Praguelodyte

I miss you, my friend. You were the instigator of many a rant. Your comments on this blog egged me on.But most of all, you kept me sane whenever I was forced to go back to the U.S. You were my friend of 20 years through good times and bad. You visited me in Prague and you knew the evils of the babi and the...  

Don't you love all those 'relationship advice' articles that pop up all over the media? I don't have to read one word of them to know the following: - They're bullshit - They're written by women about men, so see above - The female writer in question is also a dyke. Why else is she getting paid to write? So,...  

Nothing to say from Planet Praha, except I'm sitting in my room with an affliction. I'm not sure what it is. I seem to drink alot o' vodka. It's gotten so cute, my little afffliction, that I refer to the vodka as 'wooka.' Sort of a corruption of the Russian pronunciation of 'vodka' as 'woodka.' Hence the...  

"Yeah, she was a panelak* girlRaised on sausages"-Sung to the tune of 'American Girl' by Tom Petty"Panelaks are just vertical trailer parks"- Butthead, expats.czThe panelak girl guffawed at a table behind me in the local Turkish mafia billiards/ casino/restaurant. At the end of my first beer it was sort of...  

The Night Tram Avenger found his kryptonite one night: his knees. God DAMN my knees. How am I supposed to avenge the night trams with these rickety, slipshod, godforsaken KNEES!!!???In a country full of drunken creeps who scream, belch, smell, swear and occasionally smack they beotches up---WHAT'S A NINJA...  

Many people said this to me in the past:'Never get in the middle of a domestic dispute; you will always get beat up as a result.'Well, I never listen to most people. Especially THOSE people.Tonight--in fact, less than 30 minutes ago-- I punched a man on a Prague tram. I punched him 2 or 3 times to be sure. I...  

"Ty vole!" was all the Czech guy on the back of the tram could say. Okay. Another friend calling another friend 'you fool' (the direct translation is too silly to mention).But there were car brakes and tram brakes and people slamming into each other. People caught their breath. I looked out the tram window...  

We inhabitants of the Prague urban jungle unite in our primitive island getaway. We leave behind crowded trams, boring job commutes and the rigamarole (hey, even a city as beautiful as Prague eventually presents some form of rigamarole for its denizens).We jump onto the comfy sofa in the Taky Tiki Cocktail...  

I finally got to go inside the infamous Vitkov monument to dead commies and soldiers/proletariat mausoleum. The giant block of concrete communist ugly sits high atop a prominent hill in Zizkov, Prague, and is directly behind the largest equestrian statue in the known universe. The horse and rider statue is...  

(article without annotation)  

In addition to photographing people, I like taking photos of old buildings. I've tried to take full photographic advantage of my location in central Europe by photographing its immense collection of stone and brick buildings. While I could usually be seen strolling through village castles and ruins snapping...  

You take an ordinary, run-down historic part of any city in the civilized world. It contains a mix of all types of people of all colors and creeds. Often there are crackhouses in the more ragged of the neighborhoods. Students, artists and punks hang out in cafes, clubs and tatoo parlors. Next, you plunk down...  

I was just watching an old episode of the Sopranos on the pc on a lazy Sunday afternoon. They played a Cake song ("Frank Sinatra") over the end credits as one of the mob guys scrambled around doing his mob stuff. The young mob guy was slick in his suit and tie as he was shuffling toward his Lexus with an...  

I'm a documentary film nut. I'll line up in freezing cold at the most obscure film festivals just to see a film about unemployed Latvians drinking vodka and staring out the window. Okay, I exaggerate, there are no long lines for most documentaries. With the exception of the 'new documentarians', i.e. Michael...  

The new photo bolsheviks are coming to Prague. They've got all the latest gear. They've got the shmooze they learned in LA or NY or some other godforsakenly fake planet. They come here--like many other fakers before them--to sniff the Eastern European air, drink the beer, start a business. They've tried...  

I decided to avoid the usual Prague New Year’s Eve madness and opt instead for a quiet party in one of those renovated attic flats in Mala Strana. In previous years I ran the gauntlet of fire and booze on the Charles Bridge and in the Old Town Square. Bottle rockets were fired horizontally at people just...  

That's me on the left taking pictures in Mala Strana, Prague. I was at the John Lennon wall again today as I strolled through the old city quarter taking portraits of a local businessman. I guess you could cite my 'hippy roots' as the reason I stopped to snap the multi-colored global wall message yet again....  

So I just got back from my local herna* bar and they done did it to me again: drunk. I wasn't thinking I would write another bar piece at the time. Especially since I am not a writer. I'm a photographer, but I've got this weird flirtation with writing. I just want people to know that I'm not another one of...  

I was reminded of the 25th anniversary of John Lennon's death in an unlikely place: my local suburban Prague pub. The 'Ojai Music Pub' is a watering hole for disenfranchised young Czechs who sport dreadlocks and mohawks in equal proportions. Normally the music is deafening. Tonight I strolled in and heard...