#69

#69, Soho, NYC

Hey wait, this one's upside down.

#68

#68, Buda, Budapest

#67

#67, Jay Street, Brooklyn

This 67 has since been painted over & replaced. RIP.

#66

I've got a few visual stunners lined up for the next few days, so I'll let them speak for themselves.

#66, Soho, NYC

#65

#65, Upper West Side, NYC

Yesterday was scary, today is just plain spooky. Tell me this doesn't look like a place where furniture moves by itself and strange rapping noises can be heard in the wee hours. (I have furniture that moves by itself, but I live in an old tenement building with a slanted kitchen floor. And anyone who lives the "urban lifestyle" knows all about the strange rapping noises in the wee hours. Turn it down, homeboyz!) For spook value, you can't beat the aesthetic doomery of a gnarled, leafless, shadow-casting tree. I particularly like how the winter shadows obscure the thin gold 65. And then you have that arch. That black lantern. I have grown accustomed to the ramshackle, uneven quality of the facades of many Brooklyn buildings. Why is architectural symmetry sometimes so foreboding?

#64

Here's the picture:

#64, Terror Haza, Budapest

Here's the thousand words.

#63

#63, Stresa, Italy

In the lobby of the Grand Hotel des Iles Borromees in Stresa, Italy, this 63 caught my eye. The hotel was a favorite of Hemingway's and while I wasn't staying there, I was curious to check it out. Hemingway stayed here for the first time in 1918 and continued to visit for various stretches of time all the way through the 1950s. Like many writers, he had his habits and preferences. Friedrich von Schiller would inhale rotten apples to get the muse going. Balzac drank fifty cups of coffee a day. Stendhal would read two or three pages of the French civil code before sitting down to work each day on The Charterhouse of Parma. And when Hemingway was in Italy, he always stayed in Room 106 of the Iles Borromees where he could gaze out at the blue waters of Lake Maggiore. It was fun to invoke the thought that shortly after walking over this mosaic floor, Hemingway ordered a stiff drink, absently dropped a few wooden pencil shavings to the floor, had one of his "Damn you, you dirty phony martyr" inspirational self-talks, then set to work diligently, vigilantly, on A Farewell to Arms.

My favorite work of Hemingway's, maybe surprisingly, isn't his fiction. I love the short stories. I'm lukewarm about the novels. But it's A Moveable Feast, his memoir of life in Paris in the 1920s, that really makes my mouth water for more. While reading up elsewhere on earnest Ernest, I came across a website with a small but delicious collection of one writer's investigations into various "literary locations" throughout the world. The piece on Hemingway in Italy is definitely worth a read. Also included in the dozen or so pieces are Virginia Woolf's London, the Brownings' Florence, and Stephen King's Maine. My only wish is that there were more.

The writer in me understands the need for both adventure and stability. A change of environment does the soul good, but so does the comfort of old haunts. When I travel to Dublin, I always stay in the same hotel and ask for a room on the fourth floor. I ask for a room that is north-facing so I can gaze out each morning onto the Grand Canal. The statue of Patrick Kavanagh sits eternally on his arse bench just across the road, so even when I'm alone, there's always company. There's no posh mosaic floor, but the beds are comfy and the hotel bar makes a good hot port. It's a place where I can clear my head and where I can focus on my writing, which is no small thing. As habits go, you could certainly do worse.

#62

#62, Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn

Open House New York weekend is an architecture and design event that specializes in blowing my skull apart every year. If you live in the area and you've never checked out Open House New York, don't miss it this year. There are walking tours, art exhibitions, and architects showing you behind-the-scenes glimpses of buildings usually closed to the public. And for the last five years, Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery has hosted an event called Angels and Accordions, a site-specific walking tour/performance where the graveyard acts as a natural stage for music and movement both strange and beautiful.

As a Brooklyn-dwelling, accordion-playing, ex-Performance Studies major, ex-Goth who loves long autumn walks in historic graveyards, I couldn't imagine what I would ever want to be doing at an event called Angels and Accordions at Green-Wood Cemetery. Nevertheless, I suspended my doubts and went. Imagine my surprise when I found myself walking around in a euphoria-induced trance that lasted the whole October afternoon. Several times, as when trailing, pied-piper-like, behind Guy Klucevsek, I had to blink like crazy to make sure I wasn't in a lucid dream.

Angels . . .

. . . and Accordions

#61

#61, Fort Greene, Brooklyn

It was late afternoon and I was walking around Fort Greene with a mandolin in one hand and a camera in the other. It was Superbowl Sunday and now that I had my borrowed instrument, the quest was twofold: to have a pint of Harp and a plate of nachos somewhere before the football started and to find a 61 before it got dark. For one reason or another, some numbers are elusive. I could post a whole month of 60's and yet finding a 61 has felt like looking for Greta Garbo on a particularly bad day. While I like posting numbers in order, I'm not methodical at all in my quest for them. As a result, I have certain days looming ahead that are numberless, empty, blanks waiting to be filled. Finding this 61 just before dusk was a treat. It meant I didn't have to break my neck trying to find one by the deadline.

I'm in the mood to offer a little project history since I haven't touched on it since my post 365 Numbers in 365 Days. The original idea behind the project was to collect numbers 1-99 over the course of two weeks in three cities: Prague, Vienna, and Budapest. I got them all (including a blurry 61a, not pictured here) and had a great exhibition at the Fall Cafe in Brooklyn in 2007. My inspiration was Zak Smith's Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Gravity's Rainbow, which I first saw at the Whitney Biennial in 2004. If you are unfamiliar with his work, I heartily recommend you check out the project on his website. I also have the book, which was published by Tin House Books in 2006. But nothing quite measures up to the sheer impact I felt walking into that room in the Whitney where all illustrations -- all 760 of 'em -- were displayed in a grid on the wall.

There are many ways I view this project: as an aesthetic exercise to gather numbers I find beautiful; as a frantic scavenger hunt where nothing matters except that I get them all and get them on time; as a writing exercise to use each number as a jumping off point to explore architecture, memory, space, and story. An added bonus has been the ability to share all my pictures and palaver on this blog and hear what stories or associations these images or stories evoke in others. So to those gentle readers who have taken the time to visit, whether to browse, read, or comment, I want to say thank you for helping it evolve into something quite different. That is all.

#60

#60, Soho, NYC

For all the talk of the recession and grim evidence that we're headed, hell-in-handbasket style, for a second Great Depression, there's been precious little talk about, ya know, the good side of things. In 1929, just as the stock market was crashing and businessmen were leaping out of skyscrapers, THIS was being built. Two words: Art Deco. Those elegant modern forms, those geometric motifs, those fonts. It's probably too much to think we'll go backward in time to a place where there's nothing to do all day but hide out in speakeasies drinking bathtub gin, watching Eddie Cantor pictures, and listening to Al Jolson sing "Swanee" while we all go blind from moonshine and contemplate our unemployment checks. But if the Western Union Building made it out of the crash looking this good, there might yet be reason to hope.