Hewlett-Packard Building 15. From 1965 to 1973, they made small electronic transformers. Circuit boards from ’65 to ’87. The building blocks of the tech revolution, made right here. Acids. Metals. Solvents. All part of the process. They stored the chemicals in a shed until ’73, then upgraded to a “bunker” from ’74 to ’87. Because […]
Continue Reading →Here’s what I didn’t think about when I was standing there at midnight in front of Notre Dame with a Polaroid camera: that I was taking a photograph of something that wouldn’t exist anymore. Not in two days. Not ever again, really. Not the way it was when I was there, then. I’m just exhausted. […]
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The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais Death tourism: let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs among the tombs and rubble […]
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Marcel Proust. 1871 to 1922. Fifty-one years, most of them spent indoors. Asthmatic. Sickly. Spent the last years of his life in a cork-lined bedroom in Paris, writing in bed, sleeping during the day, working at night. Obsessed with memory, with time, with how the past lives inside us whether we want it to or […]
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There’s this thing that happens when you strip away everything you think you know about a piece of art, when you stop genuflecting at the altar of tradition and just look at what’s actually there, raw and pulsing and strange. Robert Wilson gets this. He gets that Shakespeare’s sonnets were never meant to be polite […]
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December 19, 1958. The Palais Garnier. You want to talk about a moment when the universe temporarily stopped fucking around? This might have been it. Maria Callas didn’t just perform that night. She walked into that gilded Belle Époque monument to French self-satisfaction, all those marble staircases and chandelier’d horseshoe balconies where the bourgeoisie had […]
Continue Reading →Devil’s Slide is the kind of place that makes you understand why people drive off cliffs. Not in some morbid, suicidal way, though Highway 1 has claimed its share of souls who got hypnotized by that impossible blue, but because beauty this raw, this uncompromising, it does something to your brain chemistry. It rewires the […]
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