bessie

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fading out

habana, d.f.

reading fantastic journal and seeing wax commando statues of el che made me homesick (again). café la habana, c. 2001. alone under the half space-age, half tropicomodernista ceiling. the whole place rumbled when the big trucks drove by on bucareli. i loved bucareli before i read bolaño. i loved it because it was wide and empty and dirty and regal, unlike any other street in mexico city. i loved the ywca nearby when it was closed and its pink déco facade was all rotten. i loved how all the buildings and sidewalks where so covered in soot and muck they were soft.

i would cut class to walk around there. just walk and stare at everything. i don't do that anymore.

please make mine blues

nothing like some good 'ol early o'gorman to fight this sense of impending weekend blues...

cottage

derek jarman was in this black cottage by a nuclear power plant in dungeness, kent. there he wrote:

"i’m alone again. i sit watching the sun go down, peach as my grandmother’s table-cloth behind the nuclear power station. A great orange moon hangs over the sea and the winds die bringing in the night.

[…]

i am tired tonight. my eyes are out of focus, my body droops under the weight of the day, but as I leave you queer lads let me leave you singing. i had to write of a sad time as a witness - not to cloud your smiles - please read the cares of the world that I have locked in these pages; and after, put this book aside and love. may you share of a better future, love without a care and remember we loved too. as the shadows closed in, the stars came out.

i am in love."

then he died.

*great post + pics found @ shorttermmemoryloss

(star)dust

when my grandmother died i scavenged her closet for a piece of her i could keep. as a kid i loved digging in the hat boxes and the dust-covered fur coats, finding all sorts of little treasures: ancient portable kodak cameras and polaroids from the sixties, silver-framed tinted blue bug-eye sunglasses, fake jewelry, bottles of fermented sparkling wine, unopened decks of playing cards, cigarette holders and the most incredible collection of hotel souvenir ashtrays and matchboxes you could imagine. hawaii, fort worth, veracruz, needles, rio de janeiro, ottawa, monterrey, nice… i was always amazed at how my grandma had managed to put together this wacky world itinerary for herself.

the one i kept was a sober black ashtray with white lettering that read : stardust las vegas. i didn’t smoke back then, but i was well on my way to developing my groping addiction to 50s and 60s americana. i still had to discover doowop and douglas sirk and duckass and develop a crush on james dean, but even at this tender age i was drawn to the dirty delight of this useless piece and the careless age it encapsuled. or so i thought.

i somehow missed the stardust’s implosion. watching the little youtube screen has sent shivers down my everything. i still have to connect tons of dots accumulated in my personal history and my personal tastes and my personal fantasies and wakings. finding this is just another reminder of how everything is tied, how we’re happy little victims of things that stand for nothing and mean everything.

the melody haunts my reverie

touring the bush (7) : buenos aires, projects 3

5. mellow modernists : i don't get this latinoamerican fixation on old-school modernism. sometimes i think it might be a sort of rejection to the tropical modernisms of the 50s-60s authoritarian developmentalism (desarrollismo). the thing is, instead of rejecting the modernist part, contemporary architects are rejecting the tropical. houses outside of santiago, in guadalajara, in rio are leaving behind the ondulating, sinous curves or the bright pink walls for more standard, straight-lined, minimalist, boxy building types. even when this usually dissapoints, some of these recent projects aren't half bad, and some even try to work their way out of boring bourgeois. more than ennui, in a city that easily tends to barroque, contemporary modernist architecture in buenos aires acts as a pleasing sedative (click pics for details)









next stop : brasilia vs. curitiba, failed and future utopias