The Haunting Idle

 

Rome, 2014 

The War on Drugs - The Haunting Idle

White fire

Sarajevo, 2014

Angel Olsen - White fire

Red Hook, NYC

Charleston, SC.

In Charleston, I learned the word quaint, as I've heard it approximately 15 times a day. 

Another of my film burned and graves started to move on the negative for me not being meticulous enough in my picture counting.

St-Louis, MO.

From St-Louis, I mainly remember a non-stop dinner getting pretty bizarre at night, a befuddled waitress dangerously wobbly on her feet trying to serve coffee and a fuzzy walk at night in eerie neighborhoods.

Through Arkansas

                                 

Hope, AR.

I spent some 24 hours in Hope, between trains. The town is famous for being the place of birth of Bill Clinton and for its gigantic watermelons. I visited every museum in town, including one about Paul Wilbur Klipsch, who was some sound genius. 

A burned down building was sitting there, and I was told it has been a jigsaw puzzle factory that went bankrupt and mysteriously went into flames a few months later. You could still see part of those puzzle from the outside.

For some reason, my film also burnt and the backing paper imprinted itself on the negative. I'm still not sure if I like it.



Walking along the interstate to get to my motel, I saw this and found it was both cruel and witty.

For some reason, these kind of signs is what directly pops into my mind when I think about the States, so I got pretty obsessed with that. There where a really cool strech of them along the 270 close to Hot Springs.

New-Orleans, LA.

 

In New-Orleans, I mostly tried to get out of the weird French Quarter and its flocks of drunk tourists. I took a boat to the other side, to Algiers. There was not much to do there, so I sat and watched the Mississippi, imperturbable and placid.

In the Insectarium was an informational display case about how do cockroaches settle in a household. They had put a bunch of them in a doll-sized house. The whole things looked pretty spooky - almost lynchean in a way.

Oh, and there was a webcam in the cockroaches house, so you can actually follow them on a daily base.

Birmingham, AL.

  

I spent a few nights in Birmingham, on my way south. 

The city looked half abandoned, empty streets in a stifling heat and helicopters hovering around.

The park in front of the Civil Rights Museum was crowded with homeless. (Almost) all of them were afro-american.

Myrtle Beach, NC.

I spent some 5 hours in Myrtle Beach, between buses.
An old guy at the Greyhound's told me he was a physiognominist and could read my face.
I was to meet a blue-collar worker, very smart and to have two children, a boy then a girl
- he didn't say if it was with the same guy.

I've been hanging out in dive-bars along the road ever since, but the prediction never came true.

Irving, TX.

I still don't know how did I end up in Irving - suburb of a suburb of Dallas.
There was nothing there, except for churches and car body shops,
and a taqueria called El Jefe.

I stayed in a place on the other side of the road of the Lucky convenience store.
The store clerk was a huge fan of Zinedine Zidane.
In the house were a lot of bumper stickers everywhere, bearing all sorts of texan-pride wisdoms

" Life is too short not to live it as a Texan"