© Matt Weber
Superbly evocative New York street photography by Matt Weber via “Mona Lisa” SOHO 1985 — Black and White Street Photographs of New York City by Matt Weber
An Education in Brick
The red brick facade of the Institut d’Art et d’Archéologie stands out as a bright note among the subtle harmonies of stone, white and grey which dominate the Paris street scene. In 1920, when architect Paul Bigot won the competition for the design of the new university building, one critic declared that the facade was […]
Learning to see, feel and think are the highest possible ideals in life. Depth is everything.
– Marcus D. Niski
Langston Hughes’ I Wonder As I Wander: Reveries of an Itinerant Poet — Carra Lucia Books
Langston Hughes’ autobiography from the years 1931 through New Year’s Day 1938 covers his early years as a professional writer during the Great Depression, in which he travels extensively and observes practices and politics as well as the status of black people throughout the world.
“Most of my life from childhood on has been spent moving, traveling, changing places, knowing people in one school, in one town or in one group, or on one ship a little while, but soon never seeing most of them again,” Langston Hughes writes …
via Hughes’ I Wonder As I Wander: Reveries of an Itinerant Poet — Carra Lucia Books
[66] Writing Exercise: “In A Regretful Room”…
Where am I? An 8×10 square room with a feeling of no air. White walls with dirt marks caused by the edge of my dirty feet mirroring an eeriness inside my mind. The bright white light blinds me for a millisecond and then I see again. A table of inferior quality stands on its four […]
via [66] Writing Exercise: “In A Regretful Room” — Smoke words every day.
The Lost Art of Selling Auto Parts
Back when Los Angeles was younger, at the dawn of the automobile age after World War I, tires, gasoline and cars were sold in buildings and displayed in a manner befitting a jewelry store. Among the rich archives of the USC Digital Library, are photographs of local businesses, who put extraordinary artistry into their signage and architecture […]
Impossible City: New Orleans – Places Journal
Sometimes you see a picture and you can tell that something’s missing, but you don’t know what it is …
Or you could try to fill the emptiness with something you love, as I love Walker Percy’s renderings in The Moviegoer:
The street looks tremendous. People on the far side seem tiny and archaic, dwarfed by the great sky and the windy clouds like pedestrians in old prints.
…
On ‘Seeing and Noticing’: William S. Burroughs, The Beat Hotel and ‘Taking The Colour Walk’ Through The Streets of Paris
By Marcus D. Niski
In a dilapidated hotel famously dubbed The Beat Hotel by its colourfully eccentric inhabitants, a coalescence of some of the Beat generation’s most important protagonists came together under one roof to push forward the frontiers of literature, painting and psychic awareness.
In an extraordinary outburst of creative energy, Gregory Corso wrote some of his most important poetry there, Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville devised The Dreamachine , Allen Ginsberg worked on Kaddish (dwelling in Room 25), Burroughs and Gysin experimented with the ‘cut-ups’ and Sinclair Beiles – amongst many others who came and went – co-authored Minutes to Go with Burroughs and Gysin amidst a burlesque carnival of creative chaos.
Always seeking new paths of creative inspiration, Burroughs also devised a fascinating observational technique known as ‘taking the colour walk’:
“I was taking a colour walk around Paris the other day … I was walking down the boulevard when I suddenly felt this cool wind on a warm day, and when I looked out I was seeing all the blues in the street in front of me… blue on a foulard…a girls’ blue sweater…blue neon…the blue sky …all the blues. When I looked again, I saw nothing but all the reds…of traffic lights…car lights…a café sign…a man’s nose…”
Excerpt from The Beat Hotel, Barry Miles, Atlantic Books, London, 2000, p 157.
Located at 9, rue Git-le-Coeur and curated under Madame Rachou’s ever watchful eye (circa 1957-1963), The Beat Hotel was undoubtedly one of the great oasis’ of Parisian creativity at that time. Indeed, in this extraordinary interview below, Sinclair Beiles recalls some of the legendary ‘eccentricities’, excesses and antics that took place amidst the dilapidated digs of The Beat Hotel –
More biographical information about Sinclair Beiles – one of the Beat generation’s most neglected, if not tragically overlooked protagonists – can also be found at:
http://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/beat/sinclair-beiles-a-man-apart/
– Marcus D. Niski, September 2017
“You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless…”
– Georges Perec in Species of Space and Other Pieces
Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it ‘creative observation.’ Creative viewing.
– William S. Burroughs
Naked Cities Journal 
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