Paul Attinello

Category: Exile

  • Focus

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    by

    paulattinello
    in

    These two days I am doing a couple of presentations about art and AIDS, around a new production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Though they are not in themselves difficult, or terribly important, nor do I expect substantial attention or audience involvement, I find myself fussing a lot over them – and not only…

  • Dis/location

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    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…

  • Elsewhere

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    paulattinello
    in

    My apologies for this post: merely another whinge about wanting to be elsewhere. But first: where am I now? At home; the apartment is pleasant and, on the side away from the western winds that are bringing us a last dose of winter, relatively warm. Small patches of snow in the corners of my downstairs…

  • Absent / present

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    paulattinello
    in

    Sleeping incredible hours: a week lost to dreams – maybe not lost, the dreams aren’t unpleasant, there is plenty of food, and the house is kept clean, as am I. But a week where my life is passing in a dream world… a week where I am basically absent…. There have been times when I…

  • Politics of border crossing

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    paulattinello
    in ,

    I tend not to believe much in politics; only in the past few years did I begin to think about my own past, and why that might be – after all I was sixteen when Nixon made Watergate; a few years later I moved to San Francisco, to a thriving arts community, just in time…

  • Jerks In Space

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    paulattinello
    in ,

    So first the context: I was rather pleased with myself today, and feeling almost capable of the hard work ahead – I liked my own entry on blog aesthetics (and could I say that about a published work? no, which shows what I mean about blogging); the meeting went well and no one argued much;…

  • What if…?

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    by

    paulattinello
    in

    Having washed the dishes, put away laundry, showered; and having written the previous blog entry, which was like taking an emotional shower – an awkward metaphor, but what I mean should be clear, which is: having removed the emotional dirt and dust of the past week by writing about it; and it being still and…

  • Flash of bitterness

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    paulattinello
    in

    While running around today – office, meeting, shopping, home – several things, pleasant and un-, came into my head to write about; but instead – just one small thing: those New Zealand tourism commercials are running again, with their seductive jingles, beautiful landscapes, and happy families (especially the amazingly hunky, athletic dads with their shirts…

  • Two places at once

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    paulattinello
    in ,

    The past few days of depression: it might be worth acknowledging something that might not be evident from this blog – that I have been here before, and for long periods of time. In fact  the blog is not only about recording/reflecting that anomie, that hopelessness, which has become so normative over the years; but…

  • Fragments and overview

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    by

    paulattinello
    in , ,

    At 2:30 am, my smoke alarm goes off. There’s no battery in it, there’s no smoke, it just malfunctions. Somewhere in what I’d watched that day were the bleakly sunny rooms of an everyday Los Angeles apartment, with all its implied background – that strange flatness, that subtly disturbing sense of endless emptiness that is…