Notes from Book of Faces
Anar Azimov
Notes from Book of Faces
By Anar Azimov
© Anar Azimov 2012
EXPOSITION
ONSET OF A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT A CANCELLED ROCK-CONCERT
URBAN POEM
ROCK-CONCERT FINALLY DONE
FOURTH DIMENSION
MONUMENTAL MEMORIES
JAZZ
LORRY
IN MEMORIAM
U-TURN
SEA IN CITY
SCRAPING THE SKY
WINDY SUNSET
NEW SCENERY
NIGHT
DUST
PHILOSOPHIC
HEAT
USELESS SECRETS
SUDDEN DEATH
OF BEING
SOMETIMES
NOSTALGIC
TRUMAN SHOW
ZOOM CHAOS
THEATRE
VIOLINIST SCULPTURE
SEASIDE RESTAURANT
SILENCE
EVERYBODY'S GONE
CLASS OF PHYSICS
NIGHT, STREET, LIGHT, AND WIND
CLASS OF PHYSICS NUMBER TWO
QUITE LONG AGO
GAPS
SMOKE ON THE WATER
MYTHOLOGY
HOME VIDEO
NOT TO ME
WIND
THE HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN
BEHIND URBAN NOISE
BOULEVARD
COLOURMUSIC OF SUBLUNARY SEA
END OF NIGHT
IT'S GETTING LIGHT
NIGHT TRAFFIC LIGHTS
BREEZE
ÉTUDE
ZOOM-IN, ZOOM-OUT, AND EVEN CLOSER
OPTICS
STOPPING BY AN OLD YARD
POETRY EVENING
BIG CITY'S LIGHTS, OR PASTEL NIGHT
DIMENSIONS
DEEPLY BELOW
WILL SAVE THE WORLD
OF THINGS
RAPID SUNSET
BEFORE
RESORT. NIGHT
LIGHTS ON THAT SIDE OF THE BAY
LIKE A WATERFALL
UNDERGROUND THEATER
IN
MORNING
SOMETHING ABOUT SUMMER
FATE OR IRONY, OR ALMOST FORTY
WRITER'S COPIES
UNAVOIDABLE QUESTION
You’re sitting on a riverbank and thinking on yourself. Pieces of strange lives and impressions are sailing by every second: photos and words, words, words. . . Sometimes, you throw a glance onto water and fish one’s impression you’ve found attractive, yet possibly letting dozens of higher attraction pass away. Or maybe dull ones. Whatever, the same Facebook can’t be entered twice. It’s me there, ARE swimming down the river, you see?
EXPOSITION
Standing on the hills, the city is painting a self-portrait. Climbing to hyper-realism, but falling into fashionable eclecticism quite often. Water-coloured clouds, oily sea, and multicolour-pencilled high-rises. Rooks come of a sudden. Or maybe not-rooks, doesn’t matter; it’s March anyway. Aerobatic manoeuvres by numerous black silhouettes seems bringing an encoded message. Frequent ups and downs of the wings turn plus into minus and back. Just away from here and already reaching the seaside boulevard, is the city so small? Or is the canvas?
ONSET OF A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT A CANCELLED ROCK-CONCERT
Fade in: a city’s balconies and those of the venue: they will never meet. They are parallel, though curved lines can never be told about so. The floor is tiled, just like it is in local country houses. Hurtful to fall on, unless matted.
Close-up: Director, House of Culture. Calling me onto his mat. His nose is right into the lens, while the remains of his hair are quite farther, mixed with lilac bushes. Yes, the close-up is calling me into his office with the record plan, but then seems to understand something (understand what?), and leaves disclosing the far-shot: a drummer on stage, single and doped. By the way on lilac: the venue is open-air. It’s still summer, but it’s already Indian one. Fan squaws; groupie squaws; musician squaws - much fewer. No, he must be a bassist, just kicking the bass-drum. Yet he’s stopped torturing the four strings as well and left to the left. The stage is empty. I’m walking there: three ragged walls and the shelter are jerkily growing. Let’s cut out a time-and-space piece and glue the tape back: the room behind is full of musicians. The lens of my camera is re-bricking the mosaic of faces, hands and guitars - a panoramic illusion. I’m clapped on my back, and the mosaic momentarily forms into an ear-to-ear grin and tipsy eyes, a bit convex: the vocalist has had an encouraging drink. Let’s cut and glue back again: the sea is zooming out, slowly at first, and then much faster into a small still stain with buildings, buildings, and buildings in front.
URBAN POEM
The rain’s over. Skyscrapers are growing like mushrooms.
ROCK-CONCERT FINALLY DONE
Close-up: a flower in the wind, in a rundown outdoor vase. A six-pin neck is zooming out to show the varnished Spanish waist.
The singer has the camera to follow him: smoking , sitting down, leaping, kneeling, and smoking again, from the previous butt. The drummer is looking for some variety within the same. The guitarist and bassist are bowing together to follow the drummer’s pattern.
The bartender is watching football on TV: another crowd on the green pitch. Back to the concert: the singer is throwing away an empty bottle of water: the death of his thirst has come and left, invisible. The song is over.
FOURTH DIMENSION
Even a thick novel of a large plot geography can easily fit into a small room: London, 1954, a village weekend, be my wife, the right corner of the desk, two steps to the right, the armchair, Berlin, forty years after, how are you, how are the kids? walking to the stadium, here it is, between the window and TV, or is it a computer? The room can swallow new and new thick novels about the strange life of the big world outside. The room, which I hate.
MONUMENTAL MEMORIES
The Sea View high-rise has stolen the sea view right before him. There is urban 2-D around with standard clouds along the horizon to the left and right from him. Anyway, the monument is looking down: the slope is too steep.
JAZZ
A piano introduction is quiet and thoughtful. The very first chords are rather cool. A right-hand crystal fragility is backed by three left-hand steps down. Broken rhythm, rustles over toms and careful hi-hats. Gentle bass nodding. White-black-white soft keying, down and up. Twine peaks of sloping triads are questioning each other. Finally, the promised explosion is coming up: the drums stop laming and powerfully pulse, chased by the bass rushing; the blacks-and-whites dubiously stand still at first, and then reply as nervous wide-spread ten-finger chords between feverish pauses. The drummer’s brass splashes raise the tempo even more; the acrobat bassist is jumping against the trampoline, placing fast finger chords between the open-string fade-outs. At last, another piano chord is blowing up into soft right arpeggio, and the music is suddenly over, fallen under the pressure.
LORRY
Showing through foliage gaps, a hairless head has rushed along the fence ridge.
IN MEMORIAM
The tea is steaming as an awkward illusion: grey locks are winding up as imitated evaporation, with virtual endlessness coming from and leaving to nowhere in a sunny stripe, among dust particles.
U-TURN
The sky is grey. The land just is. An engine noise is coming. A car from the left, tire-rustling, driven in between pits and bumps, slowly proceeds to the highway. A minute is over. An engine noise is coming. A car from the left, tire-rustling, driven in between pits and bumps, slowly proceeds to the highway. Another minute. An engine noise is coming. A car from the left, tire-rustling, driven in between pits and bumps, slowly proceeds to the highway. A bit more than a minute. An en
gine noise is coming. A car from the left, tire-rustling, driven in between pits and bumps, slowly proceeds to the highway. Some far away, behind thick bushes on the side, a door has squeaked, invisible. A boy of ten has come, his hands in the pockets of his dusty trousers. Kicking some pebbles and leaving back. Another door-squeak.
SEA IN CITY
Multi-coloured electrical makeup at night. Flowing patterns in daytime, dark-blue-on-light-blue. An upset profile of buildings afar, softly filled-in grey -this is sunrise.
SCRAPING THE SKY
The mirror surface swallows the sky, clouds, and birds flying by. The wall stops suddenly as a theatre prop: no rooms behind, no lifts, no hundreds of people in those rooms and lifts of the ninety floors - just the sky, clouds and birds, again.
WINDY SUNSET
A shadow of underwear was dancing in the unreal 3D of a 2-D wall. Then, it suddenly squeezed, turned, jumped and disappeared. They closed the window again.
NEW SCENERY
The theatre backcloth (miraculous animation: blue through horizon, waves coming, all looks so real) gets convex with every step of mine on sand already wet and suddenly proves a true sea, or just salty liquid around you while the beach has substituted for it as “the other reality”: sand, another bus creeping away, and a crowd of bodies I suddenly recognize you in with a strange feeling as if it were a random documentary shot.
NIGHT
A tall stooping street light rod has silvered a tree crown. A black shy silhouette.
DUST
Cigar ash is lying on the very bottom, under some other junk. In the complete dark, it is spread across the black varnished surface, a bit concave and somewhere scratched. Seven paper pellets make hills and gorges on this crumbly plain, encircled into a black varnished wall. Random uneven vaults of carbon paper largely torn create the darkness, ash and paper pellets are in. There is ash again on the sticky pieces with traces of a large-size awkward handwriting, this one from slim cigarettes. Only Mr. Sherlock Holmes could see the difference, yet there is no need of that. No butts. A half-crumpled paper sheet covers the black-and-grey piles. The same handwriting, twelve lines rhymed. Lines look into and add some blue lyrical hue to the sleepy whiteness of the ash-and-sheet aura. Yellowish broken logs with un-burnt brown heads are thrown over the paper. There is something written from the reverse as well: a table mirror reflects the last syllable, in somebody else’s hand. Higher is the chandelier.
PHILOSOPHIC
A chain of ships, from bigger to smaller, yet very alike, has been motionless in the bay for two days. As if someone were watching the sun through a film. Ghosts of the past, an evidence to support Zeno. Evenings’ lights on the rigs turn “Vessels’ Arrival” into “Immersing Picture Gallery”. Is the bay so shallow?
HEAT
Vertical fabric blinds move their shoulders with even coquetry as a female chorus from a Russian folklore village. Right before the air condition, the voiceless song gets as fast as a dance remix.
USELESS SECRETS
Two escalators going up - a false race.
SUDDEN DEATH
The opened door of the flat in front discloses strange lives, whose earlier times used to happily pass by, unnoticed year after year. The few meters between have proved a magic buffer. All is seen as through a well-washed glass. My brother has crossed to be found there as well, mixed with many people, silently crowding the lobby and a big far-shot room. Moving gaps are showing light wallpaper fragments, a heavily-framed portrait, and a plate on a table. Then the prospect is disguised by someone in a pink raincoat. The wife and daughter are standing in front, identically squeezing their heads in the silent anticipation of grief.
OF BEING
The sunset has upset into water a gigantic tower on the other shore. It’s snaking on water. Endlessly sinking. The unbearable lightness.
SOMETIMES
Sometimes, all around feels so fit. That words are missing to express this feeling is a torture. All the details : streets, buildings, trees, people, and clouds - seem tailor-made, and so does my body. Body?
NOSTALGIC
I’ve come from the sea, falling into the dark slowly, but inevitably, down the strange-twilight whiteness of the sand. They’ve already switched on the veranda lights, still short-sighted, and the daytime piece of the film has been cut off for me to never see it. Crickets. A garden chair. September is coming soon, which is saddening.
It’s already dark. An empty window frame places the electrically-silver garden into a strangely different dimension - it feels impossible to reach for the foliage.
Yet how to catch and keep a feeling, which has momentarily rustled by as a blow from the past? All has been rebuilt, and the walls are invisible: here was I, sitting, and there was the neighbours’, or am I wrong?
TRUMAN SHOW
A fly has walked down the screen inside and, as it were suddenly falling into a sleeping abyss, flies by the talking head’s right ear and disappears into the studio deep, whose huge spaces inexplicably have fit into the TV set. It might also have flown through an open window into the outer world, an infinitely breeding crowd, more and more tensely filling the interior of the strongest plastic walls, hidden by this sky-blue upholstery.
ZOOM CHAOS
Zoom brings your watching eye down, first slowly, and then fast; quite far a moment ago, a house suddenly is standing still, few steps before you, and you see poplar foliage rustle. Zoom does bring your watching eye down, but generates chaos: flying in from somewhere, a pigeon distracts your attention, and you can’t find a way back; pieces of buildings and the sky twitch right or left trying to fall out of the lens as a photo out of its frame.
Suddenly run into, the sea floods your last hope, and you move the picture away as if you were long-sighted: voiceless buildings and trees have quickly gathered to pose like conference participants, say cheese.
Yet there are suddenly emerging gaps, relief tricks and sole morning walkers in this chaos.
THEATRE
The hall has dived into the dark with rapid smoothness, and the lighted stage depth has swallowed the audience looks. Here are people coming out, running in load steps and speaking in load voices. Spotlights catch their faces and eyes involuntarily screwed up. In the empty foyer, chandeliers are still bright, and mirrors reflect shining floor and each other. Doors for the stalls are locked.
VIOLINIST SCULPTURE
Night. Empty is the street. He stands within a white-stone circle. What evil spirit does he hope to spell off, playing 4.33 again and again?
SEASIDE RESTAURANT
Waves are coming to become a white column to become waves to become another white column to become waves to become the balcony edge.
SILENCE
Small is the room, its narrow space reaching the window, almost half the wall. Strangely white, daylight is filling the room through the half-transparent curtain laces. The door is right in front: a rather deep split runs through the opal glass. Years’ black semicircle comes from left to right on the parquet. A cupboard and dresser are closed and mute, and so is the door. A sofa, two big armchairs, TV set and a coffee table almost fill in the space left. A bright-green portiere behind the sofa must be hiding another room. It’s quiet, it’s very quiet; cars’ sounds, hollow and muffled, are sometimes reaching in.
A small alarm-clock on the coffee-table near the phone is tick-tick-ticking. It’s the ground floor: happy voices and laughter of few people passing have come from the right behind the window.
Suddenly, something has been pulled along the curtain with load rustle: a spontaneous wind blow has hit the unlocked window to open it into the room. It’s not loud urban noise that entered the room, but boom, even and very low.
The happy voices passing by on their way back are heard with no window buffer this time, but are still sinking into some invisible softness. No more car sounds.
The heavy green cloth hardly hangs on two nails. It’s getting colder in the room. Evening has come. All things are
getting quiet in the sleepy and indifferent darkness. It’s completely cold now. The sky seems still light blue from here.
White, yellow, and blue. White is the snow, backed by yellow stains of windows in the buildings across.
The phone has rung out once in the dark, and the silence’s back now. Here dies the clock.
EVERYBODY’S GONE
Four lights along the landing stage, four moons in water, have died all in a row. The fifth one has flashed and died as a good-bye show: going home, the photographer has occasionally pushed the button.
CLASS OF PHYSICS
Driving by, he unwillingly called her - she turned back, and this turn on high-heels appeared slow because she was getting behind much faster, or he was, doesn’t matter. . .
NIGHT, STREET, LIGHT, AND WIND
No people. Flat when no wind, the wall paleness is floating.
CLASS OF PHYSICS NUMBER TWO
A car has passed by; a light, mirror, an elbow out, another window up, a dent in the trunk - have flown together to an invisible magnet and are quickly shrinking into a hardly visible point. There is the horizon.
QUITE LONG AGO
