By Paix Robinson
As with human nature, when the four walls of one’s own home become too clamorous or lackluster for imagination to thrive we retreat. Designer, Yves Saint Laurent had the tapestries and tiles of Marrakesh when his famed Paris fashion house fell under siege in the 1970’s. There he imagined some of fashion’s most elaborate and ingenious pieces. Poet, Allen Ginsberg left Paterson, New Jersey and only looked back from far off destinations like Tangier and Northern California. Boarded up in a tenement studio of solitude in San Francisco he took culture to typewriter and illustrated a large majority of his most celebrated work, Howl and Other Poems. For Bay Area native and Brooklyn resident Nicole Van Straatum, there will always be Suriname.