Pedalling home along a tree-lined street which is set aside for bicycles, I heard a crash. A man reaching up to put his brown wine bottle in the brown glass bin had tipped forward and toppled like a tree – at first I thought he must be drunk. There was nobody about, just him and me. […]
I met a man with shit-stained pants on the subway and we sang together. He had been swaying by his pile of plastic bags for half an hour, offering speeches to the cabin. People ignored him and looked away. Only the Hispanic man behind us covered his face with split fingers and laughed into his […]
Yesterday walking down a very Turkish street I saw four groups of boys, one after the other, carrying large, menacing, (plastic) bazookas. One held his fake sub-machine gun to his friend’s head as the friend squirmed and several times tried to bat it away. An eight-year old carrying the Ramadan bread tucked it under his […]
Bizarre visit to the local physiotherapist today. For one thing, we speak different languages, and the overlap (in creaking German) was slim. It took us a while to understand each other. At the top of his full-length consulting room mirror was a Post-It note with a downward arrow, which said, “This is what a person […]
I’ve cycled past this jazz club in town maybe half a dozen times & never had the nerve to go in. Today in the afternoon sunlight both the doors were standing open and, oddly, two tables with bottles of soft drink stood at the entrance guarded by ribbed plastic cups. A handsome-looking man was pouring. […]
Tonight I saved somebody’s life. I cycled past a table on the mall where Scientologists were practising Scientology, just right out in the open as though it were nothing, were not based on shame & rooted in a foul, deliberate dismaying of the self. A beautiful, sumptuous, exquisite black woman sat paying attention and nodding […]
On the first day of life-drawing class the teacher said, the mistake you all keep making is, you are trying to draw the outline. ‘The outline is an abstraction,’ he pointed out: ‘it doesn’t exist.’ One of the challenges in learning to draw for the first time, as an adult, is to see past your own expectation of what ‘a face’ looks like.