Take Me Home I'm Finished

Francis Street, Dublin

"You write until you come to a place where you will still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again... When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through."

--Ernest Hemingway

Skull Hunting in Venice

Venice, Italy

The bus from Venice trundled down the long causeway, carting a dazed load of passengers away from the world's most improbable city. I was one of them that day, weary and delirious on a still-bright July evening after my first day of exploring this odd settlement, this treasure nest, this town built on sticks in a swamp.

It's easy to fall in love with Venice. But for me, it isn't about the picture-perfect vistas or the Guggenheim or the 80 cent prosecco you can by from a kiosk alongside the Grand Canal. OK, it's kind of about the 80 cent prosecco you can buy from a kiosk alongside the Grand Canal. But Venice, with its serpentine lanes and secret bridges and dead-ends, is the sort of place where I feel like someone took a screwdriver, dug into the control panel in my brain where the deepest dreams are stored, and programmed a place just for me. My map was useless. I just gave up, and let myself be led.

Just when I thought I'd succumbed to Stendhal Syndrome -- that condition where you pretty much drop dead from overexposure to culture and beauty -- just when I thought it couldn't get any better, I gazed out of the bus window on the way back to the hotel and -- what was that blur I saw? -- SKULLS! Skull signs! Skull signs on a rusty railway bridge! First one, then the next zipped past while I craned my neck to gawk at these high-speed flashes of silver and rust. A morbid procession of eerie warnings flashed past my vision, an entire typographical ossuary. The Rialto Bridge? Yeah, yeah. Sipping prosecco on a gondola on the Grand Canal? Uh-huh. Whatevs. Whisk me off to Venice and all I'm gonna do is slum for skull signs.

The bus passed over the bridge before I could dig up my camera, carting me off to the Hotel Ambasciatori. There I dragged my luggage into the lobby, checked in, and obsessed. About the skull signs. I knew there'd be no rest in my head till I went back to find them and photograph them. Time and distance can be hard to judge in a foreign city with a fizzy head full of bubbly. I knew this. Nevertheless, I gave my head an optimistic scratch and thought to myself whimsically: Well then, how about I just pop out a minute with my camera and take a little stroll to that bridge over the railroad tracks? How far could it possibly be?

Forty-five minutes later, eyes squinting in the hot sun, I arrived to my destination. Skullbridge. Granted, trudging uphill through the industrialized outskirts of Venice isn't everyone's cuppa tea, but it's not a bad way to spend an afternoon. And granted, skull signs are their own reward. But I do recall the weird feeling as I stood by the side of the road, alone in my derelict pilgrimage, stared at by well-to-do Venetians on Vespas as I angled my camera over the rusted railroad tracks. One reason is as good as any when it comes to collecting images. It was a long slog, yes. But worth it. You do it for the love of the quest.

Skull Orchard

Temple Bar, Dublin

I'm two days late for Halloween. I'm up to my neck in offline writing. This image doesn't have any typography in it. Or numbers. Or ampersands. What does it have, then, you ask? Skulls. Lots and lots of skulls. And when you're racing toward a deadline, it's good to have a couple of these fellas grinning at you. Perspective, call it.

Dublin Dereliction Duty: The Snug

The Liberties, Dublin

I like this one, even though the crouching kid in the window reminds me of that precious Tears for Fears album cover. Cheer up, kid, and go get yo'self some mad bric-a-brac.

Outside the Locksmith's

West Village, NYC

Typespotting: Tea or Coffee?

Baggot Street, Dublin

Poor W.B. Yeats. Seventy-one years after his death and while the rest of the world reveres him as the formidable author of poems of terrible beauty, in Dublin, he's still the guy who was dragged into Toner's, ordered a sherry, and rose stiffly from his chair, announcing, "I have seen a pub. Will you kindly take me home now." Hard to live that stuff down, bud.

Toner's happens to be home to my favorite "James Joyce and Sean O'Casey drinking absinthe" mural, but it's also home to this small typographical gem of a sign on the exterior of the pub, just near the entrance. Perhaps Yeats, not known to be a drinking man, could've saved himself from ridicule by ordering a simple tea or coffee instead of a sherry, which I've only ever imbibed because I was getting drunk on a Sunday morning in the chaplaincy with the Trinity College Chapel Choir. (Proper routine was to drain the bottles quickly, then wait out in the street till O'Neill's opened to wash the churchy taste out of our mouths with a proper pint and a carvery lunch.) It's hard to imagine sherry being anyone's poison of choice, but then "The W.B." had other things on his mind than what he was drinking.

Hard drinking habits aside, I'm always a sucker for a good Irish/Gaelic "T" and a hand-painted steaming cuppa. Goes down wonderfully with a slice of "The Second Coming" or "He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead."

Dublin Dereliction Duty: Street Graffiti Puzzlers

The Liberties, Dublin

Ah, fun with negative space. At first I thought this was simply a case of paper slowly deteriorating, then I saw a cornflake in a lightbulb, and last but not least, like a believer finding the face of Jesus in a bowl of pancake batter, I saw the shape of a familiar icon begin to reveal itself in the black and white remains. Fun, innit?

Some folks like to puzzle over Sudoku, the gluttons for punishment, and others whittle away at the cryptic crossword. But if you, like me, prefer to take your brain teasers on the go, there's no shortage of this stuff on the walls and sidewalks of a city. Peeling signs. Half-painted murals. The head of the Bride of Frankenstein superimposed on a leg in fishnets. Trying to figure out what it all means may not lead to any answers or hot meals, but it's good if you're a city dweller to get in touch with one's inner hobo. Who knows, maybe if this recession keeps up we'll all be eating out of trash cans and communicating via scratched signs anyway. Might as well get a head start.

Also, there's room here to improvise a haiku if anyone feels so inspired. There's a few words to get you started, but the rest of the space is all yours.

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: Wines & Spirits

The Liberties, Dublin

It's been a good while since the ampersand has gotten an airing in these parts, so consider this one long overdue. As for the Gothic lettering, I've been a fan of these typefaces ever since my childhood when the family would pile into the car and, on special occasions, go to the neighboring suburb to a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in a strip mall called Castlewood. Castlewood, alas, is long gone, replaced probably by some insipid T.G.I. Fridays, but it lives on in memory. The place was not nearly as theatrical as Medieval Times -- no jousting, no surly nose-ringed cocktail wenches -- but it did milk the castle theme for all it was worth: heraldic menus, suits of armor lodged into red-velvet nooks and, of course, this Olde English font that's de rigeur for any decent castle-themed establishment.

As for this crumbling artifact in the Liberties, who knows how long it will be allowed to stand in its current state of decay. But I do know that wines & spirits signs go hand in hand with the weekend.

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.