night's friendly takeover

I have a suggestion to make: draw the sting out
as probingly as you please. Plaster the windows over
with wood pulp against the noon gloom proposing its enigmas,
its elixirs. Banish truth-telling.
That’s the whole point, as I understand it.
Each new investigation rebuilds the urgency,
like a sand rampart. And further reflection undermines it,
causing its eventual collapse. We could see all that
from a distance, as on a curving abacus, in urgency mode
from day one, but by then dispatches hardly mattered.
It was camaraderie, or something like it, that did,
poring over us like we were papyri, hoping to find one
correct attitude sketched on the gaslit air, night’s friendly takeover.

"Boundary Issues," John Ashbery

[California Avenue below Chicago Avenue]

makes me clumsy

Longing. Longing for a wave of love that would stir in me. That's what makes me clumsy. The absence of pleasure. Desire for love. Desire to love.

"Wings of Desire," Peter Handke, Wim Wenders

[Damen Avenue below Division Street]

trop retro

Je suis bien trop émotive
Faut pas trop que je rétrovise
Les souvenirs d'est trop retro
Et trop c'est trop

~ Serge Gainsbourg

[Chicago Avenue east of Winchester Street]

what they are

We love the things we love for what they are.

~ Robert Frost

[Damen Avenue below Haddon Street]

corner

I know one day I'll turn the corner and I won't be ready for it.

~ Jean-Michel Basquiat.

[Damen Avenue below Division Street]

things are going to happen that are going to shift your life and take it off the line you thought you were on

When I'm sitting in a room making a record, I'm pretty much the master of my own universe. Then I step out the door: Forget it. If you sat like the Unabomber and just wrote a manifesto, it would be this completely self-contained psychotic document. But if you go to the store or a bar or to a friend's house, things are going to happen that are going to shift your life and take it off the line you thought you were on. That's the beauty of the ride. That's what we're here for, to learn to roll with that ride.

~ Bob Mould.

[Damen Avenue below Division Street]

down the streets of the big night world

They had lived with a bottle of Chianti between them, the scent hanging like a little purple veil between the roof and the million-candled carnival beyond—the window lights of the late office workers, piled one upon another above the river, the tavern lights that had bloomed like lilies touching each to each across the city's lawless deeps, the auto lights in one long forevering curve down miles and miles of boulevard where one dark driver after the other bore down the streets of the big night world...


"Entrapment," Nelson Algren (2009)

[Chicago Avenue east of Ashland Avenue; Damen Avenue below Haddon Street]

no one more ferocious

There was no sleeper more elegant than she, with her curved body posed for a dance and her hand across her forehead, but there was also no one more ferocious when anyone disturbed the sensuality of her thinking she was still asleep when she no longer was.

"Love in the Time of Cholera," Gabriel Garcia Marquez

[Chicago Avenue west of Winchester Street]

let yourself be crushed by it

When hit by boredom, let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. The idea here is to exact a full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor. Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one's mental equilibrium. It is your window on time's infinity. Once this window opens, don't try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.

1995 Dartmouth College commencement address, Joseph Brodsky

[Water Tower Park, above Chicago Avenue]

remember

Always tell the truth; it's the easiest thing to remember.

~ David Mamet

[Racine Avenue above Fullerton Avenue]

easy to deride

Women have a playground slide
That wraps you in monsoon and takes you for a ride.
The English girl Louise, his latest squeeze, was being snide.
Easy to deride
The way he stayed alive to stay inside
His women with his puffed-up pride.
The pharmacy supplied
The rising fire truck ladder that the fire did not provide.

"Sii, romantico, Seidel, tanto per cambiare," Frederick Seidel

[Damen Avenue below Blue Line]

extra

[North Avenue near Humboldt Avenue]

doubt

Doubt is our passion.

~ Henry James, via Don DeLillo

[Chicago Avenue and Damen Avenue]

smoke on the ground

Iron and gold in the air,
dust and smoke on the ground.

~ Lawrence Weiner

[Wicker Park; Chicago Avenue west of Damen Avenue; Chicago Avenue east of Damen Avenue]

focus dissolved and my thoughts disintegrated

The outlines on which I tried to focus dissolved and my thoughts disintegrated before I could fully grasp them... [A]ll of a sudden no longer had any knowledge of where I was... was unable even to determine whether I was in the land of the living or already in another place.

"Vertigo," W. G. Sebald

[Leavitt Street south of Chicago Avenue]

we buy houses

[Alley, Ukrainian Village]

sidewalk is closed

[Winchester Street below Thomas Street]

time, gentlemen, please

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

"September 1, 1939", W. H. Auden



[Chicago Avenue west of Winchester Street; Damen Avenue above Haddon Street; Thomas Street at Damen Avenue

dancing about architecture

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

~ David Byrne

[Chicago Avenue west of Winchester Street; Damen Avenue at Thomas Street; Chicago Avenue at Damen Avenue]

absurd to divide

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

~ Oscar Wilde

[Damen Avenue below Division Street]