Amy Whitehouse is a white and very non-white-sounding soul singer from the UK. She sings so robustly and soufully that her age of 23 is also pretty suprising. She also frequently has very large hair. This song is a remix of “Rehab”, which is about not going even though they tried to make her go [...]

Primo purveyors of “death jazz” (as in “death metal”-type spazz energy) and one of the most life-affirming live bands I have ever had the pleasure of seeing, Soil & “Pimp” Sessions from Tokyo (never figured out the quotation marks), will be performing at the Gangster Groove party at Lido (Kreuzberg) on Saturday night (entry 10 [...]

My crunchy California neighbor (San Jose, holla!) told me about this a few weeks ago: for vague safety reasons (Sicherheitsgründen), Berlin’s Wasser- und Schifffahrtsamt (WSA) says it needs to, post haste, chop down 41 trees along the Landwehrkanal, once of the absolute best and most beautiful places in the Kreuzberg 36 summer-time to lay about [...]

Tonight @ the Tempodrom — the newish building in west Kreuzberg that from far away looks like an elongated circus tent (and supposedly has a swimming pool in the basement) — one of the world’s few true living rock legends, Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground, is performing his bracing and depressing concept (read: [...]

Noah Feldman is a law professor who writes for the NYT Magazine. In yesterday’s column for “The Way We Live Now” he decribes in the Piece Process the US admininstration’s Johnny-come-lately pursuit of peace in Palestine (complete with a b+w photo of a jet-setting Condoleezza Rice). The first paragraph reads like a handy Cliff Notes [...]

Can it be that quote/unquote chillout music is cool again? These days, when one surveys a down-sized version of the once-mighty Ninja Tune and a tidal wave of nauseatingly numerous Ministry of Sound comp, urbanites post-2001 realised that (1) a genre can’t get by on just by having coolness built into the name and (2) [...]

It started in Paris in 1982 and now, twenty-five years later, has managed to spread its party-hearty tentacles like a benevolent and groovy virus* to 360 cities all over Europe, the Festival of Music. Don’t get bummed that it’s raining ’cause quite a bit is happening indoors, every-which-where and every Berzirk.
Update 23:45 - I just [...]

Ah yeah, hear I sit with hooded eyelids waiting for the storm clouds to wipe out yet another sunny-starting day. I hear it’s already pounding Hamburg. Berlin is muggy as all get out, slivers of sun diminishing by the minute and a sweaty brow returning every five. It makes me remember the historical fact that [...]

The first Tuesday of every month wird geslammt (next: July 3 @ 20:30) at KATO “Kulturbahnhof” (U-Bhf. Schlesisches Tor).
Entry costs 4 euros, free for slammers
“12 Poeten kämpfen mit der Kraft des Wortes.”
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Peggy and Iggy sitting in a tree. A while back I mentioned Iggy Pop having written The Passenger while riding the S-bahn. It’s a classic song and I probably hear it in my periphery at least once a month on some radio station or party in Berlin. The song is effective, care-free and very simple, [...]

Photo: AFP
Six months and 29 kg (64 lbs) later… It’ll happen to your kids, too! One minute they’re eating a bowl of Cheerios in front of the telly, the next they’re out hunting squirrels in the back yard. Se la vi.
CBBC: Bear cub Knut is threat to keeper
(Yes, that’s right. I get most of my [...]

It’s true. Some presumably bored-off-their-asses scientists, using something called the Russell Seitz method, have calculated the combined weight of all the electrons buzzing around on all the world’s inter-linked servers (including the electrons used to power those servers) and came up with 2 ounces (60 g) — or, alternatively, 6 micrograms using the Discover magazine [...]

Hey, did you know there’s a massive beach volleyball court in the middle (north Mitte) of Berlin? Yeah, me either. I should have expected it though, considering that you can already camp out in Mitte. It’s called Beach Mitte, near S-bhf Nordbahnhof. It looks pretty rad but I’m hoping the prices (which are not listed [...]

At times I feel that life really is like a dream. Not so much the row, row, row your boat kind but more of the David Lynch kind whereby random but fantastical things cross my path without context or connection, having a certain but undisclosed logic wholly unto themselves (”an sich” as the Germans would [...]

Prinzessinnenbad [imdb], X-berg 36, Alter
choice motherly advice: no heroin and don’t get pregnant

I just heard the new Queens of the Stone Age record “Era Vulgaris” and I have to say I’m rather let down. I always expected QOTSA to rule the known universe single-handedly until it (the universe) died in a massive ball of fire. Alas, it sounds like they (the band) died first. I can’t quite [...]

The NYT, chiseling into that Lifehacker dollar perhaps, has been publishing quite a few pieces in the work-life time management department lately. I thought this was pretty interesting (and true) from Time Wasted? Perhaps It’s Well Spent, i.e. the best way to get work done is in concentrated bursts with frequent (but brief) breaks,
“The longer [...]

June 6, 17:06 update: the boisterous Brit at bowleserised has launched a blog called The Ponyhof dedicated to horse-related street art spotted in Berlin (or presumably elsewhere). There’s a lot more than you think.
Ever seen The Simpsons episode where they visit Canada and find street writers spraying “Obey the rules”? I saw that one last [...]

The flag of Mozambique has a freakin Kalashnikov automatic rifle on it. I just thought that was somehow worth noting. Via How is an AK-47 like a QWERTY keyboard? by Andrew Leonard @ Salon.

The Times of London reported last week:
In Görlitzer Park, in Berlin, one can take part in master classes – run by veteran anarchists – in how to blockade streets and resist arrest. One aim is to clog access roads from Rostock airport and prevent the arrival of interpreters to the summit.
I’ll probably be grilling in [...]