It’s not been all that bloggy round these parts, so much so that I’ve neglected to post my two most favourite musical objects gathered in the last two weeks for ye olde recurring feature here. So, in deference to limited time, gimmickry and twitter’s 140 characters, here are two tracks that, to quote David Foster [...]

Did you hear that BVG is super pissed at AIG about CDO-linked CBLs they signed in the 90s? It’s true. BVG lost EUR 247m last year, five times their losses from the year before—and a lot of it has to do with the now-imploding AIG and its fancy collaterized debt obligations. Berlin’s public (and deeply [...]

with UK’s Blue Sabbath Black Fiji, live @ the scuzztastic West Germany (Skalitzer Str. 133) http://www.myspace.com/bluesabbathblackfiji
Swearing At Motorists (US/DE) http://www.myspace.com/swearingatmotorists

In 1998 or 1999 (can’t remember), I saw the Welsh band Super Furry Animals perform at the semi-legendary club Maxwell’s in Hoboken, New Jersey. I further cannot recall whether or nor they were opening or if they were the main band. But there are two things I remember vividly from the show: the songs were [...]

Nope, not even in light of recent events.

Not to belittle the fine disc jockeys of Berlin—of which there are indeed many, ensuring that the good wheat from the chaff are really, really quite good—but I found this side note by Gideon Lewis-Kraus from this month’s Harper’s cover story (a glorious outsider evisceration of the Frankfurt Book Fair) to be funny simply because [...]

Even the Polizeipräsident’s letterhead now sports new city motto “be Berlin.”

It was revealed last week that David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel, The Pale King, will be published next year by Little, Brown. While I don’t know if I’ll read it, seeing as it represents to some degree the secret torment that DFW went through in his final days, it did remind me of a song [...]

Moving through the mid-level of U-Bahn station Kottbusser Tor this evening, I was surprised by the lack of drug deals happening with just a single, sorry group of four dudes (it’s always four) huddled near the flower shop. It’s night and it’s raining out, two things that would normally guarantee a packed house of buyers [...]

Oh man, I learned how to ski this weekend in the border village of Klinovec in the Czech Republic. You know how the Tom Petty song “Learning to Fly” goes “coming down is the hardest thing”? Replace Fly with Ski, and you know what I’m talking about. It is so true what they say: the [...]

An Opel Kadett, one of the least luxurious of German cars, was ignited early Sunday morning in Neukölln. I’m not sure it’s a new trend. Looking at the Google Maps hack Brennende Autos, it would seem to be just an enduring one. But it does look to be a new media trend. Could switching the [...]