solar-powered light tower
I saw it from a distance - surveillance wedded to ecological virtue. Solar-powered light tower, thankfully off since I’m here during daylight. I hadn’t walked this strip, hadn’t walked the park at all since the murder of that Columbia student. All the same yet different. Vegetation I don’t remember -- surely there was another plant by the wild Rose bush besides this. Bougainvillea (magenta)? But mostly the same. The park shed is now fenced off. Ubiquitous Amazon boxes mean the homeless have fresh bedding every night. Where are the feral cats?
Walter Benjamin wrote in an ambulatory style, says something I just read and now it’s lodged in my brain. Like a flânuer, walking. He didn’t know how things went together, how they should go together which is why the…what is the word…volutes? no, convolutes like make up the great unfinished Arcades. The way you walk and your brain leaps from one thing to another based on clues, portents, vibes in the corridor you’re prowling. Like a squirrel leaps from one tree to another “out on a limb”.
I try to think by walking but it might be that sometimes I walk instead of thinking.
It was Pierre Missac who wrote that about Benjamin, walking.
Small caches of homeless men, near the Gavin Brown gallery. That building across the street rising relentlessly, sheer glass, no way to get a climbing purchase, seems bigger than eleven stories. The Taystee Lab building, named for the building destroyed to birth it, the Taystee Cake Bakery Factory. An older Black man doing the heart pounding sign- surely not to me? No, another man traveling towards him on a bike. Do they know each other? Is it the t-shirt and what it says? Or just the fact of Black?
I thought the scaffolding was fake, put up to discourage squatting. That might still be true but in fact Gavin Brown closed his gallery for good. It was a pleasing wander; I loved the old phone numbers scratched into the walls (it was a garage last? or a brewery) and saw some great work there, all the while tutting about art-washing but what will take its place? I first saw (no, second-saw) Arthur Jafa here. The fall of 2019, Bethlehem Hospital, which included Frances Stark's four-panel Black Flag with its final, gut-sick Nancy (minus Sluggo). A gorgeous Joan Jonas installation upstairs. Random bits I will never recollect now.
Crates of chickens in front of the halal butcher. The smell of it. What was I trying to remember about today? I forgot to look for the snails along the rock wall. Spanish music.
Back in the country and suddenly I’m getting ads for sweatshirts saying ”alcohol - the glue holding this 2020 shit-show together”. From the woods, I take a picture of scat and text it to S and E: "what kind of poo?" and suddenly remember a song I haven't heard for fifty years, a parody of "What Kind of Fool Am I?" where the next line is "to have his mother killed". From a musical comedy version of Hamlet we put on at Putney Work Camp in 1970. Our drama teacher was a kid from Harvard or Yale? If Yale, it was his show for the Whiffenpoofs. If Harvard, whatever the equivalent was. I was only Chorus - I remember my costume probably because there are photos, tiny, my father took with the miniature camera he’d brought home from Japan, his one business trip. The costume looked more Tale of Two Cities than Hamlet, a dusty rose with a white ruffle around the squared neckline, bodice which fastened in the front. Someone put a lot of pancake makeup on me. It was the summer I turned fourteen.
The gloss green almost black of leaves just now, like they’ve been licked. God-spit. Be careful in the woods because now is when things fall on your head.
5 september 2020
