Category: Cities
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Hard
Sunday afternoon in Newcastle. Sunny and clear, shops and restaurants open, people walking along. A young guy, shaved head, talks on his phone, walking up and down. He goes to the corner of a granite building near the bus stop, leans over, retches – vomits, not much, some chunks of food in what is probably…
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NYC – WDC – NYC
A trip to the US: going through New York to get to northern Virginia, for my mother's memorial service; and back to New York for four busy days. From the beginning, the sheer ease of things was startling: the flight to New York, the early landing, an almost unbelievably efficient and relaxed JFK – I almost…
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The City
It will be obvious to anyone who has read much of this blog that San Francisco still has, nearly thirteen long years after I last lived there, an intense fascination (or should I say obsession?) for me. My love of small, beautiful cities, of gently artistic, liberal people, of hillside houses, of small neighborhoods stamped…
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From Berlin
[Something I wrote in 1989… and now it is the twentieth anniversary of these events.] Amazed, sitting in a restaurant and reading of the collapse of the Wall, that vast shift in the meaning of our world’s past. The bizarre responses of people, Easterners who stay up all night and see real, free capitalist stores…
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The City
Stepping along the steel edges of intersections, people in precisely cut suits walk quickly through the icy air past elongated glass windows protecting neat arrays of crystal, ebony-handled carving sets, and thin, pale diamonds. The edges of all these things extend out in a net of lines infinitely narrow, infinitely sharp, a labyrinth of slashing…
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LA ’89
He pulls back the brake, turning his head. Pressure of the gear shift. Bare arm and vinyl. Warm, bright air, a slight glare. Can’t see. Growl of the engine. He backs towards the red Porsche… Hand on the brake, he pulls. Up. Feet on the clutch and brake, his head turns, he feels the breeze…
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Dis/location
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…
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Promises
Friday: a day of things whose colors were muted, rather dull colors mixed with gray; but those things, quiet and apparently unimportant, were nonetheless good, and important. Reading Sontag on Goodman and Artaud, for no real reason, just because it was the book I picked up on the way to the bus, on the way…
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AIDS in the World
[Speech for the first World AIDS Day vigil in Newcastle, UK, December 1, 2004.] Tonight I’m thinking about some of the places I’ve lived and visited, and some the people I’ve seen and known, over the last twenty years. Many of those people have been touched by, or concerned about, AIDS, and a lot of…
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Temptations
Dinner with P– on Friday – tapas and two (!) pitchers of sangria. That’s not as dramatic as it sounds – this sangria wasn’t very strong; normally one good glass of sangria can have me giggling and inept, but I suspect this was only the wine, juice and fruit, with no brandy slipped into it.…
Paul Attinello 