Paul Attinello

Author: paulattinello

  • Cliché

    —

    by

    paulattinello
    in

    The bathtub is half full; hot, with oil, smelling of mangoes. A glass of spirits (limoncello as it happens – can’t quite do the cliché of a whiskey, not the kind of thing I drink – and that tells you something about me). Today I had to call around to the HIV patient group to…

  • Dis/location

    —

    by

    paulattinello
    in ,

    Late night television: at certain points – somewhere among the fragments of Robot Chicken, The L Word, and a long advertisement for a CD set of ‘Classic Soul’ – there are so many echoing fragments of Los Angeles: Industry in-jokes, with night views behind a talking head through a plate glass window, clearly in a…

  • The American Page, part II

    —

    by

    paulattinello
    in

    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

    —

    by

    paulattinello
    in ,

    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

    —

    by

    paulattinello
    in , ,

    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

    —

    by

    paulattinello
    in

    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

    —

    by

    paulattinello
    in

    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

    —

    by

    paulattinello
    in

    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

    —

    by

    paulattinello
    in ,

    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

    —

    by

    paulattinello
    in

    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…