The tuna fish is a big fish and even millions of sushi eaters the world round cannot seem to kill em off. After two weeks of near death, the benperry.net DA TUNA LIVES AGAIN! This week I bring you a Zeitgeist song from the Klaxons of Britain. They actually performed recently in Berlin at the [...]

Well, I’ve returned to the southern side of the Baltic Sea after spending the last five days in Malmö, Sweden (and to a lesser extent, Copenhagen, Denmark). We — Pierre, Nancy, Yuhang and I — arrived by car (over the ferry and the bridge) on the day after Bill Murray got busted for drunk-driving a [...]

I’m telling people all the time that the Gegend around Kottbusser Tor is not as dangerous as it’s reputation. Sure, it’s dodgy in places and there’s wide variety of gangsters-for-hire and down-on-their-luckers but nowhere do you have to fear for your safety. Well, having interfered last Friday night circa 3AM with a four-way turf-based gang [...]

photo: Carissa Enriquez
Is what Ralph Waldo Emerson once said. Or Yoda. (I have no idea what it means, but it sounds deep.) Forty six years ago they started to build a big fat one in Berlin.

Like Atlanta has the lock-down on crunk, the yawning ceilings of Berliner Durchgangzimmer seem to have cornered the global “market” on what they used to call IDM (intelligent dance music) and have since, thank God, dispensed with. It’s funny that Ellen Allien has become such an unlikely posterchild and that BPitch Control has become such [...]

Bastardising commerce with the urban anarchy of street art has become a pet topic of mine lately. I happened to be in Mitte this weekend for a friend’s bachelor party (don’t ask) and noticed some posters about another party that was held late-June at the gallery Deathless on Torstrasse. (I know I’m a bit late [...]

Freddie Mercury once exclaimed just that in a Queen song (Fat Bottom Girls, perhaps?) and he probably meant the sexier kind of bikes with motors, but whateveh. The NYT has an article in “Travel” that describes Berlin as an “ideal city for bicycling” (Pedaling Through a City Reborn). I’ve only skimmed it, okay, but I [...]

Every film auteur has to do something for cash in the salad days. The late Ingmar Bergman made TV commercials for Bris soap. (Slut is Swedish for end, not, uh, slut — as the end of this bizarre advert might imply.)

Here are nine others.

Reuters: Berlin restaurant cheat jailed for binge attacks (Feb 2, 10:47 GMT)
A Berlin court has sentenced a man known as “Schnitzel Stephan” to 18 months in jail for cheating 64 restaurants in the past year when he was already on probation for previous unpaid eating binges.
The heavyset man of 160 kg (350 lb), with a [...]

In the wake of Rupert Murdoch having successfully wrested the WSJ as part of Dow Jones, “one of the proudest pillars of American journalism,” from the angry grip of the Bancroft family yesterday, I present this “book review” by Russell Baker in the NY Review of Books, Goodbye to Newspapers?, on the steady dwindling [...]