Category: Art
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Other people’s stories
I listen to other peoples’ stories and imperceptibly they become mine. It is as if I were compiling an encyclopedia of stories. I settle into a seat at the corner café, open a newspaper or begin a conversation with a stranger and their stories – whether I want them to or not – become a…
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The journey to your ear
(published 28 March 2010 in The Buenos Aires Herald) In the old days, after the artist, it was about the instrument. That’s why people would go to such lengths to steal a Stradivarius. Today, in the era of amplified and recorded sound, much of the action takes place once the sound leaves the instrument and…
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The other side of the night
My only salvation is the love of a woman who lifts me in her arms and wraps me in her perfume and carries me to the other side of the night.
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Unkempt words
I wander in this forest of words. I seek. I squander. I unleash. These are my words: strong, guileless, unkempt, earnest. Sometimes they are the meaning of life; other times, the scrapheap. They can be the way forward or the exquisite distraction. Just so much hot air, the elixir of love or the blood of…
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Perhaps
A life is an endless chain of perhaps. Perhaps — had I followed that scent down the dark alley — I would have met the primordial seductress and we would have wrestled lovingly amid the garbage cans and refuse until our bodies were shrunken vestiges of their former selves. Perhaps I would have passed through…
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Storm gifts
On the waterfront here, every storm is cause for a party. Most of the adults I spoke to can remember the morning when, following several days of storms that kept all the fishermen in port, the sun broke through revealing a morning that looked like God’s first: all splendor and reflections and bathed in a…
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A sense of impending peace
Los Angeles, California – On the edge of this city of bright lights, the metropolis disintegrates and fizzles into grains of sand carried away by small waves. We are perched in a house of timber and glass, a precarious construction that looks out into the void. Comfort is found in friends, in the search for…
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Nomads of the Night
The phantom kisses awaken me in the night. Troubled spirits are nomads that scour the world in search of an answer they cannot find. They gather pieces and crumbs but never find the complete answer. Is it that they ask questions no one dares to ask or is it that they cannot accept the answers…
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The experimental life
The words came pounding at his door like ruffian bill collectors. He had turned them away so often that this time he decided to let them in. He took his thrashing equanimously: after all, the thrashing was less of a sacrifice than the years he had lost putting it off. The blows were filled with…