Wow, this interface looks different! (Not the one you’re looking at as you read this, but the one I’m looking at while I type.) My husband upgraded wordpress for my blog last night for the first time since I launched it nearly two years ago now. And it’s totally different. This on the same day that my employer switched to Microsoft Outlook for its email platform. Oh well.

So I finished the Chelsea Hotel book and have tentatively booked a room there for our trip. Photographer Claudio Edinger lived in the Chelsea Hotel in the early 80s and published the book in honour of the hotel’s centennial in 1983. Did you know Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey there? Or that William S. Burrows wrote Naked Lunch there? And Henri Cartier-Bresson stayed there too. I just found all that out yesterday, in this book. Anyways, in the introductory text, Edinger describes the problem of photographing one’s neighbours: “Then my problems began. A woman from the fifth floor, who saw me taking pictures, was convinced that I was with the FBI. She called me to let me know she knew. A notorious Lothario, once convicted of rape, menaced me with black magic, because I photographed him in the halls without his permission. For weeks afterward I checked around my door for little dolls bristling with steel pins.”  He goes on to describe the parade of people who lived in the room next to his, saying “I probably could have done a book just on my next-door neighbors, but at what cost to my safety and sanity I’ll never know.”

In a great section on the history of the hotel and its more famous inhabitants, Pete Hamill says death is part of the romantic myth of the Chelsea, and cites the death of Dylan Thomas there, which is memorialized with a plaque, among others. “But there are no plaques for the people who still arrive, full of hope or despair, to make the Chelsea their home. Years ago, the Life magazine writer Marshall Smith described the Chelsea as ‘the world’s most tolerant, non-expendable third-rate hotel.’ That description remains true today, a hundred years after it rose over 23rd Street. There is a myth of the dead, but within Chelsea people live. When I walk by the hotel on a summer afternoon, I often think about the hundreds of people inside, writing and painting and sculpting and dreaming, and I want someone to celebrate the living. To hell with the waste of early death. Life is lived here.”

Edinger’s beautiful black and white portraits, which remind me of Cartier-Bresson’s portraits actually, do that. You can view many of the photographs in a gallery on his site that pairs photographs from Venice Beach and Chelsea Hotel.