Paul Attinello

Author: paulattinello

  • The American Page, part II

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    paulattinello
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    Spurious is talking about some kinds of writing, notably the vastness of the page/canvas in American arts… well said, but that was a time that changed, that seems to have faded. I remember being startled, when I spent a year in Germany in 1993, at the sheer crowdedness of the country: at the endless neat…

  • Therapeutic

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    paulattinello
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    One way to get past sullen dullness is to do things, to make things, to have something to take care of. Two window boxes with herbs: parseley, sage, rosemary and thyme – and basil, as it happens; some new plants, plus the three rather tired ones I’d had in the windowsill all winter, all of…

  • Time: imposed, imagined

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    paulattinello
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    Sleeping too much, drifting: probably my thyroid is off again. Since Duisburg: several busy days, mostly administration, and a conference day; a lot of floating anger about promotions, ambition, respect; all among the strange long days of Spring in the far north. Those are the more sharply defined moments in what has felt like a…

  • Duisburg VIII: Leaving

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    paulattinello
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    In the taxi, on the long, expensive ride to the airport. (Here’s a Travel Tip – when Ryanair claims that they fly to Düsseldorf/Weeze, don’t think for a second that that brings you anywhere near to Düsseldorf – Weeze is really an ex-military airport in the middle of nowhere.) As usual, a shame and a…

  • Duisburg VII: Working

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    paulattinello
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    Despite various dyspepsia (we are eating and drinking too well, and my gut was a wreck before I came), we are getting work done – perhaps the equivalent of four to six hours of steady work a day. It would be more if we weren’t going to restaurants. This is, of course, Gerhard’s life –…

  • Duisburg VI: Landschaft

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    paulattinello
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    The buildings around Gerhard’s home, and in fact the apartment/performance space/gallery where Gerhard and Kunsu live, are the artistic fragments left from a demolished industrial center, a series of overwhelmingly boring buildings that have been reduced to beautiful fragments and tentative skeletons. The entire area has been turned into a park, but a strange one:…

  • Duisburg V: Chili Dreams

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    paulattinello
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    A day of eating too richly, after good work and good talk with Gerhard – there was that breakfast, for one, then a trattoria at lunch, then an Asian fusion restaurant in the evening, one that put chilis in practically everything. And tonight two unsettled comic dreams: one where, as a younger man, I am…

  • Duisburg IV: Daybreak

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    paulattinello
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    It is gray out – technically like Newcastle, but not quite the same: since this is not so far north, the sun doesn’t have such a sharp slant, and doesn’t feel as bleached, as pale. Clearly it is, however, still northern Europe, and not exactly tropical; but I am experiencing good bourgeois well-being, from that…

  • Duisburg III: Breakfast

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    paulattinello
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    Wow. German breakfast… ‘Full English breakfast’ is something I seldom have at home, as it is a rather elaborate restaurant ritual; and besides, although I enjoy it while I’m eating, all those fried meats tend to return and get re-tasted all day. Modern German breakfast – I don’t know how long this has existed in…

  • Duisburg II: Single w/ Bath

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    paulattinello
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    This room, so efficient and so uninspired, is not only part of a former nunnery, it’s also part of a new atelier – this is actually a building where artists are ‘in residence,’ where they use the studios on the ground floor to make art, or perform. So it’s meant to be a Machine for…