My City of Ruins

Wings of Desire

"Once we give up the belief that our life-world is rooted in the ground, we may thus come to a point where ungroundedness is no longer experienced as existential anxiety and despair but as a freedom and lightness that finally allows us to move."
John Rajchman (1998) Constructions

Moulinette

Anna Calvi, Moulinette ... (album just released ...)

Before After

What next for Christchurch ... how does a city bounce back after a 7.1 magnitude earthquake (and its attendant multitude of aftershocks... now numbering 4,170)?

Before After

Sow the Salt

Thomas Feiner, Steve Jansen ... plumbing the depths of the sublime

Heimlich / Garten

Exploring uncanny landscape ... the Freudian looping of the Heimlich and the Unheimlich ... roaming the garden ... time for new adventures. First, a mental field trip (owing to the limitation of funds), to the Pitzhanger Manor-House in Ealing, West London. Designed by John Soane in 1800, and reverberating with a suitable presence, the manor is home to the PM Gallery, currently hosting The Witching Hour: Darkness and the Architectural Uncanny.

Here are images that cast us in to the twilight zone of marginal spaces, liminal times. Places of palpable poignancy, latent terror, suffused with sinister seething .... double takes, absences, surreality. Channelling Magritte, limning Hopper-esque moments, communing with Bill Henson ...

David Rowan Pacha Kuti (PK808)

Ravi Deepres, Lisbon, 2006

Toby de Silva, Jack (Annie Chapman), 2006

Silence and Wonder

Phenomenology begins in silence.

Herbert Spiegelberg (1982). The Phenomenological Moment

The best formulation of the reduction is probably that given by Eugen Fink, Husserl's assistant, when he spoke of 'wonder' in the face of the world. Reflection does not withdraw from the world towards the unity of consciousness as the world's basis; it steps back to watch the forms of trancendence fly up like sparks from a fire; it slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice; it alone is consciousness of the world because it reveals that world as strange and paradoxical.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962). Phenomenology of Perception