(above image was created with electric sparklers, a gift from Angus Chassels, on the roof of the Chelsea...which was, on Sunday night, a grotto of slick steps and slanted windows in the blue mist of the rainy city...)

I stayed in Janis Joplin's room, 125, but I didn't know that until the next morning. The list of artists who have called the Chelsea home is spectacular, but I was there in pursuit of Tennessee Williams' ghost. I often end up at his old haunts, such as The Columns in New Orleans and the dunes of Provincetown, Massachusetts. 

Hotel staff, strangers and friends sat together in the dark, painting with light, sharing our histories, speaking of the changing times, as I wondered what might happen if I started on the first floor and knocked on each and every door in that place to discover the inhabitants. How much time do you really need to KNOW something about someone--or to know everything you need to know, anyway, to create a snapshot in your mind?

Leonard Cohen wrote Chelsea Hotel #2 about a romantic encounter with Janis Joplin. I think the sheets on the bed where it happened have been changed since then, but certainly not the mattress, where I slept with the memories of light-words and music in my dreams...unless it happened in his room, and not hers... 

Either way, the photos below are in honor of Leonard Cohen, and particularly the line in Hallelujah:

"There's a blaze of light in every word, it doesn't matter which you heard...the holy, or the broken Hallelujah..."

The light paintings are a record of how time takes shape, constantly, now...now...now...