Now, when you notice things, there’s someone else there.Crows lope away from us with a look that knows our atrocities.
The back garden in Wednesday rain heaves out godlessness.
Sunlight shines through the rim of a baby’s nostril.
Airports murmur the secret all governments fear: there aren’t nations, only people.
Now, when you notice these things, there’s someone else there with you.Noticing used to happen without you noticing it:
A girl’s nude armpit like an opal,
The sea’s look of marbled meat,
A bare winter tree like a cross-sectioned lung.
You woke up, noticed, went to bed dumbly enriched.
Now, when you notice these things, there’s someone else there with you.In the kitchen, after an evening in separate conversations,
You put your hands on your wife’s midriff – and there she is again,
All that you’d forgotten.
Desire learns cunning or dies.
Now, when you notice her, there’s someone else there with you.Awake before suburban dawn you master self-ridicule and step
Barefoot onto the lawn’s frost, because after all you can.
And there’s frost revealed: an old patient god
Fragilely attempting an impossible reclamation.
You notice this, but there’s someone else there with you.You can’t, quite, meet his eye, this companion who showed-up sometime after wisdom teeth or original sin.
But you begin to see your mistake:
Noticing isn’t a gift, a grace, a dispensation, but
Comes at a price, demands exchange,
And as his peripheral smile reminds,
text - Glen Duncan
image - Catherine Anyango
After doing a few Baby Food ads, it's been nice to even up THE SCORE, shake off a bit of my Catholic past and for once do something to make the world a safer (and possibly smaller) place. The opportunty was provided me by Brooklyn cult filmmaker Ronni Raygun Thomas. Cheers Ronni.
In conjunction with 'Cold War Modern' show at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Radio Clerkenwell will be broadcasting a series of shows for Resonance 104.4FM the London Arts Radio Station. The series is a trip through 'Sounds of Propaganda and the Cold War' featuring some of the absolutely extraordinary music, broadcasts and spoken word recordings of the time. I will have some very special guests along the way to keep me company too.
Well you know, we probably all spend too much time in front of our computers and for many of us it seems the hours spent on the de rigeur on-line virtual networking sites has even overtaken the time we spend actually meeting people in the flesh. I'm really not sure about it all to tell you the truth. Yet, when asked by Curious Pictures to contribute music to their new promo for yet another such site, I accepted. Why? Well, because the film was made by Ro Rao the director who directed 'Bringing the Body Back Home' and of course, as you might expect, it's wonderful.
Speaking of Catherine, she recently asked me to re-score her wonderful film 'Deep Blue Something'. She is rather reclusive and seems reluctant to ever step into the footlights, so I am forced to do it for her.
This album by The Real Tuesday Weld came out in the US late last year and there is a terrible tale of skulduggery, betrayal and infidelity behind why it is only now available in Europe. But, praise the Lord, it is now being released through Cargo / Six Degrees in all the usual places and by the new label Antique Beat as a special collectors' edition forty page hardback book. This is made with wonderful illustrations by the very magical and mysterious Ms Catherine Anyango (a fellow denizen of East Central London) who tells the album's story in a series of gorgeous linked montaged tableaux. .jpg)
Back to Blighty after visiting the New World. Meeting new friends and old, meeting celebrities, a Siegfried and Roy moment, a Spinal Tap moment, getting sunburned, getting stoned. Experiencing a lot of generosity, appreciation and passion. And that was just on the way to Heathrow..
I've been reading the manuscript of Glen Duncan's latest novel "A Day and a Night and a Day".
