#70: Mom Vs. Bob Dylan

My mom turned 70 this May. So did Bob Dylan. For years Mom has pointed out -- rightfully so -- how she and Bob Dylan were born a day apart but she "looks a lot better than he does." So this year I decided to honor Mom with a little compare & contrast card.

#132: Hellcab to Drumcondra

Drumcondra, Dublin

Having just shaken the dirt off my hiking boots after a trek to Iceland -- yes, that is Iceland this time and not Ireland -- I've been reminded how much fun it is to keep travel journals. For someone who loves to sketch, I sure don't do much of it at home. Seems the only time I remember to scribble pictures is when I've got a new Moleskine in my hand and my eyes and ears are roaming some faraway city, taking in its skyscrapers and streets and citizens. At the moment, I'm hard at work glue-sticking bits and bobs into my new Iceland book, but here's one from the archives I thought I'd share since I drew it the same day I snatched this #132.

It was cold January of last year, and I was in the back seat of a taxicab, being whisked up to Drumcondra to meet the writer of several books I admire. It was absolute misery outside and as the car drove north through the slantwise rain, I found myself the captive audience -- emphasis here on captive -- of a typically garrulous Dub who was regaling me with a mini-lesson in criminology. His story involved a psychological study about the motives of some woman's murder, and while it was probably lifted straight from drivetime radio, he reported it with such chilling and loving detail that it was a tad unnerving. I found myself transfixed by the man's tale, though equally eager when the cab pulled up to the Skylon Hotel to pay my fare and tiptoe out with one wary eye over my shoulder.

He knew an awful lot about murderers, did this driver.

#313: Chalk and the City

Hell's Kitchen, NYC

The English language's longest palindrome I learned from a blackboard outside of a deli on 2nd Avenue. Peering through a cloudy window on the downtown M15 bus, I saw the message scrawled in chalk: "A man, a plan, a canal -- Panama!"

As palindromes go, 313's a lot easier to remember but less fun to say, though the Panama palindrome did get me thinking about the many strange, educational, or witty things I've seen chalked on blackboards outside restaurants, cafés, and bars as I've wandered the streets of New York City. Anyone can scribble the day's menu or the happy hour hours, but it takes brains and imagination to come up with something that will really grab the attention of the casual passerby. A few gathered from my notebooks over the years:

"DRUNK IS THE NEW BLACK"

"Come for the lemon pound cake and apricot bars. Stay for the charming, well-educated boys."

"Today's special: helicopter flavoured crisps!" (Spotted in Dublin, presumably with a disclaimer)

"If you lived here, you'd be home by now. And showerless. But oh, the midnight snacks."

"BUSINESS SUCKS SALE"

So I'm curious: Whether it was a bit of trivia or a strange claim to fame, what's the most memorable thing you've seen chalked outside of a café, bar, or shop? And did it entice you to go in?

Soho, NYC

1 to 99 on the Number Line

The Fall Café, Smith Street, Brooklyn

I'll admit it. I've missed the numbers.

Over the weekend I found myself persuaded out of my blue-book-induced stupor to head down to Tribeca, break out the hammer and sickle nails, and hang a bunch of numbers on a wall. It's the first time I've done such a thing since my installation at The Fall Café in Brooklyn in September 2007 (see above), and accompanied by good friends and free-flowing wine, it was all very gratifying. A hit-and-run installation injected a bit of adventure into my otherwise work-plagued weekend, and after hours of uneventful eyestrain I was more than ready for the task of carrying heavy planks of wood down four flights of stairs in three-inch heels -- a skill perfected after many gigs with Balthrop, Alabama, where lugging white picket fences up and down narrow stairs is par for the course. (Speaking of the band, we had a nice pick-me-up last week when NPR named "Subway Horns" as its song of the day. Not to toot my own, er, subway horn, but those are some wonderful friends I play music with.)

The number line went up Saturday night, hung around for a few hours while friends played music and read from their duct-taped chapbooks of poetry and novels-in-progress, and the next thing I knew I was back in Brooklyn, shooting pool at B61 (the bar, not the bus), trading tales of childhood shoplifting.

As is often the case with any event where good friends and wine are present, I realized much later that the colorful evening had slipped away before I remembered to capture the night's installation for that old drudge of a companion, Posterity. But a bit of digging around unearthed this archeological specimen, a picture from the original installation in 2007, so I thought I'd post it. After all, the grid of planks hanging on that yellow wall, coated tip-to-toe in numbers, is where the harebrained idea of this blog had its genesis. (Peter Gabriel is singing "Supper's Ready" as I write, and I think it's affecting my syntax.)

Before &7, there was only Prague, Vienna, and Budapest. There was only #1-99. Oh yeah, and there was this sullen self-portrait I found stuffed into the beautiful Venetian notebook where I collected all the data for the photographs. (For reasons I don't entirely remember, Vienna turned me into a sour teenager one afternoon, until I got my bearings. Yes, that is a picture of a Prague tank on my black hoodie.)

Also in the pile of forgotten goodies was my slightly crinkled original artist statement, which explains some of the method to the madness -- the intricate art of number-hunting. I thought I'd post it here to appease the grumbling chap Posterity, and to share it with those of you who blinked and therefore never got to see the installation:

I can’t think about the numbers in this series without thinking about a certain West Virginia license plate. We travelled a lot as a family, mostly camping trips out West that involved endless hours on the open road, gazing out at passing cars and scenery through the grubby windows of a blue Econoline van. Like any kid on a long road trip, I invented ways of making the time on the long interstates pass more quickly. A favorite was the license plate game, which involved “collecting” all 50 states. Inevitably, the trip would run out before we got through even half the list. My only success with finding all 50 states finally came at the age of 21, when I was tearing up Route 90 in my brother’s red minivan on my post-college American road trip (TM). The West Virginia plate, with its blue-clawed state outline, was the last on my list (yes, I had Alaska; yes, I had Hawaii), and I was so overcome to finally see it fueling up at a gas station in Colorado that I startled the driver by shouting out, “There it IS! I GOT it!” and proudly catalogued the end of my search with a proudly written WEST VIRGINIA in a spiral notebook. Not only was it more exciting than Route 80 through Nebraska (it would be hard to think of anything that wasn’t), it was more exciting than the afternoon hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park. In a way, finding the complete set was one of the highlights of the trip.

The task of intertwining the leisure of travel with the obsessive hunt has always held a certain appeal. Other people collect shot glasses to mark their journeys, I collect images. The license plate game sustained me while travelling on the roads of the U.S.A. It wasn’t until I started exploring the side streets and cobblestone alleys of European cities that I was awakened to the idea of collecting numbers.

The 99 numbers in this series, taken in 3 cities – Prague, Vienna, and Budapest – over the course of 2 weeks in the summer of 2006, show a wide variety of styles in architecture and typography: some are extraordinarily ornamental, others quite ordinary. The project was born as much out of an interest in methodology (i.e., giving my obsessive-compulsive mind something to fixate on and watching how it grappled with the task) as it was an art project. The two have never been far apart for me.

Every number here has a story. Some were captured quite deliberately: the stark, graphic image of the 54 on a wall in Prague was the number that started the idea for the project, followed swiftly by an ornamental 3 near the castle and a nearby bright red 9. Another number, astride the Praterstern ferris wheel in Vienna, came to me through sheer happenstance: I was in a moving tram and quickly snapped a shot through the window, hoping for some “good numbers”. I discovered only later that I had found my 28. The hunt for numbers 1-99 began with the same sense of ease that marks the start of any crossword puzzle, only to end in a frantic final 24-hour push in Budapest for the upper register numbers that rivalled the Louvre-in-45-minutes in Godard’s Band of Outsiders.

My original concept was to collect 99 numbers and eventually compile the images into either a handbound book or to display the collection on a single wall in its entirety. The literal throw-it-all-on-the-wall approach turned out to be the idea that seemed the most fitting. You can take in the whole sequence all at once, a task and pleasure that would be impossible otherwise. The eye is drawn as much to the exhaustiveness of the whole as it is to the sum of its parts. And as anyone who has seen my notebooks can attest, boxes and order have always been part of my way of structuring my world and art. For inspiration for this installation format, I owe a debt to the work of Zak Smith, whose excellent Pictures Showing What Happens on Every Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, blew my mind at the Whitney Biennial a few years back. Thanks, Zak. I may get around to making that book someday, too.

And so here they are, compiled at last, each one of the 99 numbers gathered from my two-week trip: snatched from architectural pieces, stolen from electrical boxes, from Russian submarine clock storefronts, road signs, modern art museum lockers, planetarium installations, memorials, and tram wires.

What was the last number compiled in this collection, my West Virginia license plate of the journey? I won’t forget that one, either. Number 42. Taken at a terminal of the Budapest airport. Nothing like coming in right under the wire.

Therese Cox

Brooklyn, 2007

That tome ought to keep Posterity quiet for awhile, and I can head now back to Blue Book Mountain, safe in the knowledge I've done my word count penance after a slow week. Mea culpa to those who come here not just for pictures but for all the chicken scratch that accompanies it. Thanks again for the inspiration, Zak Smith. And many thanks to the supremely talented, all-encouraging, über-organized Jackie for giving me the opportunity to dust off the numbers. It's good to be back.

#345

#345, National Print Museum, Dublin

Every January for the past four years, I've taken off from cold, windy JFK to cold, windy Dublin Airport for one of many "research trips." Such is one of the joys of being a fiction writer -- whatever it is that seizes you, you must listen to, you must use, you must take and create. And if what seizes you happens to include Dublin pub-hopping ("researching the Guinness" -- very important), impromptu visits to tattoo parlors, and long afternoons of cycling through the docklands, why then, you have to listen to that. And so I have.

And now, after four years of work, four years of research, four years of living with these funny, ruined, confused, brave characters in my head, I am done. What began as a feverish thirty-day writing experiment (a novel written in a month during NaNoWriMo in November of 2005 -- That's National Novel Writing Month, for those who haven't heard of this exercise in giddy shared madness, it's wonderful) -- then stretched into a year-long project, and then it just kept piling on after that. For every page of finished writing, there are thirty to forty pages of stuff kinda like it that got thrown out, hundreds of frantic Post-it Notes scrawled with urgent, sudden bursts of prose or grim instructions for revision (I am a cruel editor), and -- perhaps my favorite part of all -- a few small, carefully kept notebooks that served as my constant companions on these research trips. The stuff behind the scenes.

It's a long road, this novel-writing, and you find at the end of it that the whole thing is like one of those covered wagon trips out to California during the Great Depression. You started it mostly to get the hell out of the Dust Bowl, then got all starry-eyed thinking of that golden coast full of promise, then worked night and day through sweat and toil to make this gosh durn thing happen. (You should probably put on some Woody Guthrie real quick, before I change metaphors on you.) Then when you get to the end, you find the trip is nothing like what you'd thought it would be, and some people died along the way and new ones got picked up, but it's all OK because it's fiction and that's just part of the journey.

But back to the notebooks. There is certainly something very satisfying about the sight of a clean, typed, 241-page manuscript on a table -- that thing you made for other people to read. But then there's these little black notebooks with maps in the front, the pages stitched together with thread, the pocket in the back stuffed with ticket stubs, scraps, and odd things that just felt "important" -- that you've filled with all sorts of stuff that's never going to make it into any novel.

I could tell you stuff about this #345 -- and the monotype machine it was taken from -- that would out-rain Rain Man. Is it important to know that the monotype was used in printing processes around the 1890's or that the slugs used for the machine are a combination of 80% lead and an alloy of tin and antimony? Of course it isn't. Not to the novel, anyway. But it's in the notebook, and the tiny streak of smudged ink on the same page reminds me that it was raining that day I went to the museum, and it reminds me of the vegetable soup I had in the little café beside it, and how I looked out the rain-streaked window, an Irish Times on my table and my head full of my made-up characters and full of ideas for Chapter 7, and all of a sudden, what was useless one moment suddenly contains the whole universe.

That's why you wrote it down. That's why you write.

#152

#152, Fort Greene, Brooklyn

"Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents." --Arthur Schopenhauer

Any book lover can attest to this: when we buy books, we think we're buying the time to read them. That's what makes it so seductive. The same holds true with art supplies, office supplies, organizational tools, and so on. I can't tell you how many times I've bought a new planner or date book and, by doing so, been flooded with a sense of immediate organization: THIS will be the year that I actually stick to a system, I tell myself. Rolodex, Moleskine, At-a-Glance, you name it, I've tried it. No matter what the product name, the same thing happens: I fill in a few dates and deadlines, carry the pretty new planner around with me proudly for the first week, resentfully for week two, then forget it entirely during the third, at which point I'll live happily on Post-it note reminders, frantic impromptu to-do lists and memory until ten months later, when the new planners come out and I start the whole process all over again.

Until now. Recently, I stumbled on a post at Notebookism. com that outlined a system for tracking projects and to-do lists that was so simple it was deceptive. It resembled your average tick-box to-do list, with one main exception. There were circles instead of boxes, and instead of two options - done or undone - it broke it down into pieces. You could cancel, delegate, do things halfway, or prioritize. Brilliant, really. Here's a sample. You can read more about the system here if you want, but basically, that's it. Simple, visually striking, and effective.

After looking at this pleasing system, I decided to try it out with my numbers. After all, it's mass chaos in here with hundreds of collected photos, some gems and some stones. I started using an At-a-Glance monthly calendar, bought cheap at an office supply store, that actually tells you what day you're on - one of those dubious features like the "Useful Information" conversion tables in marble composition books that tell me how to convert quarts into gallons when what I really need is how to fix Chapter 11 of my novel-in-progress for crying out loud. For example, you can see right away that June 1st = 152 (but you already knew that, didn't you?). This has been immensely handy for making sure I have my upcoming posts prepped, and for helping me panic rationally when I don't.

In my case, I also write the day's number in larger font so I can easily see what numbers I might need in coming weeks. Here, a blackened circle means "got it," an empty circle means, "I don't got it," and a half-circle means, "I got it, but it ain't great; do better." So there you have it. Today's 152 is half-empty or half-full, depending on how you look at it. This project's been a good one to remind me that sometimes a process can be just as interesting to dissect as a product. And if you're intrigued by the circle system, give it a whirl. It's free and it doesn't eat up time, so you'll have more time to spend procrastinating doing the things you really want to do.

Skeptical? Converted? Flabbergasted? Do tell.

#112

#112, East Wall, Dublin

There are many reasons to keep good notes while globe-trotting for cool numerals, and here is just one. It can be summed up in two cautionary words: satellite imagery.

Technology and I are reluctant bedfellows. I have slowly shed many of my Luddite ways over the years and tried to embrace the technology. Google Maps and its wicked step-sister program, Windows Live Search, have provided me with several fruitful minutes of satellite image browsing as well as valuable years hacked off my life expectancy as I, fuzzy-eyed and hopeful, scan blurry swathes of green, trying to locate the exact coordinates of the tin roof and back garden of the place I once lived in Ranelagh. Or suddenly it becomes vital that I view the old grain terminal in Red Hook from various enticing angles. It's not so much a slippery slope as the ultimate slurry pit. It's deep, it's mucky, and emerging from it with dignity is no easy task.

The trouble began in earnest because I couldn't quite place the street where I found this decaying 112. I knew it was the East Wall section of Dublin and I was fairly sure I could track it down with a simple 2-D map and a bit of legwork. So ensued a black hole of time in which I scoured RTE news clippings (my friend had told the story that there had been a shooting very close by in December on the Shemalier Road), birds-eye views of nearby roads, and my trusty photo archive. I soon realized the fruitlessness of trying to match coils of barbed wire in a photo I'd snapped with a picture taken from, well, outer space.

Undeterred, I found myself ensconced in another time warp. This one, however, caught me off guard. Quite near the section of map where I found the 112 (Church Road, for the record, as far as I can tell), I happened upon a patch of land that seemed utterly logic-defying in its insistence that every road in the vicinity was called by the same name.

Everywhere I looked in this patch of Dublin 3, it was nothing but water, the N1, and Alfie Byrne Road.

Now I realize I could simply have embraced the technology and been content to direct you to the Google map of the area in order to demonstrate the mind-boggling oddness of the arrangement. But Luddite ways die hard, and before my left hand knew what my right was doing, I was tracing over my computer screen, vertically, with a Pilot Precise pen and a sheet of paper from my printer tray, the white glow of pixels beaming beneath my manic hand and Alfie Byrnes flowing like ambrosia from my pen. I think you'll agree I may yet be called to the vocation of cartography. Or maybe I just need to cut down on my coffee intake.

If the author had taken better notes on that cycling excursion, this catastrophe of cartography would never have happened.

#94

#94, Royal Avenue, Belfast

I was going to subvert Chekhov’s famous line (“Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress”) to say that Dublin is my lawful wife and Belfast my mistress. But then I realized it's a much more convoluted relationship than that. Belfast is more than my mistress. Belfast is also my ex, the “it’s complicated” friend, the city I see far less frequently than I’d like, but when we meet again, it’s always a little awkward, a little familiar, and just when things start going good, I have to leave again. And then I realize Dublin is not my lawful wife at all, Brooklyn is, as I will have to report to the IRS very shortly, and so you can see relationship metaphors will only get you so far in life.

You see, I wrote a novel. It’s that famed first novel, the one that sits in a drawer and is read by no one. It sits on a shelf, actually, and it was read by a good number of fine editors at major publishing houses; it was looked at and nibbled on and declared tasty but no one took the big bite. I’m quite at peace with this now because I watch Dylan Moran’s short film on the nasty subject at least once a day. It helps keep the equilibrium as I finish work on the next one. The book-in-progress is set in Dublin; the first was set, in part, in Belfast. I’ve unfinished business with the place and while I don’t know the size or shape of the business, I do know it’s there.

This photograph was taken on an overcast, grey late afternoon in Belfast (is there any other kind?) after I'd spent a good hour or so writing and looking out the window of a coffee shop, admiring through a plate glass window the ghostly behemoth of an Art Deco building that stands guard at the end of Royal Avenue. Ireland’s banks evoke a whole host of feelings these days (see Bock , Sweary ) but on this day, it stood out as a singular beauty, imposing and odd, its streaked white façade and top like a melted-down, digitized Palladian dome.

I have, over the years, learned the joys of the fiction writer’s research trip. Its possibilities, whether wandering about with a pocket notebook, whiling away the hours in the streets or away in the pub researching the quality of Guinness while still feeling like you’re getting work done, are endless. The point of all the copious note-taking, presumably, is to gather material for the work you have yet to do. But in the moment, the notes and sketches, the scraps of overheard conversation and street signs, end up creating something almost as satisfying as the finished project.

And while Belfast may conjure certain associations and sights, I can guarantee none of them are quite as bewildering as this . There is glitter and disco and, while I can’t figure out what any of this has to do with the gray, once war-torn city I'm thinking of, a horrible and delightful earworm. You have been warned.

#85

#85, Smith Street, Brooklyn

You gotta hand it to the Nu Hotel, pictured above, for having the chutzpah to open a "nu" hotel directly across the street from Brooklyn's notorious House of D. You can see that they hope to circumvent any distress out-of-towners may feel at staying within gunshot of the 11-story, pink-tinted behemoth juvie detention center by "distressing" the oversized numbers stuck to the dull brick wall.

And this 85 is as good a time as any to link to designer Michael Bierut's post over at Design Observer called 26 Years, 85 Notebooks. Since I saw Bierut speak eloquently about fonts, serifs, and doomsday advertising at Postopolis! two years ago and after my recent rapturously geeky experience seeing the film Helvetica, which I wrote about here , I've had his work and his insights on my radar. So imagine my awe at the vision of Bierut's 85 composition books, all filled in with notes and sketches and ideas, stacked on a chair like a totem pole or a twisting skyscraper or an astonishing stack of pancakes. In the accompanying essay, Bierut provides a tour through some of the notebooks and what they have meant to him over the years:

On August 12, 1982, I took a 10 x 7 1/8 inch National Blank Book Company composition book from the supply closet of my then employer, Vignelli Associates. From that moment, I have never been without one. I always have one at my desk. I take one with me to every meeting. I am now in the middle of Notebook #85. It's in front of me right now. Together, these well-worn books create a history of my working life that spans three decades.

He describes design process, discovery, and his dislike of gridded paper. There are tales of lost notebooks (#45, lost in Heathrow and another lost in, oddly, the United Airlines headquarters in my hometown in Illinois) and puzzling later over notes that remain cryptic even to the notebook's keeper. ("Did I ever call Dilland? Whatever happened to Executive Sign? What was the Lefand Alliance?") Even better, you can sneak a peek inside some of the notebooks and see what really goes on in a designer's brain. Mmm.

#31

#31, UPM, Prague

Those in the know call it UPM, those in English-speaking parts of the world call it the Museum of Decorative Arts, and those undeterred by syllables call it Uměleckoprůmyslové museum. My sole association with this Prague museum, regretfully, is this single photograph as the UPM was closing its doors upon my arrival. Yes, that is a picture of the door.

My time spent in cities is so often spent on the streets (this sounds much more destitute than it really is) that it's only after I get home and click on Ye Olde Internette that I smack my forehead in disbelief at all the indoor treasures I missed whilst trawling for architecture. Not that I'd have it any other way. But my mind runs in circles when I learn that the UPM is home to some 300,000 objects. Breaking it down, that's 35,000 posters, 70,000 photographs, and some 30,000 books.some 100,000 folios of drawings and graphic art, the compelling-sounding Ex Libris collection (about 15,000 objects) and 15,000 small devotional objects. There's more, I'm sure, than is dreamt of in my philosophy (calendars! playing cards! labels! postcards!), otherwise I'd be waxing rhapsodic on the quality rather than the quantity.

Update to #31: People are often asking me why I'm always carrying around notebooks, writing things down. The answer is because I have to and I love to. But another reason might be that I have the short-term memory of a hummingbird. Further investigation into the matter yielded much forgotten fruit. Here is a page from my sketchbook from the UPM that I apparently didn't visit. It's a sketch of a Walter Crane illustration for George C. Warra's book Echoes of Hellas. Note the running catalog of numbers 81-100 on the opposite page. This was the trip that started it all.

The author of this blog would like to point out that she on occasion suffers from Stendhal Syndrome, a severe nervous condition and state of confusion often brought about by overexposure to large collections of particularly beautiful works of art. Do not, under any circumstances, let her write an art history manual.