Yesterday, Christina told me a story about Buckminster Fuller: To make people aware of the movement of earth through space, of the maniacal speed of “Spaceship Earth” through the cosmicomics of our universe, he would tell them to stand with arms outstretched, probably somewhere near Lake Eden on [more]

Slightly energetic Not more passionate Somewhat emotional Extremely shy Highly stressed Fairly thoughtful A bit more confident Not very concentrated    

Unfortunately the score of Sunderland 1 Man U 0 couldn’t last and now it’s 1-2. Sunderland fired their manager, a mad “charismatic” Italian, because he was too fascist (pro-Mussolini and given to the old stiff-armed salute when playing for Lazio) but what the Sunderland players couldn’t stomach was [more]

My brother Lukas is a film director. He studies at DFFB in Berlin. His films are usually very stylized, elegiac, enigmatic and rough. Think Andrey Tarkovsky getting drunk with Ulrich Seidl, or Alejandro Jodorowsky going shopping with Michael Haneke. In 2011, however, he did a personal project outside [more]

There is a bar in Brissago, the last Swiss village before the Italian border at the right coast of Lake Maggiore, called Flamingo Bar. We usually arrive Friday evening late for a weekend in Brissago (a kind of Tyler Brûlé sentence, Brissago replaced with St. Moritz or Tokyo). [more]

What do you do when you sit up in the Swiss mountains eating ecologically correct beef served by the most hunble of Swiss? If you have come here on a boat across the Vierwaldstätter See with captains who look like all they want to do all day is [more]

1945 Tiergarten is a battlefield. During the severe winter of 1946 the British Army gives permission to the Berliners to cut down most of the trees in Tiergarten to procure firewood. Around 200.000 trees, centuries-old, are burned. 1945 Tiergarten is a battlefield. During the severe winter of 1946 [more]

As Told by the Holy Woman in Her Own Words A Hundred or So Years after the End of the World I wanted to find the Ladies’ Giver House the woman on the trail had mentioned, so I asked directions of a man passing by who carried his [more]

Today is the last day of the Oktoberfest and a big day in the Bundesliga. BAYER vs BAYERN. The second against the third. It’s been nearly a year now that Bayern Munich has lost a game in the German League for the last time. It was on October [more]

http://youtu.be/2vViIk7Q6bA

Amber Heard. She will be in the new Robert Rodriguez movie. Amber. I can’t say much about her, besides that she is dating Johnny Depp (and female french models before) and reads a lot of Hunter S. Thompson books and that she has an amazing sense of style, she [more]

But not the kind that actually unfold in front of you, the moving stills, real life. No. Today photographs just unfolded in folders observed through my screen. It was editing time. Yet for the moment there is nothing visually I could unfold in front of you, for you, [more]

I like the Arsenal. It is the place where the Burgtheater rehearses. I like the building. It’s big. It has four or five rehearsal stages in four big halls. In one hall you can make it rain if you want, but I never saw it happen. It was [more]

& Marcel Broodthears #2 Die Crise?… ein Traum

Shameless but important: on the government shutdown

Ein Findling steht im Walde, ganz still und stumm. Ja, so war das gestern auf der Waldwanderung im Norden Düsseldorfs. Ach, wer mag der Findling sein, der da steht im Wald allein? Ein Findling, auch Erratischer Block oder Erratiker genannt, ist ein heute meist einzeln liegender sehr großer [more]

Once our former foreign minister asked me: What would one actually consider as Willkommenskultur? I thought: he is a really smart and thoughtful person and he has seen the world, so what can I say? I recalled a situation a few years ago when I arrived at the [more]

I wanted to write this post in German, because I thought there would not be a good English equivalent to the word angenehm which means pleasant, more or less – so is pleasant a good category for thought, for culture, for judgement, for measuring art, people, the world? [more]

Shostakovich*s probably most famous work. The 7th symphony. The Leningrad requiem. His beloved city, his beloved home town was suffering the most horrible blockade. People were dying of hunger, millions. Shostakovich himself was forced to be evacuated. During that period he wrote that magnificent piece. Perhaps the most [more]

MoL has noticed that the worlds of film and television exist in a parallel universe quite outside electronic time and proceed at an almost nineteenth century pace, akin to dealing with the Court of St Petersburg in 1895, with festivals the equivalent to winter and summer palaces. Philip [more]

Hardly energetic Not more passionate Somewhat emotional A little less shy Very stressed Less thoughtful Very confident A little less concentrated    

In its geological history Tiergarten is richly wet. Part of it is situated in the floodplain along the Spree, the deeply set area of Warsaw-Berlin glacial valley. It is especially evident now because of the complex network of streams running from the Landwehrkanal towards the Spree. After a [more]

The first thing that strikes you, coming to Silicon Valley from Switzerland, is that the ‘valley’ isn’t really much of a valley: there are rolling hills in the far distance, but most of the scenery that is laid out all around you is desperately flat. The term ‘Silicon [more]

As Told by the Holy Woman in Her Own Words A Hundred or So Years after the End of the World On the eighth day three bad men tried to drag me into an abandoned mine next to the Russian River. I broke loose from them and ran [more]

This is a lovely film. A 60 year old never grown up bachelor who still lives with his mother accept to host a few old ladies in his apartment in Rome during the holidays in August to extinguish his debts. This forced cohabitation with these ladies will lead [more]

Today’s post is a text written by Walter Benjamin titled “Zum Planetarium”, published in 1928; it was discussed as part of a presentation at yesterday’s panel on cosmotechnology in Lüneburg and it is beautiful. It is written in German but an English translation can also be found. Walter [more]

about Terry Southern’s BLUE MOVIE: (1970)

I’ve come to the conclusion that the average researcher in an average university assumes that he’s pretty pretty ironical (speaking from experience, not from research). He is like the flatmate who puts a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip on the fridge which stays there for the next 10 [more]

Can be.

I’m sitting in on a panel on “World Peace” after finishing up my own talk on Kittler’s source code as an historical source. His lega-C. Conferences make me stupid. I never tweet, only during conferences. Right now, the brilliant Ana Pinto is speaking about cybernetics and the fabulous [more]

First picture: Kim Kardashian a couple of days ago in Paris, styled by Euro-Queen-Carine Roitfeld. Second picture: Kim Kardashian years ago. This is how we know Kardashian. She represents the Beverly Hills/Rodeo-Drive Face: smiling to show your über-white teeth, heavy eye make up, flesh coloured lips, über-straight hair [more]

The German chancellor just said it. Today. And today is the Day of German Unity. He said it on RTL television. Heiner Lauterbach is the German chancellor. They tried to do Independence Day. The Reichstag in Berlin is hit after ten minutes. Burning physicists fly through a laboratory [more]

I stumbled over David Bowie’s top 100 must-read books recently published in the Guardian. I saw Bowie last year in the Three Lives & Company bookshop in New York, I am sure he got there one book for his list. The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby (2008) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar [more]

After traveling a few thousand kilometers via air and a few hundred kilometers via land India’s capital once more welcomes one home. The impressions and experiences of the last days get processed and so will the purely digital output of the journey. Things take time to settle and [more]

Next to the Towers and the Asian centre on Herzbergstraße opened a Pakistani diner ––no name yet–– in three containers. From Monday on the diner will be open from 6 in the morning (breakfast) until 10 at night. Today was the opening, very nice. A lot of well-dressed [more]

In a letter to Neal Cassady on October 3, 1948, Jack Kerouac wrote: “But listen … do you realize (this is apropos) that a new literary age is beginning in America?”* About ten years later The American College Dictionary wants to add “Beat Generation” to its word list. They [more]

MoL says wake up and smell the coffee, and find the email equivalent to a dog turd in your in-box. Welcome to the modern world! How do you do, friend! I live next door to your flat and I was so shocked after what I saw last night [more]

I’m at the annual conference of the Society for Media Studies and there is no time to write something remotely poetic or meaningful. I am writing this on my phone. However, there is so much fantastic language here. I try to document it on Twitter. Follow me, if [more]

Sind nett gewesen. War gar nicht so schwierig. Man muss offen bleiben.

There was once a wall running through Germany. Are we unified now?

As Told by the Holy Woman in Her Own Words A Hundred or So Years after the End of the World How I came to the white city and what happened to me there Living alone at the top of a great redwood tree was deeply pleasing to [more]