#38

#38, Herbert Street, Dublin

I love Dublin. I really do. It's the only place in the world you can pop into a hospital for a routine research look-about and find yourself a half an hour later in the lobby still chatting with the security guard. This is the man who, when he learned you were a writer researching a novel, promptly went into a locker behind the security desk and took down a battered yellow envelope of poetry. The poems were written by Patrick Nugent, another guard who'd worked on the premises ("Disappeared 4 months ago without a trace. Oh, you would've loved to have talked to him. He'd have talked to you for hours.") and insisted you take home a stapled copy of Patrick's poem "The Tooth Fairy" with the memorable last stanza (Again, for context: Abras = Abrekebabra's = regrettable fast food joint often frequented late at night and against one's best judgment.):

Now patrons of old Abras
Do not listen to any crap
Don't wear your false teeth while eating
Especially after buying a bap.

Henry Hughes, the security guard who insisted I take the poem, was a truly friendly fellow: in his fifties, maybe, fit and energetic, and full of stories. The best of them concerned his run-ins with the great writer and notoriously boozing Brendan Behan. Henry knew all the Behans and reminisced of the fifties and sixties when Brendan roamed the pubs of Baggot Street, often stopping, Henry said, to relieve himself alongside a house just across the street from the hospital. "Do you see that fence over there?" he asked, taking me outside and pointing to a rickety old wooden barrier. "They had it built after Brendan would come by one too many times to use it as a toilet." Apparently the roving Brendan had kicked it in once or twice as well, though the fence still stands near the intersection of Baggot Street and Herbert Street. Had Behan saw fit to amble a few meters in the other direction, he might have looked up to the heavens and seen this 38.

Most curiously, Henry also claimed to be in possession of the only copy of an unpublished poem by Brendan Behan called "The Dregs of the Unemployed" (with a line, he recalls, about "the biddies in furs on Grafton Street") though this, unfortunately, was not included in the collection of poems kept behind the desk in the old coat locker. I longed to know more about the lost Behan poem and asked if I might get a glimpse, but the gregarious security guard remained a bit cagey and secretive on this count. One wonders -- Henry was nowhere to be found the last time I ducked in -- if the secret will remain guarded forever.

#37

#37, Asheville, North Carolina

It was a hot summer day and we were driving through Tennessee listening to Bob Dylan's Love and Theft. Ahead of us lay Asheville and the back of Pascal's van. Behind us, near Gatlinburg, we'd passed a gas station with a teepee and a sign advertising "rat cheese homemade jams & jellies". We'd passed billboards for Cowboys Seafood and the truly dubious-sounding Flyaway Indoor Skydiving (Annie: "That doesn't sound safe." Michael, in drawl: "Now you be sure to pull that cord before you count to one. That floor comes fast!"). Josh, with an air of bewilderment and awe, was pondering the merits of Fleetwood Mac's Tusk ("This album was mixed by a mad scientist. There's no songs, but they're all great songs."). And then, legs cramped and stomachs full of gas station squirrel food, we rolled into Asheville.

We had a few hours before our gig at the BoBo Gallery with hopeful, hypnotic Hope and Anchor and the incredible "Ragtime, Steam Boat Blues, Holes in My Shoes" Woody Pines, so I grabbed an iced coffee from a coffee stand inside a defunct London double decker bus and wandered. Along narrow Carolina Lane, I found this gingerbread purple and red house. Its neighbor, 27, was also decked out in bright finery. I love the odd rockery carefully arranged beneath the window sill.

The townsfolk of Balthrop, Alabama may or may not get to roll into Asheville again soon (we loved it there), but we are happy to be playing tomorrow night at Union Hall in Brooklyn with both Woody Pines and Josh's own Rocketship Park. Check out the amazing, ransom-note collection of typography in their banner; stay for the pretty music.

#36

#36, Harrington Street, Dublin

Who says beautiful architectural ornament and boozing don't go hand in hand? It is Dublin, after all.

The 36, graceful and weathered, stands on a fading yellow building at the pleasant intersection of Harrington and Synge Street. Harrington Street was named after Timothy Harrington, a former Lord Mayor of Dublin and man-about-town, but it's the full text of Recollections of Jonah Harrington (zero relation to Timothy, alas) that led me in my wanderings to drinking songs of the country gentlemen of the 18th century. I apologize if my galling caprice and whimsical digressions puzzle my gentle readers, but I never pass up an opportunity to pass along a good drinking song, and it doesn't get much better than "Bumpers, Squire Jones". It may be useful to know that a bumper is a glass filled to the brim. A sampling:

Ye good fellows all,

Who love to be told where good claret's in store,

Attend to the call

Of one who's ne'er frightened,

But greatly delighted,

With six bottles more:

Learn Bacchus to follow

And quit your Apollo,

Forsake all the Muses, those senseless old crones;

Our jingling of glasses,

Your rhyming surpasses,

When crowned with good claret, and bumpers, Squire Jones.

Harrington was also kind enough to recall the robust ode to intoxication, "The Rakes of Mallow", though commentary in the Recollections claims this is "a jingle far inferior to the one just quoted". Readers, what think ye?

Beauing, belling, dancing, drinking,

Breaking windows, damning, sinking,

Ever raking, never thinking

Live the Rakes of Mallow.

Spending faster than it comes,

Beating waiters, bailiffs, duns,

Bacchus' true begotten sons

Live the Rakes of Mallow.

Living short but merry lives,

Going where the devil drives,

Having sweethearts but no wives--

Live the Rakes of Mallow.

The Recollections of Jonah Harrington (part of the Every Irishman's Library series, a kind of Hibernian Great Books of yesteryear) seems poised to provide many an hour of reading pleasure, and I shall endeavor to share any diverting discoveries here on my fair blogge. And now, if you will kindly grant me pardon, I must heretofore retire, bumper of claret in hand, and devote myself to the task of imbibation.

#35

#35, Dublin

Using a bright green Georgian door for one of my Dublin pictures feels a bit like donning a beret and baguette to show that I'm French, but sometimes a good match is just a good match.

#34

#34, Rotenturm-straße, Vienna

Yes, that Prof. Dr. Freud. His analysis, apparently, was so far-reaching it took up two rooms. Not to mention two titles in front of his name. After his credentials, there was hardly any room left on the nameplate for the 3 and the 4. This man didn’t need an analyst, he needed a good typographer. Still, I'd like to see what a "Freud" font would look like. Serifs? Sans serifs? Or maybe he'd need three different fonts for the id, the ego, and the superego. In any case, a bit more space for the numbers wouldn't do any harm. Unless I'm really burying some unconscious wish about number gratification that -- wait. Looks like my time's up.

#33

#33, Terezin, Czech Republic

What I remember about my visit to Terezin is not the place.  I remember the drawings by children who would not live to see their next birthday, paintings of blue skies cut through with barbed wire.  I remember the musical scores trapped behind glass, knowing that many if not most of the composers had been killed in the Nazi death camps.  In short, I remember the only things my mind could latch onto in a place that had seen such atrocity: art, music, these necessary, brave, humanizing things.  My own words fall short.  Especially redemptive and of interest is this site that provides history and insight into the musical activities of those imprisoned in Terezin.  Also, organizations such as the Terezin Chamber Music Foundation exist today to honor the resilience expressed through these works of art and to commission new works by emerging composers.

Though the setting and context could not be more different, I am reminded of evenings at the Mast House in Woodstock, Illinois.  This was a monthly folk music gathering/pot luck that my Aunt Casey would sometimes take me to on Saturday nights.  It's a ramshackle, cozy place where stringless banjos and guitars hang from the wall, friends and family gather and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" still surfaces as a sing-along.  The seats are metal fold-out chairs and cups of hot chocolate make the rounds as performers of all ages come up to the front to play songs in 10 minute slots.  And if you look up to the loft in the barn-like interior, hanging over the stage, you'll see this painted on the wooden beam in large block letters: "Music alone shall live."

#32

#32, Nassau Street, Dublin

It used to be an Eason's and now it's not. It's just as well for me as my allegiances lie elsewhere at Books Upstairs , easily the best book shop in Dublin. In addition to stocking everything one's heart desires, they also were kind enough to entrust me to the till a few days a week way back when. The owner, Maurice is, as they say, a gentleman and a scholar. I also had the privilege of working alongside a very nice, soft-spoken fella named David whose fake heavy metal band, Plasticine Cöw put on a Halloween show in a dark, sticky bar where I was pelted with skull rings and Time Out bars. It was great craic and certainly the only time I have ever heard a song introduced: "This song is for my Norwegian girlfriend. She makes love like polar bear." Wherever they may be today, I send them my best gutteral growl. The bricks-and-mortar Books Upstairs is at 36 College Green (I love the creaky steps leading up to the mezzanine and the life-sized wooden James Joyce in sunglasses we used to chain to the railings outside every morning) but they also have a very user-friendly online shop. Click around a bit on the site and you'll find some history on the place and plenty of evidence why for many years it's been a haven for book lovers. You also might happen upon this piece of information:

Indeed, a number of our staff through the years have gone on to be published writers, themselves.

Indeed, I shall have to remember that.

But back to Nassau Street. In searching for information about the architect of No. 32, I happened upon a page called Things To Do In Dublin When You're Goth, and things, as expected, just deteriorated from there. The page outlines a few clubs, restaurants and other (dare I say) haunts of a "goth-friendly nature." The site appeared to be as subversive as a Fodor's in black and purple, but I did enjoy a little drift down memory lane reading up about Fibber Magees where the bar is open from "God knows when until 2 in the morning" and the "it isn't the most salubrious pub in the world" might clinch the award for Irish understatement as every time I went there I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn't at the Sturgis bike rally. Fibbers is, incidentally, the only place apart from backstage at a theatre that the thought crossed my mind that everyone is wearing more black than me.

But I digress. No. 32 Nassau Street, shown above, houses the Morrison Chambers . A protected structure, it is an elegant corner building that faces onto the side entrance to Trinity College. (Books Upstairs, on the other hand, looks onto the main arch of Trinity: boo to you, Eason's!) The structure dates back to the late 19th century and has some gorgeous limestone ornament decorating its facade. In 2002, Mahoney Architecture went to work on the guts of the building and created an attic space that has views of the interior dome , timber on the inside and copper on the outside. You can see the beautifully weathered limestone behind the No. 32 in the above photo.

#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.

#30

#30, Vienna

They don't make timepieces like this anymore, and if they do, they ain't selling 'em at Macy's.  The Viennese had the right idea here. Why settle for an ordinary clock when you can work in a whole morality play in the process? While I have spent many content, uneventful years of time-telling with my trusty Fossil wristwatch, I seem to be coming around to the opinion that perhaps no clock is complete without a cherubic youth on one side and Old Man Death clutching his hourglass on the other.

#29

#29, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn

Brooklyn gets a lot of things right when it comes to its buildings, but shielding people from the elements in style is not one of them. It seems all you have to do is turn a corner to see another ugly green canvas canopy flapping in the breeze, screwed haphazardly into the wall by a ham-fisted hired hand. Bodegas of Brooklyn, I understand. I know better than to expect anything more of you than to stay open past midnight and keep your fridges stocked with Harp. But I'm routinely shocked by the number of otherwise respectable apartment buildings that subject their tenants to low-rent circus tent trappings over the front door. Architects, designers, disgruntled supers: doesn't anyone care what's being stuck on the outsides of our homes?

Now for the good part. If you're going to do an entrance, you could do worse than study this canopy along cobble-stoned Tiffany Place. Everything works. The silver 29, well proportioned, maintains a dignified presence to the side. The contrast of materials is striking: the warm red brick looks genteel beside the unfinished dark steel of the door. Up above, the geometric glass canopy looks like an umbrella dreamed up by Buckminster Fuller. It seems to twist and pull itself away from the cables that anchor it. The asymmetry is a little convoluted but well-balanced. A great bit of design.