13th August
I was on the train for 30 odd hours, two sunsets, we arrived in new orleans from new york city just after sundown. The train journey was beautiful in that real melancholic american way that has inspired so much road and train track lyricism. The further south we got, the more animated people on the train became, I had lunch on day two in the dining car and met a very friendly woman from Birmingham, Alabama, whos dream was to visit paris.

So I got to my hotel and its fine, theres a little pool and a free ice machine.I turned on the telly and john waters was on the american graham norton show, john waters is so deadly and ace in a really kitsch way, then I watched hip hop videos on mtv. When I woke up, I went in the pool which is too small to really swim in, but the novelty of getting into water was really great. Guys started arriving to dig and build, wherever I am in america, then, there is some kind of work crew around with angle grinders to cut concrete slabs.
I headed off and did that colt legged new city walking around thing where I wasn’t sure what was up and down or across.
I had coffee in the french quarter sat on a bench watching some amateur painters set up their stalls for the day. They mainly had paintings of jazz musicians in groups rendered in broad loose daubs of oil paint.One of them did this freaky dance every time someone walked past to draw attention to her work.

I went and looked at the Mississippi and walked along there looking at a stylistic cacophony of public space sculpture, provided by various trusts and memorium funds and so on. It was a really odd collection, factional, like the jews had bought and paid for this section, (a naturalistic bronze of a well known local pyllanthropic man talking to a boy), and the croation immigrants had formed an economic alliance with the italians to erect a sculpture over here.( a social realist marble statue of a man woman and child with a suitcase and an angel like figure leaping in the opposite direction out of the backs of their coats, it seemed.Dedicated to THE IMMIGRANT.)
"the historic warehouse district" was really beautiful, stripped brick buildings, huge, vacant seeming, but not, with all the residue of former industry, mills, farming, still embedded on their exterior, words like "shovels, tools, wire rope"painted on bricks and slowly fading.
At the museum of contemporary art in new orleans i saw probably the clumsiest, most uncomfortable but also possibly most incisive pieces of work addressing current race realtions in this country, well, in my time of being here and in what ive been exposed to through choice and through accident.
I really think she has set out to make a mess, somehow. Sylvie Blocher.French. One of three french artists invited by this space to make work for Nouveau Techno, the other two are Claude Closky and Matthieu Laurette.Claude’s work was down. Matthieu’s work is specifically identified as "comedy" I only could watched it for a few minutes it was about the old treaty between france and the usa having an "error" and so france was claiming back the former french territories of the usa in the european courts bla, a spoof, an attempt to trick gullible citizens into making dumb statements.
The Sylvie Blocher work was shot against the stars and stripes. Some of the people featured, Ive included here and ill just put down some of the notes of what people said, as soon as I sat down almost I started transcribing what I was hearing, ive filled in some gaps with a general description.
On Slavery. This was the premise of the work It was obvious at points that she had asked questions but her voice or presence was never revealed.

Black man: I don’t see Bush as sexy at all and if he was black he certainly wouldn’t have become president.
The white man fears the black man’s penis, its an incredibly complicated complex thing and somewhere in the middle is the truth, when they used to lynch a black man they used to cut off his penis.

White woman wearing a Darth Vadar t shirt: Im a single mom, I have a four year old son. I am completely poor, any extra money I have goes on my artwork, Im poor because of it, Im a slave to my artwork.I am enslaved by my work.

Blackman: would I accept the heart of a whiteman? Well, if I had a heart conditon and wasn’t too then …………..then yes , yes I would take the heart, I would, but if I was very close to death I would say no to the heart and I would be free, free to ( paraphrase: to contemplate life and make peace with my maker and leave burdens at the side).

Whitewoman: no, no I wont put it on. Because it’s a hood and it’s a symbol of hate. (Close to tears.) So much has been done its so complcated, theres so much we have to be sorry for.

Whitegirl: plays star spangled banner badly on a kazzoo. Shrugs and says " I don’t know my national anthem very well, relates how she is reading "Their eyes were looking at God" about two generations of Mulatto woman in Louisiana being raped by white masters, then starts to do an abstract shivering motion, looking at the camera and acting fear. (????)

Blackman: Im in a dream and in my dream I kill my first buck. Im watching the deer waiting to see if it’s a buck because you cant kill a doe, im waiting for it to come closer so I can see its sex, it comes closer, it’s a buck, I concentrate I squeeze the trigger real slow, I say to myself, come on now, don’t miss him,and then I shoot, and theres the report and the buck falls straight down…..I go to him, I raise his head up in my hands and I say thank you god.And today his head is on the wall in my garage.
I havenever dreamed of being white.
I have never been with a white woman sexually, and that is a choice, I guess in a way its because I felt superior.

Whiteman: tells a rambling story about researching his family and a newspaper report he found that describes a murder one slave killing another. No indication of how it relates to him or his family.

Blackwoman: (dancing to some music, the lyrics of which include:"Our African gods have not been obliterated)

Whiteman: the whiteman fears penetration and penetration can take many forms, for example when a car goes passed and people are playing heavy beats, that’s a form of penetration and the only people who might appreciate that, apart from black people, are white suburban teenagers…. I don’t think my generation does.noone wants to be penetrated.

Voodoo priestess: I invoke (names many african spirits, matriarchal gods, as well as the one christian god) to come into the hearts of young black people and to make them know that god is in their hearts, and as I say it it will be so."

Whiteman: says nothing just appears with a black puppet making it dance.

This probably isn’t coming across very well, but when I came out of it, its maybe twenty minutes long and I didn’t take notes on everyone.when I came out I had to speak to someone about it because it really left me feeling disturbed, I spoke to the invigilator in the gallery and asked her how it was made(the people were pretty choreographed, the gallery solicited people on behalf of the artist and there was a sense that maybe they picked certain key locals, who would deliver strong text.) the girl said she "didn’t care for the work" like me she specifically didn’t get how the white girl in the darth vadar t shirt could talk about her work in terms of slavery in THIS CONTEXT. The legacy of slavery is so tangible here, literally and physically, its crazy that a white girl thinks she can co-opt that as a metaphor, but at the same time and this is where the work is strong, the artist has offered each participant a sense of entitlement, the space to speak their minds and she delivers to the viewer, I think, the mess of race relations in this country, the shambles of it, she just puts this big fat jumbled mess there on the table and says this is it, she draws no conclusions or makes no distinction between a black man’s individual sense of superiority to a white woman, a white woman who thinks shes a slave to her art, a white woman crippled by "white guilt" a white girl defacing her national anthem and making excruciatingly bad attempts to act "scared" after relating how shes read a classic black testimony to white barbarity, a black man who believes the white man envies his penis and so on and so on and so on. I also spoke to some other people about it, who agreed with me about the complexity of the structure and the intent.

16th of August, 04
Bourbon street is kind of a hell hole filled with piss heads but it has its good points. Its lined with balconies where its traditional for guys to entice girls to flash their tits at them in exchange for these mardi gras neclaces that are just the cheapest baubles you can anywhere in this city. They chuck them down and ive seen girls so pissed they can hardly even pick them up.I keep thinking I can smell vomit, and all the shops have feather boas sort of floating from the interior.My first night on bourbon street, I found a good band and hung out at the bar with a Palestinian girl who has been studying international law in washington.
Last night I went to the Monteleone hotel, where Truman Capote and Tennesee Williams used to drink, it has a revolving bar! I met a nice couple from Houston who recommended that I go to the Ritz carlton to hear the trombonist. So I went up there and it was grand grand grand, a big fancy hotel up on canal street, I thought it was going to be a little dive judging by their demanour, the people, he was wearing a pork pie hat and was clearly a jazz buff. But it was really opulent, and when I got there the set was just finishing and I was taking up a seat next to a really distinguished looking guy so I moved so his friend could take the adjoning seat at the bar and he was so gracious about it he practically bowed and sipped his champagne and kind of gently patted me when he heard I was scottish.Then one of his crowd requested that he play, and he got up and did this really beautiful thing, he talked about the wizard of oz, the tornado, kansas, evoked it all, and then did this totally experimental cranked up concrete piano version of somewhere over the rainbow, you just felt flattened against the wall.

Theres been big tornadoes in florida, I saw photographs of people from trailer parks with all their furniture just in broken heaps all around them…and earlier I had been at the ogden museum of southern art, which was really a good indication of the art ambience here.( A really great painter I discovered is called Benny Andrews.)a wonderful painting called Death of the Crow. And Will Henry Stevens who is a southern icon and in fact designed the ceramic tiles at the Fulton subway stop I use in New York.But one piece, in the theme of tornadoes and brutal weather was called "Hurricane on the Bayou" by Gene Koss, and it was a huge circular slab of clear glass, spun with a dark vortex and speckles, really a great piece and it had a raw steel armeture to support it. Glass is always so mysterious, so much volatility involved in making it.
After Over the Rainbow, when I was walking back on the corner of canal st and bourbon street was this tight entourage of young black teenagers, outside footlocker, all of them playing only drums and brass instruments, this really raw old jazz, really really powerful, I went a bit crazy(to myself) when I heard it I was overjoyed at the vitality and the spectacle of it because it was so unexpected and communicated something about the now-ness of that music and the relevance of it to these young people. Plus it just sounded completely abominably good, there were lots of them playing at once so they had kick ass volume too.A huge electric crowd.

Today I went on the Mississippi on a paddle steamer, the Natchez, there were battle ships anchored up the way, resting, I guess, after being deployed last year. I tend to avoid tours and stuff but this was a really interesting few hours, we sailed past the second largest sugar refinery in the world, biggest is in brazil. It’s a working river in every sense, when I was a kid I read all the mark twain books, huckleberry finn and tom sawyer, and I imagined the mississippi as a big languid lazy river, but it isnt, it’s a really crucial and busy thoroughfare. The sugar factory was really such a FACTORY like from a popeye cartoon, and the battleships were really sleek and BIG, the scale, to sail so close to them theyre really kind of seductive in that way that enormous powerful destructive things ooze energy.
I walked around after that up on canal street.When I first arrived here the hotel guy gave me a map. He drew a cross where we were, then he drew two big crosses at the back of lousi armstrong park, which is right near here, and he said,"you don’t need to go here, you can go in the park in the daytime but here (cross)and here (cross), don’t go there. Then he said, there are good community leaders there trying to do good things but……..anyway they don’t come down into the french quarter because we have police patrolling the whole area. "(Like there’s a forcefield? The vieux cartier has a magic voodoo barrier so youre safe on this street but not the street a block away.) Anyway, as he pointed out, there are invisible lines in these american cities and today I walked to where those lines started to appear, on canal street where you can see it gets poorer and life becomes less comfortable. Im not naïve, I understand the hotel guy is concerned for my safety, I just hate not being able to rely on my own sense of where I can and cant go because before I even set foot anywhere, people are telling me Im in danger.i took some photographs, a theatre converted to a boxing arena with a poster advertising the next bouts as "blood and pain."
Anyway.

I went to the Preservation Hall tonight and heard the Olympia brass band. I am not going to describe it because maybe one day youll get the chance to go there or maybe you have already been, but I just really want to make the point that hearing and having access to something like that was a really big deal to me. I hadnt even heard of the hall until yesterday. Its not like im a huge jazz buff at the holy grail of dixieland jazz because im not, the music was really really phenomenal but the thing I loved more than anything was the grace of it.The ritual. I am acutely aware that I privilege and revere black culture, it was one of the reasons I applied for this residency, and I do so for various reasons, some are simply about taste, some are political …but this set tonight transcended race whilst highlighting it, a paradox, it became simply a human expression of joy in traditional music and sharing the living history of it.Really a rare and special thing.

still from Sylvie Blocher's video work at Contemporary Art Centre, New Orleans

August 18th
Memphis Tennessee
Yesterday I went to Graceland. It was so much better than I thought it would be. I thought it would just be tacky and fun but I left there really thinking specifically about class and poverty and all the things that shone through from the texture of the objects and things he surrounded himself in. And what he wore. I mean Ive always liked Elvis, and I remember running up the stairs with the rolls and the daily record bearing the headline The King is Dead. But I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to come here just for that, I wanted to come to Memphis for the National Civil Rights Museum, to see where Martin Luther King preached and where he was shot at The Lorraine Motel.
But unexpectedly, Graceland I found really thought provoking too and I actually thought it was a really dignified place and humble, in that he revealed his origins through his taste. Ive never really cared for the Las Vegas look, the catsuits, but in real life the garments are totally supreme, they really are beautiful things, in one room, you walk in and there’s like an army of headless elvises and it links straight into the style of people like Sun Ra and Lee Scratch Perry, moving into fashion eccentricities that must somehow errupt from bearing such immense talent and channeling or deflecting the power that comes out of you or towards you.
I really loved it there.

Today I went to the Civil Rights Museum and spent hours looking at all the testimony and the dioramas. It’s a really well put together timeline from slavery onwards. The thing that I always find so shocking is how close the events of the 1960s are to now, how recent these events are, bus boycotts and lynchings and people coming from all over america with the single aim of establishing the freedom schools to teach civil rights strategy, encourage voter registration and non violent confrontation here in these southern states.In New Orleans I had been reading an article on the packaging of the Civil Rights monuments for the tourist industry because right now there are many places of historical significance which arent marked in any way, and this article was basically discussing the marketing and comodification of that and how various communities, white and black were responding, positively and negatively. The thing that really stood out for me was regarding the site of a lunch counter sit in in Carolina, where black students had taken seats at a whites only lunch counter in Woolworths. (This form of peaceful sit in occurred at several counters statewide, while some white people harrassed the protesters by spraying insect repellant, tipping cigarette ash in their hair, emptying the sugar and ketchup receptacles over their heads, punching and kicking them, they sat in silence. Other white people joined the protesters at the counter in support and were equally harassed.) So this Woolworths was to have been demolished and until the site was purchased by two black college preofessors who have held it since maybe the eighties, waiting for the opportunity to reinstate the lunch counter as a monument. What I find interesting about this is how historical significance and space which is crucial to shared history is transacted commercially through private enterprise. I really felt this in New York too, down where I am is by the Vietnam Veterans Plaza which is in an adequate state now but during the eighties, the company who were responsible for its upkeep fell by the wayside. Noone else took responsibility for it so it declined into a terrible state of disrepair and neglect until enough public awareness was aroused to start finance flowing again.
Im not drawing any conclusions here, I am just aware of how precarious these monuments and museums and collections and all of these things are because they need to generate their own economic systems for survival and in some cases Im shocked by that.
Memphis is really really poor. Driving to Graceland the route goes through the ghetto, basically, smatterings of baptist churches with signs out for youth fellowship and miracle meetings. The shuttle bus drops off a couple of people at a famous recording studio half way there and arranges exactly when to pick them up again because "its not a good place to wander about."
I cant get a train to nashville from here, I would have to go back to New Orleans or up to Chicago, if you looked at a map you would see how ludicrous that is. So Im taking a bus over to Nashville tomorrow.
Where Martin Luther King was shot has been preserved as the motel, the museum backs up behind it, theres a wreath permanently outside the room, on the balcony where it happened. And two beautiful cadillacs parked there in the forecourt.There was a documentary I saw once where one of his companions talked about the microseconds after the shots, and he described how he wanted to take fistfulls of atomic particles somehow and force them with his hands into the shape of a gun and shoot back at whoever had done this terrible thing.
The language is always so beautiful, the proclamation of the Promised Land, the astonishing words that persuaded people to take The Freedom Bus leaving behind letters to be posted to their loved ones in the event of them being murdered on the way.

greyhound bus station, nashville

August 21st

I got on the greyhound from memphis on Thursday and arrived here Thursday night, the journey was hellish. A girl at the station was carrying all her posessions around in a threadbare pillowcase and hanging off the public phone. Then she sat next to me and I could see that she had embroidered the name "patrick" on her t-shirt. I was on the second bus to leave memphis for nashville, the first one was chockablock and the second one was too, we were all crammed in there like sardines in a scabby old bus. I had all my luggage wedged around me because I didn’t know youre meant to check your luggage at the counter … because I didn’t have a tag they wouldn’t let me stow my rucksack under the bus I had to take it on board. The bus sat in the heat in the station for forty minutes with everyone trapped on board before it eventually started to trundle up the highway. I was near the back where the most interesting people seem to sit, all sorts of conversations were going on, one guy was down to get his kids back after his wife had kidnapped them. The guy who sat next to me had been on greyhounds since LA he was like the greyhound veteran. He had tried to start a new life in california but couldn’t stand the surfers and the hippies.The couple opposite talked and talked about how their dog had run away and the hispanic girls behind me were pissed off because id stuffed a bag under my seat and they couldn’t fully stretch their legs.At the beginning id said, do you have enough space if I put my bag here? and they said yes that’s fine,but they started to hiss once we’d been on the road a while. It really was a horrible journey.

After the rest stop nearly every single person got back on with wendy’s burgers and fries to gobble on board because the rest stop was a paltry ten minutes….and there was no air conditioning, when I got off that bus after six hours I almost did a little dance of joy.

Nashville!
Music City!
‘"The Buckle of the Bible Belt"

Nashville is …..strange.
On Friday morning I had coffee and realised I didn’t have a clue how to get around. Id got a bus the night before but I couldn’t find the bus stop going the opposite way.I just started walking towards the skyline and downtown wasn’t that far but I had to cross three lanes of traffic in either direction with no signals for pedestrians and then crawl under a big wire fence. There are hardly any people on the street at any time until you get to broadway where theres a cluster of honkytonks, I thought honkytonk was an adjective but its also a noun. I went and bought a ticket for the Grand Ole Opry and arranged transport, and that night, a mini bus came to take me ten miles up the highway to Opryland. There was noone under 60 on the bus and the busdriver made us all say what state we were from, when I said Scotland they all gave me a round of applause, which made me feel really stuipid.
The Grand Ole Opry was so fantastic, its HUGE, and it was full. What I didn’t realise was it’s a radio show too and its broadcast live with live adverts after each act, like for Cracker Barrell and Dickies. It’s full on country, its awesome, the music was really really good, like really great bluegrass from Virginia and good hillbilly and country divas singing broken heart ballads.
Some of the lyrics I heard were:
"a two legged woman is better than a fourwheel drive", "saturdays party is sunday's fight" and "thers a big fat squirrel scratchin his back".
One woman who was on earlier sang a song called "Men in Cars", a litany to all her car obsessed ex lovers, it was like in her lyrics she had stretched every possible connotation of how and when a man might be in a car..but she sort of took it too far, she should have stopped at steve mcqueen and james dean but she strayed off into
"The popemobile, the batmobile, we just can’t get enough of men in cars."
That’s entertaining.

On the bus home, everyone was moaning about how rubbish the show was, that there were people who shouldn’t have been allowed near the stage of the opry, someone was specially miffed that there were fourteen year old banjo players up there. Mainly they were disgruntled because of the lack of style, that people hadnt dressed up, that there was a group up there, one in a yellow tshirt, one in a brown, no co-ordination. I was smiling at all this, it was so endearing that they were missing their rhinestone cowboys. I would have loved to see more of that too, the first guy who introduced the acts was wearing a purple rhinestone two piece, he was the guy that used to do a tv show with dolly parton, which launched her career years ago. An opry veteran came on, jennie seally, she was fantastic like a real big smoky presence and she sang an amazing song but she seriously needed to comb her hair and had no shoes on. Apparently, according to the folks on the bus home.
I do get it, a sadness at the contemporary lack of opulent style because its what country is about,that glamour. I went a bit nuts at the Country and Western Museum because of that, like that aspect of this genre is really really special.Really beautifully crafted garments from early country were in there... they had elvis’s gold cadillac in there, all the fittings are gold plated and its such a beautiful colour. They mixed ground up diamonds and fish scales with the paint to get the lustre. Really so beautiful and amazing to see.
The museum goes from around 1920 to present day so you do experience how the genre has expanded commercially, the 70s and 80s were really interesting in country, that’s when, I guess, people like Tammy and Dolly really solidified a particular glamour and the music crossed over into pop hybrids.
There was a good interview with Loretta Lynn talking about the radio when she was young, lying wrapped in a quilt hearing the songs… and it really struck me how a lot of these iconic country women never stop being little girls… like no matter how old they become they perpetuate this girlness, which isnt immaturity or weakness its like a cultural position, like they must always be newlyweds or young divorcees, preserved like candied fruit in their songs.Right now I really love Loretta Lynn, her newest album is just incredible and when I look at the cover image of her gibson guitar with the mother of pearl inlays of her name I shiver mildly, it’s exquisite, ive been looking at guitars a lot.
I think the thing with Loretta Lynn’s guitar is in what she must have invested in that object in all the years she has played it, what it must mean to her.Also, for me its always meaningful how decoration is utilised to personalise things, how objects are customised within the boundaries of their functionality.Ornament is not a crime in Country.

Something that is a crime though is the bronze portraiture in The Hall of Fame. Each person in there has a bronze plaqul with their name on and its really unbelievable how unlike the person every single one of them looks. Willie Nelson is the only one who looks good.
My new hero is Nudie, the rodeo tailor. There were loads of examples of his garments in the museum. Its really obvious how this style was influenced by Native American decoration and craft but Ive never really read enough to know if this is acknowledged.
I also went to the Frist Art Centre this stunning huge ex post office. The current show was a Nashville artist, Red Grooms, I absolutely thought it looked dreadful from a distance but it wasn’t. It definitely wasn’t what I thought I wanted to be looking at but in conjunction with the other show, social consciousness in painting in America’s great depression, it really worked well as a juxtaposition. Grooms makes 3D scultpural comic-book-esque drawings, diroamas of people and places and the main body of work on show was made in new york. Lots of it is quite unpalatable to me stylistically,but I did really admire the inventiveness of his 3Disms in paper, and there was one portrait of his mother that was so sensitive and poignant next to the brashness of the new york series.I think hes managed to make a version of new york which would resonate with a lot of people in its exaggerated charicature.It’s very 80s.
The earlier paintings from the depression were remarkable some of them, artists spending time in Hooverville shantytowns and painting pictorial vistas of people scavenging for food. Cows dying of thirst in dustbowl landscapes and unemployed workers gathering to demonstrate, before being dispersed by water canons.

With great difficulty I attended an opening here as well, someone gave me totally garbage directions to where a group show of very young nashville artists was on. This happens a lot to me here in america, people seem to talk shit when it comes to telling me where things are. I was walking for miles then realised I wasn’t getting there, so when I came to a cluster of stuff, a guy in a garage told me I was miles from where I was going. I got a bartender to call me a cab and made it there. I had to make sure the driver came back for me or id have been roaming around miles from anything. The show sounded good on paper, I read about it in the listings, but there wasn’t much going on apart from one girl who was doing something pretty interesting in the context of nashville, she was painting with make-up, nail varnish, combining it with enamel paint to make these laquered, boxy, abstract little works, I really liked them so I spoke to her, Kristen Burton.She was making work with false nails as well which sounds smart, im quite into the idea of false nails as crazy little things, little hard colour things, hard candy has to be one of the best names for nail varnish ever, anyway, it reminded me of these stocking zeena parkins was given by bjork, made by As Four in New York which had a the back seam embellished with a frond of false nails, SO COOL. I have never seen them but some things are better in your imagination as concepts, you don’t need to look at them. You DO need to look at elvis’s gold cadillac though.

August 24th
Atlanta, Georgia.

I am indolent. It’s like wading in a big thick river here, but its so interesting and somehow not at the same time, the first night here I walked a little way into Sweet Auburn an area which used to be the commercial and cultural centre of African America in the 1900s. Its really delapidated now, Martin Luther King came from here, I think, and there is a museum and a library and other landmarks dedicated to that history.I took a bus further down there today up towards Little Five Points which is where all the vintage clothes shops and gear like that are, a great bookshop. It drove past many Martin Luther King community ammenities as memorials, like swimming pools and study centres and centre for non violent protest and so on. Sweet Auburn really is impoverished though, and the King buldings are weatherworn. Im going back there tomorrow.
First I went on the subway which is really european feeling compared to new york, like its big and airy like a subway in norway or something.Those are the bits that are interesting,the neighbourhoods and the transport system. Where I am isnt at all, its just big corporate breezeblocks. My hotel has a swimming pool which never has a soul in it, it sort of gives me the creeps so that once im in it, im in a hurry to get out again. And today I set out to visit two galleries, one in particular, the museum of folk art. I was desperate to see and its all shut up and the art school gallery was lying empty in fact people were storing their bikes in it. And I contacted some curators and such here, well at short notice, but had no replies or people were installing or not available and so it does feel odd, like arriving in a city where noone wants to talk to you and theyre hiding all the best stuff. This is augmented by the fact that I feel totally exhausted by the heat and humidity as soon as I get outside. But there is for sure something really really interesting about Atlanta, it feels historical, like memphis did, deeply, and painfully, nashville felt slighter, and definitely whiter.
I take the train back to NYC tomorrow night, I feel very sad about leaving the states in only a few weeks.

Nudie, the rodeo tailor