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BETLEHEM-NEK POUSTÁILLÁ-BAN
PÁÁS-TO-ROK VIDIÁZATÁ-BAN
NADJ EUREU-EUM HIRDE-TETIQUE
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Ô SENT YOJEF MIT GONDOL-TÁL
HODJ ICHTÁ-LOT VÁLASTO-TÁL
EBEN A-A ZORD HIDEGBEN
SAILLE BE HOZÁNK MÁRIÁ-VAL
SULETET QUICHE IÉZOUCHKÁ-VAL
LAQUIA-ATO-OK SI-VE-INK-BEN

Boldog Karácsonyt...

ami magyarul

Without realising, I wrote down "ami", which both means "that which is" in Hungarian ('magyarul') and "friend" in French. Familiar signs growing around me as I raise my eyes in streets of North-East Pest or the London underground. In a corridor at University waiting for exam-time or on the staff-board... A Hungarian name, a 'made in Hungary', and the complexities those words swallow for our good use.

Further on while I am searching for colours of those very grounds that project those signs. History bares no dress when one is shy and curious at the same time. Colours referring to the unsaid, to the patterns of life and craft of passing time, which itself is no pure human gift. There is a sense in which one re-creates time as representations go, but the responsibility is so complex there is no one road to it. Responsibility means having the time, means of traveling and walking, and making use of this time in the elsewhere one constructs as an observer. Of course such poetics are a choice, but can one reduce the image to mere personal experience in such media-spaces as blogging?

This is not to say - it would be absurd in the digital age - that each picture is an ethical choice, but merely this is the reflection upon me of my experience as well as the reflection of the eyes of passers-by looking dubiously at me for choosing this particular place and bus tire (see previous post) to stop and observe. They cannot be disconnected, as much as a digital picture is only rarely reserved 'private' today.

'ami' is both an affectionate relationship on my behalf to a certain place and people, as well as a sense of this very place, a part of it.
Similar to the effort of translation; a friendship and a place in the lense of the camera, l'effort du respect.

bíznesz

scaffolded nature

colour mat

words at a loss
shame, imagine
colours slithering
through the grey paper

travels, mat and glass
pain on the edge
of a slippy photo
colours glazing

rejoicing of the heat
of late-summer szolnok
and its memories in a dark
cold, and imaginary capital

colours at loss

their profile was well chosen
colour was as golden as branch
words were leaves drafting dust
and his was a shadow of doubt

The tree of their body
gave way to the cold window
instantly traveling away
to the east, hortobágyi train

the pale blue of the wood
they left on the window sill
was like a bottle on a bench
words of solitude

recherche

I am in London, researching the relation London Hungarians have to their traditional heritage or rather hunting down symbols. I'm also forcing a dialogue, and they tell me they're here to work. Creating a dialogue when things are normal, and again I feel like attracting far-away romantic notions back on the grounds. This 'work' or 'labour of love', or 'labour on work' is for me as much as it is for them. Does it make it awkward nevertheless?
I feel like I'm painting a horizontal line in yellow on one of Depardon's diagonally driven roads thriving for a horizontal landscape, or rather I'm lost in Paris, Texas and really tracing this line (I'll go for black, references old timer's warm melted tar, the kind deserved for a cowboy's shoulders) while the dust feeds into the hot paint, and the white interrupted line goes on to kill the imaginary distance.
Why did Johnny Cash just pop in on the radio? I'm not joking..
I am told to remember the importance of working for others, painting on their grounds, yet sinking into paternalistic visions of truth as I take each step. Wherever the road goes I'm convinced it's for each other's good, and this makes me as living as my subject. Hopefully words will follow as images chill yet words of ponder, not of chilling.
Every evening I come back and pass the shivering cold light reflected along the neck of my bass. I click on the radio and the next day I'm off with a bit of my library humming in the ears. Cables of thought, fort though arsed modern.
Echoe of the woman, living ghost of our university, whose words like a cold knife reminded me of unworthy stillness of our aims, our methods, our texts. "Is this what Goldsmiths has become?" Like the cabin boy I answered in my breath how little I knew..
The best steps, therefore, are those that will be taken unexpectedly.

colours, gaps

It's always ironic for someone to start photography on his first experience abroad. The relationship between fear, loneliness, and foreignness with photographic practice is very often inevitable. It is there for simple reasons if you are still looking for light, colours and contrasts; a struggle against representation, at the same time a kind of tragedy: sacrificing the pleasure of results and frames for more effort and walking.
So for whom are we collecting this massive data? Question worth asking as over the years we learn to travel more and more through the camera obscura.

I'm often told off if I decide to picture the debris of a broken-down building instead of trying to capture the beauty of Budapest monuments or more reasonably to frame a happy moment in a more 'colourful' place.
Those remarks don't just stem from a sense of harmony between a population and a government's politics of representation, nor simply from a sense of national pride. It's a gap in between pride and history.
The no-man lands of construction and the marginalised bits of history behind the big puma or macdonalds banners, or the ones you can only glimpse through the many kilometers of temporary walls are symbolic holes in a country having to imagine its future at extra euro-speed.
The irony of an outsider's position, to catch the cracks whilst through his own country financial cracks blow down an economy so fragile.
The banners and temporary walls on the way to university, to the supermarket, to the bank, to the bar, to bed, to the night-job, to the tube... those banners stay up, reflected everywhere in the plastic colours left by soviet history. They stay up, and mirrors are everywhere that tell history in their own moments.

back in the blue - kék fajó, kék utca

A vision that could be falling
like the dust of the magnificent
burned buildings of the many circling
streets, bruises, presence in descent
But plastic hurts nobody
no one ever heard the scream
save the colour of plastic
memory, deep in its simple
rainbow architecture

Flags - szines Zászlot aranylik

Growing city

1.30p.m. kávét

I feel like a submarine peering over their shoulders. Peeking, picking the crumbs on their window-sills, on their bare shoulders, whilst they give me comfort and patience - nyugadt.
Nostalgia is not a movement anymore. Writing, I feel like loosing the security, the freedom of this peep-culture. At a loss of image but construction still is not there.
Pictures are repeated attempts to an architecture of emptiness in this space, within those lines. This line you repeat, I repeat in a space so well known. A space probably rehearsed in dreams.
Can I escape their welcome? I'm there, and not in those later words. There is no judge in the hot air, just the smell of fruit and sweet, very sweet coffee.
No camera, just a tea-spoon swimming in a soup of words, the song of the 1.30p.m. kávét.

like the silk of family lines

kis kert - little eden

Hír: heatwave

the utility futility of this blog is to travel without and within words, as you wish.
A wish for greater news, more hearted than rooted, more dual than prime-time.
Just because I cannot help it.
I believe it was intuition to feel the warmth of this unique September heatwave. It was history in paper and in sight. Through the glass window-pain of my old neighbour's read, I confused the sun for the past, as memory was so much present, presence.
It was all around us in the flower dress of her grandmother, in the powerful darkness of the night-train's yellow, in the encounter with her high-school friend. Or simply without.
It was presence and absurdity in one on my bottle's cover (Luis Figo, Portuguese football striker who recently came back from comfortable Quatar now figures on the advertising for the szentkirály Hungarian water), in his son's "Brasil" tee-shirt, in my own o'neill bag carrying a bunch of great Hungarian-made cds...
A wish is better than novelty in my view, as it is not taken for granted, nevertheless we generally wish for both.
Alas for air conditioning and the wish for ecological security, alas for the heatwave. Hungarian is not so much a country that thinks in the future as one that wishes for the future; a heavy burden but this present wish.
so my neighbour reads on his "national freedom" (népszabadság) for all the heat within, without; here and there.

still

I always wonder how things can change in a small paradise of reality.
Coming in at the gate of this lego-coloured building, through the doors under the piros-fehér-zöld flag, things could be as simple.. as imagination.
Leaving my bag at the entrance for trust to care for, entering the canteen a hundred little faces turn to face us with a shy little twinge in their eyes. Here the teacher turns to us with her passionate smile, and takes us up to the second floor. More happy adults, responsibilities fly in passion and youth in happiness. The warmest greetings, as solid as the years go by, as invisible as a window cleaned with care... People here know too well why they keep on living in this place. Back down from the office, through the corridors of this large family, and out of school, trust handing me my suitcase, and a warm african air brings us slowly and calmly through to our home, through Szolnoki út, past the television tower into the home.

Hajku for the lost branch

Not to write
words cut down
your choice
of grammar

Hajku de l'arbre coupé

Ne pas savoir écrire
des mots coupés
triste compagnie

ode to the polish verse commander

designed by history
the walls I saw reflected
upon me the words of comfort
of a disconcerting dreamer


The side-street of a glance
is in your pocket, in your grave
and wears no verb



in the night-time of a text
called love in colour
pavements said paint


deep into the crossroad
of green and dark lights
walks multiply

Terrain Vague

Two drops, just two drops

Twice the number of passing gent doubled
Blinking for all that dust, seeds of birth
Relaxed feeling of a sinking sun
Reflected in the Duna through the queens of Buda

Repeated the words of a picture, I thought
Shining from the top of that hill I thought
I saw you standing among those misrepresentations

Buda has one empty heart I imagined
Stone walk up to the rear of the great hungarian hills
I threw a stone back to the sun

Imagined the forest which leads
Through the labyrinth of Pest
Into the sunlight your reflection
Threw upon me, my memory.