#1: Memories of Chicago

an oatmeal and chocolate chip cookie at Atomix cafe on Chicago and Damen.

a woman and a dog

a broken headphone

Art Institute of Chicago:

Cézanne, Paul, Still Life with Basket of Apples, 1890-94

i won a prize for drawing this in pastels when i was at school. 

Day by Ferdinand Hodler

Strange Music by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 1995

Olaffur Eliasson tracks our horizons At the Chicago MCA, like Claude Monet with his sheafs of wheat.

Shapes are projected momentarily on a wall.  

'It would take 10-12 years for this sequence to repeat itself'.  Enter this computer-generated mechanical timescape.  Enter computer this generated mechanical timescape.

Why walls?  Eliasson also showcases his wall of moss.  a duvet of Sweet-smelling reindeer moss colonises one wall. Touch it. then enter the yellow room of happiness.  the light beams into your very soul.  even writing about it now i can feel it. enter the circle of light!  the colours move about/blurring the boundary between here and there. look at the bulb, and the bleached imprint that floats in your eyes afterward. in the ceiling, ghosts of reflections.  a floating orb of fragments of glass.

a pipe the machine.

/?___??--shoots pushing through holes in our clothes

 - On a bench on the beach at the end of Michigan Avenue 15/7/09

'Sitting here. I am free.

dinner parties?  Birthday?'

"Help the homeless?" - The Onion and a postcard of Chicago clasped in his hand.  

Renoir's Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando - what a peach!

and 

Paris Street on a Rainy Day, Caillebote

Jean-Louis Forain, Tightrope Walker, 1885

Antonio Canova, Head of Medusa

King Vulture, 1734

Munch's Girl Looking out the Window 1892

Alex Katz, Vincent and Tony 1963

Peter Doig, Gasthof Zur Muldentalsperre

Hockney's American Collectors

Yves Tanguy, The Rapidity of Sleep 1943

Death of the poet Walter Rheiner 1925

a painful faupaw could pay off.  I chose yellow + i'm not sorry.

(Eviscerated Corpse, Mike Kelley, 1989)

Robert Gober's September 11th.

Jim Nutt.  

Shedd Aquarium:

a punctured lungfish

a smokey catfish

a branded sealion

excerpt from 'lines written at the top of the hancock tower at sunset':

all of a sudden

white and illuminated

like little bones.

then the first lights, as

yellow glitter scattered

piercing

this skin between night and day

millipede buses and

the buildings gain a new definition

reaching up to the

darkening sky,

square plants

i've never known a man who loved me\

i am infatuated with sufjan, as may be apparent from my blog. so i am back. i cried when i had to leave; once into my pillow when i woke up in flo's apartment, again in the airport as i traced the city's shadowy outline in the distance, and once more, embarrassingly, on the plane from jfk to dusseldorf (yes, it was a long journey home to london). i blame the third occasion partly on the fact that marley and me was the inflight entertainment.
i have now not slept for many many hours. give me a moment and i will calculate
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35 hours.

i should be in bed now but i can't go. i just feel really strange. i don't know if i feel sad, just a bit like i have been compressed into a cube like a car in a scrapyard. i feel a bit like that, like suddenly i am in the claws of a machine, no longer free to wheel about like the liberated creature i was yesterday. i am winded and wounded. i cannot bear the idea of my travels being at an end. i will miss sleeping with citynoise and not being afraid to go anywhere and wondering who i will meet tomorrow. i will miss the open country and the sea and the view from the heights and those views from below where you feel like the smallest thing in the world. i will miss strange bodies and warm limbs and unforgettable faces (imprinted on moving filmstrips in my memory) and your accent and people not knowing who you are and those moments when all of a sudden you feel that you have learned something about who you are. new animals and winking lights and the ever-changing space above your head that is the weather and those things strung up in the sky between buildings and along power lines. the city lit heartbreakingly beautiful seen in nightviews from roofs and memories that hug you tight then leave you cold when they let go. exquisite sadness of realisation that we are all ultimately alone, but also that the best thing we've got is each other. warm friends. no man is an island. i'm sorry at how sentimental this is, but i can't help it. i'm still recovering from marley and me, for god's sake.


Goodbye, America. x

i ate two round things today, a bagel and a chocolate doughnut, and in between i had dim sum. yesterday i didn't eat much because i was feeling sad about numerous things and i find it hard to eat when i'm sad but i feel that i'm making up for it today. so i have reached the end of my trip, regrettably having had little time recently to write this blog. i make a wholehearted promise to fill in the gaps when i get back to blighty (which, sad to say, i am dreading. the thought of a summer spent in the big D makes me feel a little ill). my plan is to move to berlin and get a job in a bar until i feel a bit more favourably toward london in general, which i find a little stifling. today flo and i went to chinatown and then soho and now i'm back in her apartment which, as of yesterday, is now also home to a tiny black-and-white kitten named Congee. i will put photos up here or on facebook.vom soon

...stay tuned.

leave the ones we love/and never come again

i got my fringe trimmed by a man who looked like a builder. i think i could have done it better myself; with my teeth.

i need a hug. i would also like to soak in a bathtub until i am a prune and then lie in the sun to dry out like a raisin and then perhaps eventually if i lie there long enough i'll just become raisiny dust and blow away over the sea. i'm in new york, the site of so many memories that echo around the spaces between the buildings and linger in the air's fragile tension. it feels funny being here; i feel a bit more homeless and insecure than i did last time, and also a little sad. i had a funny experience the other day when i saw someone i used to know. and i've been thinking about home, and about my life and how i don't know what i'm doing. i am also starting to find living out of a suitcase a little difficult because it all becomes a bit claustrophobic and possessions become tiresome and i am tired. it is very hot here, too, but it is humid heat. i used to be unable to tolerate this sort of weather but now i don't really care, i have not the energy to be concerned by it. or a lot of things. it's like walking around in a large damp blanket all day. on my first day here i had two showers and brushed my teeth four times. somehow it gets into your mouth. yesterday emma and i went to the gorgeously musty westsider bookshop and i bought three books: Vonnegut's the sirens of titan; gore vidal's messiah; the tell-tale heart and other writings by edgar allan poe. the sirens of titan has a particularly amusing 70s cover, and the book is lilac and the edges of the pages are green. we went for a drink or eight in the evening and emma saw a mouse and went outside, but i didn't mind it, i feel for the little things. they don't bite, do they? we saw a rat the other day in the subway, it was nibbling on an empty polythene food container, tearing it rather poetically to snowy confetti that was scattered all over the tracks. today i am a little hungover and have not eaten anything and it's going to rain. i would like to sit in a cafe and read one of my books and be alone for a little while and wonder about the mystical child-adult transformation that apparently occurs when you turn twenty-one.

i removed my nail varnish

no hippies; lots of old men. some of whom holding reflexive conversations. today i went to the museum of fine arts, boston.

some things i liked.

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/velazquez/velazquez.philip-iv.jpg

http://cache.thephoenix.com/secure/uploadedImages/The_Phoenix/ZZZ/Importer/ShowaMain.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2053/2519859237_cd77717996.jpg?v=0

i also found out that they used to employ dwarves to look after children in 17th century spain.



* * * * *
i look back through the pinhole at the scene and it remains there unchanged, us there, not thinking, but i think now.


** *
Without you, today's emotions would be the scurf of yesterday's.
[Amelie Poulain.]

hi. i feel a bit crappy today. feeding the computer dollar bills into its hungry money slot in feeble attempt to combat loneliness/aforementioned crappy feeling. guy next to me talking to himself. saw a play. my i.d. got rejected at a bar. found out that 2 of the people i'm supposed to be meeting in NY are not going to be there now. had a chocolate bar for dinner. walked home in the rain with an angry wind that was determined to kill me and my umbrella.

boston's very red. i went to (and got lost in) harvard earlier today, it looked like money. i did have a good crepe, though, in a place called Arrow Crepes or something like that. maybe one reason i enjoyed the crepe so much is because they were playing yann tiersen and maurice chevalier on the stereo.

ok my two dollars are up. bye.