The year I spent in Texas was pretty much the worst year of my life. Reed Junior High School had an Eighth Grade class of over 500 students - the school I moved away from had 20 - and I was completely overwhelmed by the scale of it, confused as well by a Texas culture … Continue reading Jude
The year, I'm guessing, was 1973. And it must have been late in the year because I remember the threat of rain throughout the day; Brasilia's dry season had come and gone. At the Summer Olympics the year before, the USA men's basketball team had suffered a controversial and ignominious defeat at the hands of … Continue reading When the Commies Came to Play
When the wind blows from the North we can hear the train. Not the thump-a-thump, thump-a-thump we heard as the carriages crossed the viaduct at the end of the street in the Czar Peter neighbourhood of Amsterdam, when the bedroom windows stood futilely open on hot summer nights; nor even the vague and distant rumble … Continue reading Travel Notes
Told you so. Soheila Sokhanvari, 'Moje Sabz', 2011 - Taxidermy, fiberglass, jesmonite blob, automobile paint. At Saatchi Gallery, London.
Wearing a business suit and putting on a lanyard at the bottom of which dangles a security pass extending to me complete airport access gives me another privilege too, an odd and unexpected social permission: to look at people . The assumption on the part of those who see me is that I must be … Continue reading Random
Among the first things one notices about the British is their dysfunctional relationship with electricity. There seems to be an underlying conviction that, at any moment, this unpredictable menace will leap from the wall and strike one dead. There is a presumption of evil here, of malicious intent. When and by what means, in the … Continue reading British Electricity
In the autumn of 1972 I was ten years old and my parents were heading back to Brazil. My father was a printer by trade and after having spent nearly a decade with a mission agency in Manaus, followed by a three-year transition in Florida, he was now opening a new publishing and print operation … Continue reading Lockheed Electra
