Bullies Planning to Overrun the City

His camera, held at weed level, shows us weeds close-to, shoving up their saw-toothed leaves through a crack in the pavement and, at a distance back in the same frame, Atlanta’s skyscrapers on the rise too, proliferating and more rampant than weeds. Skyscrapers rear up like bullies planning to overrun the city, or running the city, from on high.

William Eggleston's Untitled, Miami, Florida

He moves about the skylines of Miami, Atlanta, Pittsburgh. No last drop of humanity could come from what we’ve built as fortifications. He tests it with a view of the Texas State Book Depository in Dallas, indelible in the world’s memory as the source of the gunshots that killed President John F. Kennedy.

Eudora Welty’s introduction to William Eggleston’s The Democratic Forest (1989)

Festival of Sculpture 2011

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense.

Jill Berelowitz's Core Femme, Cavendish Square, Westminster, W1G

Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t.

Lorenzo Quinn's Vroom Vroom, Park Lane, Westminster,W1K

And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would.

Mauro Perucchetti's Jelly Baby Family, Marble Arch, Westminster, W1H

You see?”

From Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

Three Colts Lane

Once on the road it picked up pace, free-wheeled,
then moved up through the gears, and wouldn’t give

Three Colts Lane, Bethnal Green, Tower Hamlets, E2

to shoulder-charges, kicks; resisted force
until to tangle with it would have been

Three Colts Lane, Bethnal Green, Tower Hamlets, E2

to test bone against engine or machine,
to be dragged in, broken, thrown out again
minus a limb.

Three Colts Lane, Bethnal Green, Tower Hamlets, E2

From Simon Armitage’s The Tyre (1997)