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- The man, Timothy, had a shaggy-dog story about riding a freight train to Texas from Chicago, which sounded like the blurb of a Jack Kerouac novel. I soon learned that Timothy had been in and out of the mental health system and that he’d worked intermittently as a window-cleaner. He had never known his father. His mother was ‘somewhere in Ohio’. What struck me was his wide-ranging knowledge of popular culture and the ability to combine it with references to art. He spoke in quick-fire bursts and said that listening to John Coltrane’s jazz album Blue Train (1957) was like ‘hearing prickly bits of Yves Klein’ and that Jay-Z’s hip-hop song ‘Picasso Baby’ was so bad it would make ‘Beuys’ dead hare come back to life and start shitting in people’s ears’. Eugène Atget’s Paris photographs, he said, were like watching a ‘white arrow split the air of Brian Eno’. I pressed him about being drawn to Graceland and he simply said: ‘It’s about me.’
Dendrophobe · 3482 days ago · link ·
I had this playing in the background when I saw this story. Kind of a funny coincidence. I just bought a copy of Graceland a few weeks ago, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.