“Don’t it always seem to go That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone” these are the lyrics of Joni Mitchells 1974 song: They paved paradise and put up a parking lot With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swingin’ hot spot …. They took all the trees, and put em in a tree museum And they… (more…)
Some years ago I started a loose conversation with Lars Gustafsson, my secret favorite guess for the next Nobel price in literature since I read his first book some 25 years ago. It all began with some essays Mr. Gustafsson wrote on his blog about Berlin, my home town. Gustafsson himself lived there for several years in the 70s, hence… (more…)
The 1968s students movement coined the wonderful phrase “Under the pavements lays the beach”, perhaps to further encourage picking out the paving stones for the next street fight. But at least beneath the pavements in Berlin, there is indeed yellow sand reminiscent of a seaside beach. That is because the Berlin and most Prussian underground are glacial melt-water valleys (the… (more…)
Dearest Mrs F, my far and precious angel,sometimes when I have a moment of rest, without any of the daily duties and problems of our material life, I fall into a state of deep sadness. Recognizing some of the slow changes that affect the people or the nature around us suddenly makes me aware of the cruel and merciless passing… (more…)
It is now 11:50 pm, last day of June, and for a funny reason this month will have an extra second of life (The administrators of the earth rotation have decided that a leap second has to be inserted to bring the astronomic time and the atomic time in synchronity again). Therefore I will have an extra second time to… (more…)
After watching this breathtaking movie “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” (directed by Ana Lily Armirpour) I am more and more convinced that there is a fundamental difference between movies maade by Iranian cinematographers living and working abroad for reasons of personal and artistic freedom, and movies made by Iranians at home. The latter are usually praised for the… (more…)
Franz Kafkas novels and stories were all too complex, too ambigious and without a clear message to be turned into a Hollywood blockbuster. Even the French nouvelle vague, Italian neorealism nor the German expressionist cinema had any ambitions to use Kafkas literature as a movie plot (With the exception of Orson Welles’ version of “The Trial”). But now comes a movie… (more…)
One of the highest valued novels of contemporary German literature has been written by the late Wolfgang Herrndorf, whos early death in 2013 was perhaps not only the big loss of a great literature talent, but of many yet unwritten books as well. Unlike the recent death of Gunther Grass, whos most creative period ended perhaps in 1988 with his… (more…)
This is a photo of my mother, in the mid 50s. She poses on a 350ccm AWO motorbike, which is a shame that it got lost over the years. I know that she drove to the clinic when she was pregnant with me. When I was 16 and with our rat pack made the first illegal rides on 50ccm scooters,… (more…)
In one of Monthy Python’s series there was this animated cartoon (by Terry Gillian) about the eminent yellow danger, world wide communist conspiracy that finally causes dental canker and severe tooth loss in people of the free, western countries. To combat this threat, all people in the free western world should therefor use the new toothpaste “Crelm”, making the teeth… (more…)