Monday, February 23, 2009


Shen Ling meets Gauguin
on sumptuous carpet-beach
they make purple waves

---

A lost weekend spent
behind drawn shades, the goddess
is insatiable

---

Clothes, trash, everywhere!
Yes, all in the name of sex,
What a mess we made!

---

Colours glow, images flow
right now desire reigns
tomorrow it becomes hate

---

fuschia intrusion
her boudoir in chaos reeks
immodesty reigns

---

Purple waves of Bliss
Torrents open with a kiss
Flows of Ecstacy

Creates a Chaos
Of arms, legs, warm sweating flesh
Clinging, close, climax

---

Penang hotel room
Once this was a great mansion
Where rich people lived

---

Resting on his knee.
Is this the time to tell him?
Wait til tomorrow.

---

desire is strong
return again and again
into new bodies

28 comments:

nobody said...

Hi all, better late than never.

This pic is by a really spectacular Chinese artist Shen Ling. If you want to see more of her stuff cut and paste this into google images - 申玲. That's her name in Chinese and will deliver precisely her pix. By romanising the name, all the precision of the Chinese is lost and the search will produce a ton of rubbish.

Also I understand that there will a temptation to be distracted by the 'Chineseness' of this. That's cool, but it isn't why I posted it. I like it because of its universality. Yoroshiku.

nobody said...

PS. On the last one with the map, I ended up choosing one each from everyone. (With Brian as exception. I grooved on his comment on Clown's piece). I think I might go with this now as a general rule. But rules is made to be broken sure enough. Which is to say, I make this shit up as I go along. Let's just say, I shall embody whimsy as opposed to caprice, if you can dig it.

Anonymous said...

A lost weekend spent
behind drawn shades, the goddess
is insatiable

Skye said...

Clothes, trash, everywhere!
Yes, all in the name of sex,
What a mess we made!

nobody said...

Yay! Excellent. Was it just me, or was 'biteme' somewhat fishy?

Anonymous said...

when shen comes over
things get ultra-violet
right on the carpet.

Anonymous said...

Shen Ling meets Gauguin
on sumptuous carpet-beach
they make purple waves

su said...

Brian you haiku master genius.

Colours glow, images flow
right now desire reigns
tomorrow it becomes hate

nobody said...

Susana, how dark you are today! But you're right on Brian. Brian - I hope you're not good looking as well as being talented at haiku, because then we'd have to kill you. Nothing personal you understand, but we Salieris have to look out for ourselves, you know.

Anonymous said...

Hi Susana and Nobody,
actually there is a sign in front of my cage that says, "Please don't feed the 'doer.' " but you would not have known that. But rules is made to be broken sure enough.
Maybe I need not fear assassination if we can agree that there is in Reality no separation, no separate one.
And that if anything, the Game should be congratulated, not the "players." (But in this case I might be moved to isolate and congratulate Nobody as the inventor of this little "game" within the Game. Nobody anticipates this error and takes the name "Nobody" so the energy recirculates harmlessly," no praise, no blame" as my Guru used to say, and no murder!) Clever. But like a fool, hoping for a little egoic advertising, I work under my own name! (Fifty psychopathic Mossad stooges in fifty stealth cubicles pitilessly copy it down in their notebooks at the same time. This they get. "Love" and "Humor" not so much...)
So, anyway, why all these apparent separate entities in this appearance? The Guru commented, "Does the ventriloquist want to dine each night with his own dummy?" and "Light is a great temptation."

So if it is ever again given to me to amuse you with 17 syllables, I ask you this one favor---" won't you gimmie three steps mister, gimmie three steps mister, gimmie three steps toward the door...gimmie three steps , gimmie three steps mister, and you won't be seeing me no more!"

Anonymous said...

Above from lyrics by Lynrd Skynrd of course...

nobody said...

BTW. These 'lovers' paintings by Shen Ling are of her and her husband. He appears a lot.

For mine, there's a lot to her paintings.

Perversely banal.
And who are you staring at?
Apart from yourselves?

Also digital duplications do no justice to the originals. They're huge - 2m by 2m. The colours are beyond what you see here. And they each go for over US$10,000. I once fell in love with one (in a gallery in Shanghai) and was wondering if should spend all the money that I had in the world ($10,000) and then figure out how to be penniless later. But then I realised I didn't have a house to put it in anyway. Just as well really.

But it's funny how a painting can break your heart.

nobody said...

Oh! Was that you Brian? Um... I'm not sure if I should, or shouldn't, give you three steps. Hell, whichever you prefer, no nevermind to me. But was you to hang around and continue with your efforts we'd take it most gracious like.

And yes, alright, fine, no killings. But honestly, a poetry blog without murder! The things I do for you people...

Anonymous said...

So you're Shen's husband...
Shen on you, you lucky dog!
cheeky in plain sight.

Nobody's in love
ten grand and he can hold her
Willy or won't he?

kikz said...

fuschia intrusion
her boudoir in chaos reeks
immodesty reigns


*nose crinkle*

Skye said...

Two lovers unite,
Happy to be home again,
Stress relief from work!

Magdelena said...

Purple waves of Bliss
Torrents open with a kiss
Flows of Ecstacy

Creates a Chaos
Of arms, legs, warm sweating flesh
Clinging, close, climax

Anonymous said...

I'm getting hungry
We've been in this room too long,
Let's go out and eat

schutte

Anonymous said...

Penang hotel room
Once this was a great mansion
Where rich people lived

schutte

clown said...

Resting on his knee.
Is this the time to tell him?
Wait til tomorrow.

Anonymous said...

Shen Ling tells him--- WHAM!
He never saw it coming
She's down-sizing him!

Penny said...

nobody?

nobody said...

Hey Folks, sorry sorry. I was in amongst a four-day devotion to Aergia. And now back to the routine!

Very good all. And this rang a bell for the Schutte did it? Seems it was a dinner bell, ha ha. A Chicken Mutabuk calls my name! Mind you, there's no Mutabuk in Beijing as far as I know...

nobody said...

The final shudder -
chaos brought to perfect bloom,
as light falls away.

kikz said...

hey noby..
saw you whiz by rollerblading thru the slate :)

was reading this missive by rushdie on literary adaptations into other genre..
stage/movies... and his take on slumdog..

but the ending turned more on adaptation of the species..

i thought ya'd find it interesting... but, this is the only place i thought you might see it.. as it really would belong on the cinema page :)

*snip*
What is essential? It's one of the great questions of life, and, as I've suggested, it's a question that crops up in other adaptations than artistic ones. The text is human society and the human self, in isolation or in groups, the essence to be preserved is a human essence, and the result is the pluralist, hybridised, mixed-up world in which we all now live. Adaptation as metaphor, to paraphrase Susan Sontag, adaptation as carrying across, which is the literal meaning of the word "metaphor", from the Greek, and of the related word "translation", another form of carrying across, this time derived from Latin.

What are the things we think of as essential in our lives? The answers could be: our children, a daily walk in the park, a good stiff drink, the reading of books, a job, a vacation, a baseball team, a cigarette, or love. And yet life has a way of making us rethink. Our children move away from home, we move away from our favourite park, the doctor forbids us to drink or smoke, we lose our eyesight, we get fired, there's no time or money to take a vacation, our baseball team sucks, our heart is broken. At such times our picture of the world hangs crookedly on the wall. Then, if we can manage it, we adapt. And what this shows us is that essence is something deeper than any of that, it's the thing that gets us through. The 12 separate varieties of finches that Charles Darwin found on the Galápagos Islands had all made local adaptations, but when the ornithologist John Gould examined Darwin's specimens in 1837, he could see that these were not different birds, but 12 variations of the same bird. In spite of random mutation and natural selection, their finchness, their essence, was intact.

As individuals, as communities, as nations, we are the constant adapters of ourselves, and must constantly ask ourselves the question wherein does our finchness lie: what are the things we cannot ever give up unless we wish to cease to be ourselves?

We can learn this much from the poets who translate the poetry of others, from the screenwriters and film-makers who turn words on the page into images on a screen, from all those who carry across one thing into another state: an adaptation works best when it is a genuine transaction between the old and the new, carried out by persons who understand and care for both, who can help the thing adapted to leap the gulf and shine again in a different light. In other words, the process of social, cultural and individual adaptation, just like artistic adaptation, needs to be free, not rigid, if it is to succeed. Those who cling too fiercely to the old text, the thing to be adapted, the old ways, the past, are doomed to produce something that does not work, an unhappiness, an alienation, a quarrel, a failure, a loss.

But those who do not know who they are, are doomed too: individuals who sacrifice themselves for the sake of pleasing others, comedians who stop telling jokes because they find themselves in a humourless world, serious people who start trying to tell jokes because they fear being thought humourless, people in a new situation, a new relationship, a new university, who act against their natures because they think that's the way to make things easy for themselves.

Whole societies can lose their way through a process of bad adaptation. Striving to save themselves, they can oppress others. Hoping to defend themselves, they can damage the very liberties they believed to be under attack. Claiming to defend freedom, they can make themselves and others less free. Or, seeking to calm the violent hotheads in their midst, societies can try to appease them, and so give the violent hotheads the notion that their violence and hotheadedness is effective. Wishing to create better understanding between peoples, they can seek to prevent the expression of opinions unpalatable to some of their members, and so immediately make others even angrier than they were before.

Societies in motion, at a time of rapid change such as the present day, succeed, as all good adaptations do, by knowing what is essential, what cannot be compromised, what all their citizens must accept as the price of membership. For many years now, I'm sorry to say, we have lived through an era of bad social adaptations, of appeasements and surrenders on the one hand, of arrogant excesses and coercions on the other.

We can only hope that the worst is over, and that better movies, better musicals and better times lie ahead.

( i personally hold out no hope for shoawood)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/28/salman-rushdie-novels-film-adaptations

Anonymous said...

Am I too late? I hope not.

desire is strong
return again and again
into new bodies

Anonymous said...

my brush is my wand
but i prefer yours honey
show me the money

Anonymous said...

opening into receptivity
you tirelessly merge into my depths
again and again and again