Author: john
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LOLdogs in Charlottenburg
If you’re allergic to cuteness, just move right along. I prefer to think of it as an study in parasitic evolution. So anyway, I’m walking around Charlottenburg earlier this week, meeting some friends to go to an exhibit on the history of the Chinese population in Berlin (small exhibit, a few interesting historical notes, displayed…
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Another NY boomer wants 70s music, and mass culture, back
I won’t say it’s exactly amazing how often I hear music critics — or anyone — of a certain age lamenting the lost music of the ’70s. When I covered digital entertainment closely, I was on an influential mailing list full of ostensible music lovers, smart people, and every few weeks someone would argue that…
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Disciplinary organs?
This is way too good to pass up. Reuters writes about a crackdown in China on firemen eliciting bribes, often sexual. It quotes Xinhua, the state news agency: “For every 10 corrupt officials, nine are involved in illicit sex. This old tune has already been proved by statistics from disciplinary organs many times,” Xinhua said.…
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The beginning of the end of hardback books?
The Guardian wrote this weekend about Picador’s plan to stop publishing most literary fiction initially in hardback form. That means even stellar writers like Delillo, Naipaul, Banville and Cormack McCarthy will be going straight to paperback. I read this with an initial twinge of irritation and sadness. I love hardback books, what reader or writer…
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Berlin in New York, our dancing, delightful orchestra
Berlin and New York are having a little love-in these days. It’s not just in the pages of the NYT, where gushing and usually (but not always) 66 percent fictional articles appear about the Wild Life In Berlin. The two cities are in the midst of a cultural interchange just now, swapping music and other…
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Visa woes and Haino screams
Two poles of Berlin existence yesterday, after sending lovely Ms. Peasant Glasses off to Hawaii for three weeks. After a year of pretending it didn’t exist, it was time for me to visit the friendly Ausländerbehörde, Germany’s version of the INS, again. I had my docs in order; income statements, proof of insurance, rental contract.…
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Snow, time, and Soviet science fiction
Incredible how time sneaks by and I make excuses not to blog, like this is some chore or activity I might actually get paid for. Oh foolish reflexes… It’s snowing outside (or at least it was when I was originally writing this), thick flakes filling the air like it’s the middle of winter, although the…
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Eight things, a meme-tag
I have been meme-tagged by the beautiful and eloquent Ms. Balderama, of Intoxifictian, Nonsense Versian, Naxian, and NYT-ian fame. The idea is to expose eight things about yourself. I’m borrowing in part from her borrowed template, since this is a meme, after all. So here goes: 1. I took great pride when young in being…
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Signs of the season’s change
The gray sky and sub-20 degree temperatures are all anybody really needs to tell that the summer is well over. Any serious sun we get from this point out will be cooler, and an undeserved gift, like finding that forgotten $20 bill in your pants pockets before you put them in the laundry. But here…
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Is Cheney planning a new Middle East war?
Juan Cole and a few other bloggers are reporting chatter from D.C. that the administration will launch a pre-war sales effort after Labor Day, much as before Iraq, softening up the public for an attack on Iran. Ugh. Could they be so ludicrously, criminally stupid? Please tell me Americans would see this as irresponsible, impeachment-worthy…
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Droning Shiva-style in Alexanderplatz
I ran into this guy, India Bharti, playing in Alexanderplatz yesterday. He’s a wandering musician of uncertain (but distinctly sandy-graying) age, a white yogi type, sitting crosslegged, sunflowered, maybe deeply cliched right up to the point you looked at how he was making his sounds. He was playing a pair of homemade instruments: one a…
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A moment of mourning for lost sky-blue seas
It’s not that I don’t like Berlin. I do. It’s a fabulous place to live and work, to free yourself from the fetters of a daily office. But returning last night from a vacation in the Greek islands, the Hauptstadt’s foggy summer and distinct lack of crystalline blue Mediterranean shorelines were almost hard to take.…
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Beating a dead Marx
I fear the good people in the Republican party are getting desperate. Not only are they bringing up the specter of communism once again,they’re even going all the way back to Marx (minus, of course, anything like fidelity to Marx’s actual ideas): Mitt Romney’s comments on Hillary Clinton: “Hillary Clinton just gave a speech the…
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Rodent, run
Is this a bad omen? I’m riding down Kollwitz Str. today when a big gray rat runs across the street in front of me, apparently gets spooked by my onrushing bicycle of doom, and turns back right into my tires. I swerve a little, and feel a bu-UMP. I look back; it gets up, shakes…
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To the East pt. 1: Witkacy
We’re back from two weeks in Poland, Hungary, and Romania, of which more, including pictures, later. But first a bit about Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, or Witkacy, a Polish artist who dominated that portion of our trip. The son of an impossibly stern 19th century artist and critic with Nietzschean ideas of modern education, Witkacy was…