Is everybody reading James Salter these days? Dirk Kurbjuweit of Der Spiegel, the voice of reason in politics, just shook his head in admiration as he talked about Salter*s work. Our dear friend Finn Canonica of Tages-Anzeiger Magazin can go on and on about how manly this writer [more]
How can you speak (or write) about the unspeakable? I hate people who do that. People who tell me their dreams. More often than not ending with the line: “I can’t describe it.” Right, don’t! It would be like showing the invisible. The great Ivan Lendl once said: [more]
I knew her long before I met her. Aino was everywhere; her name was in the air. Aino. Everybody in Berlin knew her and really loved her. Everybody had this little Aino-story to tell. They said how strong she was and how beautiful. They told me how she [more]
In a way it is summer wherever Murat is going. Is it that he is, in my memory, almost always wearing shorts, a rare thing to pull that off anyway in a dignified manner? Is it that he is, in my memory, rarely wearing socks in his shoes, [more]
I understand Paul Feigelfeld to be quite a sensitive man. By this I mean weirdly intimate. He’s apt to find your inner angst and discuss it at length with a true willingness to solve it. He has a rare empathy that sets him part from your average Facebook [more]
When I recently met Jeet in Delhi, he could have gone as a mafia don of Bombay´s underworld in the 1970s. But then I do not know a single gangster who would be such a blessed multi-talent and such a colourful character. As a neo-novelist, performance poet, songwriter [more]
When I saw them in Munich they looked gorgeous and at ease because they were at home in this city that they had charmed into loving them and sometimes worshipping them with a vengeance for their nightly ceremonies, a court following in their dynastically inclined city which seemed [more]
Die aktuelle Ausstellung in der Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, deren Leiter Gregor Jansen seit drei Jahren und für weitere fünf Jahre ist, die aktuelle Ausstellung heißt “Leben mit Pop. Eine Reproduktion des Kapitalistischen Realismus”. Das ist erstmal ein sehr schöner Titel voller Gegenwart und Ironie. Nicht nur, weil das, was [more]
I know Mavie from the time she lived in Berlin. She had a small dog called Attila (like her great-uncle Attila Hörbiger, the Dienstmann in the Third Man, or was this his brother Paul? It was the father-projection of Isabelle Adjani in Claude Miller’s film The Eye Of [more]
It sounds somehow ridiculous to say it but David is a man in full. Although he is still young he looks at the world with a mature man’s eyes. He has the best bullshit detector that I know of and because he inspires confidence it is a privilege [more]
“We met Jeanne for the first time in summer 2007, in the Erste Liga (First League) at the DJ Kaos Night. Zelinda, an Italian, introduced us to Jeanne as French, she knew that we are frogmunchers as well. We were all very drunk. A. was dancing with Jeanne [more]
My first contact with Finn was via an email exchange between Tokyo and Zurich. I sent him a text I had written about a walk through the Ryogoku neighbourhood, which is famous mainly for all the Sumo stables of Tokyo that are located there. I thought the text [more]
Did I mention the table in Telluride with Frances Ford Coppola, Bruce Dern and Don DeLillo? Yes, I did. Actually I did mention it twice. Later, when the whole situation dissolved I went outside, where you had this incredible view on the Rockies. It was getting dark and [more]
Lichtenberg is an Ortsteil of Berlin in the Bezirk of Lichtenberg. Until 2001 it was an autonomous district with the localities of Fennpfuhl, Rummelsburg, Friedrichsfelde and Karlshorst. The old part of Lichtenberg, now called Alt-Lichtenberg, was founded around 1230, due to the German colonization of the territory of [more]
Maybe it’s like that: There are two types of people, there are photographers and there is the rest of us. I always feel safe with photographers, I always feel that they know their way around, where to go after dark and where not to, what to drink, what [more]
First I met Anne here in Berlin. She didn’t fit. Walking down Ackerstraße in high heels and with perfect hair and a perfect dress was kind of a mismatch around 2001, 2002. And Ackerstraße was not Wedding or Kreuzberg. Mitte between Linienstraße and the Monbijoupark was always more [more]
When we met her—Lerato—she looked fabulous. Blue dress, dark sunglasses, and a furious crown of hair. She took us dancing. She showed us the Johannesburg she knows. “If you want to understand Johannesburg,” that‘s what our friend the philosopher Sarah Nuttall had told us a day before, “you [more]
This is how it happens. One day you are fine, next day you are a speculative realist. One day you go out, next day you know Armen Avanessian. Ideas come and go, people come and go, but sometimes you know there had been a longing, a sense of [more]
Chris Petit wrote a piece on Kraftwerk before Computerworld came out. “Am Diskö with Kraftwerk.” His interview with Robert Mitchum was a total failure until the moment he asked Mitchum about the hardest drink he’d ever had. The response filled five pages in Time Out. During the outbreak [more]
Georg recently sent me a text message with two links. One leading to a 1994 muscle BMW 740 in this strange and seldom purple, the other link showed a brownish (bordo metallic) Lancia Thesis from 2003. The BMW is sporty, pimped too bully, the Thesis got the best [more]
Christopher got a new hair-cut. It’s long on top and short on the sides and makes him look like the singer for a mildly successful pop band from the 80s—stop, sorry, I can’t continue to talk about Bobby if I call him Christopher. He’s Bobby, he always was, [more]
Sitting at Luigi Zimmerman waiting for Mei to take her to Lichtenberg. She wanted to see a concentration camp, and I don’t feel like it and I don’t have the time. Actually, I have never been to one, not to Dachau, not to Sachsenhausen, not to Auschwitz. Maybe [more]
When I met Hilton, we were both theater critics and we felt let down. By the theater. By much of what we saw. We sat in a Bar next to the Deutsches Theater, I don*t remember if we had left the performance early or were still to go [more]