Jesus Blue announces the publication of North Shore, the first monograph by the Brazilian photographer and surfer, Vava Ribeiro. For the past three decades, Ribeiro has been travelling the world chasing the next picture and the next wave. This stand-alone book represents some of his most compelling images, centred on the place that gives the book its title: North Shore, often described as the surf capital of the world.
Throughout the early 2000’s, Ribeiro spent a great deal of time in this remote part of Hawaii, living among the legendary surfers who have made their homes near its towering and treacherous waves. The pictures he made over these years reveal the hidden, dream-like side of the surfing life, far fr om the crowds of the public surf tour. This book juxtaposes Ribeiro’s haunting images of the Hawaiian landscape and seascape with his intimate portraits of fellow surfers and friends, including world champions John-John Florence and Kelly Slater. The total effect is immersive; Ribeiro’s North Shore is a particular kind of paradise, one where the barriers between life, surf, and art are blissfully dissolved.
The Capriccio on the departure of a beloved brother (Italian: Capriccio sopra la lontananza del suo fratello dilettissimo), BWV 992, is an early work by Johann Sebastian Bach, possibly modeled on the Biblical Sonatas of Johann Kuhnau. The story that Bach performed it at age nineteen when his brother Johann Jacob left to become an oboist in the army of Charles XII in Sweden is questionable. But the chosen tonality of B-flat major seems to be a deliberate reference to the family's name ("B" in German is B-flat in English).
Arioso: Adagio – 'Friends Gather & Try to Dissuade Him from departing'
(Andante) – 'They Picture the Dangers Which May Befall Him'
Adagiosissimo (or Adagissimo) – 'The Friends' Lament'
(Andante con moto) – 'Since He Cannot Be Dissuaded, They Say Farewell'
Allegro pocco – 'Aria of the Postilion' (Aria di postiglione)
'Fugue in Imitation of the Postilion's Horn' (Fuga all'imitazione della cornetta di postiglione)
What makes us so mean? We are meaner than gorillas, the ones we like to blame our genetic aggression on. It is in our nature to hide behind what Darwin said about survival, as if survival were the most important thing on earth. It isn't. You know—surely it has occurred to you— that there is no way that humankind will survive another million years. We'll be lucky to be around another five hundred. Why? Because we are so mean that we would rather kill everyone and everything on earth than let anybody get the better of us: "Give me liberty or give me death!" Why didn't he just say "Grrr, let's kill each other!"?
A nosegay of pansies leans toward us in a glass of water on a white tablecloth bright in the sunlight at the ocean where children are frolicking, then looking around and wondering— about what we cannot say, for we are imagining how we would kill the disgusting man and woman at the next table. Tonight we could throw an electrical storm into their bed. No more would they spit on the veranda! Actually they aren't that bad, it's just that I am talking mean in order to be more like my fellow humans—it's lonely feeling like a saint, which I do one second every five weeks, but that one second is so intense I can't stand up and then I figure out that it's ersatz, I can't be a saint, I am not even a religious person, I am hardly a person at all except when I look at you and think that this life with you must go on forever because it is so perfect, with all its imperfections, like your waistline that exists a little too much, like my hairline that doesn't exist at all! Which means that my bald head feels good on your soft round belly that feels good too. If only everyone were us!
But sometimes we are everyone, we get mad at the world and mean as all get-out, which means we want to tell the world to get out of this, our world. Who are all these awful people? Why, it's your own grandma, who was so nice to you— you mistook her for someone else. She actually was someone else, but you had no way of knowing that, just as you had no way of knowing that the taxi driver saves his pennies all year to go to Paris for Racine at the Comédie Francaise. Now he is reciting a long speech in French from Andromache and you arrive at the corner of This and That and though Andromache's noble husband Hector has been killed and his corpse has been dragged around the walls of Troy by an unusually mean Achilles, although she is forced into slavery and a marriage to save the life of her son, and then people around her get killed, commit suicide, and go crazy, the driver is in paradise, he has taken you back to his very mean teacher in the unhappy school in Port-au-Prince and then to Paris and back to the French language of the seventeenth century and then to ancient Greece and then to the corner of This and That. Only a mean world would have this man driving around in a city where for no reason someone is going to fire a bullet into the back of his head!
It was an act of kindness on the part of the person who placed both numbers and letters on the dial of the phone so we could call WAverly, ATwater, CAnareggio, BLenheim, and MAdison, DUnbar and OCean, little worlds in themselves we drift into as we dial, and an act of cruelty to change everything into numbers only, not just phone numbers that get longer and longer, but statistical analysis, cost averaging, collateral damage, death by peanut, inflation rates, personal identification numbers, access codes, and the whole raving Raft of the Medusa that drives out any thought of pleasantness until you dial I-8OO-MATTRES and in no time get a mattress that is complete and comfy and almost under you, even though you didn't need one! The men come in and say Here's the mattress where's the bedroom? And the bedroom realizes it can't run away. You can't say that the people who invented the bedroom were mean, only a bedroom could say that, if it could say anything. It's a good thing that bedrooms can't talk! They might keep you up all night telling you things you don't want to know. "Many years ago, in this very room. . . ." Eeek, shut up! I mean, please don't tell me anything, I'm sorry I shouted at you. And the walls subside into their somewhat foreverness. The wrecking ball will mash its grimace into the plaster and oof, down they will come, lathe and layers of personal history, but the ball is not mean, nor is the man who pulls the handle that directs the ball on its pendulous course, but another man —and now a woman strides into his office and slaps his face hard the man whose bottom line is changing its color wants to change it back. So good-bye, building where we made love, laughed, wept, ate, and watched TV all at the same time! Where our dog waited by the door, eyes fixed on the knob, where a runaway stream came whooshing down the hallway, where I once expanded to fill the whole room and then deflated, just to see what it would feel like, where on Saturday mornings my infant son stood by the bedside and sang, quietly, "Wa-a-a-ke up" to his snoozing parents.
I can never leave all the kindness I have felt in this apartment, but if a big black iron wrecking ball comes flying toward me, zoop, out I go! For there must be kindness somewhere else in the world, maybe even out of it, though I'm not crazy about the emptiness of outer space. I have to live here, with finite life and inner space and with the horrible desire to love everything and be disappointed the way my mother was until that moment when she rolled her eyes toward me as best she could and squeezed my hand when I asked, "Do you know who I am?" then let go of life.
The other question was, Did I know who I was?
It is hard not to be appalled by existence. The pointlessness of matter turns us into cornered animals that otherwise are placid or indifferent, we hiss and bare our fangs and attack. But how many people have felt the terror of existence? Was Genghis Khan horrified that he and everything else existed? Was Hitler or Pol Pot? Or any of the other charming figures of history? Je m'en doute. It was something else made them mean. Something else made Napoleon think it glorious to cover the frozen earth with a hundred thousand bloody corpses. Something else made . . . oh, name your monster and his penchant for destruction, name your own period in history when a darkness swept over us and made not existing seem like the better choice, as if the solution to hunger were to hurl oneself into a vat of boiling radioactive carrots!
Life is so awful! I hope that lion tears me to pieces!
It is good that those men wearing black hoods are going to strip off my skin and force me to gape at my own intestines spilling down onto the floor! Please drive spikes through not only my hands and feet but through my eyes as well! For this world is to be fled as soon as possible via the purification of martyrdom. This from the God of Christian Love. Cupid hovers overhead, perplexed. Long ago Zeus said he was tired and went to bed: if you're not going to exist it's best to be asleep. The Christian God is like a cranky two-thousand-year-old baby whose fatigue delivers him into an endless tantrum. He will never grow up because you can't grow up unless people listen to you, and they can't listen because they are too busy being mean or fearing the meanness of others. How can I blame them? I too am afraid. I can be jolted by an extremely violent movie, but what is really scary is that someone wanted to make the film! He is only a step away from the father who took his eight-year-old daughter and her friend to the park and beat and stabbed them to death. Uh-oh. "He seemed like a normal guy," said his neighbor, Thelma, who refused to divulge her last name to reporters. She seemed like a normal gal, just as the reporters seemed like normal vampires. In some cultures it is normal to eat bugs or people or to smear placenta on your face at night, to buy a car whose price would feed a village for thirty years, to waste your life and, while you're at it, waste everyone else's too! Hello, America. It is dawn, wake up and smell yourselves. You smell normal. My father was not normal, he was a criminal, a scuffler, a tough guy, and though he did bad things he was never mean. He didn't like mean people, either. Sometimes he would beat them up or chop up their shoes! I have never beaten anyone up, but it might be fun to chop up some shoes. Would you please hand me that cleaver, Thelma?
But Thelma is insulted by my request, even though I said please, because she has the face of a cleaver that flies through the air toward me and lodges in my forehead. "Get it yourself, lughead!" she spits, then twenty years later she changes lughead to fuckhead. I change my name to Jughead and go into the poetry protection program so my poems can go out and live under assumed names in Utah and Muskogee.
Anna Chukhno looks up and sees me through her violet Ukrainian eyes and says Good morning most pleasantly inflected. Oh to ride in a horse-drawn carriage with her at midnight down the wide avenues of Kiev and erase the ditch at Babi Yar from human history! She looks up and asks How would you like that? I say In twenties and she counts them out as if the air around her were not shattered by her beauty and my body thus divided into zones: hands the place of metaphysics, shins the area of moo, bones the cost of living, and so on. Is it cruel that I cannot cover her with kisses? No, it is beautiful that I cannot cover her with kisses, it is better that I walk out into the sunlight with the blessing of having spoken with an actual goddess who gave me four hundred dollars! And I am reassembled as my car goes forward into the oncoming rays of aggression that bounce off my glasses and then start penetrating, and soon my eyes turn into abandoned coal mines whose canaries explode into an evil song that echoes exactly nowhere.
At least I am not in Rwanda in 1994 or the Sudan in '05 or Guantanamo or Rikers, or in a ditch outside Rio, clubbed to death and mutilated. No Cossack bears down on me with sword raised and gleaming at my Jewish neck and no time for me to cry out "It is only my neck that is Jewish! The rest is Russian Orthodox!" No smiling man tips back his hat and says to his buddies, "Let's teach this nigguh a lesson." I don't need a lesson, sir, I am Ethiopian, this is my first time in your country! But you gentlemen are joking. . . .
Prepare my cave and then kindly forget where it was. A crust of bread will suffice and a stream nearby, the chill of evening filtering in with the blind god who is the chill of evening and who touches us though we can't raise our hands to stroke his misty beard in which two hundred million stars have wink and glimmer needles.
I had better go back to the bank, we have only three hundred and eighty-five dollars left. Those fifteen units of beauty went fast. As does everything. But meanness comes back right away while kindness takes its own sweet time and compassion is busy shimmering always a little above us and behind, swooping down and transfusing us only when we don't expect it and then only for a moment. How can I trap it? Allow it in and then turn my body into steel? No. The exit holes will still be there and besides compassion doesn't need an exit it is an exit— from the prison that each moment is, and just as each moment replaces the one before it each jolt of meanness replaces the one before it and pretty soon you get to like those jolts, you and millions of other dolts who like to be electrocuted by their own feelings. The hippopotamus sits on you with no sense of pleasure, he doesn't even know you are there, any more than he takes notice of the little white bird atop his head, and when he sees you flattened against the ground he doesn't even think Uh-oh he just trots away with the bird still up there looking around. Saint Augustine stole the pears from his neighbor's tree and didn't apologize for thirty years, by which time his neighbor was probably dead and in no mood for apologies. Augustine's mother became a saint and then a city in California—Santa Monica, where everything exists so it can be driven past, except the hippopotamus that stands on the freeway in the early dawn and yawns into your high beams. "Hello," he seems to grunt, "I can't be your friend and I can't be your enemy, I am like compassion, I go on just beyond you, no matter how many times you crash into me and die because you never learned to crash and live." Then he ambles away. Could Saint Augustine have put on that much weight? I thought compassion makes you light or at least have light, the way it has light around it in paintings, like the one of the screwdriver that appeared just when the screw was coming loose from the wing of the airplane in which Santa Monica was riding into heaven, smiling as if she had just imagined how to smile the first smile of any saint, a promise toward the perfection of everything that is and isn't.
When we think of beds, we usually think of them as neatly made, waiting to be used. Noah Kalina wanted to undo that, to pull back the covers and sculpt a monumental shape out of the fabric where our bodies would be, and where our bodies have been, as both a still-life (of the materials of sleep) and a portrait (of someone's presence).
Bedmounds is the culmination of Kalina’s long-term project creating and capturing sculptural forms in the middle of beds around the world. The mounds appear to take on anthropomorphic qualities, highlighting the relationship between presence and absence. Bedmounds takes a common scene and adds a twist – subverting what we are expecting to see by inserting something unanticipated.
One hot September summer night in 1990 I’m tossed and turned in bed like the mattress and the sheets are a storm and I’m a small ten year-old boat in it. I wake up soaked in sweat from a bad dream I can’t remember to the siren’s call of music from downstairs. I go look. Music is where mommy and daddy will be, where I’ll find solace. Down I go. The record player is in the front room and in warm weather my father balances the speakers on the windowsill and feeds music to the porch and the world beyond. Sinatra croons to the Ohio darkness over luscious Gordon Jenkins’ arranged strings about his very good years. The Voice is turning fifty in 1965, the year he records the song, a comeback year for him. Bear in mind this is the sixth recording of the Ervin Drake original, but Sinatra is Sinatra and that’s what everybody remembers.
Mom and dad sit on the porch step, they hold each other close with eyes shut, silhouetted in blue and silver. I can’t see, but I know their eyes are shut. How could they not be? Beyond them, mysteries, the dark land, a billion stars. I daren’t interrupt. I know not to. He leans into her ear and whispers. She smiles dreamily. I stand inside in the shadow by the record player. I watch the needle navigate its predestined way in the black shiny vinyl grooves. It’s hypnotic. My father never owned a CD in his life, as far as I know. It was all old school for him. It’s the first time I hear the song and I will never forget it. I don’t forget my father’s white t-shirt clinging to his strong shoulders, my mother’s flowery blouse which the warm breeze occasionally ruffles, her wavy blond hair that she lifts from her neck to try and get some cool air in there. But all she gets is a kiss from my father and he leaves his head hidden in her blondness and then takes her by the hand and walks her down the path, across the road into the woods. Maybe, I’m just saying maybe, they ended up by the pond where I would lie down with Cat and then Roy, years later. For a moment, I fear they’re gone never to return. But it’s fine. Sinatra keeps me company and he’s all I need. The song’s over and I lift the needle before the next one begins, bring it back to the start of Side B. I listen to it again. Again, and again, until I can sing along, until I believe the particular grooves of that track are now worn deeper than the others. What other song could I have sung for Uly and Mad, on our own soft summer night, the night I drew his blood and Madeline–
They’re still gone. I don’t mind. I can cope. I wish them well. I stop the music and listen in on the night. Wind in the trees and small animals and beautiful silence. Someone laughing in the dark. Is it? I shiver. I’m a little afraid, I am, but I stay a bit longer, because the night is under my skin. This is about a month before my father is shipped off to the Middle East, back to war, this addiction the country has him hooked on. This is two months before I turn eleven and wake up early to his garbled, clipped, flat, satellite-borne ‘happy birthday, kid.’ This is happiness and love and goodbye, and time passes and what do we do with it, all mashed up in one moment, a choreography of gestures and secrets with the right soundtrack. We yearn and we long and our memory goes.
This is five months before he dies.
Sinatra had five more songs to go through on that side of the record, the B Side. The record is called The September of My Years. Won a Grammy. The last song is Weill’s September Song. It came together, it made sense like that. Tonight will not swing. Tonight is for serious. Says so on the back cover. It says he sings of days and loves ago. I set it down by the record player with the wistful painted Francis Albert facing me. I go to my room. The heat doesn’t bother me anymore.
Live from Musikbrauerei, Berlin – Pianist Daniil Trifonov performs Rachmaninov’s ´The Silver Sleigh Bells´, Op. 35, No. 1 at the Yellow Lounge in November 2019.
Director: Róisín Murphy Producer: P Tidyness 1st Ad: M Lawson DOP: Farmer D' Focus Puller: Bhen Worthington Gaffer: Chris Dowling Art Director: P Tiddy Wardrobe Designer: Polly Banks Make Up: Emil Zed, Bobbie Gordon
Offline Edit: Ben Unwin Grade / Effects: Sim Tennant On-line: A weird box of Effects. Catering: Phil Tidy Runner: Veronica Allana Camera Kit: Love Film Lighting: c/o Spectrecom Studio: Spectrecom Studios.
Choreographer: Joshua Hubbard
Dancers: Patrick Ross Webster, Gareth Mole, Simon Ventzislav Larsen, Michael Lin, Michael Duke, Joshua Hubbard
The saddest story ever told The perfect Glory So all alone And I could love you Til kingdom come I might not deserve you But save you from The saddest story ever told Loving only What you behold In your own reflection When love is here All your pretension I hold you dear The saddest story ever told Narcissistic glory To be all alone And I could show you, listen what I say To feel real love is to give it away A happy ending would never be Narcissus dying
Be in love, be in love, be in love, be in love, be in love with me, Narcissus
Rosebud Narcissus touch me reach out your hand Oh if you fall in love with your own reflection like it was planned You would die in love fading to feel or to understand That only I can give Narcissus, I the nymph The rosebud Narcissus see me turn into sand If you fall in love with your reflection you may be damned But darling I could teach you to feel and understand Narcissus my love, thy love Echo
