In the nihilistic aftermath of the Towers' levelling to the ground, `Zero' swiftly became the hottest buzzword in advertising and marketing. From the heat of twisted metal to the iciness of suicidal slimming: Zero Coke's non-calory promise of air-conditioned disappearance. Bodies at the service of image. Whether plunging downwards from the ninetieth floor of a skyscraper, their flesh briefly made spectacle and almost immediately removed from circulation for being too real, too close to home. Or, as skeletons at a celebrity matinee, only made flesh by dint of the ten pounds of weight that press or flashlit photography adds to any body soon to be sacrificed to oblivion.
Tags: 9/11 Advertising Body Buzzword Capitalism Coca Cola Coke Commemoration Cultural Criticism Diet Flash Ground Zero Image Marketing Nihilism Slimming Social Documentary Zero Twin Towers World Trade Centre JohnPerivolaris
On the journey here, coffee from a Turkish coffee pot has always meant home for my family. A copper pot was essential equipment for my grandfather and father on their travels around the world as Greek merchant seamen from the island of Chios, in the Northern Aegean. Also a symbol of the Ottomanised Greek homeland as it took its place in the Pop-Art, late Fifties-early Sixties kitchen of my parents' apartment in Montreal, where I was born. Impossible for me to part from this ambivalent artifact of an immigrant family and my Londoner's identity, I cleave to a sense of displaced roots. This pot was bought from the Algerian Coffee Store in Soho and was given to my future wife as a token of serious intent long before it occured to me as an afterthought to consider an engagement ring
Tags: Autobiography Coffee Family Immigrant Immigration Migrant Migration Object Pot Still-Life JohnPerivolaris
My mother and I return to the same cinema where we would spend every Saturday evening with my late father when I was a boy. Now corporately multiplexed, popcorned, and air-conned, almost the last trace of its previous smoke-filled palace splendour is the Odeon's marble and brass staircase, up which my elderly mother struggled to climb to her seat beside me, witnesses both to the resurrection of Bond beyond the camp Sixties of my early childhood, the jaded cynicism of the Seventies and Eighties, the virtuality of the Nineties, to the guilty global violence and sense of compromised personal morality of the new millennium.
Tags: 007 Autobiography Bond Cinema Movies Tickets Loss JohnPerivolaris
Periodically dosing myself with 60 mg of codeine phosphate to relieve a dull and persistent toothache. I could get quite used to the simplification of a life reduced to the alternation of pain and analgesia; agonised insomnia reading Rimbaud and narcotic unconsciousness interrupted by argumentative dreams. Only the accompanying nausea dissuades me.
Tags: Bottle Close-Up Codeine Color Colour Drug Medication Medicine Still Life JohnPerivolaris
Nothing more useless
than a dead man's toothless comb
Shabby trains creeping
Tags: johnperivolaris Green cameraphone Mortality Infinicam Comb color colour lofi iphoneography Memento Mori Haiku