new year's eve 2010, 55 degrees

[Damen Avenue above Huron Street]

we delivery

[Chicago Avenue west of Winchester Street]

rat's alley

I think we are in rat's alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.

"The Waste Land," T. S. Eliot

[Damen Avenue below Division Street]

cashed

[Damen Avenue below Chicago Avenue]

smoke and steel

Pearl cobwebs in the windy rain,
in only a flicker of wind,
are caught and lost and never known again.

A pool of moonshine comes and waits,
but never waits long: the wind picks up
loose gold like this and is gone.

A bar of steel sleeps and looks slant-eyed
on the pearl cobwebs, the pools of moonshine;
sleeps slant-eyed a million years,
sleeps with a coat of rust, a vest of moths,
a shirt of gathering sod and loam.

The wind never bothers … a bar of steel.
The wind picks only .. pearl cobwebs .. pools of moonshine.

"Smoke and Steel," Carl Sandburg

[Lake Michigan east of Lake Shore Drive]

strange cats

"You will always be lucky if you know how to make friends with strange cats."

[Winchester Street above Thomas Street]

booth one

[Pump Room, Ambassador East]

home federal

[Loop]

mira!

[Michigan Avenue below Chicago Avenue]

water towers

[Chicago Avenue at Michigan Avenue]

harold's

[Milwaukee Avenue above Division Street]

choco

[Ukrainian Village]

you

[Michigan Avenue below Chicago Avenue]

blot

[Damen Avenue below Chicago Avenue]

and so

"Πληροφοριών έχει γνωστοποιηθεί."

[Damen Avenue below Division Street]

you've seen him

[Damen Avenue above Thomas Street]

peter gabriel's ace

shaved recently

north

chicago

fix

his awkward armor

yet another film
of Bresson’s has
the aging Lancelot with his
awkward armor standing
in a woods, of small trees,
dazed, bleeding, both he
and his horse are,
trying to get back to
the castle, itself of
no great size. It
moved me, that
life was after all
like that. You are
in love. You stand
in the woods, with
a horse, bleeding.
The story is true.

"Bresson's Movies," Robert Creeley

[Chicago Avenue east of Damen Avenue]

of moderate concern

hands

Maxim's, Goethe Place east of State Street. At a presentation by Paris Review's Loren Stein and StopSmiling Books' JC Gabel. Lois Weisberg folds her hands.

how you made them feel

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

~ Maya Angelou

[Leavitt Street below Augusta Boulevard]

advertise 666

[Chicago Avenue west of Orleans Street]

neon, rain

[Chicago Avenue west of Damen Avenue]

elevated

[Lasalle Street above Lake Street]

varying reasons blooming

I did differed from I do differed from I can’t.
I couldn’t then as now make anyone happy.
We all more or less were bleeding. Which differed
from blood on all our hands. Held behind our
backs, varying reasons blooming each their own
stern logic. Time passed, returned, flirted with
seconds as it watched the days. And you watched,
didn’t you, everything, from the first illicit wink.

"The Golden Bowl," Michael Snedike

[Damen Avenue below Division Street]

tower

[Above Chicago Avenue west of Green Street]

crack in everything

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

~ Leonard Cohen

[East of Damen Avenue above Augusta Boulevard]

not everybody will do

I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ”idea of them.”

~ Anaïs Nin

[Milwaukee Avenue, Wicker Park Fest]

take on me

Take on me, take me on
I'll be gone
In a day or two

Oh the things that you say
Is it life or
Just a play my worries away
You're all the things I've got to
remember
You're shying away
I'll be coming for you anyway

"Take On Me," A-Ha; cover by Cap'n Jazz, 31 July 2010. Six photos here. (Or you can see their version from... 15 years ago?)

[Milwaukee Avenue below North Avenue]

cat in the rain

"I'm going down and get that kitty," the American wife said.
"I'll do it," her husband offered from the bed.
"No, I'll get it. The poor kitty out trying to keep dry under a table."
The husband went on reading, lying propped up with the two pillows at the foot of the bed.
"Don't get wet," he said.

"Cat in the Rain," Ernest Hemingway

[Chicago Avenue east of Damen Avenue]

anyone lived

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did...

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was...

"anyone lived in a pretty how town," e. e. cummings

[Chicago Avenue west of Winchester Street]

rats ripple across

Rain the rats ripple across, five—a family?—in five minutes time, flooding streets marked by lumbering lightning.

[Damen Avenue below Division Street]

pink hotel

image repertoire

baby

Baby, you gonna miss that plane.

"Before Sunset," Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke

[Chicago Avenue west of Damen Avenue]

the greenness of love

>My personal poetry is a failure. I do not want to be a person. I want to be unbearable. Lover to lover, the greenness of love.

“Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions," Anne Carson

[Damen Avenue below Division Street]

task of a lifetime

I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime.

~ Anne Carson

[Thomas Street west of Damen Avenue]

wait under the weed

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.

—through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

"A Sort Of Song," William Carlos Williams

[Damen Avenue below Lee Street]

blue skies

Blue days
All of them gone
Nothing but blue skies
From now on

"Blue Skies," Irving Berlin

[Damen Avenue below Division Street]

"606" in CUFF show at Siskel Film Center gallery

Through July 18: details here.

human being after human being

There is despair, contemplating humanity, if you're looking at all the violence and unnecessary death. Then, you see that human being after human being is living life. And there is joy in it, because in existence there is also great joy. If you spend your whole life being depressed about life, you're wasting it. That's the wisdom of my old age.

~ C. K. Williams

[Chicago Avenue west of Damen Avenue]

i had to do some business

The usual. I got up in the morning. I read the paper. I drank a pot of tea. And then I went over to the little apartment I have in the neighborhood and worked for about six hours. After that, I had to do some business. My mother died two years ago, and there was one last thing to take care of concerning her estate—a kind of insurance bond I had to sign off on. So, I went to a notary public to have the papers stamped, then mailed them to the lawyer. I came back home. I read my daughter’s final report card. And then I went upstairs and paid a lot of bills. A typical day, I suppose. A mix of working on the book and dealing with a lot of boring, practical stuff.

~ Paul Auster to Jonathem Lethem in The Believer

[Chicago Avenue west of California Avenue]

holes in paper open

I don't find solitude agonizing, on the contrary. Holes in paper open and take me fathoms from anywhere.

"The Unnameable," Samuel Beckett

[Rush Street above Chicago Avenue]

being an ideal form means I don't move a muscle

People, I'm beautiful! I'm a dream made of stone!
My body, upon which my lovers each in turn
received their bruises, was put here to inspire
poets to sing the eternal music of the spheres!
Aren't I inscrutable? Like a sphinx on my throne –
my heart: a fist of ice; my skin: white as as swan.
Being an ideal form means I don't move a muscle.
You will not see me weep. You will not see me smile.
Poor poets: having once known my exquisite body,
they lose themselves, poor lambs, in fruitless years of study –
if only I could blink! My eyes shine – & so I,
with mirrors cunningly arranged to magnify
my beauty, hypnotise anyone fool enough

"Beauty," by Paul Batchelor

[Chicago Avenue west of Damen Avenue]

crammed into the confines of that space

What I remember is this: at one point in the evening, I wound up standing alone in a corner of the room. I was smoking a cigarette and looking out at the people, dozens upon dozens of young bodies crammed into the confines of that space, listening to the mingled roar of words and laughter, wondering what on earth I was doing there, and thinking that perhaps it was time to leave. An ashtray was sitting on a radiator to my left, and as I turned to snuff out my cigarette, I saw that the butt-filled receptacle was rising toward me, cradled in the palm of a man's hand. Without my noticing them, two people had just sat down on the radiator, a man and a woman, both of them older than I was, no doubt older than anyone else in the room—he around thirty-five, she in her late twenties or early thirties. They made an incongruous pair, I thought.

"Invisible," Paul Auster

[Ukrainian Village]

i thought of matchsticks

>Anyway. I got the books in the post yesterday. I felt nothing looking at the book. Nothing. The books look beautiful. But I felt empty. Like these books were a refuse of my past, and them being printed and packaged and made into commodity objects is totally separate from why I created the work. I am looking forward to having new readers, that dialogue. But I looked at the books and I thought of matchsticks, yes that’s what I thought of, matchsticks. Maybe because the books are paper. And I thought of burning them, like Artaud writing about poems, meant to be read once and then burned.

"Frances Farmer Is My Sister," Kate Zambreno

[Chicago Avenue east of Rush Street]

flags

I would like to salute
the ashes of American flags
And all the fallen leaves
filling up shopping bags

"Ashes of American Flags," Wilco

[State Street below Randolph Street]

kindness and unkindness

Look to your life.
Rest your kindness
and your unkindness
now, and listen: I know
what makes your heart
clench coldly
in all weathers,
I know how it feels
that it always will.
Bear that. Look to your life,
to your one given garden.

"Garden," Sam Willetts

[Chicago Avenue east of Winchester Street]

ignorant of death

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

[Damen Avenue below Division Street]