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imomusOn Saturday, before playing the Momus show at Bios, I went with Babis (my best friend from when I was 20) to Psychico, the Athens suburb where we both lived as kids (me when I was ten, in the days of the military dictatorship, Babis a bit younger -- his communist parents fled to Rome and London when the colonels took over).
Little had changed in Psychico. Odos Narkissou, where I had a little box room overlooking the street (the room where I experienced my first orgasm!), was tranquil. Orange trees, an all-pervading smell of pine and eucapyptus, a baby tortoise on a garden wall, a cicada singing in the old pine tree (slightly blighted), the hazy, marbled mountains framing the whole thing.
Psychico still has Mini Coopers with alloy racing wheels, just like it did in 1969 when I lived here. The kiosks still sell the chocolate I used to buy, in exactly the same wrappers. The brutalist Alpha Beta supermarket on the main road is still there, though its stock is disappointingly globalized; I bought sushi, which tasted like supermarket sushi anywhere. My old school -- St Catherine's British Embassy School, my favourite of all the schools I ever went to -- is now the South African Embassy, and has lost all its peeling charm. The Bluebell cafe is now a post office.
Psychico's streets were deserted on Saturday. There were no children in its dry, sprinkler-irrigated parks (people have gone, this weekend, to their home villages to vote). The more modest houses had been replaced by big vulgar neo-classical villas and gardenless "luxury" apartment blocks. Apart from sinister security men, nobody was walking on the streets at all. Telescoping forty years, I got the impression that the world had become meaner and more segregated in the interim.
It was a relief to return to the shabby-but-vital Kerameikos neighbourhood, where Hisae and I caught some Brazilian art films (part of the ReMap biennial festival, and organized by Pablo Leon de la Barra) in a mosquito-infested vacant lot and ate simple fresh food at a wonderful pavement restaurant -- you really felt like you were on Hydra or Andros! -- before heading to the very chic Bios, where I played a two-hour show with great verve making up for patchy sound. The weird mirror in the top photo is in the Bios bathroom.
Little had changed in Psychico. Odos Narkissou, where I had a little box room overlooking the street (the room where I experienced my first orgasm!), was tranquil. Orange trees, an all-pervading smell of pine and eucapyptus, a baby tortoise on a garden wall, a cicada singing in the old pine tree (slightly blighted), the hazy, marbled mountains framing the whole thing.
Psychico still has Mini Coopers with alloy racing wheels, just like it did in 1969 when I lived here. The kiosks still sell the chocolate I used to buy, in exactly the same wrappers. The brutalist Alpha Beta supermarket on the main road is still there, though its stock is disappointingly globalized; I bought sushi, which tasted like supermarket sushi anywhere. My old school -- St Catherine's British Embassy School, my favourite of all the schools I ever went to -- is now the South African Embassy, and has lost all its peeling charm. The Bluebell cafe is now a post office.
Psychico's streets were deserted on Saturday. There were no children in its dry, sprinkler-irrigated parks (people have gone, this weekend, to their home villages to vote). The more modest houses had been replaced by big vulgar neo-classical villas and gardenless "luxury" apartment blocks. Apart from sinister security men, nobody was walking on the streets at all. Telescoping forty years, I got the impression that the world had become meaner and more segregated in the interim.
It was a relief to return to the shabby-but-vital Kerameikos neighbourhood, where Hisae and I caught some Brazilian art films (part of the ReMap biennial festival, and organized by Pablo Leon de la Barra) in a mosquito-infested vacant lot and ate simple fresh food at a wonderful pavement restaurant -- you really felt like you were on Hydra or Andros! -- before heading to the very chic Bios, where I played a two-hour show with great verve making up for patchy sound. The weird mirror in the top photo is in the Bios bathroom.