1. Art School Confidential by Terry Zwigoff: Set in an art college, meant to be fun but it’s just piling up stupid clichés. This is very annoying, given that Mr. Zwigoff used to be a good director who made the great comic book adaptation „Ghost World“ in 2001 with Thora Birtch, Scarlet Johansson and Steve Buscemi.
2. Mission Impossible (MI:3) by … – I don’t remember. Well, it’s an action flic. After the opening scene where Mr. Cruise gets married there is a lot of action going on, the camera is moving constantly, a lot of explosions, shooting and fighting. It’s ok as an action movie.
3. Hard Candy: Quite a horrible film about a 14 years old girl who takes revenge on a pedophile who she deems responsible for the suicide of her friend.
4. The Preposition, after a screenplay by Nick Cave. The movie stars Guy Pearce as one of four brothers who form up a gang. It is set in late 19th century Australia. The scenes are populated with dirty and fucked up people which makes the movie a little different from its American counterparts. The music which was written by Nick Cave is very good. The film is good, too.

List of items which broke down so far:
1. Portable CD-Player: breaks down due to a faulty CD.
2. My knees, but they are ok again.
3. My watch gets destroyed as I unintentionally expose it to water having a shower.
4. First pair of blue jeans: get a hole on the backside as I bow down. There is only a small hole at first which widens fast every time I do a similar move.
5. Second pair of jeans, due to a similar event.
6. Cell phone: my Motorola cannot charge the battery anymore.
6. Third pair of jeans, break as I get on my bike.

On Sunday evening I take a bike trip at sunset. I ride on the west side along the Hudson to the southern tip of Manhattan. I have a look at the orange disc of the sun slowly going down behind skyscrapers. I head north on the other side of the peninsula along the East River. I pass quite a few ball parks with men playing baseball or other sports. I have a look at Williamsburg at sunset. I feel free and very happy on my bike, i don’t need a car, a bike does it.
I go all the way to the UN-Headquartes on 40th Street. The building looks beautiful in the dark. From the UN I continue West. I come through a little area of Victorian houses. One is a residential building which is called the Cloister. It was a real cloister which they turned into an appartment building. Close to that area superslim skyskrapers rise…

This is my new Hi-fi which looks like a bicycle. Well, it is a bicycle, but it’s a Panasonic. Until i found it, i did not know that Panasonic made bikes. Now i know. You know, too.

Friends take us out to dinner in Astoria, which is an area in Queens. We get picked up by car and are driven to a Greek restaurant which is said to have good fish. On our arrival we are a bit disappointed about how basic the place looks like. While we are waiting for a table I have the opportunity to see big grilled fish on the guests’ plates. Yummi!
Our friends who have celebrated their marriage here order grilled calamari and sardines as appetizers and Peter’s fish (as I recall) as main course. I have the best food which I had in NYC so far.
After dinner we are taken to a riverside park in Queens. While we have a smoke we get a glimpse of the Manhattan Skyline in the dark. It looks great how the lights in the buildings make up an irregular pattern. I imagine that this pattern changes every day, as peoples’ lives variate (at least a little) from day to day.
We stand next to the beautiful Triboro Bridge which connects Queens, Manhattan and the Bronx.

has sprung, as one advertisement lets us know. On Easter Saturday the temperatures reach at least 20° Celcius. The trees are blossoming and everybody is out in the streets. New York is very colourful in many ways, even more so right now. There is a great variety of people and cultures, even the population of dogs is much more diverse than in Vienna. Very often I see people walking 3 dogs and they are all different. That’s fun to watch.

is a Russian restaurant in Brighton Beach which offers live music, too. We have dinner in the hall and then swing on the dance floor. On stage is a 50 year old live entertainer who sings old songs in Russian, English and Italian. He is accompanied by a blond bombshell and a Chinese looking woman who also sing songs. The Chinese woman has a very dark voice.

Most of the songs are melancholic love songs. On entering the place we immediately feel like in Eastern Europe. There is a heavy 70ies touch to the place. My girlfriend feels like home in Romania.

There are a lot of stages of womanhood of gay men in the West Village. There are the young, skinny and good looking boys, the fortyish bodybuilder-types who put the emphasis on a manly appearance. There are the elderly couples and there are a lot of she-males. Many of them dress like women, quite a few probably have had a sex change.

Yesterday two black Wo-Men passed. They were both quite big and they had very big breasts. From their faces and voices though I can tell that they are men or very probably transsexuals. They are the most stunning transsexuals/transvestites I have met so far.

So far I met: Michael Stipe (seems more sympathetic in reality than on pictures or with REM), Hugh Grant (seems to be the same jerk as in films) and Elijah Wood. We see him in a street between SoHo and Little Italy. He wears jeans and a jeans jacket. He has cool shoes. He is rather small (as can be noticed in Lord of the Rings) and has those incredibly blue eyes. He seems sympathetic to me.
Yesterday Helena Christensen comes around the corner of my house. She then enters a neighbouring house in the West Village where she probably lives.

lies in the East River between Manhattan and Queens. It can be reached by subway or by aerial tram. The buildings on the island consist mainly of 70ies social housing complexes in a brutalist style. Nowadays luxury condominiums are being built too, like on many places in the city.

The island is a calm place with little traffic. It makes me feel as if I was on some strange kind of holidays (from Manhattan). You see people spending their day in an idle way, a lot of kids doing sports and also quite a few handicapped people in wheelchairs. One disabled man is on a wheelbed, he moves arond lying on his belly.

The place has a strange athmosphere which probably made it suitable for a film shooting. Roosevelt Island served as location for Walter Salles’ mystery film „Dark Water“, which is a remake of the Japanese original of Hideo Takata, who also made „The Ring“.

Movement of Jah People? I have not spotted any cockroaches for 3 days. I wonder what happenend to them or where they went. Last week I met 2 of them on the stairway. They were moving idly around as if they were on holidays. When my left foot came down on them they began to run faster. But that was already too late. Doomed to die on the stairs, so to say…