The one and only, the legendary, DJ Premier is doing his thang tonight at the 103, the newish club on the Kreuzberg side of the Oberbaumbrücke. Thx, Fish!
I’m putting up a Berlin music events calendar here soon. Watch this space.
Unless I decide to outsource the job; then watch another space.

Did I miss something? Did Rupert Murdoch buy the Washington Post while I wasn’t watching? Somebody named Perry Bacon Jr. (sic) gets front page acreage today to file a report “on the Democratic front” about how Barack Obama’s adversaries are using his supposed Muslim past—claims debunked ages ago in countless papers and blogs and snopes.com—by [...]

True, Germany, Japan, Chile, Congo and Israel don’t exactly speak for the entire world, but they do cover a decent per-continent portion of it. This event is going on for the next four days at the pregnant oyster. Tonight is the damn-near legendary Nobukazu Takemura from Nippon. I got to see the defunct-since-76 Harmonia last [...]

This graphic from DER SPIEGEL makes it pretty clear why German business groups have been chiding Angela Merkel about her ill-advised meeting with the Dalai Lama last month. Also clear is that German business groups don’t care that much about democracy or what people like to call human rights. Even Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier disagrees [...]

Berliner Zeitung reports that Kreuzberg is not the Problemkiez it used to be with social ills like poverty and unemployment now more, well, problematic in Wedding, Neukölln and Moabit. Check this space sometime next year for gentrification news. And be sure to check that article for hot German words like Abwärtsspirale and Interventionsbedarf.

Quiet Riot - Cum on Feel the Noize
R.I.P. Kevin Dubrow, found dead in Vegas at the age of 52, reason unknown.

Honest to goodness this is what Lidl had on offer during “America Week” last week — as I was to discover on Saturday; this at a store that prides itself in its profound lack of variety. Unbelievable.

I’m on twitter now. It’s pretty geil, as the Germans say. And pretty fun. You can update via sms or im. I just added a widget to the blog here, lower right under Recent Twitter, which fits well with Recent Chatter. So I really couldn’t not name it that. Double negatives rule!

My sister at the age of twelve once mentioned that she liked frogs and, so, for every birthday—since everyone knew what she liked—that’s what she got, frogs: frog socks, frog stickers, frog pillows, frog lunchboxes. She was overloaded with so much froggieness and nothing else to show for her birthday but frog stuff for much [...]

In honour of No Music Day, I give you this week’s beautiful sound:
(silence)
Hope you liked it. I sure did.

Kottke notes a funny-sad quote from Canadian cyberpunk pioneer (and bloody brilliant sci-fi writer) William Gibson about our day and age:
If one had gone to talk to a publisher in 1977 with a scenario for a science-fiction novel that was in effect the scenario for the year 2007, nobody would buy anything like it. It’s [...]

Chinese movie director Jia Zhangke was visibly delighted last year to be presented (by Catherine Deneuve no less) with the Golden Lion, the highest honour of the Venice Film Festival. Still Life beat out faves like The Queen and Bobby, surprising pretty much everyone. A controversial judgement at the time, one year after the award [...]

Paul Krugman notes today what has to be the most attention-getting headline yet about the sinking dollar, from Der Spiegel Intl: ECONOMIC PEARL HARBOR! Gabor Steingart in the article, however, tightly sums up what the US Federal Reserve right now probably fears most: that the Chinese will dump the dollar.
For the United States, a Chinese [...]

Sure, it happened a while ago but a good’n is a good’n and this cover for the January issue of Texas Monthly was just awarded 2007 Best Coverline by the American Society of Magazine Editors. It gets even better at the asterisk.

I’ve been casually blogging about director David Lynch’s world travels of late. On Monday I noted his globe-trotting activities, planting meditation schools hither and yon across the European plains. (He wants 192.) Little did I know (until I read Hermann today) that the next day he’d be in town announcing plans for building Berlin’s very [...]

I just upgraded my WordPress version to the new hotness, 2.3.1. Now Widgets are built into the core. You don’t even have to install the plugin anymore. If that’s not sexy, I don’t know what is. Oh, wait, yes I do. Catherine Deneuve, for instance. Well, at least the 1967 version was pretty sexy.

I was overjoyed to discover the band System of a Down circa 2002. Rage Against the Machine was gone just when we needed them most and for a while the whole alternative rock thing was dominated by faux-angry crackers like Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit. Scary times. Then Serj Tankian arrives with his jolly band [...]

If you live in Berlin there’s a good chance you get a bill from Vattenfall, the ginormous power company with the cute-sounding name (waterfall in Swedish). They make a big deal out of their green credentials, having a “clean coal” plant in Brandenburg for example, which helps distract from the fact that most of their [...]

All these striking TV writers standing around in picket lines lately are out of their natural habitat and primed to talk about things we normally wouldn’t hear about. Jon Stewart’s head writer, for instance, tells the Daily News about why the Writers Guild needed to strike and why “Wednesday you were watching Jay and Dave [...]

So, David Lynch has been spreading the meditation gospel around the world. Last month he started a school in Scotland with Donovan (that’s right, the Mellow Yellow and Hurdy Gurdy man). It’s gonna be called the Invincible Donovan University. Now if you think I made that name up, get a load of his new school [...]