgenomen in de reeks universidade moderna, publicaçoes dom Quixote, boekdeel 40.
Dan nog een deeltje uit het aanbod van Philipp Reclam, iets van H. v. Kleist, de novelle Michael Kohlhaas. Ook aan dit volume werd op de kaft met potlood het jaartal toegevoegd: 1810 ou 1811 en aan de handtekening van Isabel Frautos, of -is, met blauwe balpen wanneer ze het kocht: março/68.

In het vakje met Kleist, Rioux en Dumas is er ten slotte ook nog een meer lijvig volume, Debate sobre a arte contemporãnea (Publicaçoes Europa-America, 1962), met essays van onder andere Cassou, Ansermet, Maulnier, Fouchet, Portmann en Vittorini. Het papier kreeg een gelige teint en vertoont een willekeurig patroon van bruine vlekken. Het is niet ondenkbaar dat de display geen andere dan een efemere functie heeft. De volumes aanraken is niet verboden maar houdt niettemin het risico in dat ze uiteenvallen.

afternoon at the museum

In the bookshop of the cultural center of Belém, also known as Museu Coleção Berardo, west of Lisbon, one of the girls adresses me in French, apparently because of the book I bought, a bilingue edition with sonnets of Luis de Camões.
On her face I try to trace the French I heard.

What I really like is the face of the black girl, tuned with ancient eyes
at ease with gods and beasts
all of a sudden wearing nothing else but clothes. Next to me on a black leather seat
we both look at the names on the wall in front of us:

Bernd & Hilla Becker, Carl Andre, Marcel Broodthaers, Alighiero Bickerton, Jimmie Durham, Dennis Oppenheim, Bill Viola,
Sigmar Polke, Louise Bourgeois,
Dan Flavin,
Gerhard Richter,
Matt Mullican, Thomas Ruff, Wolf Vostell
and many others.

What I really like is the face of the black girl.
A man with roots unknown, apart from the Adidas blue beneath his gaze, steps to the bathroom.

Pleasant seats make pleasant habits. Apart from the thousand corpses it is the only work that may have took a day.

And what really touched me: there she sat, looking at the screen of an iPad.

Seen from the terrace el Tejo had nothing else but the sound of seagulls.
A cargo took the river under a sky as grey and white as toilet paper.

Sunrise Blvd

There are the drunk and long asleep, slowly awake from an old date with history.
Has none of them noticed how it came to an end?

How it came to the end? With the first steps, unfamiliar, or maybe not, as no one ever would have dreamt
if someone else hadn't told so.
That again nothing remained, as not one step could be saved for once and all, of distance
and its disappearance in front of all of them.

It is, indifferent, the old step, coming from a nearby age of stone
engraving spectacle of fire and illuminated fish fried to the bone. Still there,
no one touched it,
but distance came, indifferent difference coming from a nearby stone,
the uncertain knowledge of the drunk and ruins certain of the long asleep.

From few hours long asleep, usefull as indifference from such distance seems, the long asleep
gets out of bed
and steps through rooms where not that much should have been changed.
Maybe someone cleaned the table? One wouldn't know.
Steps bring us to a bathroom. There we sit and think. Or maybe not.

Later, or maybe not, looking at the first steps of a nearby tree. In the kitchen
a heap of dreams need to be finished. Wait, wait. A cup of coffee first.
Of breedings new to come any rooster knows, but a sense of limit took the narrative.