Samothrace
Samothrace has made one major contribution to world culture—the Nike that gave its image to the Rolls Royce radiator cap and its name to the world’s largest sneaker manufacturer . . .
Lindos
By ten o’clock at night, there's a significant increase in the volume of the music pouring out of the bars, and a significant decrease in the average age of the population thronging through the narrow, white-washed streets . . .
Heaven’s Gate
I was picked up on an access road in California by a battered hulk of a station wagon, the back filled with clutter and the driver an unkempt, roly-poly man in his late twenties in a thrift shop tuxedo and a t-shirt . . .
The Fall of the Berlin Wall
I had become accustomed to the strangeness of crossing the border—the long lines for the visa, the blank but prying stares of the border guards, the doors that open only from the Western side, as if all of East Berlin were being stored in a vault . . .
Kafka’s Prague, 1983
There, on the second floor of the house that stands in the place of the house where Kafka was born, above ground level where quite probably no one sees it, is a ghastly pseudo-expressionist bust of Kafka—gaunt black metal face lurching out of a curved rectangular shield . . .
Le Bateau Ivre
Le Bateau Ivre does for New York dining what Rimbaud’s poem of the same name did for nineteenth-century French literature—it stands it on its head . . .
Mama’s Food Shop
Even more than homelessness, Lower Manhattan has a problem with momlessness . . .
Sin Sin
Despite what the name suggests, this is not some ultra-decadent East Village dive devoted to a systematic transgression of the Ten Commandments . . .
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