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Wednesday 8 April 2015

Jim Dine: 'When Creeley met Pep' (simply a doll to love)

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Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. An abandoned mansion: photo by Seph Lawless via the Guardian, 30 October 2014

When Creeley met Pep
he couldn't stand her.
She, on the other hand,
had no memory of him.
This was way before her
brain exploded.
Me, I was curious, so I asked her,
after the anti-Pep diatribe
by Bob C., if she knew
who I was talking about.
Aldo, always vigilant about
Bob's foibles, tried to prompt her
about Creeley's empty eye.



Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. An abandoned mansion: photo by Seph Lawless via the Guardian, 30 October 2014
Now --

.......Bob's dead and
.......Pep --
.......well she has
.......the vision of blood clouding . . . . .




... and lava in the backyard. When darkness fell in Sicily on the evening of 26 January 2014, the beautiful lava flow running down Etna's upper southeast flank became fully visible. This view was taken from the town of Zafferana, on the southeast flank of the mountain, with a power pole rising in the foreground. The lava looks close, but in reality is some 8 km away from the power pole. This lava flow is now going on for more than three days, and mild Strombolian activitiy, at times accompanied by minor ash emission, is continuing at the New Southeast Crater: photo by Bruno Behncke, 26 January 2014

What's not to like
about Pep I once asked
Creeley?

He replied that she was
too bossy etc. etc.
Hmmmmm

I believe you were
wrong kid!

Pep has always been
simply
a doll to love

Now --
..in thin air

Jim Dine: 'When Creeley met Pep', from About Her For You: Poems 2003-2013, in Poems To Work On: The Collected Poems of Jim Dine, 2015


Rome, Italy. 82-year-old Gelsomina Squatriti mends broken dolls in her family’s doll hospital: photo by Gary Jones/Barcroft Media via The Guardian, 3 April 2015

Pricey: Real wood floors and actual tapestries adorn Fairy Castle's enchanting dining hall. The doll house cost $500,000 to build in the late 1920s and early 1930s -- in today's dollars, that's about $7 million

Colleen Moore 'Fairy Castle' Dollhouse at the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago. Pricey: Real wood floors and actual tapestries adorn Fairy Castle's enchanting dining hall. The doll house cost $500,000 to build in the late 1920s and early 1930s -- in today's dollars, that's about $7 million: photo by Museum of Science and Industry via Daily Mail, 31 July 2013

Embedded image permalink

The first known #DollHouse is the Nuremberg House, built in 1611: image via Artesíana Latina @hobby artesiana, 25 February 2015


A Kurdish Syrian woman sweeps away the debris from what is left of a destroyed building in the town of Kobane, recently liberated from Islamic State militants
: photo by Yasin Akgul/AFP via the Guardian, 28 March 2015


15 August 2014. Mousa Sweidan, 50, walks in one of the rooms of his father’s damaged home in the Shejaia neighbourhood of Gaza City. The family of 15 people fled from their home and took shelter in a UN school when Israeli tanks entered the area. Mousa used to work in Israel as a painter until 2005 and is now unemployed
: photo by Heidi Levine/SIPA/Rex via The Guardian, 25 March 2015

Still, no one finally knows what a poet is supposed either to be or to do. -- #RobertCreeley: image via VerseWrights @VerseWrights, 22 August 2013

#Creeley: image via shawnacy kiker @arbitraryjane, 29 January 2015


‘I was 12 years old when this was taken, on the train from Victoria back to my boarding school in Sussex.’
:  photo by John Chillingworth via the Guardian, 21 March 2015

Si l'amour rend aveugle, alors pourquoi acheter de la lingerie à 300 boules? #Weegee: image via Lilas Goldo @LilasGoldo, 7 February 2015


 Girls in movie theatre with doll: photo by Weegee/International Centre of Photography via The Guardian, 9 January 2015


Rome, Italy. 82-year-old Gelsomina Squatriti mends broken dolls in her family’s doll hospital: photo by Gary Jones/Barcroft Media via The Guardian, 3 April 2015 

5 comments:

TC said...

Talking of bobs... the fifth image here, Colleen Moore's Fairy Castle dollhouse, represents a truly amazing miniature construction wrought, over a considerable period of time and at no little expense, by the silent screen star Colleen Moore, of Port Huron, Michigan, whose two great loves were her dolls, and the movies.

She had one blue eye one brown, so that her career was necessarily limited to the b & w era -- when DW Griffith signed her, his first piece of business was running a screen test to see if the eyes came out looking wrong. They didn't.

She starred as female lead in a lot of popular cowboy pictures opposite such cowboy stars as Tom Mix.

But the key to her fame was her pert hair-do, which took America by storm. and which she kept until the end of her days.

Colleen Moore with bob, 1927

After the movies she made a killing in the stock market, and much of that free money went into the fabrication of her incredible doll house.

It ended up in the Museum of Science and Industry, a wonder among wonders. The place had Messerschmitts and Stukas and Zeros hanging on guy wires from the main hall ceiling, an actual working coal mine deep under the ground, and so on.

But the doll house!

Ultra-ultra coolio!!

Mose23 said...

The Roman doll's hospital is grand too.

Took me a while to adjust from the toy houses to the Gaza City shells.

That is a wonderful do. The Louise Brooks look always did it for me.

Mose23 said...

Bob's dead and
Pep --
well she has
the vision of blood clouding

There's poetry for you.

The grand moral force of Creeley's Here.

TC said...

Thank you, Duncan.

Oh, that doll hospital and the beautiful image of hand-work being done in the old way, reminding that art might not be a bad thing, nor craft either for that matter, if done with care.

Colleen Moore and Louise Brooks started that bob look at about the same time, Colleen however wasting hers on mere cowboys, whereas Louise, as Lulu, caught the bigger capitalist fish.

Louise Brooks with trademark bob, 1930

Hilton said...

Amazing and spooky.