All Picks posted by Georg Diez
So this is what happened next: I lost my black scarf, the one I bought with Christopher in Delhi at this really small market next to Connaught Place – for some reason I always want to say Connaught Square –, it was the last day that we were [more]
Weather is rarely obvious, decided, easy to figure out, especially not in Berlin: Here the weather always comes with a hidden meaning or agenda, there is some undertow to it, some otherworldliness even, that makes it very uncomfortable and hard to adjust. Yesterday, for example it was supposed [more]
Weather, you ask, the weather? No, just weather, as in: just Facebook. Or is it The Facebook? See. Plus, is there anything more profound, anything more surreal, anything more threatening and heart-warming and staggering genius than weather, the? See. This is why we do it. Look at the [more]
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. This is, of course, what F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, about age and fame and love and wisdom and trying to push ahead and fight, for yourself, for what you believe in, what you want [more]
Use ideology wisely. But use it. Ideology is not necessarily bad. It gets things moving. It shakes things up. It puts a certain force and urgency behind arguments and observations that if lacking will be felt like a bucket draging behind a boat as you try to move [more]
So the rift is really a strategic thing. It is a border to cross, a threshold, it tells you: Now you are here, but maybe you want to be there, so if you want to be there, you better move. If you don*t want to move, that is [more]
We talked about hedonism, and Armen, maybe without really meaning to, sounded like that might be a problem. The good life. The pretty things. The pretty people. The pretty clothes. I knew what he meant. But this is the problem, right, of 2000 years of falsehood. Because: Hedonism [more]
The rift was there, infront of our eyes. There was a sense of time, a sense of ending, a sense of urgency. Armen was very adamant about it. The new way of thinking, the new way of doing things, or doing business, of bringing people together, the new [more]
The trouble with a classicist he looks at a tree That’s all he sees, he paints a tree The trouble with a classicist he looks at the sky He doesn’t ask why, he just paints a sky The trouble with an impressionist, he looks at a log And [more]
I was going to read the fascinating new edition of Merkur, the flashy, amazing, heart-stoppingly astute magazine for retired German professors and stuck-up Feuilletonisten – I was at their office on Mommsenstraße a while ago to witness the latest scoop of German publishing, a new edition of the [more]
This is what happened 2013: I had arranged a few days back with a writer whose name you might or might not know to meet at Mogg & Melzer on Auguststraße around four. He wanted to go and see the game of Alba Berlin later, I wanted to [more]
It is there. At any given moment. And it is always elusive. One can never catch it, name it, live with it. One can never be one. So why is there this romantic notion that in writing you can be yourself? As if this was some holy sacrament [more]
I think Gin Tonic is austerity and hedonism at the same time. Getting drunk without getting pissed. You can have the cake and eat it all. It is a drink in an age of crisis. It is stabilty, security, without Spießigkeit. You can rely on Gin Tonic. You [more]
I want to start a little project: I want to uncover the meaning of Gin and Tonic. What is it about this drink? Why is it so of this moment? Why is the moment so Gin and Tonic? Where was it a while ago? Why is it everywhere [more]
I ordered a book today because I was listening to NPR on the way to Friedenau which is a very remote part of Berlin if you come from Mitte and Mitte is Berlin and all you see every day is Mitte with its Mittepeople in their Mitteclothes – [more]
What is it about American Express? What is their business modell? I once made the mistake, out of sheer conceit, to give in to a woman who presented to me the Platinum Card as a way out of the constraints of the middle-class, my ticket to a world [more]
What is it about manhood? There is talk, there is envy, there is ambition, there are lies, there are misunderstandings, there is silence, there is boredom, there is food, there are women, there are friends, there are enemies, there is soccer, there is sex, there is the thing [more]
When I think of Michael, I think of him sitting in front of a school or what it exactly was, I don*t know, he has his dark blue down jacket on and jeans and brown desert boots and he has this book by Einar Schleef in his hand [more]
Sometimes I am late adapter, sometimes not. In the case of Miley Cyrus I am not sure. I guess I am late, but then again, what does that mean if you see a girl on a wrecking ball swing through a studio full of plastic walls? When was [more]
It happened. Claire trumped Francis. And I was surprised, I was not stunned, it was only TV after all. But after a while, this is the thing with a series, you are they. So when I wrote yesterday that the marriage of House of Cards was one of [more]
Claire and Francis. Two nice names. Not two nice people. Their marriage is a vow: to succeed. Failure is not an option, as they say. I am not sure yet how far they would go. He might go farther than she does, that is so far the impression. [more]
So Alice Munro has won the Nobel Prize for Literature 2013, and everybody is content as they should be because: the first Canadian, a woman with grey hair and bright eyes, a “master of the short form” is something to be content about. A good thing. Well, I [more]
If the American Empire is really to fail, like all empires before it and after it, it will at least be well documented. There it is all, paranoia, autodestruction, total failure: the collapse of society on all levels as shown on The Wire, the collapse of the individual [more]
One. There is no reason to wait for any literary prize, any time, let alone the Nobel. Two. Prizes are modern day shamanism. Three. And as such not totally untrustworthy. Four. It can be like watching a volcano; you may not like it, but there is nothing much [more]
It is a song of the death, this existential ballad, it is a night without end and a sleep with no coming back, it is red like the moon and dark like the sun, it is Büchner and it is rock’n’roll, good and plain, with a voice full [more]
They used to say that we live in an age of Nervosität. This was in the 1910s and 1920s. Today it is less the age which is nervös, it is more the people. So what is the difference? It is the difference between a war without and a [more]
What do you do when you sit up in the Swiss mountains eating ecologically correct beef served by the most hunble of Swiss? If you have come here on a boat across the Vierwaldstätter See with captains who look like all they want to do all day is [more]
I wanted to write this post in German, because I thought there would not be a good English equivalent to the word angenehm which means pleasant, more or less – so is pleasant a good category for thought, for culture, for judgement, for measuring art, people, the world? [more]
The thing about Thomas Pynchon is, always has been, for me at least, this strange combination of a certain Vorfreude because of the newness of the new work and a nauseating feeling the first, depending, 45 to 450 pages on. This confusion, is there a higher purpose to [more]
Everybody is looking for something. Everybody seems in crisis. Everything is crumbling. Well, the appearance is still there. You look the same. Just a little worn. Just a little tired. But underneath. The shallows. And it is not only you. There is insecurity all around. It used to [more]
Something came up, and I had to interrupt reading James Salter and start reading Gideon Lewis-Kraus instead. I know Gideon from a few years back, he was recommended by a friend, Christopher and I were looking for somebody to help us with this 80*81 research about the great [more]
This is an experiment. I am reading James Salter, 88, about his life, a life, about love and sex, so far, marriage in the fifties, New York in the fifties. There is a certain Mad Men glow over this book All That Is which seems to capture something [more]
I saw Leonce und Lena today, a play which might be overrated or overly beautiful, I could not tell from the children*s version we went to with my kids at the Opernhaus Zürich. I had seen the play before, a couple of times actually, the adult version. I [more]
What Don DeLillo achieves in such a perfect way is this mixture of looking at the present with a critical perspective (is there any other way) and understanding more than condemning what he sees and describes. For a while now I have been trying to remember where that [more]
What happened? It looks like Versailles was nothing but a trailer park somewhere in the vicinity of Cologne. There are empty bottles of Coke. There is fruit on the table. The furniture is half royal, half brothel. A fake fire-place in gold. An apocalyptically huge gold cat, one [more]
Now that Armen Avanessian brought it up, it might be time to talk about Mid-Atlantic. It was Anne Philippi who said the other day in the skype chat that we had between Los Angeles, Zurich, Delhi, Vienna and Berlin that she had heard people talk about this new [more]
It was a cold morning when I met Pussy Riot, in the basement of a bookstore not far from a subway station where a man waited for me by the stairs. He did not talk much on the way, his English was poor, my Russian non-existent. I was [more]
If it was bad before, it is worse afterwards. The major political parties in Germany had more or less given up the game of politics heading towards the elections, now they refuse to even consider doing the possible, thinking the realistic, enlarging the field of options instead of [more]
We took a cab to the election party of the SPD. The result, this much was clear after the first forecast at six pm., would be unpleasant for the Social-Democrats. And at the Lindengarten, another very German pub where politics is being made in this country, the mood [more]
And what a night it was. Pankaj came over to meet me at Pariser Platz. He was in town to see his old friend Hal Hartley who had just left Berlin because he took up a teaching job which he was forced to take up because nobody will [more]
Yes, it sounds like Joseph Conrad, and yes, this is what Lichtenberg still is for many people: The horror, the horror. Heart of darkness. This is why we went there. Because we dare. Because we boldly challenge old assumptions. Because we had Monkey 47 and Thomas Henry with [more]
It was, in a way, day one. This is where it happened. So we went. To see and understand. Alexanderplatz, the place where the young Jonny K. was beaten to death, the place where the GDR had ice cream, the place where there used to be the gate, [more]
And so we went. Beautiful Alexanderplatz. A lot of people. They came for the candidate. Or for the beer. Lou took a lot of stickers home, a two lunch boxes, a bit of candy, a few pens. It was a good place for the Social Democrats. It is [more]
I only met Marcel Reich-Ranicki once. It was at his apartment in Frankfurt, I was there with my friend and colleague Dominik Wichmann for an interview about everything, Reich-Ranicki*s wife Theophila opened the door, she led us into the living room, there was a large black sofa and [more]
There is a very popular trend in so called avantgarde theater which is reenactment. It is meant to show power structures, make guilt, shame, the forces of history more palpable. But what if reenactment becomes politics? Does this have the same enlightening effect? Or is it like history [more]
What is it about communal tables? We wanted to go to Richard, this is a place on Köpenickerstraße that Sam and I both like for the quality of the food but also for the melancholic splendor of the setting, think Los Angeles as imagined by a Swiss, think [more]
Today, in the museum, I thought of MC Hammer. I was there with my kids, we were minding our business, investigating the depth and quality of Walter de Maria*s fountain, boring, this was our conclusion, not one of his better works. When a guard called from the other [more]
How could I? I love Zwieback and Freedom, I love Baseball Caps and Fish and Chips, I love Los Angeles and David Foster Wallace. This is a thin line, Bobby said, we were sitting at the Don Xuan Center in Berlin-Lichtenberg, sipping Vietnamese Coffee, which is dripping into [more]
What I don*t get, what I really just don*t get, is Obama and Syria. Basically all I know about the conflict/tragedy/guilt reservoir of the future – whatever you want to call it – I know from the piece in the New Yorker by Dexter Filkins (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/13/130513fa_fact_filkins): But go, [more]
“9/11”, said Pankaj Mishra, “will be remembered as a minor event. It was an atrocity, no doubt, but it did not change the course of history as much as people think it did.” We were sitting in his office, close to Highgate cemetary in London where Marx is [more]
It was a great moment of national reckoning when the writer Mohsin Hamid, having come from Lahore to talk about his new, daring novel How to get filthy rich in rising Asia, asked the simple question, sitting at the Bar 1000 Cantina (“is that still around”, Maxim Biller [more]
They are going to close the Neue Nationalgalerie for renovation, that*s what Thomas Scheibitz told me when I met him on Albrechtstraße, and he should know, because he has an exhibition on right now right there, called, of all things, Bube Dame König Ass, is there are more [more]
Isa Melsheimer was back from Rome, Bobby Roth was back from New York, Sam Chermayeff and Johanna Meyer-Grohbrügge were back from Machu Picchu, I was back from the Uckermark, so we all met on the roof terrace of the Arno Brandlhuber house on Brunnenstraße, the one that looks [more]
This is what my old friend Dirk wrote after my last column: alten freunden darf man das mal schreiben aber merkel herrisch zu nennen ist wirklich absurd. kohl ja, schroeder fischer erst recht aber merkel, machtbewusst ja, wie sonst soll man in der maennerschlangengrube politik voller eitler alphatierchen überleben. [more]