Hotel Chelsea

Have been flipping through Hotel Chelsea, which I first read in January 2010. Oh my, how life has moved on since then. Became pregnant, got engaged, planned a wedding, got offered a new job, moved states, started work, got married, renovated my home, had a baby, husband changed jobs and return home too.

At the time of reading the book, I lent it to a friend, enthusing about it, but also reflecting on the fact that I was having nightmares about being homeless, about living in the Hotel Chelsea but feeling vaguely scared and worried by the ennui, that claustrophobic dangerous feeling that David Lynch evokes so well in Lost Highway. My friend laughed, said it wasn’t hard to draw a link between my real life temporary homelessness and what my psyche yielded in my dreams.

So 18 months along and I’m reading the book and found myself still moderately interested in the individual stories of the hotel residents, but completely put off by the author’s tone and narrative. It was slightly smarmy, "I know better, everyone else is a jerk" type of talk. And so I found myself disinterested from reading any longer. Enough that I read also, of the experience of living at the Hotel Chelsea, in Patti Smith’s book “Just Kids”. She talked of the refuge that she and Robert Mapplethorpe found, relocating there from soul destroying flop houses inhabited by needle junkies who were formerly successful artists/dancers without retirement income…