It’s been some 20 years since I first watched Down By Law. I remembered, like a couple of million other people I guess, the prison scene. I did not remember Robby Müller’s stunning cinematography in what is not even my favorite Jim Jarmusch film. Now I wonder whether the sequences after the escape, shot in swamps and forests in the South, lingered in the back of my mind. When I watched Down By Law yesterday, I couldn’t help but think that the scenes in the swamp were part of the inspiration for my recent forest images. Anyway, it sure is nice to believe that not *all* of your youth was wasted!

August isn’t the greatest month for grocery shopping, whether you’re in Italy or in Manhattan. It’s just too hard to keep things fresh. For the past weeks, I’ve carried cool packs through the city when I wanted to get fish and meat. It’s so hot that things would spoil on one’s way home. Yesterday, however, I grew a bit tired of it all, returning from one of my favorite grocery stores, not having found anything that I would have liked to cook. I was hit by a rare attack of nostalgia, my thoughts wandering back to the old world, my old life, and my favorite market: Padua’s market at Palazzo della Ragione, famous for its poultry and game. I think of Padua’s market at my saddest moments. I guess I mentioned this before: A few years ago, I spent a rather awful winter in the Veneto. But I also think of it with a painful desire to be there, and to go back, even if only for a while, to the kind of life where inspecting the produce at several stalls, having one’s favorite seller for every kind of food, and going home with a happy plan in one’s mind for dinner, belongs to one’s daily routine.

Not without surprise I notice a trend among fellow inmates to get pets. Well, I come from a small town, and I find the idea of having pets (or children!) in Manhattan surprising.

Anyway, I went to Harlem yesterday, and when I got back I realized that the only picture I had taken was this one.

Like any other self-respecting publication in the Western hemisphere, we called our antenna specialist. We wanted to find out more about the iPhone 4 and eventually publish a super-well-informed piece. Turns out our specialist doesn’t care – she’s at the beaches of Montauk, with her new boyfriend. She called back from the Lighthouse, where the two read Hölderlin poems to each other. On top of that, she actually owns the iPhone 4, which kind of disqualifies her to blog about it. Disturbingly, when we received her call, the thing seemed to work.

Meanwhile, back in the city, I wonder what we’ll all do with our lives when Apple is no more. Yesterday’s press conference surely was disappointing. I found the company more refreshing when they told customers who didn’t like a product to give it back, go away, and f___ themselves. What’s up with the latest “We love our customers” nonsense?

It looked like the perfect afternoon for German Manhattanites: 104 degrees outside, air condition on full blast, watching the game on Spanish TV. Well, thank you Spain for moving a dreadful object of reverse culture shock out of our sights, at least for the remainder of the tournament: the light blue sweater of our German coach!

When I look at the weather forecast for Manhattan, I can only conclude that by the end of next week we’ll all plead insanity. So it’s a good time to work on some images from happier, cooler days up in the mountains. I just posted some of them, from this past March, here.

I spent much of the spring and early summer in Europe, and now I’m back – and in shock. It’s so hot! Isn’t this supposed to be for August, 77 degrees at 6 am, above 90 during the day?

Today’s entry is a plea for help. I am looking for a sorbet recipe, something simple and low on sugar. I made some watermelon sorbet two days ago, and it doesn’t taste at all. It has the wrong consistency, like steel, nothing creamy or soft about it. I should admit that I never made sorbet in my life, don’t have great equipment (no ice-cream maker), and didn’t even look up a recipe. So I probably shouldn’t complain. But how much can go wrong with such a simple dish? I’d be most grateful for advice (perhaps watermelon isn’t the right fruit?).

Where are today’s creative writers? A cursory glance reveals that some of them are all over the MacRumors discussion forums – close to 1.500 comments and counting on Steve Jobs and how to hold your new iPhone. If you don’t have time for that, you may enjoy a short and sweet take on why this is a non issue here.

Of all things, it is this week’s release of Apple’s iBooks application that makes me say something about the rocky transition of book publishing to digital. I’m in a bind here: the contributors to NFN have published, or are in the process of publishing, what by now amounts to about a dozen books. That includes the entire range, from work with small publishing houses, to highly specialized and prestigious academic publishing houses, to the largest and quite mainstream publishing house in the world, to self publishing. Some of these books are available as e-versions, some not.

Last night I spent some time reading both the Iliad and Winnie-the-Pooh on the iPhone. I am hopeful. I think that 99.9 percent of today’s dead-tree hardcovers and paperbacks will be better off existing in virtual space. I’m not sentimental about printed books. Horrid and densely printed typesets, cheesy cover designs, flimsy paper, the overall poor reading experience, and tons of boxes whenever one moves – I won’t miss any of that. Reading on the iPhone and in a paperback side by side, I actually prefer to read the Iliad on what arguably is, due to its small size, the worst e-book reader in existence (except that the best English translation is not yet available in the iBooks store). I didn’t even mind losing the line breaks, though the true poetry-lover might balk at this: verse ought to be verse!

The question for me is: are the old dogs getting it? I think not. As far as I can see, established publishing houses in the US like to present themselves as being ‘open’ to the whole e-book revolution. But that’s perhaps because over here, going through the motions of embracing the future is something you just do by instinct, all the while where I come from people often cherish the past for its own sake (this includes an unnamed publisher who, in the year 2010, considers the use of PDF files eccentric and insists that proofs must be snail mailed back and forth half way around the globe…). Either way, it seems that many are having a hard time to think outside of the old paradigm of the printed book. Right now, e-book versions and their distribution are merely an afterthought, and the idea of publishing ‘only’ an e-book is almost considered blasphemy. I can’t help but think that today’s book publishing giants will suffer badly from the same disruptive forces that the music industry by now is quite familiar with: iTunes and the likes.

And yet, there’s an irony to all this. Never has the high quality approach of people like Gerhard Steidl made more sense. The same is true for independent books that fit the creative vision of a specific project. And from a technical viewpoint, the EPUB file format is not yet suitable for publications that are image- rather than text based (it is interesting though to think what one can do even within the current limitations).

For everything else – there’s an app for it. To me, that’s a good thing.