Category Archives: Last days of the circus

This is the text of an interview in ArtsHub in July 2007.

At music school I was too old to be a young turk, but I used to hang around with them; and we used to say “Resolution is death!” – a reference to the serene uneventfulness of the tonic chord compared … Continue reading →

Hippies, like other fundamentalists, usually believe the world is about to end, continually revising the date as it fails to occur (currently December 21st, 2012). In this part of the world, that belief is melded with right-wing libertarianism, so that … Continue reading →

Panhandling is a major industry here, but in some cases a pure artform, done for its own sake and not out of need, presumably to the chagrin of those begging by necessity.

Galveston, oh Galveston is on an island in the Gulf of Mexico, but is not as romantic as that sounds; it’s flat and surrounded by oil rigs and chemical plants in decline, some of which recently blew up.

Monterrey is magical: it’s surrounded by spiky volcanic mountains, with one emblematic ragged crater, “La Silla”, looming close, and colorful favelas (but they’re not called that here) clustered around the foothills. The city is about Sydney-sized, with a beautiful old … Continue reading →

For some reason I’ve always wanted to be able to say “I’m in Pittsburgh on business”. Now that I am, I see a town that looks like they were building another Manhattan, but ran out of money about eighty years … Continue reading →

If you’ve got a week to kill, N.Y. is the best place to do the crime. So now I’m in Manhattan going “Where is everybody, already?” – after Hong Kong, it feels deserted. I’m at the Harlem YMCA – tiny … Continue reading →

Hong Kong is a hundred years of vertical concrete architecture with smoggy tropical armpits. Every building is completely full of people. The trams are two storeys tall, skinny with wheels very close together; they look as if the only thing … Continue reading →