Breaking Bad comes to an end tomorrow. In the UK we haven’t been able to watch the show on a regular broadcast channel for years, since series 2 was on Channel 5 on a daily basis over a Christmas holiday. The same happened to Mad Men, which moved [more]

Yesterday, Tuncel Kurtiz, died at the age of 77. Kurtiz was one of Turkey’s most respected actors, both on stage and on set. In his early years he also played in theatres across Europe, including Göteborg, Stockholm, Frankfurt am Main, London, he also appeared on the Berliner Schaubühne. [more]

Real Virtuality

As the journey through Bihar’s rural interior continues a lot of interesting characters cross one’s path. The overwhelming multitude of each persons story of life, stories of joy and sorrow, stories of love and hate, peace and violence, are not only almost impossible to grasp but even more [more]

Book a night to see the show! 80$ and maybe you get dinner!

Heute abend ein Schmankerl mit Arto Lindsay, DNA, der mit John Lurie, Bill Frisell, Fred Frith, John Zorn und Bill Laswell spielte, als Produzent für Caetano Veloso, Laurie Anderson und David Byrne werkelte, für Heiner Goebbels Musik schrieb und einer der Kuratoren der Klangkunst-Ausstellung Volume: Bed of Sound [more]

What Don DeLillo achieves in such a perfect way is this mixture of looking at the present with a critical perspective (is there any other way) and understanding more than condemning what he sees and describes. For a while now I have been trying to remember where that [more]

Around Anton-Saefkow-Platz they had a party yesterday. A municipal get-together, which had this 1960s Eastern atmosphere to it. Nevertheless two guys with sunglasses performed classic rock ‘n’ roll: “This was the big hit here in the Federal Republic in 1957,” one of the guys said standing in front [more]

Wie gut, dass ich immer alles aufhebe.

Today I feel bad. Horrible nausea. I think I have been poisoned. So maybe I have to talk about something else: not me, for once. I think I should mention some interesting Italian films you might want to discover, from the last 5 years. I guess you don’t [more]

As Told by the Holy Woman in Her Own Words A Hundred or So Years after the End of the World (yesterday’s last line: Thinking this would give me a chance to tell him about the world of Light and Love, I leaped off the branch and lit [more]

I guess it is this thing one calls adolescence or disillusioning or giving up utopia or becoming reliable or resigning from aspirations or may be just forgetting why you stood up in the first place. It is this time period that apparently has to pass until you stop [more]

This afternoon I had to walk through Berlin Mitte to pick up food I ordered. China City on Leipzigerstraße probably already existed in the GDR, like the one just opposite: Vietnamese Palace. Huge, empty and excessively decorated temples. Online, I looked at the vegetarian choices straightaway. #135, the [more]

Last night we went to see “RUSH”. Daniel Brühl as Niki Lauda is actually very entertaining with his Austria-English. He is really good in doing the “rat face” and performs well as the bitchy and talented driver from Vienna. The story: young Niki Lauda’s and young James Hunt’s [more]

It is 3:30 am, I have to get up in five hours, I’m working tomorrow, on a Saturday, it’s cruel, I should go to bed now, but I’m still trying to write something. The fear of the little empty white squares (leerpost) is stronger than the fear of [more]

(continued from yesterday, hate-love, love-hate, hate-hate. Apple, German Telekom, Google, Facebook, Oracle.) The pattern: First they build up these huge dark and in a way invisible empires no matter what. Then they donate. They save us. You, me, the Africans, the world. The Internship (Prakti.com in Germany) is [more]

What happened? It looks like Versailles was nothing but a trailer park somewhere in the vicinity of Cologne. There are empty bottles of Coke. There is fruit on the table. The furniture is half royal, half brothel. A fake fire-place in gold. An apocalyptically huge gold cat, one [more]

Komme gerade aus Köln zurück, wo am Aachener Weiher die Ausstellung der Künstlergruppe “The Echo” eröffnet wurde, überwiegend KünstlerInnen aus Berlin, einer aus Tokio, einer aus Düsseldorf. 12 an der (permanent wechselnden Gesamt-)Zahl. Eine neue Generation jenseit von Tokyo Pop und Hello Kitty Fantasy, aber immer noch auf [more]

Another sandstone sculpture around the corner. We thought it would be the same artist as yesterday’s piece. Wrong. It’s by S. Krepp and one year older, from 1986. It is called: “German resistance against fascism”

[jwplayer config=”player-400″ mediaid=”3732″] Meine Finger waren Zeuge.

As Told by the Holy Woman in Her Own Words A Hundred or So Years after the End of the World How I was caught by the authorities and ran away and fed myself from my own breasts When I walked out of our cabin the next day, [more]

What is the difference between the 5.00 pm and the 5.34 train from Zurich to Basel? Not much. 1.30 Swiss francs. COCA COLA ZERO PET CHF 4.10 – ICE train at 5.00 pm COCA COLA ZERO PET CHF 5.40 – SBB train at 5.34 pm or at 4.34 [more]

Are politics allowed? Should musician be political? I have been present at some heavy discussions on the topic. To be clear: Musicians who think that politics are absolutely unimportant for an artist (a famous one once told me: “If you are interested in political realism, quit music and [more]

I was thinking about writing something about a 1985 paper that a mid-level People’s Liberation Army officer named Shen Weiguang wrote in 1985, in which he coined the term INFORMATION WARFARE for the first time in history. I came across it in a paper published by an intelligence [more]

people always need faith something that assures them in their hearts that all will get better

MoL Fragments of the Lost Library. Some titles: The Answer to Life is No by Anonymous (1960, Rupert Hart-Davis) Blaming by Elizabeth Taylor (1976, Chatto and Windus) Negative Space by Manny Farner (1971, Studio Vista) A Voyage in Vain by Alethea Hayter (1973, Faber) Nothing by Henry Green [more]

War Primer 2

i will leave the house. i will travel. i will go to kassel. i will see a show and meet many people. i will take pictures. actually i will take so many pictures so that i’ll have enough for 60pages (i mean for ’60 pages’)

After a long and quite sketchy journey from Uttar Pradesh to Bihar the arrival at one of the many villages spread all over this East Indian state is much appreciated. Yet don’t be fooled about the tranquility of the photograph. Especially in this region of the country something [more]

Toni Servillo (again) stars in UNA VITA TRANQUILLA (A quiet life) directed by my friend Claudio Cupellini and written by my other friends Filippo Gravino and Guido Iuculano. It’s a tight noir built on a great character: a former killer associate with Neapols’ Gomorra who escaped to Germany [more]

My grilfriend Valentina plays ukulele. From a few years now. There’s even a video in youtube in which she ironically teaches how to do it. For her birthday my present was a session in a professional studio to record her first two original songs. Since the studio I [more]

Fever again, today, the 25th post or pick, still kind of feverish and have read too much Victoria Nelson. September 26, three days after the German election. Brilliant thoughts by Wolfgang Münchau on Spiegel Online about how much Keynes the FDP or German Liberalism could or should swallow. [more]

Dem Leben gewidmet – die Vögel von Tschernobyl Juri Sinkewitsch, UDSSR – Sandstein 1987 Dedicated to life – The Birds of Chernobyl Yuri Petrovich Sinke, USSR – Sandstone 1987  

This morning in the S-Bahn: Six girls around the age of 16  (which is quite hard to guess with young people today)  were sharing seats. First they sat on each other’s knees and tried a few different positions before squeezing in next to each other. Three girls on [more]

Now that Armen Avanessian brought it up, it might be time to talk about Mid-Atlantic. It was Anne Philippi who said the other day in the skype chat that we had between Los Angeles, Zurich, Delhi, Vienna and Berlin that she had heard people talk about this new [more]

Eigentlich keine Lust #3! Ganz ehrlich. Nun denn, auf eine Neues. Sitz zwar an einem ganz anderen Text, bin weiter weg als mir lieb ist, aber muss ja, muss ja. Japaner in Düsseldorf, oder auch in Köln? Noch einmal schlafen. Holla, die Waldfee. Herrenreiter, und so weiter!! Nun [more]

The first German politician my father showed me was a man with the same hairstyle, Helmut Schmidt. That was in the 1970s, and who could know he would become the nation’s wise old statesman, the ultimate authority of Germany, and the most popular chancellor of all times, turning 95 [more]

Das ist der Zwischenbereich, den man keinesfalls unterschätzen sollte.

Frank Stronach, born Franz Strohsack, is Austria’s most extraordinary politician. In the early 1950s he left Austria with only 200 bucks. In Canada, Stronach founded a company that grew over the years into a multimillion-dollar enterprise. Now, in his 80s, Stronach doesn’t care about money anymore. He wants [more]

Have you ever seen anything like this? I haven*t. Gyorgy Cziffra. Hungarian pianist. One of my favourite and to me most important and influential musicians of all times. More videos will follow. I want people to listen to this guy. One of the most honest and deepest pianists [more]

Instead of sharing this picture of this woman cutting grass for her livestock I initially wanted to share another impression with you which struck me while spending time in a remote village in rural Uttar Pradesh. The sun had already set and as I was leaving the house [more]

I assume, I wouldn’t have got to know Armen Avanessian without 60pages. And even if I had in another context, I guess he wouldn’t have given me a book in little Pakistan Lichtenberg called Realismus Jetzt. Realismus Jetzt is a collection of essays, edited by Armen, mainly from [more]

i’m an academic. no one is supposed to be eager to read my texts. and then THIS: dear people out there, i am asking you: do you really want to read my posts? i mean ok, obviously my mid-atlantic english is much better than bobby’s. but there is [more]

Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Princeton! I made it!

As Told by the Holy Woman in Her Own Words A Hundred or So Years after the End of the World What happened to me while I was dead and why I chose to come back from the world of Light and Love I must say, it was [more]

In the first days of September and on the very last day of summer, I was sitting at the English shore of Essex, watching the tide roll away and enjoying a few cups of bottle fermented Rosé sparkling wine called “Mount Bluff” with Eva, the artist David Gates, [more]

so I am walking with caution sleepless nights are taking their toll on me this festival called aardklop in the dry north

MoL shot the books (see previous post); now it thinks about the tee-shirt.

I want to write a little bit about each film from my Italian recommended cinema list, so let’s start. Il Divo, by Paolo Sorrentino, is a film who raised a lot of rumor, in Italy. Because it’s the portrait of one the most controversial politician in the history [more]

Wednesday and I am still in Piemonte. I am not feeling great today. Me and my girlfriend we move for a few days of relax in her family country house in Roddi, on the top of one of the Langhe hills (one of the best wine areas in [more]