Thursday, August 22, 2013

UNE JOURNÉE EN ENFER






Wilfredo Lam, The Jungle, 1942-44
 

A lifelong, born and bred New Yorker, shouldn’t say this, I suppose, but yesterday in Manhattan was une journée en enfer.

From Penn Station to Penn Station the city was a wild sordid assemblage of grimacing grotesques.

Everyone looked unhappy or insane (I don’t think it was the heat, which was intense) and, oddly, I didn’t observe a single person who looked like any other person or anyone I knew.

My phone rang constantly and everyone I spoke to seemed to have lost their mind and be consumed by anger.  It really was a lot like a Twilight Zone episode, with all the terror but no art.

It’s a cliché, but I really can’t work out how I ever lived there.





Wilfredo Lam, Sans Titre, 1973

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