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]

capable of moments unlike

"There's a thing about being capable of a great moment. This city is capable of moments unlike any moments you'll ever experience in life. To see an Indian come down the street in full regalia on St. Joseph's Night on an unlit street of messed-up shotgun houses and one burned-out car, and he's the most beautiful thing on the planet, and everything around him is falling down. It's a glorious instant of human endeavor. It's duende from the Spanish, chills on the back of your neck, and then the next minute it's gone. Lots of American places used to make things. Detroit used to make cars. Baltimore used to make steel and ships. New Orleans still makes something. It makes moments. I don't mean that to sound flippant, and I don't mean it to sound more or less than what it is, but they're artists with a moment, they can take a moment and make it into something so transcendent that you're not quite sure that it happened or that you were a part of it."

~ David Simon

[Michigan Avenue above Madison Street]

the moon walked across

On the edges of our dreams was the sea,
which the moon walked across with soft footsteps.

"Gilgamesh," Spencer Reese

[Chicago Avenue east of Damen Avenue]

where all the ladders start

Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

"The Circus Animals' Desertion," William Butler Yeats

[Milwaukee Avenue at North Avenue]

what do you read

"What do you read, my lord?"
"Words, words, words."

"Hamlet," Shakespeare

[State Street]

the true nature

All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved. I have shirked the duty of coming to a conclusion upon these two questions—women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.

"A Room Of One's Own," Virginia Woolf

[Ukrainian Village]

the fineness of sand

Penumbra de la paloma
llamaron los hebreos a la iniciación de la tarde
cuando la sombra no entropece los pasos
y la venida de la noche se advierte
como una música esperada y antiqua,
como un grato declive.
En esa hora en que la luz
tiene una finura de arena,
di con una calle ignorada,
abierta en noble anchura de terraza,
cuyas cornisas y paredes mostraban
colores tenues como el mismo cielo
que conmovía el fondo.

"Calle Desconocia," Jorge Luis Borges

[Superior Street east of Rush Street]

evoking happy moments

How beautiful the sun is on warm evenings! How deep space is! How powerful is the heart! Bending over you, queen of adored ones, I thought I breathed the perfume of your blood. How beautiful the sun is on warm evenings! ... I know the art of evoking happy moments, and live again my past curled up in your lap. For what is the good of seeking your languorous beauty elsewhere than in your dear body and in your so gentle heart? I know the art of evoking happy moments.

"The Balcony," Baudelaire via Elaine Marks

[Damen Avenue above Haddon Street]

well then cry

Well then, cry! Be sad! Pour out your heart and tell me, now and again, how you
are.

~ Gustave Flaubert

[Damen Avenue below Division Street; Damen Avenue east of Chicago Avenue]

now we cannot go anywhere

You see we all thought the ride would be lovely
and worth the trip, which it was, but now we cannot go anywhere
having already been everywhere. No, do you
understand how realistic it all is?

"Girls on the Run," John Ashbery

[Chicago Avenue east of Ashland Avenue]

what is this quintessence of dust

Hamlet: What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—
nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

Rosencrantz: My lord, there was no such stuff in my thoughts.

"Hamlet," William Shakespeare

[Peninsula Hotel, Rush Street at Superior Street]

chicago

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning
as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with
white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young
man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has
never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse.
and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of
Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog
Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with
Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

"Chicago," Carl Sandburg

[Chicago Avenue west of Noble Street]

children by the millions

Children by the millions
Wait for Alex Chilton
To come around
They say, I’m in love
What’s that song?
I’m in love
With that song

"Alex Chilton," Paul Westerberg

[Augusta Avenue at Hoyne Street]

parracide

Parr slides a Sharpie from the pocket of his crisp blue shirt. He has a look a photographer would affect: bemused, unremarkable, with fleeting but deadly accurate awareness. The room is crowded and the dozens of pictures on the walls range across three decades of his career, sampling from the satirical eye that has made him perhaps the most controversial of the Magnum Agency’s members. [Cont'd.]

[Martin Parr appearance, Stephen Daiter Gallery, Franklin Street at Huron Street]

who'll text first?

[Huron Street east of Franklin Street]

endure

What is to give light must endure burning

~ Victor Frankl

[Dana Hotel, State Street at Erie Street]