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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Fifty Shades of Snow

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(Part I – The Four Ages of Snow) For the last three winters of my life I have been surrounded by snow and frigid weather. A completely new experience for me. Before coming to Boston three years ago, I had spent all my life in no-snow zones. In zones where you sometimes get fed up with too much sun: in Lushnje (a small town in central Albania) and Athens, Greece. Even in my mum’s bedtimes stories the presence of snow was scarce. The only “snow characters” I remember from childhood are snowman   and Snow White. The first didn’t figure among my toys. As for the latter I never fell in love with her (maybe because I couldn’t dream of myself as a  P rince; I felt closer to the Seven Dwarfs) . *** In the songs that I hum time after time, snow is almost never mentioned (except for Adamo's "Tombe La Neige"). The first time I came face to face with snow was when I was 13. It happened at a town in Southeastern Albania, called Librazhd. As I was visitin...
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Open letter to a Northern European...

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Hello from Athens and thank you for asking me how I’m doing in this mess. We walk in the streets. We buy fruits from the greengrocer. We listen to the radio and watch football. We are doing a thousand useful and useless things and thinking a thousand useful and useless thoughts – each and every one of us… things that will never be reported  on the front pages of the major international newspapers and in the headlines of the major international TV channels. Big Media, actually, is expecting to break the Big News on the results of the Greek election. The Big News is called the “Grexit”. Which means, according to the experts, a total collapse for Greece and an eventual collapse for the Eurozone. It’s a period of economic crises and prolific in neologisms. “Grexit” is the latest buzzword.  But here, for the time being, we are recycling old concepts and words. For example, the words “plot” and “guinea pig”. More and more people are convinced that Greece is  the “guine...
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