Cast adrift

The storm scene from Robinson Crusoe looks like it's been through a real storm.

Rue Mouffetarde

"In my room, number 13 on the fourth floor of the Hotel Carcassonne at 24 Rue Mouffetard … is a table Vera painted blue one day to surprise me. I wanted to see what the objects on half of [it] … could suggest to me or spontaneously awaken in me while describing them; like Sherlock Holmes, who could solve a crime from a single object; or like historians who … reconstitute an entire epoch out of the most famous fixation in history, Pompeii." Daniel Spoerri, Topographie Anécdotée* du Hasard

Clothesline canyon

A New York tenement yard, 1900.

And for some Manhattan flavour of a different kind, I am reading The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. It's the orginal Gossip Girl and is scathingly brilliant.

"Ruling the turbulent element called home was the vigorous and determined figure of a mother still young enough to dance her balldresses to rags, while the hazy outline of a neutral-tinted father filled an intermediate space between the butler and the man who came to wind the clocks."

Frank O'Hara

The Highway

as cool as rushes
rush is
along the paved
as my dripping
anoints tar
coursing macadam
and the concrete
slipping
under my blood
o empty heart

[October 13, 1946]

Love

Patty

Pin up for May? Patty Hearst.

"Honey, the way you play guitar makes me feel so, makes me feel so masochistic, the way you go down, deep into the neck, and I would do anything, I would do anything, and Patty Hearst, you standing there in front of the Symbionese Liberation Army's Flag, with your legs spread, I was wondering , were you getting it every night from a back revolutionary man and his women, or were you really dead? And now that you're on the run, what goes on in your mind, your sisters they sit by the window, and all your Mama does is sit and cry, and your Daddy, well you know what your Daddy said Patty, You know what your Daddy said Patty? He said, he said, he said, well sixty days ago she was such a lovely child, now here she is with a gun in her hand."

Margot

Maybe it's because my denial of all things tobacco is beginning to waver, maybe it's because I am thinking about locks and doors so much these days, but Margot Tennenbaum is definitely my pin up for April.

She has a touch of Holly Golightly who ran away from her hick family and old man husband. Like Holly she has disasterous mood swings and a uniform. She is ten times as secretive and duplicitous as most femme fatales and is desired by not one but two Wilson brothers. She ran away to the museum and kissed her adoptive brother, she somehow managed to get married to and divorced from Bill Murray.

In her honour I will be smoking (in secret), chaining my television to the wall, and watching it in the bath.

I will also listen to this amazing Margot mix tape on repeat.