Avat-aren’t: the moment of the failed imagination in what could have been a revolutionary film

So by now you’ve read my title, and know that this is going to criticize the recent film Avatar. What you should also know is that it might also spoil the plot for anyone who hasn’t seen it and still wants to be bedazzled by it’s juicy bursting eye-smacking wonders. So don’t say I didn’t [...]

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ordinary extraordinary

Here’s a thought: In the Ubahn between Görlitzer Bahnhof and Schlesiches Tor, I sat reading the first sentences of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and was completely blown away by the transition between looking down at the page, at her exquisite sentences gleaming, twining there like strands of liquid emerald running pages long, and then [...]

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barely there

The last eight weeks have been a non-stop early-morning roller-coaster of teaching English to unruly German and Spanish teenagers. I am tired. I am out of touch with everyone who I sincerely care about in my life. One more week of teaching, and my previous life of unemployment will start again. A blessing and a [...]

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watching whales watching us

Yesterday evening and this morning I read this wonderful article in the NY Times magazine, “Watching Whales Watching Us“, about the return of almost-extinct gray whales to lagoons of Baja. They are called “Friendlies” by the locals and the biologists who study them, because they appear to be trying to gently communicate with the same [...]

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question

Standing on my elbow With my finger in my ear, Biting on a dandelion, And humming kind of queer While I watched a yellow caterpillar Creeping up my wrist, I leaned on a tree And I said to me, “Why am I doing this?” from Standing by Shel Silverstein ♥ I read that poem to [...]

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creative aspect, special circumstances

This month I am reading about linguistics, to remind myself about the foundational legos of human communication. One book is by (of course) Wendell Berry, called “Standing by Words,” in which Berry argues that the degeneration in the clarity and meaning of words is symptomatic of the disconnection of individuals from their communities and the [...]

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slow food revolutions

As I sat in a chic office writing a small article about a heavy metal band performing next week in Shanghai, wondering what in the world am I doing in freezing cold Berlin writing about a band I’ve never heard of and whose music I would probably hate on the other side of the world, [...]

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the chicken or the palace?

On origins of things; how important are the ideas that came before us? How important is tradition? How much are we shaped by those ideas?

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shadow hopping

Dear Diary, Today in German class, was irked when a girl told me that she could never have moved to another country for a man because she was too independent. Irksome for the following two reasons: one.The significant rattling of my independence was precisely one reason why I found (find) it so difficult to come [...]

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was that a smile, berlin?

The verdict is in: Berlin looks better in the sun. We went away to summer in Australia—an incredible experience of nature, Sydney, time together with J’s family, backpacking on the coast, swimming each morning in the ocean, cooking over a camp stove, being swept away by huge gentle waves, blue-bottle jellyfish, kangaroos in the campsite, [...]

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