Maaaaaaan

Obsessing over the sound of 'Blase' by Archie Shepp.

At half past one in the morning.

After getting back finally from France at midnight.

After being delayed in stupid fucking tiny french airport for hours.

And after promising my mother I would not touch my laptop.

I read an article in the FT magazine (or at least I think it was the FT. Some newspaper colour supplement anyway) last weekend, about this photographer guy in like the 50s or something in New York (what is it about 50s New York? The Beat Generation running round in coffee shops - remind me to talk about Howl some time - and all those Salinger characters talking in italicized syllables, which is just darling.) Anyway he lived in this loft and all these incredible people, like writers, and Jazz guys, and artists, and just random junkies and prostitutes and everyone hanging round and he took pictures of them all, and I just googled him to find the pictures because if I can't live without them you can't either. So here you go.

Also dreaming of the day I move out and get my own flat. (In New York... or Paris... or Rome... (mmmm gelato)) And yes, I will confess this is mainly so I can smoke naked in bed and hence complete my image of tortured existentialist/jazz person/beat generation wannabee. While reading Sartre. In French (yes, this is what I have been attempting to do for the past week - pretentious I know but so worth it) And this rather nicely leads me to my other new obsession, which is this passage from 'Nausea" - best book ever. I'm copying and pasting it directly, because I just need to share the beauty. It's so beautiful it makes me cry.

I think about a clean-shaven American, with thick black eyebrows, who is suffocating with the

heat, on the twentieth floor of a New York skyscraper. Over New York, the sky is burning, the

blue of the sky has caught fire, huge yellow flames are licking the roofs; the Brooklyn children

are going to stand in bathing drawers under the jets of hose-pipes. The dark room on the twentieth

floor is baking hot. The American with the black eyebrows sighs, gasps and the sweat rolls down his

cheeks. He is sitting, in shirtsleeves, in front of his piano; he has a taste of smoke in his mouth and,

vaguely, a ghost of a tune in his head. "Some of these days." Tom will come along in an hour with

his hip-flask; then the two of them will flop into leather armchairs and drink great draughts and the

fire in the sky will come and burn their throats, they will feel the weight of an immense, torrid slumber.

But first the tune must be written down. "Some of these days." The moist hand seizes the pencil on the

piano. "Some of these days you'll miss me, honey."

There. Irrelevant, really, to the plot of the book, but one of the most fucking beautiful passages I've read in a long time.