I’m gonna put off any kind of resolution until Chinese New Year (which, I believe kicks off the Year of the Pig–or swine, boar, whatever you wanna call it–personally, I think going from the Dog to the Pig, I wouldn’t mind calling this coming six-week in-between period the Pigdog Time—Schweinhundzeit?).
2006 was an up-and-down year, more [...]

That’s the Yiddish (a germanic language, mind you) that Germans are speaking when they wish you “Guten Rutsch” (not a “good slide”). Thanks to my boss and with a follow-up to good ol’ German wikipedia (the second biggest), it turns out that Rosch ha-Schana was spoken to wish a good beginning.
As for Germany’s second strangest [...]

I heard about James Brown’s death at a Christmas party full of hip-hop DJs. Some (Hype, et al.) said you can get so many samples from just one JB song, which makes sense considering how every instrument was used to build the rhythm. It makes me wonder just how revolutionary bands like Germany’s Can really [...]

We visited the Berliner Weihnachts-Circus last night and I shot a few videos on my digi-cam during the non-stop cavalcade of Russian gymnists, the ‘American wheel of death’ (amerikanische Todesrad) and various groups of African wildlife (six tigers, five elephants and two giraffes paraded in at various interludes). This particular 18-second clip—the horse trainer encircled [...]

菜鸟142 What are you doing?

Visit ChinesePod.com

powered by performancing firefox

After two years of homelessness, well-known but ‘underground’ club, Cookies, is back in ‘07, reports The Berlin Paper (translating from Der Tagesspiegel):
Berlin club entrepreneur Heinz Gindullis (aka Cookie) is to reopen his popular Cookies club on 16 January in a cinema behind the Westin Grand Hotel on Friedrichstrasse. While different in style, Cookies had the [...]

Overall rating (out of 10) = 8.2
Even if we finally got there ten minutes before official closing time, I can verify that the WICKED WEINACHTSMARKT is a special tree in a forest of cookie-cutter Märkte (’wicked’ in the UK sense, I’m guessing). Most of the stands were already closed though the ones still manned [...]

As I pre-blogged back in August, Lou Reed resurrected his bleakly beautiful 1973 album ‘Berlin’ for four shows in Brooklyn late last week. Ben Sisario of the NYT asked Reed about his ‘Brechtian song cycle’ and managed to get this little bit of news out (at least to me—I always reckoned he was shooting up [...]

I just noticed this new flower shop at Kottbusser Tor. It’s open around the clock. Now, that’s just what Berlin needs. No, really, it does.

Sorta. Just yesterday I was wondering aloud (well in blogland, aloud) why Pitchfork Media, the fascist arbiters of hipster taste, hadn’t reviewed Aloe Blacc’s new record yet, this deep into the year, and then, lo and behold, I see they posted a review today. Ah, man, just call me your friendly neighbourhood psychic visionary. Haha. [...]

Here’s something for your cool aunt’s (or uncle’s) coffee table.
My sister, Rebecca (big up), pointed me to this book, Graffitti Women: Street Art from Five Continents, feat. among others, Swoon.
It’s compiled by Nicholas Ganz, a German graffiti artist [aka Keinom] from Essen, who also put together the popular Graffiti World.
The Brooklyn Museum, which [...]

Clipped from the newest Harper’s Weekly (so it happened last week). I still can’t decide if this is a little or a lot racist—and on whose behalf:
A police officer in Tempe, Arizona, was criticized for telling two black men that they could get out of their littering tickets if they rapped. “The dangers of littering,” [...]

Bitchdork puts up its fave 25 music videos from this year but I find this list of 50 much better and all the YouTubers are embedded directly in the post (though it takes some time to fully load). Plus it rightfully gives this OK Go joint of pure greatness the top spot—so entertaining, the song [...]

So Wired is calling that little strip of icons you seen under an online news story Iconistan. The best IMHO of these social news ranking sites, Reddit (which Wired incidentally just bought), seems to be down today and I’m freakin’ out man. That was my main source of internet hotness. So this is what cold [...]

One of the first things the Berlin transplant learns is that the city has an overabundance of museums (~100). The ironic thing about living in an artistically rich city, is that the longer one lives there, so wanes the visits to museums and galleries. I’m still kicking myself for missing not one, but two consecutive [...]

That’s a good name for a David Lynch movie, eh? Well, that actually is the name of his new movie (all-caps is required in the title, apparently). It was filmed in Poland and France, in all digital and–despite fears generated by a near universally off-putting leaked scene (turned out to be a red herring that [...]

Overall rating (out of 10) = 7.0 (servicable if dodgy, inordinate amount of ambient concrete seems to sap warmth out of food and Glühwein faster than normal) Atmosphere = 6.2 (festive if grudglingly, bleakly, inevitably, ill-informed tourist so) Correctness = 6.5 (it’s all there, the Grünkohl, the Boulette, the Wurst, the Quarkbälle, the random and [...]

So what do you do to get all festive in December in Germany? What else, you go to the Christmas market (Weihnachtsmarkt) of course. I was looking for a list of markets in Berlin (there’s a lot) and, lo-and-behold, found the motherload here. The one at Gendarmenmarkt is full-canopied and especially nice but also exacts [...]

The legendary New York rapper (whose name is hilarious in German, = ‘wet’) has dropped another dime bag of street poetry. Hip-hop is apparently dead so let’s just pimp it out, is his arguable claim in a recent polite interview with Pitchfork. Regardless, this joint is hot and, no, you’re not high; he really is [...]

Today in Germany and most parts of Europe is St. Nicholaus Day–not to be confused with British actor Nicholaus Day–or Santa Claus, for that matter. The first saint of gift-giving (before Harpers Weekly and Coca Cola turned him into a ho-ho-ho-ing, bowl-of-jelly rider of reindeer-powered flying sleds) is a bone of contention among many a [...]