In memory of David Hockney (9 July 1937 – 11 June 2026)
Inspired by "A Bigger Splash" (1967)
a cloud of droplets
from the blue swimming pool
and the diver gone ...
how long a life can linger
after the one who made it
One of his best-known paintings, “A Bigger Splash,” which Hockney made in 1967 and which became part of the permanent collection of the Tate in 1981, shows a modernist house flanked by a pair of skinny palm trees, before which extends a brilliant-blue swimming pool equipped with a yellow diving board. There is no one in sight, but the surface of the water bursts with evidence of someone having just dived in, disappearing into the cool aqueous depths. The painting is suggestive of heat, with the palm trees offering no shade, and of a full-body relief from that heat: someone—probably male, probably young, almost certainly beautiful—is about to emerge from the pool’s sublimity, gasping with pleasure.
...what Hockney’s best works can make a viewer feel: the splash of water that, in reality, takes seconds to dissipate, captured over weeks of careful brushwork, then held in place forever on the canvas. Just as Hockney did, these works draw us in with their winning superficies only to hold us rapt with their enduring depths.
Added: Politics of Distraction, X
At an outdoor briefing, "military operation," "little excursion," "self-defense strikes" amid camera clicks in unseasonal heat.
smoky haze
war after war
of this wor(l)d
FYI:
NBC News, June 11, 2026: Trump says U.S. will hit Iran ‘very hard’ tonight and take ‘total control’ of Iran’s oil industry.
And this gembun is a sequel to the following:
Politics of Distraction, IX:
blocking the blockade
to break the strait blockade ...
in gathering dark
a gin-soaked flight to nowhere
through the un/truth of this war
Added: Politics of Distraction, XI
the flat TV
mounted on the side wall
of a bookstore
blasting, a great deal!...
layers of dust on Trump books
Added: Politics of Distraction, XII
flip-flopping
on the ceasefire deal
amid camera clicks --
a dove's feather caught spinning
in the White House's wire fence
Added:
thunder rumbling
his talk of war turns dark
then darker still
Added:
a skinny girl
drags her Disney Princess
by its hair ...
the doll’s eyeless face turns
to the orphanage window
Added:
lying on her back
arms and legs splayed open …
a refugee dead
then the shelter left alone
with its rows of empty beds
