Yuhang and I have been flitting around on our Flitterwoche for the past three days like little dragonflies, though at the pace we decide, something we did not always have during our highly scheduled Daqing wedding prep days. Speaking of which, it was great success, it was agreed on every second toast of bai jiao afterward. It was not unsurreal, but the near Hollywood level of production that went into it could make this the dvd hit of 2009. And yes there will be a DVD. Cameramen were posted at regular intervals all the way from my one night villa [...]
I feel like I've been getting married all week, as this phot o might suggest, though tomorrow is the event, the official wedding party, regarded in China as the once-in-a-lifetime occurance more important than the wedding itself (which technicall already happened in Sweden last year anyway). Family members and family friends are coming in from all corners of the country. I've even got a few family representing the Perry corner as my sister Rebecca, with her bf Jorge, flew in last night from South Korea, where they live now. Conveniently right over the border. That didn't keep them, as [...]
They say the Chinese aren't sure exactly how many characters they have in their written language. You could probably say the same for their food, or at least the impression I was starting to get tonight, nibbling on a chicken neck. Not only is there an endless variety of regional and sub-regional foods, they seem to have absorbed foods from other cultures and sinofied them. Or perhaps vice versa. I've seen in Harbin a Chinese doener kebap on a turning spit (spiced with coriander, natch), a bright-yellow baseball-sized globe that was basically cornbread stuffed with sauerkraut (better than it sounds) [...]
American children hear in grade school, at some point, that if they make a hole straight through the earth and crawl through it, they'll wind up on the other side in China. It struck me, skyping with my Dad last night-who was living exactly 12 hours in the past, that I was in fact on the other side of the earth from him and, as I had pictured as a child, walking upside down. That bizarro world feeling goes beyond astrophysics, as I sit here behind a shiny mahagony table in a home office in Daqing, China. Yuhang and I [...]
Tech writer David Pogue is too much of an Apple cheerleader to get my regular read, but I accidentally learned something from his column today, which I accidentally read. (Because it was a list and had cocktail-party in the title?) Q: I'm always losing cellphone calls. How come that never happens in Europe or Asia? A: Two reasons. First, those are smaller land masses; easier to blanket with signal. Second, those governments dictated where to build the cell towers for ideal coverage. In this country, cell carriers can't put up [...]
taken down for now because my reformatted version crashed someone's browser, but you can watch it here .
Those Rebellious Kreuzbergers , originally uploaded by bpx . via à Berlin via Neues aus der Hasenheide berlin.equipier.com/musique/di e-kreuzberg-rebellen.php hareheath.blogspot.com/2009/02 /von-hasen-heiden-und-heide...
The NYT's young Berlin bureau chief, Nicholas Kulish, sees a connection between Germany's refusal to pony up stimulus funds in proporition to the U.S. with a red line guarding a "barefoot zone" beyond which no shoes my trod. Everyone strictly obeys the line and grown men freeze in place when they see it, demonstrating a voluntary policing of the type you wouldn't likely see in Paris, let alone Rome. This collective sense of Ordung above all else is familiar to any non-German who has watched, baffled, as pedestrians line up at a red cross walk light [...]
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 Wallace, ring my cherries. (Like the jackpot on a slot machine, get it?) They both happen to be the first "songs" on their respective new records. Zu - Ostia There's a Werner Herzog movie about dwarves breaking out [...]
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 in-debt) transport company, the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe, like hundreds of munipalities in Germany and across Europe, were in 1997 approached by wise guys from Deutsche Bank and Daimler Financial. They were offered a great, one-time-only, hard-to-refuse opportunity: just rent us your subway cars, we (as owners) [...]
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 incandescent and, as much as he bantered between songs, we, the audience, could not understand a bloody thing frontman Gruff Rhys was saying. It was English-like, but what came across was so mumbled and sputtered and Welshified, I wondered if he was putting us on. [...]
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 it's true. Nothing like some Berlin-centric snark. Oscar’s international-brotherhood encomium is cut short by Jamie [Byng], who wouldn’t miss this dinner for the world and is again talking about Damien [Hirst]’s limited-edition, thousand-pound run of the cocaine [...]
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 I've intended to post for some time. Last September, speaking at a memorial for DFW held at Amherst University, erstwhile roomate and co-writer Mark Costello spoke of his strong affinity for music and how he believe that certain songs [...]
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 and sellers in Berlin's most infamous open air drug market . Not tonight. Maybe it's the combined deterrents of a heightened police presence brought on by hyperactive press attention brought on by the recent citizen initiative (headed by this guy with awesome [...]
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 first day is the hardest. It was. I've got the black and blue to prove it. Falling down every three minutes in a pile of arms and legs and nothing but your own willpower to get you back up and at 'em. That [...]
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 lighter to Opel from the more popular Mercedes Hassobjekt signal anger at the Opel company itself, a massive American-owned European car company in deep financial trouble, seeking a billion euro bail-out from German tax payers? [...]
This being the last day of Black History Month, a well-meant thing that's nonetheless insulting and has probably run its course (though it did introduce me to Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Washington Carver back in grade school), I nonetheless have set for myself the completely unasked-for task of picking a song that might encapsulate said history. So, I choose this song, more of a spoken word poem set to music (or Sprechgesang) than a song per se, that arguably launched what today we call hip-hop, not to mention a few generations of tablet-scribbling slam poets. After 38 (!) years [...]
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Noteworthy (Stream): Kanye West – Black Skinhead (SNL Performance)
Kanye West Performs “Black Skinhead” & “New Slaves” On ‘SNL’ Season Finale: Watch
Watch Fred Armisen’s SNL farewell with Carrie Brownstein, Kim Gordon, J Mascis, Aimee Mann
Watch Kanye West on Saturday Night Live, performing “Black Skinhead” and “New Slaves”
