About London Trip-tych

London Trip-tych is the collaborative film-poem debut of Luca Paci, co-author of ‘The Fine Line’, Eric Gregory Award-winning poet Luke Heeley, and the musician Rowan Porteous (aka Superimpozer). Conceived in late 2004 and filmed and edited over two years, the film fuses image, poetry and sound in three chapters to create a kaleidoscopic meditation on this elusive and protean city.

The films begins with ‘The River’, a journey through the repository of the city’s memory where past and present coincide, before probing the vestiges of ‘Hubris’ and the legacy of industry and war. The final part, ‘Noli Me Tangere’, depicts a vanishing city, glimpsed in reflections of water and glass, and through the looking-glass of CCTV.

Luca Paci is the co-author with Jürgen Ghebrezghiabiher of the poetry collection The Fine Line, published by Chanticleer Press in 2004. He has published numerous articles on literature, philosophy and poetry and with Huw Thomas translated A Girl Named Carla (La Ragazza Carla) by Elio Pagliarani (Troubadour, 2006). He also edits the online journal Rizoma (www.rizomatic.wordpress.com)

Luke Heeley has published poetry in The Times Literary Supplement, The Wolf and The Tall-Lighthouse Poetry Review, as well as the web-based publications Boomerang and Limelight (www.thepoem.co.uk), and larger selections in the anthologies Reactions 4 and Phoenix New Writing. In 2002, he received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors.

Rowan Porteous (aka Superimpozer) is a composer, producer and trumpet player. He released the Psy-Ops EP and the album, Lines Of Flight, on machine records (winner of the Welsh Music Awards Best Label 2005) and the follow-up album Thought Fungus on dubiousaudio (www.dubiousaudio.co.uk). As well as playing various gigs in the UK, his music has been played by Mary Anne Hobbs on BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 3’s ‘Mixing It’ show, on Resonance FM and on the Arts Council funded international radio show ‘The Selector’.

 

Then open the shutter, let the light
rush in through the gate.
Nothing seems to move
but listen and listen again
until you hear
the white noise of the leaves,

and the bloodstream of traffic
circling the covered face of the dead,
the concealing cape.

 

————

 

Dusk of dancing atoms
coming from a place
they long to return to.
Cars and buses with eyes of light
brighter than stars
held for a moment
in a mirror
where people are bending by.

The speed of trains leaving this world,
uprooting houses and trees.

 

————

 

No one sleeps in the last hotel.
Its keel deflects the wrecking ball.

Dust particles of the demolished
coat the windows so you cannot see
along the vista of these corridors.

The echo of a trolley roams them
bearing the coldest breakfast.

The night porter lays a salver outside the room
where the pure products of leisure
snooze among the remnants of the night:
spent champagne, a cigarette stubbed out
in the yolk of an egg.