What is it about communal tables? We wanted to go to Richard, this is a place on Köpenickerstraße that Sam and I both like for the quality of the food but also for the melancholic splendor of the setting, think Los Angeles as imagined by a Swiss, think [more]
Daniel Dafoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, was known as the ‘Sunday gentleman’ because after having failed one of his businesses and not being able to satisfy his creditors, he only could appear in public on Sunday, when no debts could be collected. Last Saturday, I went to [more]
Tief im Westen – vor rund 30 Jahren sang der Mann aus dem U-Boot eine Ruhr-Hymne, und vor 65 Jahren gab es den “jungen westen”, einer der renommiertesten Kunstpreise der noch garnicht gegründeten neuen Bundesrepublik – ein Jahr vorher gründeten die Maler Emil Schumacher, Thomas Grochowiak, Heinrich Siepmann, [more]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGOqmXhNzRY&w=400
Last night on television we had Simon Schama’s History of the Jews, leisurely, quite interesting in a travelogue way, but not very, with Schama a preposterous, pleased-with-himself figure: presentation as the art of waving one’s arms around while looking smug. Schama camps it up and patronises at the [more]
Today it’s cloudy. The wedding party went on until four o’clock, we all drank as we should and now what’s left of us roam through the narrow streets of Ponza as zombies. Happy zombies, though. It was nice and tender. Lots of love, on the island. I liked [more]
Contemporary capitalism is an object of high abstraction. The symposium is an invitation to discuss and disclose the anonymous and inner tendencies of capitalism, to study its monetary, algorithmic and energetic viscera. How can one grasp the living drives of financial markets and technological innovation? And more importantly: [more]
It’s been a while now that I have stopped holding business meetings in my office. People in office meetings almost always behave as if they were mentally paralysed. They anxiously wait until it’s their turn to talk. They play with their mobile phones like old Greeks with their [more]
Time passed.
Change happened.
The mobile is back.
And with it the possibility of sharing what deserves to be shared.
Like a picture of these two men. Or rather a man and a boy.
The room in which they sit and dye clothes from early morning till late evening is not only their workspace but also their housing.
It is difficult to describe but even harder, if not impossible, to imagine.
Look around your office.
Look around your home.
Compare, think, relativize.
Russell Brand isn’t the only one going back in time really far. If you are looking for new perspectives on Hollywood, Entertainment and the Nazis, here we go. You might want to look into this book.”The collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler” by Ben Urward. It’s full of amazing [more]
The Kantine. The heart of the famous Burgtheater in Vienna is the only cantina in the whole of Europe where you are allowed to smoke. Whether you are smoking or not – you have to. I quit. For one year. And started again – there. It’s ugly and [more]
I landed at Tegel Airport at 11pm. No way I could take the S-Bahn. Too late, too tired. So I took a taxi. I was looking at the different cars and drivers standing outside their vehicles. This time I wanted to make sure to have a nice car [more]
2013 marks the 725th time, Lichtenberg was mentioned first in a margravial deed dated 1288. A historical publication is now issued by the district office. Author and historian Prof. Jürgen Hofmann will present it on Tuesday to the Mayor Andreas Geisel. 12:00 noon in the museum at the [more]
I was conflicted this morning. I wanted to write about the fact that Lars von Trier’s new movie “Nymphomaniac” has the length of 5 hours (think “Ben Hur”, but next time.) I got distracted by Russell Brand. From today on we can consider him as one of the first [more]
I am reading Urs Widmer’s autobiography “Reise an den Rand des Universums” (journey to the end of the universe) with great interest (review in the NZZ here). In a strange way, his account is like a distorted and reverted echo of my own upbringing with a gap of [more]
Yesterday MoL while on an archeological dig unearthed the following cache of old 45 singles. (MoL dedicates itself to the deleted, the forgotten and the reforgotten: the anti-pantheon.) 1. Ain’t Got a Clue by The Lurkers 2. Coloured Music by The Pirhanas 3. Girls, Girls, Girls by Sailor [more]
This is the day of the wedding. It’s a civil wedding, which means more fun (Church wedding are so boring, aren’t they?). I don’t know about Deutschland, but we in Italy we have a new law, which allows basically anybody to be the officer of the wedding. You [more]
Today, in the museum, I thought of MC Hammer. I was there with my kids, we were minding our business, investigating the depth and quality of Walter de Maria*s fountain, boring, this was our conclusion, not one of his better works. When a guard called from the other [more]
I guess that’s just the way it is. I guess that’s the way it always was. I guess that’s the way it always will be. There is not much you can do about that and even if you could, why would you? I guess some things don’t need [more]
Today are elections in Bavaria. The CSU will win. C stands for Christian. These elections doesn’t make much difference, 1000 years of CSU, it’s the countryside, farmers, conservatives, but,––BUT if the FDP doesn’t make the 5%, doesn’t make it into parliament, than people will vote for the FDP [more]
we have to think about accelerating. quickly. the future is already here. and the past is unforeseeable. we’re living in anastrophic times.
A breeze of Bratwurst lays upon the whole city. Market stalls are set up everywhere. Even the tiniest little places are filled with stands in which traditional dressed people sell useless crafted wooden things or organic Bratwurst. People are wearing funny things but are absolutely serious about it. [more]
Coming back to Munich is always nice. For a day or two. You see boats on the street with Hawaiian license plates. You see Oliver Berben in front of the former Helmut Lang store: You see this huge monumental and swanky new building for Munich’s small film school. [more]
“Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.” Bruce Lee
if you want to reach the Island of Ponza – which is what all the people invited to Ludovica’s wedding is supposed to do – you should reach the port of Anzio or Formia, and there you can take a hyrdoplane or a fast ship to the island. [more]
After yesterday’s unexpected mobile loss not much has changed. For the moment some older mobile has to substitute for what had been so smartly purloined. But the substitute is not as smart anymore as it once was. These days it lost its capability of visually capturing anything whatsoever. Unfortunately [more]
Why the #FT #weekend is so excellent (it’s not the colour: apricot)*: It’s James Blitz on Syria. In “A long week: Putin’s diplomatic gambit” he shows day by day how Russia has outplayed the US over Syria within one week. It’s John Gapper on Tina Brown. “Tina Brown [more]
We don’t know anything anymore. Linear and vertical are irrelevant. Change is the central dynamic. Where the television set was once the electronic hearth it is now the empty fireplace. MoL aspires to the lowest YouTube ratings. The cultural state is conditioned by shrinking margins. Modern life is [more]
Today we went to “Costco”, this gigantic supermarket with sizes and packages that are too big for any human being. The first time I went there my head was spinning, too many sausages, too much meat, too many red reindeer, teddies and pandas, bigger than a queen size [more]
Today I didn’t take the S-Bahn, I took the plane. Berlin – Munich. I was sitting at the bar close to the boarding gate. I had red wine. I like airports and especially their bars. It is a kind of nomansland. I always feel like i’m about to [more]
Day 2. Same anxiety. Well, more anxiety. Not only I have to write THIS: most of all, I have to write a speech. It’s for Ludovica’s wedding. Ludovica, well, she’s my writing partner. We write together. Scripts, mostly, now even a book (but it’s a novelization, so it [more]
How could I? I love Zwieback and Freedom, I love Baseball Caps and Fish and Chips, I love Los Angeles and David Foster Wallace. This is a thin line, Bobby said, we were sitting at the Don Xuan Center in Berlin-Lichtenberg, sipping Vietnamese Coffee, which is dripping into [more]
It’s Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) and Nassim #Taleb and Rolf #Dobelli are throwing shit at each other. I reviewed Taleb’s book ‘Antifragile’ some months ago for DAS MAGAZIN (as I also did with Daniel Kahneman’s ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’, where, I guess, Dobelli has found even more [more]
First nobody believed in him. Only some people of the opponent party, the CDU, liked him. His own party, the social democrats, the SPD, never thought he is the candidate who would push Merkel out of power. He was not down to earth enough, he was interested in [more]
(…) As Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have shown, aesthetic critique will at the same time ultimately be used (by the neoliberal discourse of crisis) purely for the provision of catchwords for an ever new and seemingly faster “liberalization,” which is called upon from the other side as [more]
Dear mobile thief I wonder what you were thinking I wonder if you really needed the money I wonder how you could be so incredibly fast
MoL is reading Nadal’s biography. Interesting how a gawky, clumsy kid afraid of sleeping in the dark (still) transforms himself into a court warrior hell-bent on winning, knowing his game is not as good as the best of his rivals (he is not a natural player). The obvious [more]
Many people would rather not vote in the upcoming elections. Peter Sloterdijk just called it “Lethargokratie”, (Lethargocracy). He will not vote. On the other hand they tell you that you vote for the radicals if you don’t vote. Because these are the people who go voting anyway. And [more]
I saw Russell Brand yesterday. He walked into a restaurant like he always does: peacock with tattoos, head a little to high, like an aged and snotty english royal. Russell’s face says “world, listen to me, I have things to tell you”, his legs: yoga strong. Russell always [more]
Spent some time with the muskrat population of Prato today
Everybody is complaining about the fact that people are not reading, especially young people, especially books, nobody is reading anymore. But this is just not true. At least not in the S-Bahn. This morning a man was sitting in front of me and he was reading a book. [more]
Without any effort Gesine Lötzsch repeats her list of demands of DIE LINKE, the LEFT. “Our program? One hundred percent social!” Minimum pension, minimum wage, abolish Hartz IV. “Lichtenberg is indeed not an island,” says Lötzsch. She doesn’t even try to go into Lichtenberg’s specifics. At the end [more]
What I don*t get, what I really just don*t get, is Obama and Syria. Basically all I know about the conflict/tragedy/guilt reservoir of the future – whatever you want to call it – I know from the piece in the New Yorker by Dexter Filkins (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/13/130513fa_fact_filkins): But go, [more]
Criticism – Crisis – Acceleration Armen Avanessian Monetarization indexes a becoming-abstract of matter, parallel to the plasticization of productive force, with prices encoding distributed SF narratives. Tomorrow is already on sale, with post-modernity a soft-commodity, subverting the modernist subordination into continuous crisis (prolonged critically). —Nick Land No one [more]
<Do you wish to get money from war? It’s the very time to realize this. Just as the first rockets touch the ground in Syria, black gold prices will rise…> This email came from angela.winters@hrtechinc.com on September 10, at 7:08pm my time. <…just as Monarchy Resources, Inc. (M-O [more]
Tuesday and again yesterday I went to hear Robert B. Laughlin giving the so called Paul Bernays Lectures at ETH Zurich.* Laughlin, who won the Nobel Prize in physics 1998, started Tuesday evening by talking about his popular 2006 book “A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down”. What he said [more]