Untitled (Ooooooh! ... Dat Waskily Wabbit Twikt Me!)

Fig. 1. Jeff Koons - Rabbit, 1986


You can't copyright a self-image.

[Insert The Name Of Your City Here], Mon Amour ...

Fig. 1. Diane Cook - Little Red Lighthouse - Fort Washington Park, Manhattan, 2002

I am less interested in how one locates oneself in a city than in how one locates a city within oneself. ... For the traveller willing to be seduced, a new city is not only an affair of the mind (all that remembering) and body (all that perambulating), but also an affair of the heart. We leave the cities we love as reluctantly as we leave the beds of our beloveds. We leave the cities where we have loved (albeit briefly), and been loved (albeit badly), even more reluctantly.

Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien ... Je Ne Regrette Rien ...

Fig. 1. Andi Domke - Ausgestopftes Meerschweinchen auf Rollbrett (Stuffed Guinea Pig On A Skateboard), 2009.

We can’t always be worthy of our opportunities. We should, however, always strive to be worthy of our gifts, no matter how great or small, because it is from these that we derive our fundamental - and, yes, final - greatness or smallness. In truth, I wish I’d been granted more gifts and fewer opportunities. Too late … too late.

Histories Are The Collective Memoirs Of Our Species

Fig. 1. Anselm Kiefer - Germany’s Spiritual Heroes, 1973


Pasts are lived. Histories are told.

Then There Were Three - Now There Is Only One ...

Fig. 1. Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Francesco Clemente - Alba's Breakfast, 1984


The necessity of sharing the world with others is a fate we can hardly avoid. Sharing our way of being in it, on the other hand, is a fantasy rarely achieved.

On Obscuring, And Unobscuring, Objects Of Desire

Fig. 1. Lorenzo Lotto - Venus and Cupid, c. 1525


A lover becomes a lover long before obtaining, or even locating, the object of his or her desire. Lovers are created (or, rather, create themselves, and each other) the instant they affix a name or image to their latent impulses, which would otherwise have remained worryingly anonymous - and, perhaps worse, perennially amorphous. These names and images are potent aphrodisiacs, as well as the first warning a lover receives that their desire, no matter how precisely objectified or labelled, will always exceed its objects. ... Unsurprisingly, lovers routinely ignore this niggling augury.

Memories Are What Clinch Our Exile From The Past

Fig. 1. Holger Niehaus - Untitled, 2000


Nostalgia is one of the many skins in which we wrap our memories. ... Like us, they perish when flayed.