Occupy birthdays

The building is a former monastery, empty for years. And then long before the occupy movement homeless people started squatting there. Now only a small group of squatters still live at the premises. Poetry nights were organized and parties can be organized there as well.There is also a people's kitchen.

 Music was made, people were fed and people had a good time, talking, laughing, enjoying the music. We were invited by Ken on the guitar who celebrated his 59th birthday among friends and strangers. There was even a real technician for the sound system present.

The last picture was meant to render the general atmosphere:  children and grown ups eating ice cream, girls and boys standing in a group discussing hairstyles, dogs playing and yes a dog came by and changed the focus of the picture. It became an abstraction with warm vibrations, probably a better general mood picture after all.

On the road again- Up the flyway - Las Vegas and down the highway

Flying over Colorado and Northern Arizona the sun catches some mountain peaks. here and there still patches of snow.

Touching down in fun and gun crazy Las Vegas

The contrast between the architecture of opulence and beggars on the sidewalk, between a perfect world based on greed and habits supposed to bring joy... I did sleep once with my dog Vee in the motel 8 across the street. The door of the room was repaired with cardboard and everything was screwed down... Hookers and dealers walked around all night.

The photographer takes his job seriously taking in the surroundings sitting not on a manicured lawn but on Astroturf.
Even the hedges on the Tropicana are plastic

Inside view of the MGM's dark, rich ambiente. Light flashing, Internet gambling with Internet croupiers talking to the people strolling by.

The grand scale and life games of craps... and then to the car leaving Las Vegas crossing the by pass over the Hoover Dam and the glorious desert landscapes no Casino can compete with.

Frienship's crossing

The water, the bay, wind in your hair, a shawl is advisable, is a quiet time on the way to see an old friend in Sausolito. Friendship requires crossings, letters, phone calls but always a hug, a touch will erase the time of distance.

The rewards are manifold, the Golden Gate Bridge in a quiet fog, lifting above the tide.

Alcatraz, where a few students stay for a couple of months to repair the salt eroded steps,where tourists flock to to see the place of the movie or the occupation by AIM in 1969.

Here the Sausolito Bay where my friend grew up, and the hills with her father's house. She grew up a wild child without mother and became a strong and independent spirit. Friends try to let one grow and become the best one can be.

Goodbyes are hard, the distance to bridge is vast and friendship is priceless.

Like beauty friendship is its own reward.

world wide reading

This is a call for a world wide reading launched by the berlin literatur festival

We ask all of you to read this poem and to let us know through a comment where the poem was read.

Thanks for all you do for Freedom of Expression and the writers in prison because of their writings..

You Wait for Me with Dust

- for my wife, who waits every day

by Liu Xiaobo

.

nothing remains in your name, nothing

but to wait for me, together with the dust of our home 

those layers 

amassed, overflowing, in every corner 

you're unwilling to pull apart the curtains

and let the light disturb their stillness

over the bookshelf, the handwritten label is covered in dust

on the carpet the pattern inhales the dust

when you are writing a letter to me 

and love that the nib’s tipped with dust

my eyes are stabbed with pain

you sit there all day long 

not daring to move 

for fear that your footsteps will trample the dust 

you try to control your breathing 

using silence to write a story. 

At times like this 

the suffocating dust offers the only loyalty

your vision, breath and time

permeate the dust 

in the depth of your soul 

the tomb inch by inch is 

piled up from the feet

reaching the chest 

reaching the throat

you know that the tomb 

is your best resting place 

waiting for me there 

with no source of fear or alarm 

this is why you prefer dust

in the dark, in calm suffocation 

waiting, waiting for me 

you wait for me with dust

refusing the sunlight and movement of air 

just let the dust bury you altogether 

just let yourself fall asleep in the dust

until I return

and you come awake 

wiping the dust from your skin and your soul.

What a miracle – back from the dead. 

April 9th 1999

This is why you haven't heart from me. I was in Firenze.



After years of not seeing I visited my friend and old Professoressa Giuliana who lives smack in the middle of Florence. This is the view when one steps out of her frontdoor.



The city is splendid. beauty everywhere and good food. The first times I was in Florence I could not deal with it. Even now at times it was hard: As long as I did look at the Duomo from any other side than from the front I was ok. It would physically make me queasy when I did. My pulse would go up. So not pictures of the front which causes in me le mal de Stendhal. But the food is gorgeous and the city and the hospitality in a city palazzo... beyond words.

Synagogues

A young Jewish guide will teach you a lot about Prague's recent past. The jewish cimetary is charming, like many old grave yards are. Scrolls on a grave indicate learning and grapes and pine cones a multi layered, multifaceted person held in high esteem. The Spanish Synagogue is not build by the Sephardi Jews but by the eastern Ashkenazim. They build it in the Moorish, Spanish style and showed their opulence. The Pinkasova Synagogue is now an impressive memorial for the victims of the Nazi's. The 77.297 names are inscribed on the walls. It is a shock to find one's own last name there. There are 2000 Jews registered and practicing and about 5000 in total. 'There are no problems in Prague with Jews', said the guide, 'because you cannot see who is a Jew. We don't have an orthodox community here.' The old ghetto had been torn down under communism with the cooperation of the Jewish Council and the insalubrious place has been turned into the most expensive street of Prague: Paris street. The Guide said a generation of people is missing, since they never knew they were Jewish and she did point out there is a difference between being anti-Semite and anti-Zionist. The cultural life is vibrant , the arts are doing well and these synagogues are used as museums and as places of worship.

White Nights in St Petersburg

See the long shadows the bench draws on the path... The low setting sun past midnight creates a strangely diffuse light, a challenge for an unexperienced photographer like me. It took this city about ten minutes to steal my heart. Many of the old buildings from the time of Peter the Great are now under the protection of Unesco and restaured with their funds. The white nights make one restless because life goes on, even when it is past bedtime on a workday. The abundant light also brings lightheartedness and easy joy because all the surrounding beauty is there to be seen and felt and heard in the music of buskers...

Homes and Happiness

If by accident you fall in love with a place or a view, an atmosphere and you think seriously of moving around your perfectly sheltered life to pursue this vision, then ask yourself what the new place represents for you. Our homes tend to reflect our personalities, even our values. I live in two totally different environments, the Arizona drought-ridden desert and a European bustling city… Each place represents part of me. So when I fall hard and consider a change from the not so leafy suburb to the modernity of an older high-rise flat with a view, ten minutes away from the theater, the big Saturday and Sunday market, then I need to ask myself Whom is it I am trying to become? And also will the place help me do that, will the place remind me of what it is I want to strive for and will the windswept corner with morning sun and view of the sunset shelter me, will my vision of possible happiness sustain itself? I have learned with my late husband that it is not about ‘happiness as a state’ but at the possibility of everything falling into place once in while and the rare moments of pure perfection. It is all about beauty, creativity and the promise of possible happiness. Leaving behind the old house, the physical prompting of memories, of habits, drama’s and joys would stop. I see the new place as sparsely furnished, light, room for guests, books and Tony’s paintings. I guess I am longing for an uncluttered life, having sorted it all out by moving and leaving behind what is superfluous, being connected through the view to the jumbled chaos of the houses I can overview from there and the grander story of culture and politics that is told by panorama of the city. Would the change express that I have confidence in the future now that I am contemplating my different paths and possible and desirable futures, letting go of pains of past? Tony’s paintings would remind me of vibrancy and creativity, of balance and honesty, beauty or at least the striving for those ideas we shared. Yet the space would be totally defined by its place in the weft and warp of the city, the myths and invisible writing and rhythms of it and my writing, translations I hope to bring forth: a balance between discipline and temptation, the community of Jazz lovers on Sunday afternoons, urbanites walking their dogs versus the concrete tower that would be my nest far from the maddening crowd… yet being part of a condominium where the individual might easily be crushed by the community. Inviting friends over would be like inviting them to a skyline restaurant, a quiet backdrop of clouds, twinkling citylights.
The building expressed a belief in progress, betterment of humanity, democracy, (one of the mayors of the city lived in it, amongst a happy few fellow citizens) equality, individuality and a sense of worldliness. Now 43 years old it has gathered a patina of imperfection that is endearing, that has softened its attitude. The grime of the city has stained the façade, yet I would be literally ‘above’ the dust, reminded of how things, people can be dignified by aging. Although looking like a squat, gentle giant, the age upon it also reminds us that all is ephemeral… All is vanity. Maybe the transient in me identifies with the reconciliation symbolized in a home, a stronghold cradled near the clouds in the impermanence of the eternal cycle of day and night.