What I remember

That camera was magic.  A simple 35mm SLR, Praktica LB, I think I was using Fujifilm I'd bought in Russia that summer.

Chicago: hometown, two generations removed. My grandfather never really lost his accent and at 97 still says: "And I says to him, I says..." That's the generational and geographical gap. I'd just turned 19 and was visiting the city for the first time with my mother. It felt more like home than the city I'd spent 18 years of my life in: more chaotic, darker and brighter at the same time, more colourful, but indifferent about that fact. Certain parts of New York, too, had this quality. The wall of the Jewish bakery in lower side Manhattan, 5 in the evening, late autumn, papered over with old news paper clippings. This photo came later. But at some point, the two photos mean the same thing.

Manhattan had a way of being unintenionally colour-coordinated, a lot like Paris, and sometimes Boston. Or at least I always managed to find those secret spaces of spontaneous order.

Like the luck I had with buying wine, or earlier, buying classical music CDs I'd never heard before, selecting them based on intuition and whim. I always managed to find good ones. Brahm's 4th symphony and the Deutsches Requiem; Tristan & Isolde; Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto and the Isle of the Dead with the corresponding Böcklin painting gracing the cover of the CD-booklet.

Charon... maybe we do not need Charon. Maybe we need only the green light in the subway on the other side of the world.