bliss

this one's from 2000... one of many watercolors

dear m >> mini book / mini love letter

dear m, a mini love letter as a mini book

gringa en sampa :: on the tower

"Fuk. AH...Tom, I'm scared of heights," I stammer. & it's a little late to confess this standing 20 feet off the ground atop a steep hill mountain. Tom shrugs nonchalantly. "Maybe you can overcome it... the view is really beautiful, you know..." and pulls up the ladder, swinging his hips back and forth to prove his point.

I feel stupid still and crawl down to the lowest crossbar while Tom and Jack chat to each other in Polish, but! alone I can be as dorky as I wish, swinging my legs over the edge and pointing my toes down at the valley below. Tom told me, I think, that the train below almost killed him as a kid, and I have this abrupt image pop into my head of him running in a gaucho outfit through a tunnel with big buggy cartoon eyes and I laugh. I forget that I'm on the edge of a plummeting death and look down and see the valley of eucalyptus trees waving and lean back and kick my feet out at the sky.

Fucking toxic glow from Sao Paulo lights up everything at once and nothing is quite real. When we climb down my butt is yellow-dirty and Jack sneers, "The view was better up there!" and I feel so embarrassed that I blush roses. The more you try to pretend you aren't afraid, the more obvious they come out to kick you in the butt.

gringa en sampa : fragments

Once upon a time a young woman went to Brazil for a short, short time and fell in love with life...

a great many other things had happened that day, but when I finally arrived at the pinacoteca do estado museum in sao paolo, I took my time sketching and looking. Of particular interest were the works of Lasar Segall, a Lithuanian Jew who studied art in Berlin, lived in Brazil for a time, returned to Europe where the country seared itself into his subconsciosness and surfaced in all of his paintings. He later returned to Brazil permanently and became one of its most celebrated artists.

The lesson: Once you go to Brazil, you're never the same!

children on their birthdays by truman capote

photo by Mary Ellen Mark from Streetwise

from "Children on their Birthdays" by Truman Capote

Yesterday afternoon the six-o'clock bus ran over Miss Bobbit. I'm not sure what there is to be said about it; after all, she was only ten years old, still I know no one of us in the town will forget her. For one thing, nothing she ever did was ordinary, not from the first time we saw her, and that was a year ago...


Anyway, we were sitting on the porch, tutti-frutti melting on our plates, when suddenly, just as we were wishing something would happen, something did; for out of the red-road dust appeared Miss Bobbit. A wiry little girl in a starched, lemon-colored party dress, she sassed around with a grownup mince, one hand on her hip, the other supporting a spinsterish umbrella.

"Begging your pardon," called Miss Bobbit in a voice that was at once silky and childlike, like a pretty piece of ribbon, and immacuately exact, like a movie-star or a school-marm. "but might we speak with the grownup persons of the house?"


As Aunt El said, whoever heard tell of a child wearing make-up? Tangee gave her lips an orange glow, her hair, rather like a costume wig, was a mass of rosy curls, and her eyes had a knowing penciled tilt; even so, she had a skinny dignity, she as a lady, and, what is more, she looked you in the eye with a manlike directness. "I'm Miss Lily Jane Bobbit, Miss Bobbit from Memphis, Tennessee," she said solemney.

Coloring like an apple, Billy Bob said, please ma'am, it being such a hot day and all, wouldn't they rest a spell and have some tutti-frutti? and Aunt El said yes, by all means, but Miss Bobbit shook her head. "Very fattening, tutti-frutti; but merci you kindly," and they started across the road, the mother half-dragging her parcels in the dust.

...

Miss Bobbit pranced into the yard toting the victrola, which she put on the sundial; she wound it up, and started a record playing, and it played the Count of luxembourg. By now it was almost nightfall, a firefly hour, blue as mlkglass; and the birds like arrows swooped together and swept into the folds of trees. Before storms, leaves and flowers appear to burnw ith a private light, color, and Miss Bobbit, got up in a little white skirt like a powder-puff and with strips of gold-glittering tinsel ribbonning her hair, seemed set against the darkening all around, to contain this illuminated quality. She held her arms arched over her head, her hands lily-limp, and stood straight up on the tips of her toes. She stood taht way for a good long while, and Aunt El said it was right smart of her. Then she began to waltz around and around, and around she went until Aunt El said, why, she was plain dizzy from the sight. She stopped only when it was time to re-wind the victrola; and when the moon came rolling down the ridge, and the last supper bell had sounded, and all the children had gone home, and the night iris was beginning to bloom, Miss Bobbit was still there in the dark turning like a top.
...

merry new year!

dancing goddess

the uffizi

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

-- Carl Jung (1875 - 1961)

• I like to eavesdrop on tour groups speaking in English or German. It's a nice summary. The tour guides are always young, very earnest, well-dressed because they usually don't need the jobs (at least the ones that work in museums). In the back of their minds they are wondering if the people they guide are absorbing everything they say. It's always amusing to see them try to seize control of their tourists when the tourists start wandering away.
  
• The disarming thing about the Uffizi in Florence is that for hundreds of years famous artists from far and wide travelled long distances (relatively long in those days) to see the paintings I went to see. Even Dürer was a tourist there. To slog through the mountaings and villages, and to not have the benefit of the internet or color photographer or offset printing: it must have been an emotional event to finally gaze at all the paintings!
  
• I like to sit down and stare at a painting for 20 minutes. A lot of people stand. When I am standing I start noticing all of the other people entering the gallery, especially what colors they are wearing, and what they are talking about. Nobody was particularly clever nor particularly stupid, but in a place as crowded as the uffizi they were a big pashima shawl blob, and it was hard to get a view of many art pieces.

el oso de fatima

Florence in the Rain

It was raining really hard, and for some reason we kept bumping into Filipino people in Florence. It's not something I'm used to, but it evokes strange emotions in me: I feel at once safe, at home, and then a little nervous, because suddenly I feel like they know everything and that I have no privacy. This time we were on our way to the goth bar, bumping into one of the student areas with communism posters and girls with nose rings.

And on a long street we trailed a Filipino woman taking her son home from school, and from behind I thought, "Oh, she must be about my age, but I look so much younger." It must be the child, no? Even when I go to Asia, people remark that I look remarkably young. Perhaps once you give birth, the child sucks the life out of you and makes you grow heavier and wrinkled and frumpy. At about this age many women, like the woman in front of me, start to cut their hair short and perm it into strange feathery layers, something I could never quite understand, but which I know would age me 15 years in a moment.

In the rain we could not hear her words, but she was not walking the walk of a relaxed and happy woman. She was lecturing her son, but about what I don't know. She veered suddenly into a calling center. We got lost looking for the bar, and then we turned the corner and saw her again in the window. (Why do people still go to calling centers in this age of skype?) Her son was playing and sitting at a table, and she was calling someone. I never saw her face, but how did I know? her son's face? What was she doing here? Was she born in Florence?

What were her dreams? As a young child, what had she thought her future would be like? Did she read poetry and drink wine until she passed out on the weekends? Did she love passionately and sing songs? What was it that she wanted to give to her son that she never had, and what expectations did she have for her child that he would most certainly reject or not fulfill? Would her son, growing up in Europe, ever understand her or her culture? Would he grow up and think of himself primarily as a European, only to be happily delighted, confused, dismayed, elated and surprised to fly to Manila and be surrounded by millions of people who looked like him and reminded him of his parents?

In the rain, passing by, she was a blur, gone forever. We proceeded to go to a bar where everyone wore black and played sad, sad chanson music. I suppose I have not been drawing enough lately. I need to practice more. You get so lazy once you have a good digital camera, but photography is so fun for me, with so few expectations. There's room for both, I guess.

Walking back, through the heavy rain we ran into a little Italian rebel girl with punk rock patches... she was not holding an umbrella. She was too cool for that. I was so happy to see a girl like that... there will always be girls like that, headstrong and defiant and always wearing a little too much make-up and going about things their own way. If I ever have a child, and I am not sure that I ever will, I want my daughter to be like that, free of fear from the world and a little too wild to keep everyone happy.

My happiest moment was when my husband turned to me and said that he, too, loved the Uffizi. He is not an uncultivated person, but I know that going to museums is a drag for some people. Enjoying something so beautiful and with such history at the same moment as another person... it's really a great thing. We hiked up the hill in the Boboli gardens, thirsty (why do I always feel so thirsty when I travel in Europe?) and trailed by snarling, fighting British couples dressed much more fashionably than us. They did not persevere... we lost them when we reached the hill, then took a side detour and found another set of gardens that gave us what we were looking for, one of the best views in the city! It was a great moment. There was a weird episode where I was trapped in a mysterious elevator, but that's a story to tell on another day. So many had tried, and while they did not fail, they ended their journey early for some strange reason.

jose rizal in berlin

I was on my way to the Rembrandt exhibition (which by the way, was quite excellent, since I bothered paying for an audio guide this time--it's really important to do things like that in these mega exhibitions crammed with too many people), when I passed by a house with a huge plaque... I was surprised! I knew that Jose Rizal lived in Berlin for a time and even studied here, but the plaque announced that this was the house he lived in and it was here that he wrote the extremely famous book Noli me Tangere.

Jose is a bit of the Filipino version of Gandhi, and Noli me Tangere is one of its most inspired literary works--as many other sources say, it was instrumental in forming the Filipino national identity and began the revolution against the corrupt colonial European government and clergy. In my failed attempts to become fluent at Tagalog I bought a comic book version of Noli me tangere during my last visit to Manila, but I'm going to have to read the English translation.

I did a bit of a search and found that the plaque was only installed last year, in 2005, and man, the Filipino ambassador looks really sharp, she does. I quote her speech here:

Rizal’s stay in Germany was an important part of his life, and for that matter, for Philippine history. In the course of his travels throughout Germany, Dr Rizal had acquired a broad knowledge and understanding of Germany and its people, its history and literature, its arts and culture, and its customs and traditions, which greatly influenced his two immortal novels, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. It could therefore be said that Germany influenced his writings.

In his Noli Me Tangere, Rizal mentions about German customs and traditions, the thick German forests, the romantic Rhine river, and the numerous castles he had seen in the course of his boat trip along the Rhine. In his second novel, El Filibusterismo, the German poet mentioned by Rizal clearly refers to the great poet, dramatist, historian and philosopher Friedrich von Schiller. Rizal’s most popular poem, To the Flowers of Heidelberg, was inspired by the beautiful flowers on the banks of the Neckar river and the Heidelberg castle.

During his stay in Berlin, he became a member of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Pre-History. Through his membership in this organization, he met many noted German men of science, among them Dr Rudolf Virchow, famous scientist, anthropologist and statesman, who wielded a considerable influence on him, and Feodor Jagor, noted German ethnologist and geographer, who visited the Philippines from 1859 to 1860.

all-knowing

On one of those pretty streets in Italy where the apartment buildings were sandwiched between large 3 story houses, a woman brought her bicycle out along with a huge plastic bag stuffed with clothes and boxes of electronics. The house from which she emerged was large and grand but not too grand, a proud large house but not pompous. She looked tired after a hard day's work, but of course we had no idea who she was or what she was doing, perhaps it belonged to her? She was a filipina, so why did I instantly assume she as a housekeeper?

As we walked by she stared at me with x-ray eyes. When people are examining you time seems to slow down. I gave her a smile, and she returned it uneasily, then rode away on the bicycle.

"They always do that, they always know," my husband remarked. "All the Filipino people here always look at you like that. They don't think you are Japanese." That made me a little happier for some reason. He has never been to Asia, so I suppose he has never been the sore thumb sticking out, and I am pretty used to that by now, which is why my trips to California and New York are always a welcome relief, a return to the privacy of annonymity among the crowds that I never find in Europe.

The last time I was in Italy was a few years ago, and I was walking back to my hostel with a heavy, heavy hangover when a woman x-ray eyed me and we just started talking out of the blue. I had a severe headache, but a strange compulsion to show respect took over me, and I hoped I looked presentable to her because she looked like she was old enough to be my mother. Her friendliness was so quick, and she bragged that she had been living in Italy for 12 years and knew the ropes and if I ever needed a place to stay (for a few euros) and help moving there she could hook me up, and it was nice knowing I could find an instant place where they had adobo and rice and san miguel beer. There are some things I will never understand, like the obsession with Gucci and Prada purses, and the lack of desire for privacy, but nobody is perfect.

bumblebee men

Late at night in our hotel, we tried to fall asleep... On the Italian tv show there was some kind of bizarre dating system and a brunette woman who looked a lot like a retro prostitute (say, circa 1988), and she was kept on the other side of a wall as three really scary men went through all sorts of humiliations to win a romantic date with her. The woman had a serious overdose of make-up, but she had this bright happiness and effervescence that I miss, and I understood everything perfectly even though the language was a barrier. The humiliations were carried out by a short man with a mustache who appeared on the stage in various costumes: a superman outfit, a bee outfit with a large prong on its crotch, and so on... the three men clearly had no chance of a date with the woman--well if they had a great deal of money they would've gotten a date and a great deal of oral satisfaction, but let's suspend belief for a moment--and they were laughed at and made to sacrifice their dignity.

In perhaps the most amazing trial the men had to take off their clothes then crawl into tubs full of red balloons and somehow change into these strange g-string outfits as the taunting jester poked the balloons with his sword penis bee costume and hundreds of audience members jeered and screamed. The beautiful prostitute looked on with an expression of horror and amusement. My husband could not understand why I found all of this so great. At the end of the show he had succeeded in falling asleep. The winner joined the hooker and the bee man wrapped them both in a giant roll of saran wrap, then proceeded to wrap himself in with them so that they formed a really ridiculous threesome, and confetti fell from the air, and I was laughing and crying.

I guess I just never feel the cultural divides as much as times like this. Why is something like that funny? he asked me later. I couldn't say why. It brought back a rush of memories of Univision and the Spanish bumblebee, and then all the filipino variety shows my parents had me watch. One of my best friends, the few people who ever gave me consistently good advice, always asked me why I bothered torturing myself by choosing to live north of the Alps. "You are clearly not made to live in Northern Europe," he said, and he was right. And my Brazilian friend wondered if it was even a form of masochism. "Choosing to live so far north, I can see that it really hurts you."



I went downstairs to get a drink: there was some kind of really intense country party going on, and everyone was drinking and dancing and the music was too loud. A guy in a suit kept yelling at a two-year old sitting on the stairs, talking to him about something very intense--and a very long-legged woman in polyester white pants and black thigh high boots passed by me, a faceless woman with a head of very long and black hair. The young people standing outside in the darkness smoking made sense to me, the adults asking children for psychological advice, children acting as prophets and looking intot he future, everything made total sense.

In the museums the student girls with political buttons went out of their way to give me discounts. The old men working in the cafes got to know us and greeted us the second time we came for coffee, and smiled and waved every time we departed. Lesbians flirted with me at gelato stands and people in bars persisted to know if we were doing fine and if all was well. Why was everything so easy? Had I indeed made a fatal mistake by choosing Teutonia? Maybe living in Spain, the south of France, or Italy, or even moving to Istanbul, making that serious decision differently many years ago, would have made my time in Europe too much of a party and not enough of a challenge. You don't really push yourself when you are in your comfort zone.



I feel like I have people crowding around me always demanding to know if I feel liberated living where I do. And these questions are not so easy to answer: how can I feel more comfortable in places that seem more overtly sexist, and how can I enjoy television shows about bumblebees and still be a person of the letters and arts? Why do I feel more liberated on a busy American street than in places with parliamentary democracies? How can I be so fascinated by religion but consider myself an atheist and a sometimes weekend Buddhist? I guess the world is not a simple place, and neither am I. Maybe I am also growing weary of having to express myself directly and literally and to hold my emotions in check which does not come so naturally.

My husband woke up the next morning, later than I, as he usually does, and he asked groggily, "What the hell was that last night on TV?" He was a little horrified that I could remember everything in such gory detail, and that I even bothered standing up to simulate the saran wrap incident, turning around in circle and wrapping my arms around myself to simulate the union of the hooker, the desperate bachelor, and the bumblebee. "That's so weiiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrd," he said at the end of my small performance in a valley girl American accent.

blue woman

Berlin manhole

woman in bloom & dog girl

soundgirl check

people in berlin :: sleepyhead

alcohol is an amazing drug... it's legal and accessible, and people drink unhealthy quantities of it when they are trying to do things like dance in clubs. most people throw up or look really stupid when they pass out, but this guy reminded me of a child, maybe because he was so big and tough and curled up into a little ball.

maybe there is something wrong when you are so wasted that you can fall asleep against a gigantic speaker on an uncomfortable dirty clubbing bench covered spilled beer. but somehow he made it seem ok.

his girlfriend and i tried to bunch up someone's expensive jacket and give his head a pillow, but the expensive jacket belonged to another guy who didn't want to be a good samaritan. he snatched it away, but was maybe a little nicer about it since we were two chicks.

i can understand that, though, because hair gel mixed with sweat is really hard to wash off.

more stickers

people in berlin :: holbein vision

at this point of the year it should be warmer, not warm so that you can lay on the beach and get a tan, because I'm not pushy like that, but warm enough to ride my bicycle for a few hours without getting frostbite and warm enough to walk around the park without ten layers of clothes. i don't want the sun to get burning-bright hot and wash all the colors out of everything, which never happens here, because i don't want this place to be something that it's not.

but if i am flexible, couldn't the weather be flexible back?

in this state of mind nobody is happy, no matter how well their life is going. the subway is a completely silent, unhappy holding pen of tall, thin, pinched-faced people with no love. the christmas gift jackets have become a little messier, dirtier, and the ugliest colors imaginable and the strangest fashions clash up against each other in a row before your eyes.

i was reading a hans holbein art book, and these images were in my head, because the reality of the world did not present anything as pleasing to the eye. i turned and saw this girl with a mona lisa smile, and i thought, "she looks just like a hans holbein painting!" her parka was scary, her roots were showing on her dyed black hair, and who knows what she was listening to: does it matter?

she was pleased with herself, pleased with the world, not quite smiling but grinning enigmatically in contrast to all the dissatisfaction around her. i like these moments when people look like they are posing for paintings: it's so timeless. it makes you want to drench them with tubes of oil paints.

people in berlin :: the best man

a man, the best man, is the kind that is down and out and always broke but finds a way to make ends meet.

he spends his last euro on a bag of oranges to make fresh-squeezed juice because you've been living too long here and only have faint memories of what good orange juice used to taste like. he doesn't talk you about how he's going to have a lot of money in the future and how he has a really nice car, because he's too broke to have a car. maybe the qualities of a good man are determined by what he does not do: there is no hair gel in his bathroom, and he doesn't gossip with other men about women or obsess on being a player. he's too cool for that!

he's got good style and turns women's heads when he walks down the street, but his shoes are falling apart. he plays fussball (soccer), he doesn't watch it. boys like these are showered with love from the ladies, because he doesn't say dorky shit like, "that's a woman thing" because he's so smooth he knows women already. he's an honorary lesbian.

he always has some weird creative thing going on, you walk into his apartment and it's in shambles, you look in his fridge and there's nothing but a bottle of ketchup, even though nobody in Berlin really eats ketchup.

the only thing that sucks about the best man is that it makes all other men out there pale in comparison. it's not that the other guys were lame to begin with, just after seeing the best man, they just aren't the same. just hope that he isn't thinking about the best girl when he's with you!

people in berlin :: stud chick

her look was a little intense. i'm straight, but whoa! she had a girlfriend there too, ready to claw my eyes out, and it was at katya's weird party where there were crazy butch women throwing food at everything and knocking chairs over. you couldn't tell if it was malevolent or not, and all the men hid in the kitchen, hiding in the corner.

it's weird, i've never met a man who has that kind of charisma. it's always women. so many men i know try to be like that, but you can't attempt that kind of gravity. it's gotta be natural. you can't pull in the moon with a rubber band. you're just going to fail.

people in berlin :: phone booth boy

first, it's weird to see a phone booth since cell phones / mobiles / "handys" are so cheap and prevalent everywhere here. using a phone booth is really expensive.

it was sunday at noon, and he was dirty and wearing a fur vest and a kilt, he must have been freezing. his white legs showed between the knee high doc martens and the kilt, goosebumpy? but they were dirty, smudged with club dirt. when you have long, long legs, do they get cold more easily? i guess it's really awkward to go shopping for men's tights, even here in freak city berlin, but he could also have gone for long johns.

he had a very anxious look on his face, and he could have been either arguing or begging with someone on the phone. i mean, it's been so long since i've used a phone booth, but there's something really desperate about begging someone to do something from a phone booth.

these are places in public of last resort. phone booths are asking for it: you're ready to just cry in the middle of the street and push people away when they try to offer you tissues. is it really harder to let yourself cry in public if you are a man? it must be, right?

people in berlin :: asian waitress

usually the waitresses at japanese restaraunts are chinese, but at the thai restaraunt the waitress was japanese.

i like her because at other asian restaraunts they always ask me where i am from, what i am doing here, if i am married, if i am studying, if i want to have a baby, and what i think about German men.

she just gave me the food and a friendly smile. she probably also really has a great record collection, but who am i to guess?

people in berlin :: touf daddi

there's this scene in MAD MAX BEYOND THE THUNDERDOME where there is a midget who is attached to a big muscle guy named MASTER BLASTER. that's how babies are with these snarling hippie mommies and the construction worker daddies who are at home holding bottles of milk where bottles of beer usually go.

these sexy tough daddies are not to be messed with, but they often overbundle their babies, whose eyes are barely visible in the winter, gleaming with mischief. MASTER BLASTER. just pray that the baby is not having a bad day or touf daddi will be out for a beat down on the u bahn platform.

people in berlin :: s-bahn angel

some of the young girls on the train are so pretty in their new clothes and their make-up. she was tiny and bundled up in her pink pimkie jacket and knee-high boots radiating life on a gray day.

i like these small-boned girls that look a lot like all the other sweet girls. there's something comforting about how they all fit in with each other, like variations of a pattern repeating across the city.

people in berlin :: breakdancing boy

first drawing in the 1 berlin person a day set.

i forget your name? ahmed?

he taught me lots of good dance moves last weekend. but he was way more fit and good than me. i can at least do decent floorwork now. if only i were 18 years old again and had a perfect body and could do backspins while wearing fresh clothes and a cool gold chain without choking on it.

it's sweet how instead of being silly, young guys are often overly serious when showing people stuff, because you just know off the floor they are goofing off somewhere throwing balls of paper at the wall.

and even though i sometimes wish i were taller, dancing is one of those things where i like being small. somehow it feels like i can fly around and defy gravity more easily, or maybe that's just me being vain.

crossing the bridge

After spending two confusing weeks in Istanbul, tortured by barely seeing what there was to see in the city, worn down but exhilarated by the sightseeing, pushing my way through crowds of tourists from all the weirdest edges of the earth, I found my moment of calm in Beyoglu, perhaps the most romantic part of Istanbul outside of Sultanahmet, where the ancient monuments were bunched up and nightlit and very proud. Beyoglu was easier on me because there were so many more nooks and crannies and as it was on a steep and winding hill, there were infinite steps up stairs and beautiful patterns in the night made by the lamps.

I was still bumping into tourists too, but there was something refreshing about being in the playground of the city, pressed in on the long pedestrian streets by the flood of people looking for something on a Friday night. How many faces would I never see again in my life for a second time? It was like being jostled around Paris or New York City for the first time.



I just like to wander through neighborhoods, it's a hobby I've always had. I like maps and streets and alleys. We went to Levent too, which was less romantic but interesting too, smoky and affluent and plagued with 12 lane traffic jams. The wealthy of Istanbul were impeccably dressed in all the latest Italian and Turkish fashions, facial hair plucked and hair styled and incredibly fit and chic. There were rows of designer furniture stores in shopping malls where the sofas looked like kidney beans.

There was the music, too. and the dancing! on new year's eve we sat in a strange posh Italian restaraunt (it was very random) full of middle-aged women with lots of make-up and very tight swathy black clothes, and there were gypsies there singing and dancing to the night, and this woman, she had to be about fifty? she got up and danced to the drumbeat and followed it with her hips, her face matching her emotions, and the men could dance too! it was so beautiful. and everybody sang the words to the songs out loud. when was the last time you were somewhere where they weren't too proud to do that? i was very sad and consumed with thoughts of death and she was out there with perfect hair dancing arabesque, so full of life.

A few days ago we finally saw the movie crossing the bridge, and i identified with the crazy burned out einsturzende neubauten band member Alexander Hacke crashing around Beyoglu, unkempt with a straggly beard recording random musicians in this crazy city. i'm old and burned out sometimes, and i could relate to him passed out in his rickety hotel room staring into space, staring at the sea. but so much importance is placed on musicians, where were the interviews of the dancers? what do musicians have to say most of the time? they were stoned, all of them. and the singer is always fooling around with the drummer's girlfriend, that's how it always is.



we got a huge bargain on another place later in an old ottoman mansion, where the walls were painted pink and there were pink curtains and so was the bedspread. it was pink, not painted I mean. we had a balcony, but it faced a big gray school whose bell rang every hour and was full of screaming children and an ice cream truck playing fuer elise. i liked it. one morning a rainbow shone over the playground after the children had left. it was in a neighborhood full of immigrants and working class people and old-fashioned ottoman houses made of wood that were crumbling. but they were so beautiful, and so were the little chimneys that stuck out sideways and belched smoke into the night.

Fashion is a huge deal there, and next to that neighborhood was another one full of Russian immigrants and four story high showrooms for denim and fashion textile manufacturers. it was incredible. I had never seen such an explosion of high quality designer jeans in such a small area, and in every shop there was a sullen and very, very beautiful Russian girl sitting disinterestedly in front a television set expecting me to say something, but maybe they knew i was just lost.

There were not so many girls wearing head scarves, but the ones I did see were really wild. one had a pink headscarf and had make-up on as thick as an art school girl of doom. she wore knee-high converse all star sneakers and a puffy floral skirt, she was a riot of color and beauty. The girls without headscarves weren't as made-up and stuck to black, next to her they faded, she was a supernova!!!



like a good tourist i read books set in the city. being in a dark mood, thinking of failures and death and friendships lost, it was not a good idea to be checking out orhan pamuk's Istanbul: Memories of a City. I had bought the book a few months ago in a generous money-spending kind of mood and didn't realize that he was on trial, and neither had I read his other works, and a memoir about Istanbul in its less than shiny days in the sixties and seventies as he was growing up, a city on the verge of collapse, it was something of a downer, and I can tell even from his childhood photos scattered throughout that book that mr. pamuk was a dour, rather gothy boy. it was comforting to read because he is also the kind of person compelled to wander through city streets aimlessly, staring wide and watery-eyed at the people around him. he repeats again and again that this is not a book just about the city, istanbul, which he loves, but a badly disguised self-portrait.