Remember the movie The Matrix? Remember the creators, the Wachowski bros, the future of cinema? That didn’t quite happen (ah, 2000 was an innocent, hopeful time, wasn’t it?). Their output has been a little choppy since–but they did make the pretty good V for Vendetta (let’s not talk about Matrix II, III or Speed Racer). [...]

Man, conscious rappers hate that phrase, even ones from the Left Coast of the U.S., which has the world’s largest per capita head count of hippies. But the phrase is especially appropriate when you’re talking about an alternate rapper in the true sense, a cat who’s developed and perfected his own jazz-inflected style for decades, [...]

William Burroughs would’ve loved this town. Walking around the area of Kottbusser Tor, I think sometimes I’ve walked right into Naked Lunch. It’s got the obscenity, the freaks, the superfreaks, the rain-streaked bleakness, junkies, literate junkies, stupid junkies, romantic junkies and the cornucopia of psychotropic offerings to support them, each user his own self-proclaimed prophet [...]

One of the New Yorker’s best writers just spent the last three or so months on a stint with the American Academy. And before I could post something about it, he’s already returned to the U.S. But not before blogging about Berlin’s life-threatening bike paths and aggressively-named streets. Or writing about 1989. Or getting into [...]

For obvious historical reasons, Germany has a conflicted relationship with its military forces. For more than a few pacifist Germans (and in a way ‘pacifist’ is nearly synonymous with being German today), the fact that the country even has active armed forces is barely tolerable. That’s why Nicholas Kulish’s piece No Parade for Hans resonated [...]

Not satisfied with desecrating the memory of Kurt Cobain in Guitar Hero 5, Bon Jovi managed to make Monday’s rained-on Wall celebrations a little soggier with their new song about following or not following. T’was a poor choice by any measure of taste, but there’s no accounting for popular taste (though the song was no [...]

Way to go in 1989, German people, 20 years later. Twenty-eight years is a long time to live behind a wall. There are not many explosions of freedom in history, and this was one of the greatest.

The “my first banana” cover of German satire magazine Titanic’s November 1989 issue is easily its most famous. The Berlin Wall had just fallen and East Germans coming into the West were buying bananas like crazy, like the exotic unknown fruit of freedom it was. The cover shows Gaby (upper right), fresh from the [...]

Having just returned yesterday from a five-day whirl through Greece, there is still a lot to process back in here in rainy Berlin. But I wanted to put this up, a short video of our chance encounter with Olympic history when we managed last Wednesday to run into a Greek-American tour guide at the foot [...]