The Half Century Mark Hotel at Sixty North

An Imaginary Space about Becoming Real

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  • Questions

    Questions

    A Letter from Jean(ne) Baret, a French herbswoman and the first woman to circumnavigate the globe, to Her Son.

    Although many aboard Baret’s ship kept diaries, no first person accounts of Jean/ne’s direct experiences have been found. These series of letters imagines her words as she might have written to her children had they survived her.

    My dearest Moonbeam,

    Tomorrow will be five years since I lost you.

    I know. Lost isn’t right because I gave you

    Up. Abandoned you for me. Our only way out. Do you see?

    I mean when you close your eyes do you ever see me?

    I mean, do you even see? Uneven see? Is there dusk?

    Or dust? A dawn? A new day? My only way out is still

    up. Still out. Spill out. To only you my son. My moon. My all.

    And now I must rest. In order to conjure your reply in bubbles and babbles.

    Love Maman

    photograph: For Roberto Matta by Patricia Christakos, October 2023

    My Jean/ne Baret, is an ongoing multidisciplinary project. I make photographs and videos using found images, paintings and floral designs that hold significance to Jeanne Baret’s life. I also am creating a series of fictive letters and collages between Jeanne and her two-three children who may have all predeceased her. Roberto Matta (Chilean, 1911–2002) was an important artist in the Surrealism movement. His oil painting, In the Center of the Water, Au Centre de L’eau, 1941 was the inspiration for this post. Baret’s time in Chilean Patagonia near the Magellan Straits was incredibly arduous. Yet I feel that Baret found strength in the work she did in Chile. For more photos in this series go to http://www.patriciachristakos.com.

    Roberto Matta, In the Center of the Water, Au Centre de L’eau, 1941

  • Still Dreams

    Still Dreams

    Snow Job II_Patricia_ChristakosI know it’s been awhile. So long that the world changed since we last spoke. Is that even possible? Is this all a dream?

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    Several, lots of severals, months ago I stumbled into a wondrous rabbit hole filled with kind people and colorful props. The pictures moved. And the dresses danced. I felt at home there. 

    Snow Job III_Patricia_ChristakosNow I make pictures that move. I’ll show you one day. There’s no rush. The world is still a mess. Yet still I dream.

    [photographs are from my new multi-media work, Snow Job]

  • Interiors

    Interiors

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    Somedays I imagine my Hotel’s interior like the belly of whale. Pink? No, more like the inky blue of a midnight sky lit by a super moon chandelier. How do you imagine the interior of an imaginary hotel? Someone shared with me recently that to them hotels are  transient, impersonal places, not necessary conducive to permanence or deep rooted connectivity or imaginary delight. Totally paraphrasing my friend’s remarks; she may have just said that she prefers to stay at B and B’s. But she made me think. Why do I like to imagine hotels as such dreamy, blank slates, waiting to receive whatever memories and hopes, fears and residuals that accompany me on any given journey? For me such a place offers an escape from the habitual concerns of domestic life. No clutter. No demands of individuality or worse: good taste. To stay in such a place can be positively, or darkly, inspiring. And curiously, this leads me back to thoughts of home. See more of what I’m working on here.

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  • When Slips Fly

    When Slips Fly

    So many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible.” —Norman Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth 

    This week I gave a speech. I think it possibly went quite well.

    Judge for yourself, said the White Queen.

    ———————————

    *The time has come, the speaker said

    To talk of many things:

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    Of shoes—and socks—and sealing-wax, and photographs that sing.

    And why the world is boiling hot and whether slips have wings.

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    The Girls were shining. Up you see,

    To shimmer was their right:

    They did their very best to make

    Their fabric smooth and bright—

    And this was odd, because they were

    A riddle clear as night.

    ———————————

    *Thank you to Lewis Carroll’s Alice who traveled Through the Looking Glass to meet the Tweedle brothers. Whereas Mr. Carroll offered pigs with wings, we preferred our blip with slips.

    ———————————

    There is no doubt that our Slips have wings. The Hotel has been a flutter with their recent activities: a lecture, two newspaper accounts and an art show. And former slip-wearers continue to come forth, bursting with their own evocative slip tales and memories of distant stars and girls on hot tin roofs. One generous guest even gave us some orphan slips to nurture and groom. These new girls are waiting in the wings, clamoring to be seen and introduced. Soon, sillies. Soon.

    ———————————

    All photos by Patricia Christakos from her 2016-2017  series, Permission Slips. Pictured from top – bottom:

    Waiting, to Fly

    Flying II (Demi-Blu Moiety)

    Flying III (Blanche Marvels) 

    Flying IV (Ebony Moiety) 

    Flying I (Blanche Marvels)

    ———————————

    ps.  This post was originally intended to address the author’s fear of public speaking, something along the lines of If slips can fly, I can share their stories without throwing up. But that train got delightfully sidetracked by flying pigs, climate change and Lewis Carroll’s poem The Walrus and The Carpenter.  Thank you for trying to follow along.

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    pps. We just received exciting information regarding winged pigs. Seems that John Steinbeck would sign his letters and books with a delightful drawing of a pig with wings, a symbol of himself as ‘earthbound but aspiring: Ad astra per alia porci’.  How lovely is that? Meet Steinbeck’s “Pigasus“ here.