Category: Travel

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…

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 –…

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:…

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…

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…

I keep smiling at things, all sorts of things, in a half-humorous, slightly bemused way – recognizing bits of Germanness that are so utterly, well, German: the way one notes the distinctly odd but predictable behavior of an old friend. Gerhard has had me put up in a room in a reconditioned cloister, on a…

Off to Germany tomorrow; Duisburg, to work with a friend for five days, on a long-overdue book that is about his work. Haven’t done much real work; kept up with some administration. Continuing rather irritable with many students; some are brilliant, inspired, interesting, others just slogging along, skipping classes. I am uninterested in dragging them…

Still on that train, but now in the other direction. Last night, in a small movie theater on the Dartington College of the Arts campus, I saw Pan’s Labyrinth. Well, I practically had to see it – arriving one late and rainy evening, in a countryside school of the arts, with nothing else to do;…