Revrobe

Black and White Haiku

2012-02-05T10:03:00.000-08:00

Black and white haiku

A frozen trace of movement

Map of my passing

Mystics and Photo Opportunities

2012-01-06T09:46:00.000-08:00

Some deserts have produced mystics. I suppose that in the time of the tribes, the plains and valleys of Iowa, Omaha, and Nebraska did too. By the time I was a pre-schooler in Québec, visiting the reservations was just a photo-opportunity for the white folks in the cities, including my parents. Yet, when playing cowboys and Indians in the English playgrounds of my childhood. I always chose Apache. I suppose it was the 1960s and there was something in the air I picked up. This photograph is proof of my affiliations.

River Memory

2011-12-11T13:24:00.001-08:00

River memory

Wintry and indifferent

Bridges, borders, skin

Deleted scenes - rain

A death surrounded by light

A coin on each eye

Cities countryside

A bird flies across the frame

Emptiness nothing

I dreamed of crossing

wintry railway tracks alone

Feet cold in the snow

Nothing more useless

than a dead man’s toothless comb

Shabby trains creeping

The dead facing east

Something always left behind

Delicate like glass

Empty photographs

In a tunnel on a train

Peacetime snatched from pain

Gravity barking

Emerging from the half-light

Shadows fooled my eyes

Time

2011-08-30T02:17:00.000-07:00

In a box of my old papers I find: A lurid card of flamenco dancers in Seville, a black and white picture of Malcolm X, one of my dad in a ship's cabin writing a letter with a Parker 51 fountain pen, another of Lee Miller dressed in combat gear and smoking a cigarette next to some gasoline canisters, a colour photograph I took of Pedro Albizu Campos's house, now demolished, in Old San Juan, and a 1994 copy of Time Magazine with a picture of Jackie Kennedy on the cover on the occasion of her death.

Shopping

2011-08-30T02:02:00.000-07:00

Looting is the symptom of an age when the most meaningful activity available to the citizen is shopping.

Post-Political Anomie: A Morning After the London Riots

2011-08-09T08:42:00.000-07:00

A soundtrack of sirens wafts into my gated community in Ealing, heralding an age of social meltdown in the UK.
A cocktail of Ballard and Burroughs instead of the revolutionary solidarity witnessed by Orwell in the Spanish trenches.

Central Line, 21 January 2011

2011-01-23T04:01:00.000-08:00

`When you hear through your eyes, only then will you know' (Ssu-Hin)

3D

2011-01-07T01:08:00.000-08:00

Technologists never realised that imagination is the third dimension of visual media. 3D is only good for sports and missile targetting.

Divorced from Myself

2011-01-06T02:50:00.000-08:00

Divorced from myself
Under high-tech house arrest
Weather memory

Melancholy Abstraction

2010-12-30T08:05:00.001-08:00

On the internet even dirt is clean and groping is a melancholy abstraction.

American Dentistry

2010-12-28T01:23:00.000-08:00

The profile pics on social networks may validate Baudrillard's observation that Americans have sacrificed culture for great dentistry.

Kyoto Garden

2010-04-30T00:24:00.000-07:00

Nocturnal fat fish
Circle their insomnia

Mauve silence of monks

An Online Man

2010-02-23T08:28:00.000-08:00

As I watch Judith Butler talking about gender trouble on YouTube, Google Ads tells me that I should `Start Flirting'. Reasons Given?: `Thousands of women are waiting for you in the East Midlands', and `Sexy women from Baltic countries are looking for true love'. My philosophical afternoon is thrown into check by the cognitus interruptus of being a man online.

Conchita Rey at Home, c. 1930

2009-09-23T07:23:00.001-07:00

Reproduced in La mirada del tiempo: Del campo a la ciudad I, volume 11 of Memoria gráfica de la historia y la sociedad españolas del Siglo XX (Madrid: El País/EFE), p. 249. With thanks to Felipe Guerra Pinillos for sending me a copy of this book.

Portrait of Casimiro Municio Águeda (1874-1938?) by Alfonso, Madrid, May 1934

2009-09-23T04:56:00.000-07:00

Previously a security guard, Águeda was appointed Madrid's executioner in 1915. Never comfortable in a role which he carried out with a notorious lack of skill, he took to drink. His health undermined by rheumatism and alcohol, he was hounded out of the neighbourhood of Tetuán by his neighbours. His only friends were a sharpener of knives and a castrator of pigs.

Image held in the Archivo General de la Administración, Alcalá de Henares. Reproduced in La mirada del tiempo: Del campo a la ciudad I, volume 11 of Memoria gráfica de la historia y la sociedad españolas del Siglo XX (Madrid: El País/EFE), p. 277. With thanks to Felipe Guerra Pinillos for sending me a copy of this book.

Here Lies Eric Arthur Blair

2009-06-27T04:11:00.000-07:00

Here Lies Eric Arthur Blair from John Perivolaris on Vimeo.

Four Rainy Footsteps

2009-06-27T04:09:00.000-07:00

Four rainy footsteps

Cemetery without borders

Eternal chessboard

Nothing Lasts for Long

2009-04-29T02:44:00.001-07:00

Nothing lasts for long

Winter chestnuts lose their glow

Heat turns to longing

In My Mother's House

2009-04-25T00:32:00.000-07:00

In my mother's house

Images without echo

Eternal embrace

Retinas

2009-04-24T09:29:00.000-07:00

A palpable frisson of intimacy when the optician informs me that my retinas are still in tip-top shape. Jeepers, creepers ...

Looking and Sneezing

2009-04-17T02:27:00.000-07:00

Looking and sneezing

Throwing stones in glass houses

Disintegrating

Intoxicated

2009-04-14T06:37:00.000-07:00

Intoxicated

Ripples from a gust of wings

Black bird of good luck

Empty Coats and Shoes

2009-04-10T05:16:00.000-07:00

Empty coats and shoes

Sunk in water, weighed with rocks -

Rippling shadows fade

Spring Chick

2009-04-09T07:02:00.000-07:00

Mowing the grass while I avoid looking at a dead chick on the lawn.

Nawroz

2009-03-21T09:23:00.000-07:00

Your redness is mine --

Untie the knots of trouble

Break the earthen jars

Only A Fraction

2009-03-05T22:56:00.000-08:00

Only a fraction

do I ever understand

of what I'm doing

Leaves

2009-01-13T05:49:00.000-08:00

Every journey a return journey.

Every departure a homecoming.

A posthumous feast of star-apples.

Chrysophyllum Caimito leaves

chalk in the mouth, gold in the distance.

Morning

2009-01-02T08:14:00.000-08:00

The suspense of swans skating on thin river ice.

Winter Light

2008-12-06T13:41:00.000-08:00

Winter light, tunnels, transit, vanishing points and poetry.

Silhouettes

2008-11-27T08:27:00.000-08:00

1964. My godparents' house in New York. Watching the Beatles sing `I Wanna Hold Your Hand' on the Ed Sullivan show while the silhouettes of my screaming teenage cousins danced wildly in front of the flickering TV screen.

Dates

2008-10-16T04:58:00.000-07:00

A Sudanese shopkeeper in Brighton informs me that a human being can survive on five dates a day.

Sat Nav

2008-09-12T07:09:00.000-07:00

I've discovered that sat nav is more absorbing than tv. Planning and anticipation followed by the twists and turns of a plot narrated in real time by a female voice that leads you on a journey towards arrival, as the miles count down and any digression is accommodated.

Autumn

2008-09-05T05:35:00.000-07:00

The last cricketers of summer grow older by a season. And I am embracing the humility of each photograph I have missed.

Three Women

2008-08-14T01:29:00.000-07:00

Three women glimpsed on a walk through a city. The first in a headscarf sitting alone in the square. The second waiting anxiously on a bench. A cellphone cradled silently in her left hand. Her gaze receding down the street to her right. The third, smoking outside the hairdresser's where she works. Blonde bob and pale skin bleached invisible by a blast of sunlight after the rain.

Home

2008-08-12T08:04:00.000-07:00

I'm wondering if home is that place that brings us to ourselves somehow.

Mainland

2008-07-27T00:39:00.001-07:00

6 Am. My return to the mainland after a week of prehistoric disconnection in Orkney. Sunk in fog and hung over, I am standing outside a boarded up hotel in Sutherland, the most depopulated part of Britain, hanging on to the last breath of a Tom Waits song.

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Haystacks

2008-07-16T05:47:00.001-07:00

Still lazing on a haystack in Aberdeenshire wondering if this iPhone will be able to pick up an adequate signal in Orkney. The two dogs dozing at my feet while I watch my human loved ones being energetic in hiking boots up a hill in the distance.

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