The new face of Athens that I will never stop loving...


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Two Lightning Bolts

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«Two lightening bolts were delivered to my room/ they were gifts from Zeus/In the cradle of Democracy/ The pigeons are wearing gas masks” Two lightening bolts filled up with explosive black humor from Nick Cave, which crashes the myth of Zeus, calling the “darling little boys” who evoke his inheritance, to get out of their myths of the past and look at the present in the face. Wake up - before it’s too late, before it gets so ridiculously and tragically dark, before “we are, I say, mostly lost”…
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Reading F. Braudel on the Albanian mediterranean riviera (after a long walk)

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  “The best witness to the Mediterranean’s age-old past is the sea itself. This has to be said and said again; and the sea has to be seen and seen again. Simply looking at the Mediterranean cannot of course explain everything about a complicated past created by human agents, with varying doses of calculation, caprice and misadventure. But this is a sea that patiently recreates for us scenes from the past, breathing new life into them, locating them under a sky and in a landscape that we can see with our own eyes, a landscape and sky like those of long ago. A moment’s concentration or daydreaming, and that past comes back to life. But if that is true, if the Mediterranean seems so alive, so eternally young in our eyes, “always ready” and willing,” what point is there in recalling this sea’s great age? What does it matter, the traveller may think, what can it possibly matter, that the Mediterranean, an insignificant breach in the earth’s crust, narrow enough to be crossed at contempt...
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Smoking Shelters

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I am sitting on one of the blue shuttle buses going toward Boston airport. I am searching the pages of Europe, travels through the twentieth century, the book of Geert Mak, looking for a precise quote I intend to use in an essay I am writing currently. I find it, finally: “Blood is stronger than any passport” – one of the slogans of the Nazis in the 30s. I take my eyes off the book and start staring out of the bus window. I see a Smoking Shelter across the street, next to the airport. This is the first time I see something similar. It looks like a glass-cage; there is someone smoking there, but he stands out of the cage, out of the smoking shelter. Repeating silently the words “Smoking Shelter”, the words "Fallout Shelter" follow suit in my brain, like an association of ideas. Who knows, one day, smokers would have to buy or rent fallout shelters, in order to be allowed to smoke. - “Excuse me, are you American?”. A female voice, in her forties, sitting next to me, ...
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