#326: Chicago Ghost Sign

Chicago, IL

I didn't snap nearly enough of these faded ads last time I was skulking about the south side. The fun bit about working with ghost signs is that if you can't read what the numbers are, you can draw your own conclusions. Is that third number after "PHONE" a 6 or an 8? Chicago phone numbers have both the 326 and 328 exchange, so it could be either. But since I needed a new 326 for today, I'm gonna go out on a limb and stick with 6.

#139: Dapper Dan's

Chelsea, NYC

About two years ago, they ripped off a chintzy awning on 14th Street to reveal this marvelously old-skool sign for a clothing shop called Dapper Dan's. Dan kind of has a large fan club among NYC picture-snappers, and I was just pleased to have a 139 in there so I could join the mutual admiration society.

#186: Red Hook Ghost Story

Red Hook, Brooklyn

It was Thursday night, late enough to be early Friday morning, and I was in the back seat of a car headed home from a gig, accordion under my arm. It was my first memory of being out late at night in Red Hook. We were on our way back from the now-defunct Lillie's, where we'd played through our set in coats and wool hats and fingerless gloves in front of two small space heaters -- the only heating in the whole bar though it was mid-January. (Shutting down venues was what we did best. See also Curse of the Peacocks.)

Though we weren't lost, the deserted streets and warehouses suggested that we well might have been. Almost total darkness surrounded us. There was a haunted, distant creak from the marine dock. What if the car ran out of gas? What if something was after us? Where were we, that we could be in New York and yet be plunged in so much darkness? What I remember most is the quality of fear -- not that we were going to be robbed, or shot, or robbed and then shot. But fear that we were going to be attacked by the ghost of a dead sailor.

Looking back on it now, it's too bad we weren't. We could've made a great post-punk sea shanty out of that. And if there are no longer ghosts of dead sailors lurking about Red Hook at night, I can always break in to IKEA and steal a lamp.

#193: Rusted

Gowanus, Brooklyn

Dublin Dereliction Duty: Spiderman Was Here

Western Way, Dublin

On a lonesome curved road on the north side of Dublin, opposite the dark spire of the Black Church (walk around the church counterclockwise three times at midnight and it's said you'll see the devil), this mural -- half ghost sign, half art installation -- once stood. I went looking for it about six months ago when I was in Dublin, and either it's not visible through beer goggles or it's just plain gone.

Supposing you were too busy courting Beelzebub to notice this bit of street art, now's your chance to see what you missed. It was a strange sight, this mural: towering above a single red Georgian door, stretching across a massive wall of dull brown brick, it was both in plain view and yet still felt hidden. The faded pastels of the paint and hardly legible text made sense enough, but then it was topped off with this bit of metal work: a stylized spider web that would do Spidey himself proud.

I've hunted all I can for the story behind it, but all I seem to find are more tall tales involving run-ins with Old Scratch. Maybe I have to circle the building clockwise three times at noon to get my answer.

Dublin Dereliction Duty: Newmarket Potatoes

Newmarket, Dublin

No dereliction duty would be complete without a drive-by of a run-down, crumbling, desolate old warehouse whose only sign of industry appears to have been painted in or around the time of the invention of sliced bread (1928, for those keeping track. Thanks, Otto Frederick Rohwedder!).

The fading Newmarket Potatoes sign in Dublin is one of my favorites, and in fact I feel such affection for the rotting old thing that I hesitated to even post it. Could I manage to do verbal justice to a relic whose only easily catalogued positive trait is that it's "old" and "kinda creepy"? Could I put into words the haunted yet familiar feeling I had when first happening upon deserted Newmarket on a bicycle late one evening, able to make out only the faintest shadow of an already faint sign? Is it in any way healthy that I've spent the last hour pondering this? No. It's rather unhealthy, actually. Now then, I'm going to pour myself a glass of red wine and kick my feet up and we'll call it a draw. This dereliction duty is harder than it looks. At least with numbers I knew what I had lined up next.

Ghost signs. Fading advertisements. They're well-documented enough to have their own fan.clubs. There's a whole manifesto wrapped up in my fascination with the derelict and downtrodden (see Hugh Pearman), but there's also something intensely personal about it. When I see an old sign, my mind slows down. I like to take the time to notice things that are so easily glossed over in this über-glossy age. It's a waste of brain cells, yes, but a pleasant one. Who painted the sign? How long has it been there? And how long will it be before the sign disappears completely -- either by a long, slow weathering or by a sudden, violent demolition?

The state of a sign often can tell us a lot about the state of the space around it. In this case, a forgotten, desolate sign in fact exists in a forgotten, desolate square. I was interested (and in that selfish "but I discovered it!" way, almost horrified) to find this re-imagining of the Newmarket area of Dublin: "Animating Newmarket Square in Dublin," from the spatial planning Inspiring Cities project. It reminded me of how New York City's High Line linear park -- once an abandoned railway line -- came to be. First, the vision. Then, the plan. Then, the money. And oh yes, if we're lucky (or unlucky, depending on your point of view) -- the manifestation.

Of course it makes sense to do something with an abandoned urban space. Not all can be left to decay. But sometimes I like the thought of simply imagining it, then going back to the bustle of our usual city centers, leaving the outskirts untouched. There's something rich in that sense of possibility. A charm to the unbuilt.

That said, some of the ideas in the Inspiring Cities report were pretty, well, inspiring. Personally, I'm partial to the report's Idea #3: Temporarily Breeding Artists. But then again, I've got ulterior motives.

#364

#364, Chicago

"Performance is about the urgency of vanishing."

I remember hearing these words spoken in a dusty black box theatre in Evanston my senior year at Northwestern University. It was the week before our final performances for our Non-fiction Studies class and we were gathered around the stage with our scripts and our props (I was probably packing a pince-nez and anguished letter to Maud Gonne as part of my transformation into the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats), listening to a pep talk from our professor, Dr. Dwight Conquergood.

He was the consummate enthusiast though that term -- "pep talk" -- doesn't quite capture all that went into one of Dwight's addresses. Dwight (he wanted us to call him Dwight; no one ever called him anything else) could go from the quotidian ("Eat lots of yogurt! Complex carbohydrates are good for boosting energy!") to the pedagogical ("Performance is about the urgency of vanishing") to the encouraging (just about anything else the man ever said) in the span of one spirited burst.

Though I remember him saying many things that were wise, this phrase is the one I remember most: "Performance is about the urgency of vanishing."

Even before that day, it had been an intense semester. The point of the Non-fiction Studies class was to research a historical figure we were interested in, arrange the research -- all primary source material -- into a script, then put it together into a one-person show. I was armed to the teeth with Yeats books and would spend long hours at the Pita Inn consorting with Emily, Jill, and Sarah -- Toshi Maruki, Bette Davis, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, respectively -- over jasmine tea and falafel, talking about our projects. Dwight liked to call the class "a caravan." It was a fitting metaphor. There we all were, piling things into our separate cars, carting our own baggage and tricks, but we were all on the same journey. We were all headed for the same scary but rewarding place: the stage. Other students took a class with Professor So-and-So. We rode on a caravan with Dwight.

But as for the show itself, what did I know of the seriousness of such an endeavor? I was twenty-one years old. I was just a bundle of energy and coffee. I grew very interested very quickly in the nuts and bolts of the script: what aspect of Yeats' life to focus on, what "lens" to put on it, and wouldn't it be cool if I threw in some ancient Rosicrucian ritual stuff to the blocking? It was Dwight who gently guided us to the idea that we were not just putting on a show. We were performing somebody's life, and to do that well required much more from us than the simple audacity -- "Hey look, I'm this dead poet/ movie star/ important religious figurehead!" -- we all vaguely felt. It wasn't enough to just slap together a script and say a couple of lines and hope it all held water. What we were doing required empathy. We had to try to see a life from the inside out rather than from the outside in.

When we first walked into his course one blustery fall Chicago day, we'd all heard great things about Dwight Conquergood's class. He was academically respected and the chair of the Performance Studies department. We immediately liked him: a positive, smiling, sharply intelligent man with little wire-framed glasses, slim build, and fair skin and hair. His friendly appearance gave the impression of a lovable uncle, or -- if not for all that vast intelligence underneath the cheery demeanor -- even a greeter at Wal-Mart.

Weeks before he uttered those lines about performance and vanishing in the black box theatre, there was one day in class -- maybe to give us a break from our own projects, maybe because some of us had asked -- Dwight presented some of his research on gangs. He showed us slides of Latin Kings' graffiti and spoke of the semiotics of gang symbols. His area of interest was working with disadvantaged or marginalized communities: Hmong refugees in Laos, gang members in Chicago. What we hadn't known was that in the eighties, he moved into a housing project in Albany Park called Big Red, a part of Chicago so rife with crime it was known as "Little Beirut." Gangs, crime, graffiti, and disorder -- that was what he faced on a day to day basis. No one told him to do it. It was his idea. He was studying a community, Dwight reasoned, so there was no better way to do that than to live among the people he was trying to get to know.

Little by little -- and often at great risk to his personal safety -- Dwight became part of the community. He gained the trust of gang members. He learned about them because he had a profound desire to understand and wanted help give them a voice in a society that thought they had nothing worthy to say. He didn't see them as academic subjects. He tutored and mentored them. He attended their funerals. He thought their stories were important and deserved to be heard. Even after he suffered an assault while living alone in Albany Park, he stayed in Big Red. When he said that to represent someone's life was a great responsibility, it was because he knew it firsthand.

Did my performance about Yeats and the occult change lives? No. Did it give voice to someone marginalized and misunderstood? Depends, I suppose, on your definition of marginalized and misunderstood. But I did learn a great lesson in the process of putting on my dusty old cape and pince-nez and reciting "He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead." If we are lucky enough to have a written document of a person's life -- what they saw, thought, and experienced -- we are left with a great gift and a great responsibility. And the fragile quality of that gift is what can make a performance so poignant, or an untouched drift of snow beautiful, or a wonderful holiday somehow painful: because we are aware that as it is happening, it is also leaving us.

One day a few years after graduation, I heard from a former classmate that Dwight had been diagnosed with cancer. He was no longer teaching, and the cancer, I was told, was gradually worsening. The next day, I sat down with a big pad of stationery to write Dwight a letter.

It was a difficult letter to begin. Of course it was. But there was no choice. I had to start. I told him how much I had learned from him. I recounted my memories of "the caravan" and tried to put into words my gratitude. I tried, already grieving, to still be present in the moment, to simply say what I was able and hope it would be enough, even as I knew it could not be. I signed my name with love and enclosed a photograph of me, Emily, Jill, and Sarah -- friendships I forged in Dwight's Non-fiction Studies class, fellow passengers on that mad, wonderful caravan, friendships that remain strong to this day. I sealed the envelope. I put on a stamp and walked down the four flights of stairs of my Brooklyn apartment and out to the nearest mailbox. I took a deep breath, then slipped the letter in the mailbox.

As I walked back home from the street corner -- no tears yet, only a lump in my throat -- I thought back to that enthusiastic, gesticulating professor giving us a pep talk in the black box theatre, speaking excitedly of yogurt and empathy. I thought, again, of that day when he talked to us about the urgency of vanishing.

When I received word a few months later that Dwight had passed away, I returned, after hanging up the phone, to some of my old notebooks. In them, I had placed important papers from college (I threw away nearly all my notes), and I found some hand-written notes from Dwight. He would watch our rehearsals and give us feedback while we stumbled through our lines or tripped over our props, and his notes were always written in his elegant, scrupulous script. Everything he wrote was positive: not a mindless optimism, but a deeply grounded, intelligent reflection on what we were attempting. Any small feats of empathy we achieved -- we captured someone's true voice, we were sensitive to the difficulties of cross-cultural or cross-gendered representation, we had done our research well -- Dwight treated like a great victory. It gave us courage to attempt what felt like the unattemptable. I can think of no greater gift a teacher can give his students than that.

Dwight saw performance in everything around him. It was interchangeable with life. It was, in his own words, both "a contest and struggle." The urgency he described to the whole endeavor, well, I feel that a lot, whether or not there's a curtain rising or falling. That's part, I guess, of what makes life so precious. Vanishing is not just a fact of performance, it's a fact of life. But what a shame it is when the vanishing comes so soon.

#357

#357, Bowery, NYC

You know, instead of all those tired-looking CBGB's OMFUG shirts that have been clogging the clothing aisles and sheathing stick-like models for the last twenty-five years, I'd like to see a true bastion of the New York City underground celebrated. That's right, kids, head a few buildings north of Joey Ramone Place and you can be the first in your parents' luxury high-rise apartment 'hood to don a commemorative 357 Bowery t-shirt. Y'all know there's a party going on at the Landmarks Preservation Commission, and I'm bringing my accordion and a full bottle of Laphroaig 10 Year. Who's in? Oh, and if you happen to have a spare screen, a 10" ink squeegee, and about ten gallons of black paint, bring those along, too. We've got some silk screening to crank out.

#340

#340, Upper East Side, NYC

Sugar? Snow? Salt? No, just a carving over the doorway of a building on the Upper East Side. As I sit in New York City, pining for rain to turn to snow already, it seems fitting to have this 340 to, well, rub it in.

A few months ago, while trawling design blogs for typographical eye candy, I came across some breathtaking images both playful and ephemeral. The pictures -- words and designs delicately crafted in sugar -- were the work of Canadian graphic artist Marian Bantjes. The detail in the images is so arresting that it's hard to not draw closer even as you hold your breath, both out of awe and a fear, maybe, that one sneeze could send the whole thing packing. I admire an artist willing to craft something that inevitably will crumble to dust. This is the fate of all projects eventually, but I'm talking about the artists who embrace this very aspect and make it part of their work.

On the subject of art and the ephemeral, few things are as beautiful to me as the meditative, painstaking projects of Andy Goldsworthy, the subject of an excellent 2001 documentary by German filmmaker Thomas Riedelsheimer, "Rivers and Tides." Watching Goldsworthy, this stoic man, hunker down in the woods, stringing together a magnificent chain of leaves simply for the sublime pleasure of watching them float down the river, enduring every nuisance of nature -- bad weather, errant winds, broken stems -- in his quest to do so, is both tragic and inspiring, mundane and heroic. In an interview, Goldsworthy speaks in simple, direct terms of his craft:

All that effort goes into making something look effortless.

A better expression of the creative process (apart from the one where I bang my head against a wall, repeatedly, which is satisfying only marginally and hardly eloquent) I have yet to find. If you're curious, you can check out a clip of "Rivers and Tides" here, though I can't recommend highly enough seeing the full-length feature -- beautiful, meditative, stunning. And don't miss the chance to admire the intricate, ornamental beauty of Bantjes' sugar images. Certainly nothing to sneeze at.

#339

#339, Lower East Side, NYC

A favorite among fading ad enthusiasts, ghost sign collectors, and hunters of the New York ephemeral (do not be fooled by our intrepid nature: we are legion), this decaying 339 on Grand Street on the Lower East Side is the gold standard.

"Ideal" was the big advertising promise back in the day -- you can see another example of it in my #20, Samuel Cohen's Son Ideal Class on 2nd Street -- and here both ladies & men could rest assured that they could fetch their ideal hosiery wholesale from this corner shop. (It begs the question, what exactly is men's hosiery, anyway?) My heart went pitter-patter when I discovered this gorgeous specimen of urban decay earlier this year on an otherwise uneventful number-hunting expedition on the LES, and if I wasn't already bought, sold, and sent down the river at first glance, when I glimpsed that tiny fading ampersand I sure as heck was.

More gawking, speculating, history-mongering, and oohing and ahhing to be found from fellow friends at Greenwich Village Daily Photo, Lost City, and Fading Ad Blog. Or take a stroll down Hosiery Row and see for yourself. Have an ideal weekend.

#336

#336, West Village, NYC

#326

#326, West Village, NYC

#286

#286, Portland, OR

I spot an old hand-painted sign through the holes of a chain link fence, and it's like I'm a kid who's just heard the Mister Softee ice cream truck. Paint it on a garage, throw in an abandoned parking lot into the mix, then drape some telephone wires overhead, and well, that's like you just dipped it in chocolate. Yes, I have been focusing on my off-line writing, and yes, it appears I've skipped one too many square meals along the way whilst furiously revising and overcaffeinating. So if I just throw some numbers at you and yell, "Bon appetit!" just be patient with me. I'm finishing a novel. It's what happens.

#252

#252, Smith Street, Brooklyn

Call me civic-minded, call me Zen, but there's something about the transient nature of chalk graffiti that appeals to my sensibilities. I've written before about my enduring crush on Ellis G., the street artist who patrols the streets of Brooklyn at unknown hours, drawing beautiful chalk outlines around fire hydrants, street lamps, and bicycle wheels, giving the shadows of everyday objects an odd luminosity. But a few months ago, in a little alcove on Smith Street that was seemingly unloved and abandoned, I was intrigued when this (non-Ellis G.) message appeared on a doorway.

My head filled with questions: Who is the couple? Do they still live there or have they been evicted? Why has the wind and the weather beaten them so, and does that have anything to do with the dismal state of the buzzer? And, of course, the next obvious question that comes to mind: Who the heck is ELBOWTOE?

Street artists can be a notoriously canny lot. Some seek attention; others do their work on the sly. But this one, shall we say, toes the line between the two. So just for fun, I've compiled a list of little-known facts about the elusive Elbow-Toe, just in case you were wondering about the, er, face behind the rest of the anatomy.

1. Yes, the name was inspired by the ubiquitous Neck Face. Yes, he knows it's absurd.

2. By day, Elbow-Toe works as a senior programmer. He probably uses his real name.

3. He used the word "echelon" in an interview.

4. He works in other media: chalk, charcoal, paper, paste-ups, woodcuts, ink.

5. Elbow-Toe likes doorways and alcoves because of how they frame his work.

6. He does his art in Brooklyn mostly because he claims he's too lazy to go to Manhattan. (It happens.)

7. Elbow-Toe listens to Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart.

Hardly exhaustive, but we don't want to give away all the mystique, right? Till then, it's got me thinking of other possible monikers that might pepper the neighborhood walls and sidewalks someday. But between you and me, I don't think I'm ready for the wisdom of Waist Foot.

#229

#229, South Loop, Chicago

Today's 2 for 1 special: a ghost sign with an additional ghost concept: the old telephone exchange abbreviation system. Back before everyone had three personal phone numbers, in the days when switchboard operators still labored away in tiny cement buildings connecting and untangling cables by hand (my Luddite heart beats warmly to think of these days when you could still sort of get the logic behind how dialing this leads to that), you had these little clusters of people living in the same spot whose phone numbers all began with the same prefix. To make it simple, the prefix was often written out as a word instead of numbers, based on the area where the phone numbers were centered: Gramercy numbers would begin with 47 (GR), and so on. The John O'Hara story BUtterfield 8 and the song PEnnsylvania 65000 both riff on this idea.

Really old phone books and ghost ads like this one will sometimes show signs of this mostly outdated system. Instead of an ad telling you to dial 842-2973, instead you'd see this one that reads VIctory 22973. Or, because I'm running a tight ship around here, you'll see only part of it. You get the idea. I crop because I care.

#195

#195, Smith Street, Brooklyn

#178

#178, Venice, Italy

#161

#161, Elk Grove Village, IL

This unremarkable suburban curb, spray-painted and stenciled with a 161, makes me feel weirdly homesick. Fitting, since I grew up in the two-story blue-gray house just behind it. There was no American flag in the 161 I knew - patriotism wasn't quite the growth industry that it is today - but I do recall, in my all-noticing, Harriet-the-Spy way, taking special notice of the fact that all the houses in our neighborhood had the addresses painted on the curb and thinking this was important.

The original black and white 161 was there for years. It underwent a slow fade into obscurity until the village repainted them all, this time with a bright white background with a much larger, tall, forest green stenciled number. The new number existed alongside the ghost for years, and I looked forward to seeing them both when I walked home from school. It was a comforting sight. The numbers - almost more than the house - meant I was home.

Now both of them have faded, replaced by this flag, though I did hunt doggedly for clues to their existence (much to the consternation of the people peering out at me through what used to be my window). Visits to the past can be cool, and then they get creepy, and then it's time to drive off, wondering if the toboggan hill in front of you has sunken over the years or if you always remember things as in a rearview mirror where objects are smaller than they once appeared.

#141

#141, Bergen Street, Brooklyn

One morning back in February, I was standing at the counter of the Fall Cafe on Smith Street, chatting with Chris while he made my latte, leaning on the counter and eagerly awaiting the injection of caffeine I so badly needed. Beside the tip jar was the usual array of flyers and postcards for upcoming shows: announcements for dive bar bands and one-act plays and Brooklyn craft shows. One especially neon postcard caught my eye. It was for a house party in one of those hipster enclaves I usually avoid: Greenpoint or Williamsburg. "Party with all the Brooklyn street artists you have a crush on!" one card announced, oozing with self-referential congratulatory hipness. I filed this bit of information away as irrelevant when suddenly, scanning the list of artists on the flyer, I had a start. Hang on, I thought. I do have a crush on a Brooklyn street artist!

His medium, as it happens, is chalk and not spray paint. And his name is Ellis G.

You'd be hard pressed to get me to agree to this many days, buried as I am Pig Pen-like in the cloud of white dust that is every English prof's lot in life, but chalk can be kind of awesome. Out in nature, out on my free time, I can appreciate it for what it is: whimsical graffiti that starts to vanish the minute it's applied. Finding a bit of unusual chalk art feels like a secret between me and the city, one that I can enjoy more knowing it will soon be swept away by the elements.

I wasn't always this enamored. Ellis G. - the street artist famous in Brooklyn 'hoods for his chalk outline drawings - merely irked me in the beginning. Who was this artist and why was he post-dating all of his works? (Outlines drawn in 2006 would be signed Ellis G. Copyright 2008, and so on. What was up with that?) Then I started noticing them more and more, phantom shapes appearing on sidewalks and building walls: a bicycle tire, a fire hydrant, a street sign. I began to look forward to them. They were surprises on familiar street corners, luminous companions on late night walks home from the F train.

About three years ago, the New York Times did an article on Ellis G. - real name Ellis Gallagher - that shed more light on the man behind the shadows. The more I learned about the artist - he began drawing chalk outlines after his own "brush with crime" - the more I grew to love his drawings and the random joy they create in strangers. It's a great read, especially if you have ever been lucky enough to see one of these drawings in person. Then I saw this image and my heart nearly melted. The caption (photo credit: Chang W. Lee) reads: Ellis Gallagher drawing the shadow of a stop sign and explaining what he is doing to a young admirer.

My street art crush was officially born.

In today's 141, the freshly fallen (and soon-to-be-filthy) white snow and the stark, faded chalk make this picture ephemeral times two. And while the street-artist-I-have-a-crush-on was not, far as I know, responsible for the 141 above, his work is so intertwined in my mind with chalk drawings in Brooklyn that it I can't see anything in Boerum Hill and Cobble Hill written in chalk without thinking of Ellis G. If you look closely, you can see scribbled beneath the 141: "Bergan St, Brooklyn NY." I'm not usually one to find misspellings amusing - and woe be to those who think "k"s replacing "c"s are somehow cuter, especially where the word "car" is concerned - but having the street name etched onto brick in chalk is such a rarity I'll make an exception. Also, I've had my mind changed more than once about chalk drawings, so I'm less quick to judge harshly these days.

A coda to this story: I was exiting the F train at Bergen Street one night. It was late at night and I'd dragged my harried body up the steps, tired from the long day and thinking only of getting home. I spotted a bicycle wreck on a mangled street pole, lined in familiar blue chalk. In block letters, a message was scratched out next to it: LOOK UP.

I turned my face up to the sky and beheld the eerie, smoky, glowing image of a lunar eclipse. It had only started some minutes before; by the time I got home, it would be gone. I stood bewitched by the surreal sight, unthinkably distant above the bodegas and the rooftops, a thing of beauty I would have missed if someone with a love of the fleeting and the sublime hadn't taken the care to remind me.

Just before turning around to leave, I spied a hooded figure on the street corner, pacing up and down furtively. Maybe he was just watching the eclipse, maybe he was out buying a bag of chips. Or maybe he was checking to see if anyone had stopped to notice the message on the sidewalk, pocketing his stick of chalk, grinning at his handiwork. Wondering if any other souls in the city could see the beauty he wanted us to see.

#113

#113, Venice, Italy

In Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, the young Venetian traveler Marco Polo tells the old Kublai Khan stories of fantastic, impossible cities, cities made of "exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions." One has a thousand wells with gods living in the buckets. Unmatched shoes tumble down in avalanches in another. Bored citizens of one city leave at the same time and start an entirely new life in a new city. Drainpipes and cobblestones merge, girls holding skulls milk the carcasses of dead heifers, memories are exchanged with a glance. The cities have names like Euphemia, Valdrada, Eudoxia, and Fedora. When Khan demands that Polo tell him stories about Venice instead, Polo admits that "Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice." Clever bastard, that Marco Polo.

"Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little."

For me, what isn't fixed on film is fixed in writing, in notebooks: the eighty-cent prosecco, the dead ends at canal edges, pigeons in the piazza, the sputtering engines of the water taxis, gondoliers' oars rolling gently to the sounds of an accordion, the porticoes passing by with delicious slowness. There are a thousand Venices packed inside of one Venice, and the one I took a shine to was this one: the steel and crane, the rust belt-meets-maritime outskirts, the faded 113 on a slab of concrete. Go figure.