Unter den roten Geweihen

Happy new year

2009-01-02T00:34:00.002Z

R.I.P Harold Pinter 1930 - 2008

2008-12-26T19:50:00.005Z

Meeting

It is the dead of night,

The long dead look out towards
The new dead
Walking towards them

There is a soft heartbeat
As the dead embrace
Those who are long dead
And those of the new dead
Walking towards them

They cry and they kiss
As they meet again
For the first and last time

Harold Pinter, 2002

Weinacht

2008-12-24T14:51:00.001Z

Weinacht

Einfall

2008-10-30T16:16:00.003Z

Fussball

2008-06-26T01:52:00.005+01:00

It's 3am and celebrations continue on Schleisicher Strasse as Germany go through to the final of Euro 2008. I am not a great football fan and feel a real sense of relief that England are not in this competition (so I don't need to justify my disinterest). In the Kiez the last few weeks have seen every other cafe bar and restaurant install video projectors, the crowd outside the Shisha kiosk on 0ppelner Strasse growing from about ten to a couple of hundred.

Tonight was Germany versus Turkey, a bit of a dilemma as this is a Turkish Kiez - anyway Germany won 3-2 but I guess the community here feel as German as they do Turkish and don't need an excuse for a party. An impromtu drumset appeared at the corner and at time of writing the party is only just quietening down.

The Invisible Kiez

2008-06-17T00:14:00.009+01:00

The Invisible Kiez is a KMZ project to be presented at Art Claims Impulse in WrangelKiez, Berlin, in the summer of 2008.

The project consists of a large archive of photographs of the neighborhood, or Kiez. These photographs are annotated and accompanied with links and short texts.

The objective is to build a three dimensional ‘text object’, a subjective impression but also a narrative with multiple points of entry, in which fact and fiction overlap with history and highly specific (geo-tagged) information, visual, textual and audio.

Amongst the emergent themes in this project are:-

1. The idea of graffiti as ‘a layer of metadata written across the real’ – (with reference to pseudo-occult practices of sigilisation and magical thought within an urban context).

2. Specific historic resonances, The Ghost Wall, The Dry Canal, The Ruined Fountain

3. The Temporary Autonomous Zone

3. The immanent threat of aggressive property and land development (Mediaspree)

4. The relationship between virtual and real space

5. The function of Niemand's Land in the urban context.

Noise rock + potato

2008-06-03T18:59:00.002+01:00

Mai Fest

2008-05-02T02:18:00.003+01:00

The first of May is a strange ritual here. Every year for longer than forty odd years the residents of ‘36 fight the police in an odd co-dependent square dance in which the authorities, clad in various shades of Robocop armour, equipped with water cannon discretely parked in the Hinterhoff, floodlights, radar and no less than sixteen vans full of back up stretching all the way down Skalitzer Strasse and Kottbusser Damm, stage a pitch battle with the evil Autonomen horde - which consists, largely, of angry folks with nearly empty bear bottles.

This odd ritual is general best witnessed as night falls. In the day an atmosphere of chilled carnival pleasure presides but come dark der Polizie stop smiling and put on their helmets. Their strategy is a strange one. Small groups of fifteen or twenty walking backwards, turtle like, appeared to retreat beneath a handful of bottles, then changing direction with alarming speed. After an hour or so of this boredom sets in but so does the suspicion that as the streets grow emptier the mood might darken further.

The policing seems curiously provocative. Perhaps, after a day of tax payers overtime in the sun, hanging out with your friends and generally not having much to do it was time to dance. There is no doubt however that this was a weird kind of glamour riot. A re-enactment. A tourist attraction.

In fact the day cops and the nights cops were a different species. The day cops communicative, friendly, ordinary, glamorous, dull, laughing, bored, a range of recognisable emotions. The night cops panicky, aggressive, military and heavily armed, facing jeering citizen journalists with two hundred cheap camerphones and a handful of Raggazzi.

The YouTube video that slickly announced the Kreuzberg Revolution, noted that last year, the anniversary of a riot in Lausitzer Platz, might have seemed a little anti-climatic but was in fact a diversionary tactic, the real riot occurring in a virtual Alexanderplatz in a virtual Berlin.

This year, being forty years after ’68, it threatened to be anything but virtual but at time of writing nothing serious was on fire and the crowd was still parting politely for the occasional ambulance and partying to hip-hop, hardcore, ad-hoc sound systems, reggae, techno and epic psychedelic stoner jams occurring with the appearance of spontaneity at Orranien Platz.

Tomorrow is the first day of the revolution.

The invisible Kiez

2008-05-01T06:00:00.000+01:00

Things have been a little quiet here beneath the antlers as I have been working on the development of a Google Earth project which will be presented in the summer at Art Claims Impulse The details are to be found here at Rhizome.org and (as money is, as always, too tight to mention) please join up (if you haven't already) and vote!

Anton Newcombe

2008-03-31T00:20:00.004+01:00

Cartoon by Leuenberger © Dorfdisco 2008

Anton Newcombe from The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Interview at Dorfdisco.

It's a chicken and egg thing......

2008-03-29T17:44:00.002Z

Toward an invisible Kiez: Mash-Ups, Geo-tagging and Psychogeography

2008-03-24T23:35:00.003Z

Art Claims Impulse - Lübbener Strasse 5, 10997 Berlin
Thursday 27.03.08 8pm.

Mash-ups, geo-tagging, psychogeography atArt Claims Impulse on Thursday

Border Blaster

2008-03-23T10:55:00.001Z

Wolfman Jack, seen here in a unattributed 70's drawing which appears, appropriately enough, to be made with metal filings. The Wolfman worked for a border radio station in Mexico but due to the unbelievable power of those remote transmitters (circling birds died in their vicinity) his voice would bounce of the ionosphere at night and could be heard all over the world... and what a voice it was.

Border Blaster , a two parter on radio 4, tells his story.

Skalitzer Strasse

2008-03-11T20:19:00.000Z

Berlin by Balloons

2008-03-09T23:15:00.001Z

Berin, balloons, what more could you want?

Heckmannufer

2008-03-07T15:59:00.002Z

more photos at Flickr

Leap Year

2008-02-29T19:13:00.001Z

Well it's the 29th but seeing as how its a leap year my circumnavigation of my first 365 days in Berlin is complete. Let's celebrate tomorrow, the usual place and the usual time.

2008-02-26T23:06:00.001Z

Schlesische Strasse

2008-02-24T15:24:00.002Z

Wrangel Strasse

2008-02-23T17:07:00.001Z

Control.

2008-02-13T19:49:00.008Z

Control, at Dorfdisco.

lets get digital

2008-02-13T19:43:00.001Z

All that Jazz New York 1956 . . .

2008-02-13T19:36:00.005Z

I blow hot and cold on jazz. Bad memories of seeing Stan Kenton interviewed and explaining that “it was a language” and thinking, yeah, ‘a language’, which if you didn’t speak excluded you from the conversation. Courtney Pine’s early neo-bop incarnation didn’t help either, the energy of Ellington and Basey, the desolate cool of Baker, Blakey, Davis, the wiggy experimentalism of Coxhill, all were lost to me when, periodically revived as it tends to be, Jazz turned into a soundtrack to a chic brasserrie. A formula in which each musician in turn got to display their chops. Their hated virtuosity.

The Jazz Baroness did not, however think this way. A friend and contemporary of Bird, an habitué of the Left Bank her story was an extraordinary one and told here by her relative, the filmmaker Hannah Rothschild.

Underwood

2008-02-10T21:49:00.001Z

Underwood - balhaus ost at Whitehot

mod

2008-02-10T21:15:00.000Z

“It is said that the obsessions with fripperies in art is a sign of the death of serious ideas.” Or at least so it was said by the 1960’s radio presenter who was featured in Phil Daniel's account of the Mod culture", Archive hour, R4 Sat 9th Feb. Money, sharp suits, Dexedrine, what more could you need?