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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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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