Friends

In March 2007 Le Petit Mignon closed its Neukolln shop, moved up to the Torstrasse in Mitte, and merged with Staalplaat, a Dutch record shop and label which started as a cassette distribution operation in 1982. At the time, it looked like Le Petit Mignon was getting "upwardly mobile", moving from a marginal area to hipster central in Mitte. But in early 2009 rumours started to reach our ears that Le Prodigal Mignon was seeking to return to Neukolln, bringing Staalplaat with it. Guillaume spent a couple of months scouting locations, and finally settled on Flughafenstrasse, a busy commercial, working class street that slopes down from Tempelhof Airport to the Neukolln town hall.

The new Neukolln Staalplaat -- called Staalplaat Working Space -- opened in late April. I made my first visit last night, to see a Midori Hirano show in their concert space at the back. I actually missed Midori's set because of a fireworks display at Tempelhof, catching instead the sensuously placid guitar sounds of Rac-ka, a duo from Osaka.

It felt good being in there, even if there was something a bit cautious about the way Guillaume had to unlock the door to let us in. On the Staalplaat blog page Rinus details not just the new venue's problems with noise-obsessed neighbours, but their view that "the neighbourhood is turning into a red-light district, with illegal prostitution, women-, drugs-, and arms trafficking, bribery, violence and noise disturbances."

I personally felt a big hippy-alternative vibe of calm. Staalplaat's concert room has sofas. It's very quiet in there (and not just because of the neighbour with the decibel meter) and the only lighting is a couple of candles and some ghostly ambient seep from the backyard. When experimental music is playing, you're instantly in a Wire magazine article, and when the show is over and the audience mills out into the shop area you feel something of the vibe of the old Rough Trade shop in Covent Garden, the one under Slam City Skates.

The move back into Neukolln -- deeper into Neukolln, in the developing area around Boddinstrasse -- seems to have given Staalplaat a rush of relevance, a new mission and energy. Whereas, up in Mitte, Staalplaat pretty much blended in, sensibility-wise, with neighbours like Bongout Gallery and Neurotitan, down here in "deep Neukolln" it seems to be back on the cutting edge, joining semi-squat cultural guerilla operations like Loophole (from which I did a livecast back in February at the invitation of the ubiquitous Rinus Van Alebeek). The gamble seems to have paid off; foot traffic into Staalplaat during the day is apparently rather higher down here "in the middle of nowhere" (actually close to happening spots like Weserstrasse) than it was up on tacky Torstrasse, the Oxford Street of Berlin hip.

Neukolln may not have Mitte's buy-yourself-hip clothes boutiques (oh shit, did Best Shop close down already? Maybe Mitte doesn't have them either!) but it does offer less conventional clothing possibilities. I'd recommend a trip to the gigantic Bauhaus store on Hasenheide, directly across the road from Viet-café Hamy, our cut-price version of Mitte's Monsieur Vuong. At Bauhaus you can marvel at gorgeously utilitarian gas cannisters, chipboard slabs, orange-painted trolleys and red nested toolboxes.

Copying Jan Lindenberg -- my personal style guru, who uses them to soften his recycled MDF chairs -- I bought a €4.60 recycled Bauhaus packing blanket yesterday and modeled it for Hisae's camera right there in the store, to the amusement of Saturday shoppers. I run the pictures here so that Twit Opera and the Anons can mock me as if I weren't already mocking myself, and because milky_eyes was complaining yesterday about the absence of photos of me. Packing blankets -- like deep Neukolln -- are where it's at, man. You read it here first.

earlier this week, my new high-powered wireless adapter arrived. with an estimated range of one mile, i figured i should have no trouble connecting to unsecured networks that broadcast from just up the block, about 900' from my place. well, it can't see those. in fact, it brings up only a handful more wireless networks than my laptop's built-in radio does, although they do each have more bars. fuck.

it was time for an alternate plan: since this adapter is also capable of packet injection, i'd just jump on one of the many WEP-secured networks in my general vicinity. i spent the entire day yesterday at the coffee house, saving tutorials as complete offline webpages, and burning a backtrack 3 live cd. i got home, printed out the bits of tutorials i thought i'd need, and booted from the cd. i chose the KDE graphic mode, and the shit just hung. same thing for other modes. fuck.

so, today i'm back at the coffee house, downloading backtrack 3 for a usb drive, as well as a vmware image of it. i hope the usb version works, because i don't have vmware workstation installed on this machine...meaning that's one more thing i'd have to get. i'm going to make sure that i can at least boot into the environment successfully before i leave here (i hope so, anyway - they close at midnight, and their network ain't the speediest in the world). if i can, i'll head home confident that i can crack someone's WEP and be good for internet access until month's end. of course, that's how i headed home last night...and i was instead greeted only by defeat.

this is fucked. solid, high-speed internet access should be available to every citizen at no cost, be it labor or monetary. same thing for water, electricity, housing, food, and health care...but i suppose that's a different series of posts.

Coming from dense, Turkish Neukolln to Blankenfeld was like entering another world. After riding two trains and a bus we found ourselves skirting a poppy-dotted wheatfield in a thunderstorm. Boat-shaped suburban houses were surrounded by gnome-haunted gardens, many boasting ornamental fountains, statues of goats, and clumps of bamboo. Even in the heavy rain, we paused to marvel at flowers and plants we never see in the inner city.

At the school -- a clean, modern brick box -- ten-year-olds scurried about in Japanese headbands, guided by the friends who had invited us. Look, there's Ido-San, the performance artist! But today she's Ido-San, the judo instructor! Look, there's Saiko, the art student who works in the kitchen at Smart Deli! But today she's the kimono lady!

Like Superman, these friends of ours have secret powers. We thought they were artists, but after a quick change of clothes in a phone booth they become... ambassadors for Japan! Speculating idly as the slick Workshop Japan DVD played to the teeming assembly hall, I wondered if I too could earn money from the German government teaching "the Scottish Way" to kids? Is there even a Scottish Way worth learning? How do we arrange our gardens? How do we fight? How do we dress? Is it sufficiently different from the German way to warrant a three month course? Is it charismatic enough? Could this be what my Book of Scotlands leads to?

I suppose I was perceived as a parent at the Workshop Japan afternoon -- a parent nobody had ever seen before, not attached to any particular child. Like all the other "parents" I raised my Japanese digital camera and snapped dutifully during the kimono fashion show, as young German girls paraded past in unlikely kimonos featuring what looked like the double-headed eagle of the Hapsburg Empire.

In fact, if I was the "father" of anyone, it was the Japanese instructors themselves. It was with some kind of paternal pride that I told Saiko-San that the arrangement of hair at the back of her neck had achieved the pinnacle of iki beauty.

What I noticed, out at Blankenfeld, was that we all became different people there. In central Berlin the culture allows us to be somewhat ageless and cultureless. Out at Blankenfeld, we suddenly had ages and cultures. I was "old", the girls (in their mid to late 20s) were "responsible adults", and the kids were "kids". Your perceived age slotted you into this syntagmatic hierarchy, did away with equality, made you act a certain way. We also had more noticeable ethnicities. All the kids were white, and German. All the instructors were Japanese, and did stereotypically Japanese things, like paper-folding and flower-arranging. I passed, I guess, for a German.

Despite the emphasis on culture, there was less cultural mixing going on out at Blankenfeld than happens in central Berlin. Last week Ido-San did one of her multimedia performances in Neukolln -- an act that mixed Japanese and Western idioms. But out at Blankenfeld she was being 100% Japanese.

It was a relief to get back to dense, dirty Neukolln, where people are as various as flowers are in Blankenfeld. It seems to me that central Berlin is the exception and Blankenfeld the norm, in the sense that rather few places allow you to escape your age, your class, your race and your culture -- should you wish to! -- in the way that urban Berlin does. Here nobody ever says "Act your age!" or "Scots don't do that!" or "Be a man!"

But if it's a sort of freedom to escape your age, your gender, and your culture, it's also a sort of freedom to embody them gorgeously, generously, even stereotypically. Perhaps, out in blank Blankenfeld, my Japanese friends were suddenly free to express a repressed part of "themselves" -- the part, paradoxically, that we're not at liberty to change.

tomorrow is free slurpee day, and i don't think there are any 7-elevens i can walk to, either. fml.

i wonder where i'm going to be living in three weeks? i'm not sure i have anywhere to go. at least i'll have some interesting post-fodder.

more details here. :-(

Every July the Serpentine Gallery -- currently under the direction of the enlightened Hans Ulrich Obrist -- lets an architect erect a temporary pavilion in its Kensington Gardens enclosure. SANAA's, the ninth in the series, is certainly the least bombastic. As the Times' architecture critic Tom Dyckhoff explains in a video on the paper's site, the Japanese team has built a light plane of polished aluminium sloping modestly towards the ground across pillars and bendy plexiglass walls. The inside space, dotted with Nishizawa's white bunny chairs, merges inside and outside. From a distance, the mirrored structure seems to blend with the trees, like a calm sheet of reflective water.

Equally reproachful of bombast is the music of Otomo Yoshihide, the subject of a new documentary called KIKOE. Filmmaker Iwai Chikara (who also runs a club with Yoshihide) filmed the musician over ten years, building up 500 hours of footage of concerts, interviews and sessions, which he's edited down to 99 minutes. Chikara calls it "a document of a system observed from a fixed point" -- the fixed point being Yoshihide himself, and the "system" being collaborators like Sachiko M and Kahimi Karie. The film shows at Shibuya Eurospace later this month before heading out to European film festivals.

Yoshihide is part of the No Input onkyo movement which shares a certain organic minimalism with SANAA's architecture. "I just wanna listen, no playing," as Sachiko M puts it, and I can imagine SANAA saying the same about Kensington Gardens -- their building really seems to want to listen to the park rather than dominate it.

My final example of a Japanese dislike of bombast comes in the form of the documentary Jesus Camp, which we watched last night on the recommendation of Japanese friends. The Christian evangelicals depicted in Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing's 2006 film probably won't surprise anyone -- they're a well-explored, even over-familiar subject, and for the moment they've lost their mainstream political capital -- but what I found interesting here were the cut-aways to a Japanese studio discussion in which a short-skirted woman exclaims to an expert how sorry she is for American kids whose ideologically-motivated home-schooling doesn't allow them to study art or music -- let alone Darwinian evolution -- and whose parents are so out of love with the world that they can't wait to die.

"It's truly scary that 25% of Americans think this way!" these Japanese commentators agree. A religion, or a culture, with a little more love for its surroundings -- and a little less bombast -- suits them better.

My beloved readers! How are you doing? What have you been up to? It's been too long -- almost three months! -- since last we met.

I'm not quite sure how it happened, this gap in communications. It's partly because I went traveling. I spent a month in New York with only an iPod Touch to keep in touch. I imagined I'd have something to tell you about the music scene in New York, something I could tap out on the iPod's tiny keyboard. But in the end I was so busy doing other things that I hardly saw any live music.

The only new band I discovered this time in New York was Twi The Humble Feather, a trio who play acoustic guitars and sing in ways that remind me of the Animal Collective (though they're a bit tired of that comparison). In the video lounge at the back of Monkeytown in Brooklyn I saw the Twi trio play a refreshing, relaxing set accompanied by the quirky projected animations of Nobuko Hori, one half of the Matsuri-kei girlband Groopies.

When I got back to Berlin, a funny thing happened. Kyoka, the other half of Groopies, brought the touring guitarist from the metal band Korn round to my house. It turned into a real-world re-enactment of my last column, in which I attempted to scandalize my own internal "good taste Taliban" by listening to music I wouldn't normally tolerate.

Shane Gibson sat on my sofa and politely watched the Mower videos I cued up for him, before taking control of my bluetooth mouse and showing me songs by (ahem!) "progressive metal" bands Sikth and Meshuggah. I made polite noises, but my inner Taliban hated them.

Metal music out of context doesn't have to be a bad thing, though. I heard a nice example when I attended Dexter Sinister's "documents opera" True Mirror Microfiche at the ICA in London in late June. Hunched at overhead projectors or standing stiffly at podiums, actors and art world personalities performed press releases and read pages of text, interrupted occasionally by a guitarist and drummer who played very short, very loud phrases from a Napalm Death song. The dryly cerebral texts were beautifully counterbalanced by the aggressive spurts of grindcore; the dream collaboration of Apollo and Dionysus.

But the music that's touched me most over the last couple of months hasn't been Western, and hasn't been rock. I heard street musicians in the Athens district of Kerameikos playing the most beautiful Balkan mountain music on accordion and clarinet. I held a pajama party at my flat in which we played only Greek Orthodox church music and the music of the Whirling Dervishes of Turkey, and it was the most fun party I've ever had; we whirled till our skirts spun high!

Most of all, I was impressed by an American called Jonny Olsen, who's become a big star in Laos and Thailand singing his own version of the local folk music. As the No Age blog explains, Jonny was a skate kid in California who started working in a Thai vegan café and, through it, fell in love with Thai culture.

Jonny Olsen moved to Thailand, mastered the language and several traditional instruments, and began making records. He's now a pop star there and in neighbouring Laos -- an incredible cultural chameleon, and an example to us all. With love and dedication, anything is possible!

Translated from the original Spanish by a robot chameleon. Tip of the hat to the Pulled Up blog for putting me onto Jonny Olsen.

i believe in desperate acts -
the kind that make me look stupid. (look like a fool)
just keep reinventing myself -
it's move or die. (i change my form)
these days, the people i love
are spread so far apart. (all out of reach)
it's a thin sheet,
across the face. (cover me now)

that's pretty old.
that's pretty old.
i never felt like this before, i say that every hour.
i never felt like this before, i say that every hour.

it's never going to be like it could have been -
now it's just this room. (window looks back)
you're a big part of it -
but i don't care. (you take the lead)
and can you really see me now,
like i made me? (made me anew)
just like
anyone else. (safer alone)

that's pretty old.
that's pretty old.
i never felt like this before, i say that every hour.
i never felt like this before, i say that every hour.

so right, so wrong - another winter's coming on.
you win, you lose - it's the same old news. (some things go wrong so often)
pick up the phone, and punch your home code.
somewhere, sometime, let me make you mine.

lean your head on mine,
like you used to. (used to your lean)
i don't mind
if you're faking it. (make it seem real)
i'm not asking the questions.
i'm not demanding the answers now. (take what you give)
right or wrong - just take me, lead me on.
i'm going. (i'm giving in)

so right, so wrong - another winter's coming on.
you win, you lose - it's the same old news. (these things go wrong so often)
pick up the phone, and punch your home code.
somewhere, sometime, let me make you mine.

• Computer Issues Last Weekend – Can I Use 4GB of RAM?
• Crucial Fun Fest
• K Moving Stuff
• Flickr Catchup
• Mom and Sis Visit
• Moving

Here are the gözleme girls from whom I bought my lunch yesterday at the market. They work at a window facing the street, three of them in a row. I find their pattern-clash muslim workwear style totally admirable. Gözleme is a filled, griddled flap of lavas bread, a recipe from Turkish mountain villages. You can have your pancake with spinach, cheese, lamb, potato or sweet fillings. Here's a video of someone griddle-baking the dough and adding the fillings:

There's a new "designer's market" which runs from time to time on Saturdays at the same Maybachufer location, but I have to say I find it super-lame. It's a product of white gentrification of a predominantly Turkish neighbourhood, and represents the "Boxhagenerification" of the Maybachufer (the Boxhagenerplatz market, like others in Berlin areas where the demographic skews white, focuses on slightly hip, slightly ironic goods). Stalls at this occasional, subtly menacing, designer's market sell vinyl bags with rounded 90s logos on them, models of the Berlin TV tower, twee hamster mousepads, pink t-shirts with "cool" slogans on them, perfumed soaps, and Jarvis Cocker glasses made of wood-effect adhesive. No gözleme are for sale, but sausages sizzle on grills.

The colours, smells, shapes and references of the Saturday designer's market are as "wrong" as the colours, smells, shapes and references of the Tuesday and Friday market are "right". They're "wrong" not because they're a culture I don't understand, but because they're a culture I understand all too well. After all, I'm one of the white people gentrifying this neighbourhood. Turkish people would just look blank if you said "Jarvis Cocker", but I know exactly what the cardboard Jarvis glasses and the cardboard Terry Richardson camera are about. They're references to a culture I'm part of. But it's a culture I wish would widen its horizons a bit, and love itself less.

The Wikipedia entry on Turks in Germany points out the ways in which Turks-in-Germany differ from the Germans -- and therefore, you could say, provide a corrective alternative to the limitations of life in Germany.

First of all, the Turks are younger than the Germans. Whereas 25% of Germans are over 60, only 5% of Turks are. This means that if you're living in a Turkish neighbourhood, it's going to feel a lot more youthful than a German neighbourhood. Secondly, the Turks are more urban than the Germans. They mostly opt to live in high density inner city communities thronging with small-scale commerce. This provides a bustling, lively street life notably missing from other parts of the city.

The Turks are working class, but also bi-cultural; they're likely to travel more, in a year, than the average German, clocking up air miles with cheap flights to and from Turkey. The Turks in Germany vote, massively, for the red-green alliance -- in 2005 90% of them voted for the socialists and greens. A majority of Germans, meanwhile, elected conservatives.

Turks were invited to Germany as "guest workers", and therefore there was no expectation, either from themselves or the Germans, that they would assimilate. Instead, they've integrated -- complementing German culture rather than reproducing it, becoming a syntagmatic element in the German sentence -- a qualifier -- rather than a paradigmatic one.

This is probably Freud's "narcissism of minor differences" at work, but if I hear music floating from a nearby flat into the evening air, I vastly prefer it to be Turkish music than anything from "my own" culture. And -- while it's nice to have art events, organic cafes and ice cream stores and trendy mobile coffee stalls in our hood -- I continue to be much more inspired by the style of the Anatolian gözleme girls on the Maybachufer than by people carrying vinyl bags with logos of the TV tower on them.

this has been in my itunes / on my ipod for quite some time, but i never heard it until i was walking home from the store today. since then, i've listened to it about 30 more times.

today, i went to his daycare to play with him, and another baby's mother informed me that he was "a major flirt".

at least there can be no doubt as to this child's paternity!

Kim's newish ink
Originally uploaded by +Russ.

russ3ll

there's a bonkers party on friday night with dubstep & idm-y stuff that looks fun. headliner is wisp from rephlex.