Sunday, November 7, 2010

ghost

1. a disembodied spirit of a dead person supposed to haunt the living as a shadowy, pale, evanescent form.

2. a haunting memory, a semblance, a trace, a ghost of his former self.

3. a faint possibility or glimmer, a ghost of a chance.

4. the principle of life, soul, spirit.

5. a secondary image, especially one appearing on a TV screen as a white shadow caused by poor or double reception or a fault in the receiver.

6. a faint secondary or out-of-focus image in a photographic print or negative resulting from reflections within the camera lens.

7. another name for ghostwriter.

8. a fictitious employee fabricated for financial benefit.

Sunday, October 31, 2010

japan - ghosts

just when I think I'm winning

     when I've broken every door

          the ghosts of my life

                blow wilder than before...






another 80s favourite...

all hallows' e'en

To mark Halloween, All Hallows' Eve, Samhain, ghosting through considers La Isla de las Muñecas (The Island of Dolls) among the Xochimilco canals south of Mexico City.




The local folklore goes something like this: that three young girls were playing in a canal and one drowned.  The island was deserted for years until the 1950s, when a loner, Don Julian Santana, moved there and began to place discarded dolls and toys on the trees to honour the spirit child said to haunt the area.  Locals began bringing him old dolls in trade for fresh vegetables.  Eventually Don Santana also drowned in the canal.



The island now has an amazing collection of thousands of dolls in various stages of macabre disintegration.




The extreme contrast between childish, playful innocence and disintegration and death, as embodied in the dolls, is fascinatingly creepy and the stuff of horror films...  Their empty staring eyes, the corpse-like torsos - why do these provoke fear?


It's a curious practice - hanging dolls, teddy bears, stuffed toys in trees and bushes, and it happens in my part of the world as well, although I'm not sure what the motivation is... I found this one in a graveyard:



So cute!  Sleep well - Happy Halloween!

Thursday, October 28, 2010

house of stone

While I'm in 80s nostalgia mood, this is The Roaring Boys...



...although I remember them in their previous incarnation - the brilliant Cambridge student band The Models... Paul Michell, Tim May, Stefan Osadzinski, Paul Goldbart, the Great Northern pub, the make-up...