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Saturday 28 December 2013

Styx


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25: photo by Petros Kotzabasis (pkomo), 3 January 2012


Getting away with it's the easy part
But what comes later, the flight
Into incompatible identities
Taking shadows hostage
On the descent...




murder: photo by Petros Kotzabasis (pkomo), 5 January 2007
 

470: photo by Petros Kotzabasis (pkomo), 3 January 2012

9 comments:

ACravan said...

This is super -- really wonderful. It's funny how often getting away with it is the easy part. Producing something like this, however, is never easy. Petros Kotzabasis's bottom-most image is hauntingly true and I'm speaking as someone who was actually abducted once. Curtis

Poet Red Shuttleworth said...

Wonderful... completely terrific!

Nin Andrews said...

I, too, am a bit of a humbug, but I have to say I've never been a fan of the season.
And yes, Curtis said it. Superb.

Hazen said...

A story in four lines and three pictures. What beautiful economy.

Be the BQE said...

Lovely five-line, three-frame noir. Even the rolled up poster in hand in the last photo has its sinister element.
-David

TC said...

Nice eye for the sinister, David. Not to mention the dexterity.

Those rolled up posters -- I think maybe that's Vergil and Dante escaping from the underworld even as the shadowy putative villains descend into it.

The rolled up posters carried by the unseen poets ascending toward the light would then be the maps of Hell they have used to negotiate this tenuous passage.

We may have missed the central action, here. The show started at 9 o'clock.

TC said...

Well, I suppose it is just the one shadowy figure carrying the two rolled up posters. Not to mention the black trash bag. (Ambidexterity at work here?)

Hazen said...

Five lines it is. (Seasonal defect in the neurons here. Year-round malady, actually).

Descending into Plato’s cave
of illusions and entertainments
our shadows precede us
at nineteen hundred hours

fade to gray

That last photo is the shadows of two parents swinging a child down the stairs. Both my daughters loved to do that.

TC said...

Hazen,

Yes, and surely what we're seeing here is a harmless moment of some kind.

And yet, and yet... the posture of the shadows, their apparent haste in their downward trajectory, and the mystery as to exactly how many figures we are seeing... these things contributed to an ominous feeling, for me.

A kind of Platonic jump-cut?

(By the way and in case it's not obvious, the narrative imposed on these images by the text and title are strictly my doing, the photographer should not be blamed in any way for this... and no innocent ghosts were harmed in the course of the production.)