Wilson Wanderlust

The Violet Hour, NYC

2011-09-12T19:13:00.000-07:00

"This is the violet hour, the hour of hush and wonder, when the affections glow again and valor is reborn, when the shadows deepen magically along the edge of the forest and we believe that, if we watch carefully, at any moment we may see the unicorn." - Bernard DeVoto*

Riding home tonight through 5th avenue's grand concrete canyon
on my new baby blue Peugeot I didn't see the unicorn
but I could have sworn Frank was resurrected from that Fire Island beach.

He was gliding gracefully of course
riding alongside me
no hands!
loosening the top button of his impeccably pressed shirt,
reaching for an unfiltered Gauloises blonds in his left pocket
and lighting it in one fluid gesture
before riding off into the velvety violet hour.

*(Sure it's from a book about cocktails, but uh, literary drinks? perfect...)

Soundtrack for Wander/lusting

2011-07-07T02:49:00.000-07:00

Zuzuka Poderosa's story about a broken hearted girl who flees to live with a Makonde tribe in Mozambique. Word.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7hlXJGydhU&feature=player_embedded#at=37

Things I was told THIS week (no really, I couldn't make this shit up)

2011-07-03T00:55:00.000-07:00

It's cliche, but what's beyond remarkable is who stands up and comes to your rescue when everything else falls apart... Who is really really there? My gays, blacks, artists, stunt men ("I've been set on fire, broken bones, crashed cars, nothing hurts more than this, and you will make it through") old provencal farmers, an ex con man ("turn around as you walk out of your cell, bow to it and thank it for all it has taught you")... All I can think is thank god to be rid of those rigid "rational" blonds who don't know shit about love and struggle and what it actually means to hold it down.

Here are some of my favs from this week:

"buy chips and condoms: extra large. you have my wallet."

Old Senegalese guy to my friend: "is this your woman? if not, i would marry her 40 times just to be sure she was mine"

Bestest girlfriend: "we will talk this weekend. and then you will come home and we will sit shiva on this loss and we will love you to pieces until your pieces are whole again."

Now *that's* love.

You know love has obliterated you when...

2011-06-30T16:37:00.000-07:00

A fucking cat-sized, giant Noailles rat stands in your path, on his hind legs, yellow teeth bared, and you say out loud to him, "really? What the fuck are you going to do to me that homeboy hasn't already?"

Then you realize this rat probably doesn't speak English.

Aural Colonization

2011-06-09T12:57:00.000-07:00

A musician friend wrote to me recently that he was starting to see Fleet Foxes as the musical salvation for our generation. And I know what he means: Their soaring harmonies often make me feel like I’ve packed my heart a suitcase and binoculars and sent it off on an incredible adventure in a hot air basket, a journey that’s somehow completely quaint but simultaneously beyond remarkable. Their music is beautiful and clean and simple, but not entirely without angst and therefore, mostly, manages to avoid feeling too sappy.

But it gives me pause, this new (old) sound that seems to have crept (back?) into our cities in the past 5+ years. It’s hard to avoid noticing this powerhouse coterie of groups who sound as if they belong more to a meadow than the metropolis (I’m sure there are hundreds more, but the groups in constant rotation I’m thinking of include Fleet Foxes, St Vincent, Beach House and others). To be sure, this isn’t a criticism of these groups, who do what they do fantastically, rather, I wonder what it means when we’ve allowed our aural cities to be colonized by a sound that doesn’t speak to, about, or from “the urban” but appears instead to occult our urbanity. After all, isn’t that what’s been happening to our aesthetics on all fronts for at least the past decade? The boys traded in their “PNB” hoodies for plaid Woolrich jackets and scruffy beards, our neighborhood streets have transitioned from graffiti filled alleyways to suburban style strip malls (helloooo Soho) or precious hand-crafted (read: obscenely priced) specialty stores that hearken back to some small village most urban dwellers seem to be saying they’d rather inhabit (yeah, I’m lookin’ at you, Brooklyn).

The miracle of cities—like the “old New York” that so many of us are still stuck on— is that we come face to face with different, challenging realities that stimulate and excite us, consistently knocking us out of our comfort zone, expanding our notion of what is desirable or even possible. That wall wasn’t just a wall, it was a canvas. That cardboard wasn’t an old box, it was a fucking dance floor. It’s the friction between what is and what could be that makes city life so complicated and often so seductive.

It’s not necessarily that Nas’ Illmatic presents a more authentic urban voice—I mean, any self respecting rapper will tell you theirs is just as much a constructed, composite narrative of urbanity as any other— but just what are the political implications when we’ve stopped including these voices and perspectives in our own soundtracks? What happens when we have so thoroughly rid our urban landscapes, visual and aural, of any space for contestation, for alterity, for fantastic(al) deviance?

All I can think is that maybe if we weren’t so busy singing along to blissed out harmonies, fantasizing about the Blue Ridge Mountains, we could acknowledge that our situations are a bit closer to Biggie (“know how it feels to wake up fucked up, pockets broke as hell ... But they don't know about the stress-filled day, baby on the way, mad bills to pay ...”) and maybe, just maybe, we’d be pissed off enough to actually do something about this bleak ass future we’re staring down.

Cooking

2011-03-19T10:14:00.000-07:00

I've been cooking a lot lately. Partially because doing this amazing year long program in Europe has blown to shreds what paltry savings I'd managed to amass in the past few years, and partially because one of the really lovely things about Europe is how ubiquitous dinner parties are. In New York if you invite someone you're not sleeping with over for dinner they cast you a long sideways glance, like, huh? You want me to schlep where, for what? Maybe it's fear of intimacy that makes New Yorkers not want to invite people into our spaces, or just that those spaces are so damn cramped to begin with. Either way here in Eurolandia, it seems so commonplace that I've felt liberated to really dive in and listen to my Italian grandmother who always seems to be hovering over me saying, make delicious food with your own hands. Save for a sandwich or two during a grad school class trip, weeks will go by without eating anything cooked by someone else.

Cooking has lots of benefits we all know about, it's healthier, you save bucketloads of money (two collegues in my program who live down the street from me in Manchester said they survived 5 days on 7 pounds for both of them, through some seriously smart budgeting and cooking.) I always imagined cooking most of your meals isolating, since it seems, at least in New York, eating out with people is one of the biggest social events for friends. But the wild truth of the matter is that during this year away, cooking has been one of the greatest connectors for me with people I love- every time I whip all random stray veggies in the fridge into a delicious pasta I feel like I've spent the evening in my mother's kitchen. And I know that whenever I make the super simple, delicious hummus my lovely friend Robert has just shown me how to make, I'll feel he's right next to me giggling and gossiping with a fantastically insightful question about what makes wonderful cities what they are.

another city:

2011-02-06T09:15:00.000-08:00

On the way "home" from Edinburgh...

Of course, the universe is ever expanding, so why shouldn't my heart be?

Each moment here felt like a miracle. The simple beauty and generosity of time and space was enough to leave me speechless: these sounds, these moist green fields, even- I had no idea I would love them the way I do. And it makes me homesick like you wouldn't believe, but also high and confidant and sure in the belief that home is the real heterotopia. At once everywhere and nowhere.

There are always more landscapes to embroider onto my imagination.

"In case of emergency, breakdance."

Walk, Talk, Make

2011-01-19T00:12:00.000-08:00

A really fantastic day with a new friend today in Manchester. (Sometimes I am //so// impatient!). It's only Tuesday, at noon, but we drink a few beers, eat greesy pub burgers and walk around the city- laugh, talk politics and class and language and dinosaurs (of course). We stop at the Whitworth Gallery and I almost fall asleep through a beautiful video of race riots in Birmingham (UK), told in strange video-art, but still documentary style, by the Black Audio Film Collective (what a fucking great name). And I wonder what on earth to do with myself when I know I want to make god damn beautiful movies or words or pictures and later definitely at some point make and raise beautiful babies with a lovely man whom I think, odds are, I've already met. But these days I've barely managed to make my bed, let alone anything else.

Things to Fight Against:

2010-08-22T10:21:00.000-07:00

free radicals (those motherfuckers)
cellulite
cynicism
ambivalence
hetero-normative patriarchy
eurocentrism
alienation
fear
wavering faith in the goodness of the universe.

to be continued...

Things That Are Heartbreaking:

2010-07-26T10:11:00.000-07:00

Using the past tense to talk about what you would call your mother ("Mama").

Things that were beautiful today

2010-07-25T04:06:00.000-07:00

Riding my bike through the city in a steady rain, beer in hand, faulty raincoat that lets the warm summer rain leak all over my shoulders. My man on his graceful bike behind me calls out: "Look at you! you're a regular Berliner! I could not ever love you more than I do this very moment!"

Dope Text Messages I Found on an Old Phone

2010-07-17T10:13:00.000-07:00

(because the extraordinary things people have written me no longer exist)

Sunday 5/30/10 2:43 am
i wish you came home with me instead of that attractive spanish man

Saturday 5/29/10 3:43 pm
yeah, cocaine. it is what it is.

Thursday 4/22/10 6:29 pm
even within the existing system there are spots for a critical you. Your ideas and I'm sure for your happiness

Friday 8/7/09 10:23 am
so happy to wake up with you in my bed

Everything Junot Diaz Said About White Girls is True...

2010-07-10T02:24:00.000-07:00

We're the worst.
It didn't matter that I had a man, there I was... 2nd of July, Brooklyn, New York, 3 am, speaking my broken-ass 8th grade Spanish via Bogota, Colombia (remember that untamable graffiti boy I convinced myself I could love 6 months after college? Thought we could set up shop en La Candelaria and he could paint and I could write and all the rest of the shit just wouldn't matter... yeah, pura locura). Anyway there I was batting my eyes at homeboy (two day stubble, Mets hat) talking about Willie Colon and Woody Allen, cause he reminded me of a boy I'd loved at 19, or 20 or 21. I was twenty-fucking-five and moving to Europe the next week and didn't know the next time I'd see the sun rise while crossing the Williamsburg bridge, or smoke a blunt with twenty puerto ricans who had suddenly descended upon the party just as it was about to end.

City to the Farm

2009-11-23T20:44:00.000-08:00

Institutionalized racism runs through the core of so many elements of food politics its hard to even know where to begin. The paltry amount of food stamps "food insecure" families receive in relation to their need, shoddy produce availability in low income communities, bureaucratic trap after bureaucratic trap, along with seriously condescending and discriminatory food + agriculture policy: it's all enraging and heartbreaking, but one of the elements I was stuck on while researching for the Hungry documentary I worked on last year was the blatant exclusion of black farmers from farm subsidies. I give The Times enough shit, but today they at least managed to mention the unique challenges (which few acknowledge) faced by these farmers having an already tough time. And if you think this doesn't effect us city dwellers, you've got another thing comin...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/us/23farmers.html

City Girls

2009-11-20T20:05:00.000-08:00

I've been obsessed with the NYRB Classics editions of books for the past few months, the quality of the lesser known works (at least, many of the authors I'd never heard of before)is just remarkable, the covers are gorgeous (yeah I'll admit it, I like the objects!). Also worth noting is the fact that they publish a huge amount of great women writers (working for this website: Shewrites.com has made me more conscious of the fact that so many of the authors I really cling to, are men... But that's another story) and international work that was hard to find in translation. Elizabeth Hardwick is one of the great writers I've recently discovered, and I particularly love how she writes about cities:

"The miseries of the deformed diners and their revolting habits; they were necessary, like a sewer, like the Bowery, Klein's, 14th street. Every great city is a Lourdes where you hope to throw off your crutches but meanwhile must stumble around on them, hobbling under the protection of the shrine."

Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

The Right to the City

2009-08-13T13:41:00.001-07:00

(Because my thoughts about cities aren't all lusty)

My good friend Mario Yedidia sent me this great David Harvey article on the relationship between urbanization and capitalism and how important it is to work towards insuring cities remain places to which we all have the right.

In it Harvey writes "urbanization, we may conclude has played a crucial role in the absorption of capital surpluses, at ever increasing geographical scales, but at the price of burgeoning processes of creative destruction that have dispossessed the masses of any right to the city whatsoever. The planet as building site collides with the 'planet of slums'" ...

He goes on to say, "I wager that within fifteen years, if present trends continue, all those hillsides in Rio now occupied by favelas will be covered by high-rise condominiums with fabulous views over the idylic bay, while the erstwhile favela dwellers will have been filtered off into some remote periphery. .."

Of course, it's already started happening in New York with the privatization of formerly mixed and low income housing projects on the edges of Manhattan (see Stuy Town on the East Side, I.P.N. in TriBeCa and elsewhere) and its gonna be a real shame to watch the trend as it spreads globally. I have to say that the most shocking thing about the (seriously limited) time I spent in Rocinha, Rio's largest favela, a few years ago was not the fact that the much sensationalized favela felt more like Harlem than some third world war zone, but those fucking views. While it's a seriously poor trade off for significant lack of state provided infrastructure + social services, everyone who has ever stood on a rooftop, broke as all hell and felt like things were gonna turn out alright in the end, knows that there is something glorious about looking down on a major world capital and feeling like you own the world, especially when you don't.

Read David Harvey's full article here: http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2740

Thursday

2008-09-25T08:41:00.000-07:00

I eat a box of bitter tomatoes and feel the pull of 3 continents.

Things I may or may not have learned this week:

2008-09-16T09:43:00.000-07:00

We exist in languages, not nations.

Sometimes it's harder to kiss someone you like than to sleep with someone you don't.

Home is everywhere, and no where, especially for an American.

Fall arrives in Marseille like a flash of lightening, changing everything: bringing the mistral and cold stunning sunshine.

The global market collapsed, but Marseille la plus puissante! Wins bid for European capital of culture 2013
http://www.marseille-provence2013.fr/

What I miss the most no longer exists.

reasons to stay: light, love, language

2008-08-30T18:18:00.000-07:00

(or, two outta 3 ain't bad)

Urban Lovers

2008-08-29T07:49:00.000-07:00

Restless.
Drempt in French all night last night, arguing about the weather or something silly like that.
Sunday after a lunch that stretched out almost until 8 pm, my obscure urban architecture obsessed friend, Nicholas turns to his girlfriend and asks, "so, do you have a new route to take me on?" with the eyes of a man who loves, maybe even lusts after his adoptive city in the same way he does his lady. "Yes" she says all sultry and native marseillaise that she is.

mmmmm, that urban sweet talk. And it makes me think we are a completely different breed, us city lovers. Lusting after new corners, fucked up bridges, explanations for why we congregate where we do. Here, Nicholas explains to me, it's at the top of the city's hills and the few bars situated there which people float between like archipelagos, worlds apart though so very close. High up above the city so that we feel like we've had a good work out on our way to drink and are therefore even more deserving. Of course it helps that the inevitable drunken descent home is quick and rewarding (can you imagine that ascent drunk? hell no).

Wednesday night we've marooned ourselves on the island of La Petite Nice where we run into what feels like half the city. We sit for hours, four of us and try to explain our arts: silk-screening, installation, architecture and seeing (which I clumsily claim). Nicholas says to me "pour etre integre ici il faut etre un peut voler." To fit in here you have to be a little bit of a thief. By which I'm not exactly sure what he means but I can't help but think it relates more to the heart than anything else.

I smoke too much and wonder if I shouldn't return to the REAL WORLD? Take a shitty room somewhere in BK and fall back into the arms of a boy I know and trust (?).
Being a liberated, unattached woman of the 21st century is exhausting-- How much more effort it is playing at the sublime without the depth.

Could I carry this feeling of a happy-go-lucky stranger home with me like a souvenir tee shirt?

Memories of Colombia

2008-08-28T11:51:00.000-07:00

Something about being away from home calls up memories from other adventures. Today I felt like I spent the day chasing off Bogotá. Maybe it’s the startlingly bright cool sunshine, clear robins egg blue sky and trash blowing all over the place. But since I never wrote anything about that trip (I’m still trying to understand it) I thought I’d post some memories:

In Ardmero:
The scummy top of the pool that no one could believe a white girl would clean. Our long hot trek to town to buy groceries. He's in the front seat of a makeshift town taxi (local with a car who charges 50 cents for a 10 or 15 minute trip) we have flagged down. I am dirty from the never cleaned pool and washing my hair with no shampoo. Wearing LG’s teenage soccer shorts in the colors of the Colombian flag, thinking on some level that maybe somehow by wearing them my almost translucent skin won’t set me apart from the brown leathery farmers we’re surrounded by. The windows are open too wide, but I get the feeling not much about this ancient car works and I decide against fussing with the jammed roll up handle. Seated next to me in the windy back seat is couple that looks too old for the type of nervous excitement spread across their approaching-middle-age faces. They hold both of each other’s hands crossed across their laps, knees touching, in a move that I’ve never seen in the states, let alone by anyone over the age of fifteen. He has homemade tattoos on his forearms; hearts whose lines look more like melted dashes, initials in the center of each heart, and I wonder if they are for her or someone else.

In Bogotá:
We move from location to location. Our bags always half packed, half spread across the floor of someone’s apartment. Mostly I remember quiet, hushed conversations on a futon late at night before my early morning flight back to the states, which he takes me to even though my Spanish is good enough to manage the basics: did you pack all your bags? Are you carrying any explosives? We search for a final pastel de Gloria, and I cry on the way to the gate, like I always do, happy or not to be leaving.

During sunny, windy, brisk weeks we visit friends of his from childhood: Huge apartments with brilliant minimalist design. Young people struggling to figure out families across languages and cultures. On separate occasions I smoke a joint with a very pregnant woman and a crew of rappers (who laugh when I explain that after a few drags Spanish starts to sound like Arabic to me which is probably the most absurd things they have heard in ages, but at least I’ve managed to express an entire thought, stoned in Spanish.) Mostly we hold hands and walk quickly, crossing dark streets and unexplained shadows, heads down. We hang out with an ex girlfriend of his, with exquisite brown eyes, freckles, an asymetric haircut and a high pitched voice that manages to not be annoying. She seems younger than she is and I am tempted to seduce her, sure that she will have beautiful breasts and enough of a tiny belly to be charmingly self conscious. Instead she leads me to a store where I buy a pair of light brown, handmade suede high heeled boots I will rarely wear and that probably cost the equivalent of an entire months rent in one of the gorgeous modern apartments we visit. But it’s the beginning of the summer and I am feeling rich and invincible, with no sense of how any of the coming months could possibly unfold.

Malmousque again, or The Perfect Day

2008-08-19T02:39:00.000-07:00

The perfect day actually, if only I could have read a touch more:

wake in the cool morning sunshine
long lazy coffee at Danaide
run into neighbors
lunch with delicious tomato salad, haricots verts, fried eggs, salad and hearty country bread
pass out on couch for long hot nap
deep sleep and deams of a graham green phrase about caravans

early evening at the sea, topless swim
and what's to come?
murmers of a roof top party over a broken cellphone & me
unable to hear over the sea

2008-08-10T14:38:00.000-07:00

2008-08-10T05:20:00.000-07:00

Frank O'Hara stuck in my head on this Saturday. And I half hum to myself a piece of "poem":

"Ah daddy, i wanna stay drunk many days" on the poetry of a new friend my life held precariously in the seeing hands of others, their and my impossibilities

Unsure of what language it is I'm thinking or writing in, it's all so mixed up in my head.

The gorgeous Corsican sculptor I've met says he wants to build primitive sculptures that appear to be fucking.

And me, I want to build an enormous transcendental transitory tower of pre-Babel that speaks all these languages, words that I clumsily request definitions for, and writes and sings and swims. (maybe I have already built it)

I feel 15 again. Momentarily timid and stumbling over my words, but unable to turn down any invitation, be it a plunge into glacial waters, a 2 am pick up to a random wild party, or a sculptor’s hands.

and somehow the fact that it's Saturday makes it ok that we woke at one. ate greasy and late; start to drink because the friendly guy in the cave suggested a good rosé and we sit on the couch, sticking to the black leather en plein soleil to talk French anthropology and orientalism. The ways that we come to know and understand ourselves vis a vis our world. The folly it is that the French continue to believe education is neutral and void of politics. What it means to work without judgement or being overly conscious. its been days now that i've been this very disciplined writer ( je suis fier de moi!)

And then we ignore each other. spread out in his enormous studio to pretend to be alone.

I read and write while he attempts to coax fucking primitives, or primitive fucking (difference?) out of unwieldy wood.

And I know it's unevolved to say. but sometimes I do wish everyone I loved and carried with me in my heart like a talisman was here: full of youth and desire and the unknown. And suddenly time collapses into a tiny bundle of threads. The old woman across the way leans out her window into the late, clear evening air to observe her street below. Maybe it is the heat, or the rosé but suddenly I imagine myself years from now (it feels like centuries now but of course will eventually seem like only seconds). my own pale wrinkled skin and my quick tongue and slowing mind leaning out over my city and the lives I will have lived and the people I will have loved and the children I will bear.

and it’s neither happy or sad but just is: like this city, a rapid collapse of modern and ancient into one.

Medellin to Marseille

2008-08-09T18:01:00.000-07:00

It's painfully obvious, but language here takes on such a strange and difference importance. like words them selves have so much less meaning to be parsed, instead I am so focused on the general sense or understanding conveyed. Which is why it's nice to read this afternoon, holed up in my temporary, Ikea paradise apartment to escape the medeteranian heat. Spend a while lingering over the sublties, and imperfect nature of words- so whole and complete in themselves (thank you Bolano). It is silent except for someone in the garden below me playing a few cords on an acoustic guitar (far enough away to not be annoying) and the trains outside my window reminiscent of Marcy outside Matts window late afternoons, hot and sweaty.

as always Walcott is stuck in my head (heart): either I'm nobody or I'm a nation.

Late night couscous.
My new Mexican physicist friend Adrian tells me it is now the national dish of France and later on at the beach points out the big dipper so we can compare names of constilations in French English and Spanish and tells me that the star connecting the ladle to the handle has died three months ago and what a wild phenomena it is to see that in our life time and I agree, but silently think that the greater phenomena is me: happy, social, the world dancing around my shitty (or really, pissy) Saltwater sandals on the Rochés. I am full of couscous but slid easily enough into my Colombian spanish, following the Paisa accent with greater ease than my Mexican compot who says he can't quite pick it up.
Almost as easily as after some aquadiente which i normally hate and a shitty joint we are convinced that an (after) midnight swim is in order. And quicker than I can slip out of my humid jean shorts 15 naked Colombians are launching off the rocks into the cool black waters.

Today I am happy and hung over. Marseille is blustery and I wander around the centre comercial looking for the french sailor shirts my mom has requested, stop in one of the run down pizza/hamburger joints that are everywhere for a bottle of water. after chatting with the Tunisian man behind the counter about the coverage on aljezeera of the olympics and ensuing protests he invites me for homemade sweet black tea and a piece of baklava to share. When I say I am from NY he immediately so sincerely says, "I am so , so sorry. It was a horrible, horrible thing that happened there." More genuine that anything I have ever heard uttered about 9/11. And for a second the french verb "to owe" slips out of my head and I struggle to clarify that the things america has done in response (and prior) to the world are awful and inexcusable.
the unremarkable, simple tender humanness of us, old and young, berber and american over hot tea on a hot day.