Utopias are funny places. They emerge unexpectedly; any plans to create them crumble. They are like fine weather or a close, sudden friendship: inarguable and generous. Settings can be utopic one day and banal the next. In Berlin, I consider Tempelhofer Feld, an airport that has been converted [more]
Unsere Nachbarn hatten schon 1969 ein Fernsehgerät. Im Sommer jenes Jahres sass die halbe Nachbarschaft vor dem Gerät und sah zu, wie einer als erster Mensch verkleidet von einer Leiter hinab auf den Mond sprang. So richtig habe ich es nicht begriffen. Aufregend aber war die Aufregung [more]
Hanno Hauenstein (hallo Hanno) wrote today about how we need to paint our future again. A couple of weeks ago I saw the new Spike Jonze film “Her” at a festival and it left a bigger impact on me than I thought at first. I was never into [more]
We’re all doing great. Excellent, even! If worse comes to worse, we’re doing pretty decent. That’s the disease of the Western hemisphere. You can (and probably will) call me cynical, but think about it – unless you’re a shrink, when is the last time that you heard someone [more]
Man sollte meinen, es gäbe viele Orte auf dieser Erde, die „Land’s End“ heißen. Denn es gibt ziemlich viele Landzipfel, die von Engländern entdeckt oder besetzt wurden, als Britannia noch Herrscherin über die Wellen der Weltmeere war. Tatsächlich gibt es aber nur ein einziges Land’s End, und das [more]
There’s a Christmas tree in the foyer of the big square building where I go to work. It’s been there since last Monday, I think. I don’t remember exactly, just that it was there some morning. Bang, it popped up from nowhere and seemingly out of the blue, [more]
Recently I read an interview with a poet from the tuareg tribe. Apart from the striking beauty of his unimaginable existence in the middle of the Sahara desert, I found a quote that made me think. «A good story is always true, even if it never happened», the [more]
Scientists at Emory University claim they have found evidence of the inheritance of memory from previous generations in mice whose “forefathers” had been trained to be afraid of the smell of cherry blossoms and who appeared to remember this fear. This is another example of current research in [more]
Tonight, children all over the Netherlands will celebrate the age old Sinterklaas feast (or more formally Sint Nicolaas or Sint Nikolaas; Saint Nicolas in English). For those who don’t know, its festivities are centered around a winter holiday figure who basically looks like a roman Catholic priest with [more]
There’s a storm a-comin’, so I went to the corner store to get supplies. Like, some chocolate milk. The corner store is a supermarket, so I couldn’t really expect to see people board up their windows and doors. Or maybe they did, on the third floor of their [more]
A magazine I write for (attention, explicit advertising: REVUE) came out today with its new issue on rituals – “People commonly engage in rituals with the intention of reaching a desired outcome such as reducing their anxiety and boosting their confidence, alleviating their grief, performing well in a competition, [more]
1997; mein zweiter Sommer in Berlin und der Wunsch nach einem Sommerhaus im Umland wird zur fixen Idee. Ich bin Architekt, leide unter ständigem Entwurfszwang. Anstatt endlich ins erfrischend kühle Nass zu tauchen, stehe ich bis zu den Knien im Schlachtensee und sehe mir auf die andere [more]
With immigration-reform advocates fasting on the National Mall for more than three weeks now (a first group of fasters was replaced by others yesterday), immigration reform is once again at the forefront of national consciousness here. The debate, of course, revolves around ‘undocumented immigrants’. Pathways to legalization? Border [more]
I have uncles and aunts in the second district. The last snows trickle down from the rooftops onto Leopoldstadt. The gutter laps up the erev pesach water. Birds carry straw like crosses to a great old window of the Schiffshul. Jews wet their fingers at the washbasin. A [more]
Today there was a coincidental 60pages meeting in Berlin. At least there were couple of people present. They shouldn’t have met, one of us suggested. There were some beautiful dramas. In one I was involved (nothing to do with 60pages) in the other I wasn’t (probably nothing to [more]
In our globalised world when received wisdom is that few issues can be resolved effectively outwith supra national and macro economic interventions it was startling and uncomfortable to read about the current situation in the Lebanese city of Tripoli where we are told tensions between Sunni and Alawite [more]
The Dutch anthropologist Joris Luyendijk asked London bankers, traders and brokers what they do regret the most about their job. Many of them answered: That they once had been loyal to a bank they worked for. No bank happened to be loyal to them later on.
Every morning when starting up my Bloomberg terminal, I am greeted by a quote of the day. Today it read: “Measure not the work until the day’s out and the labor done”, courtesy of a certain Elizabeth Barrett Browning (who isn’t familiar, I must admit). Duh. Truisms leave [more]
I am fascinated by what people are afraid of. It’s probably because of my parents being therapists and hearing about phobias since I’m little. Today I found out about the term Agoraphobia, pretty common fear. A friend of mine is afraid to be killed in his sleep, he [more]
The home closest to my heart is a retirement community in northeast Georgia, just south of Highlands, North Carolina. It has the slightly unbelievable name of Sky Valley. Most of the houses in Sky Valley were built in the 1970s, a combination of ranch and chalet styles, with [more]
The passage of time, central to all aspects of human experience, is fundamental to the perception and understanding of existence in general and in my life inherently of works of art. However, as a metaphysical concept and a popular topic within the contemporary art discourse, it had only [more]
Douglas Adams says: «I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.» Woosh.
She was a southern girl, she was beautiful and wild. She fled her home in the poor and mountainous canton of Ticino close to the Italian border, and she moved north. Moved to where the people spoke in harsh tongues and looked pale and worked hard. She liked [more]
To detach oneself from one’s narcissism means to subscribe to an indeterminacy which evades control.
Eine von vielen möglichen Folgen von Schlafentzug: Kopfschmerzen. Schlaflosigkeit kann behoben werden, zum Beispiel durch die Einnahme von Melatonin. Eine von vielen möglichen Nebenwirkungen von Melatonin: Kopfschmerzen. Soll ich jetzt Melatonin nehmen, um besser zu schlafen, aber mit Kopfschmerzen aufzuwachen oder soll ich schlecht schlafen und einfach so [more]
Seit ein paar Tagen blättere ich in Heften, die mir meine Mutter aus München mitgebracht hat. Fünf Exemplare der „Schwarzen Botin“, eine feministische Zeitschrift mit satirischem Unterton, die 1976 von Gabriele Goettle gegründet wurde und in der Frauen wie Silvia Bovenschen, Elfriede Jelinek, Meret Oppenheim und Roswitha Kaever [more]
The premise that an end-reel moment can redeem all that has gone before.
