I just sold my air mattress, late on a Saturday night, to a small, muscular, warm dude whose name is Ramon. He rang me an hour ago from my online classifieds ad and asked, how much longer are you up? He described what he wants to do with it – lie under the stars among […]
Reaching my Kiez in the late afternoon* I nearly ran into a boy-girl couple kissing strenuously outside the Turkish supermarket. This supermarket annoys me because they always reel off too many plastic bags and I have seen a man who had put his single apple into one bag accept another bag to carry it home […]
Walked into a Turkish convenience store late on Friday night, they sold water pipes as well as a dazzling array of alcohols and sundry sweet snackettes… behind the counter stood a very untall & wizened woman wearing a scarf, her hands on the counter at chest height in front of her, and beside her a […]
I passed a Turkish döner shop where they carve shreds of meat from a large, limb-shaped conglomeration that’s turning very slowly dripping grease into the grill. In front of the low window sat a patient Alsatian. His nose was lifted towards the man sunning himself on his elbows, dreamily staring along the street while the […]
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 […]
I find Berlin the most extraordinary city. Nothing is regular, not that in my life anything ever is. I guess in an individuality-seeking cult/ure this sounds boastful or false-meek, but I have spent a lifetime hunting the things I have (bountiful, it turns out) in common with other people. Went through the drug-dealer park this […]
Back in Berlin for a few days: what a strange feeling. Now there is no snow on the ground and the trees have appeared from nowhere, they are green, green, green. We ate at a Turkish grillhouse where you sit around a glass-cased cooktop fired with coals, onto which four brawny and frankly handsome men […]
An hour ago I made friends with two Israeli dudes selling Vietnamese knives on a drearily dripping, cheerily lighted Berlin market. It is so warming and cozy to wander under damp vinyl awnings and it has been so frustrating trying to chop vegetables with a bread knife all these weeks. One was called Coia and […]
On New Year’s Eve after a quiet dinner party at the home of a Romanian artist & Swedish poet, I climbed the round hill that gives Kreuzberg its name: cross mountain. In the dark it resembled Borobudur, with heads facing outwards as far as the eye could reach like ten hundred white buddhas. Three different, […]