WDET- Detroit Public Radio: "Detroit and Berlin are iconic cities; symbols of cultural and economic domination, as well as of collapse, and (potential) rebirth. Detroit and Berlin have ideological similarities that go far beyond industrial power. As beacons of culture, Detroit and Berlin have both been on the cutting edge of arts activities. Berlin is a crossroads of European film, art, music and food; Detroit is a center of African-American culture, with global credibility in jazz, techno, and emerging cultural expressions."
Audio Preview. [more inside]
posted by HLD
on Oct 10, 2011 -
13 comments
Since the fur-coated Boot Girls’ particular services were suggested by the iridescent colors of their calf-length, patent-leather boots and shoelaces, suitors had to be intimately familiar with their semaphore-like advertising before accompanying them to nearby apartments. Naturally, only devoted aficionados could decipher such specific messages with confidence. Other potential clients had to buy special primers, where Berlin’s complex street semiotics were thoughtfully decoded for the uninitiated.
-
Sex tourism in Berlin during the Jazz Age, along with some
illustrations from the period.
(Racy rather than obscene, but somewhat NSFW)
posted by Slap*Happy
on Mar 24, 2011 -
16 comments
Wijnanda Deroo: Inside New York Eateries "Continuing her long-term exploration of the architectural interior as a genre of photographic investigation, artist Wijnanda Deroo has scoured New York's five boroughs documenting the full spectrum of the city's culinary institutions. From Café des Artistes to Papaya Dog, the Russian Tea Room to Yonah Schimmel's Knishes, Deroo's viewfinder alights on diverse sites (and sights) where we New Yorkers sit (or stand) to consume our daily bread." More interiors at the artist's website --
Indonesia ::
Curacao ::
Mexico ::
Berlin
posted by puny human
on Mar 20, 2011 -
5 comments
Do you like video games? Have you ever wanted to
comprehensively reenact the daily life of a double-decker bus driver in 1985 West Berlin?
Your prayers have finally been answered. Aerosoft's impressive
Omnibus Driving Simulator allows you to take command of the venerable 1980s-vintage MAN SD200 and SD202 double-decker buses (in 20 authentic 1980s advertising liveries) along West Berlin's Omnibus Route 92, complete with an accurate simulation of all four production-runs of the SD200's transmission, drivetrain, climate control, and passenger information systems. If the SD202 doesn't cut it for you, or you want to escape the clutches of West Berlin, there's
a comprehensive map editor and scripting engine at your disposal.
(via) [more inside]
posted by schmod
on Feb 22, 2011 -
46 comments
On August 30, 1978 a Polish airliner was
hijacked and redirected to Tempelhof airport in West Berlin. Torn between a policy of supporting defection and a recently-signed anti-hijacking treaty, the West German government ceded jurisdiction over the defendants to the United States government, which was still technically an occupying power and had an interest in the case because of the US Air Force Base at Tempelhof. The result was the one and only decision rendered by the United States Court for Berlin,
United States v. Tiede.
[more inside]
posted by jedicus
on Jan 7, 2011 -
13 comments
Following the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the rail networks of East and West Berlin were divided, necessitating the closure of a number of stations, creating
ghost stations, through which West Berlin trains slowed, but did not stop. They appeared on
West Berlin U-/S-Bahn maps as stations at which trains do not stop, in the case of stations lying in East Berlin through which trains passed or as out of service. The map also included some stations reachable only from East Berlin trains. The
East Berlin map omitted the West Berlin lines and stations entirely.
[more inside]
posted by hoyland
on Dec 2, 2010 -
17 comments
Postcards from Berlin is a call from a Berlin (Germany) design studio for virtual postcards from all of the places in the US named Berlin.
posted by mkb
on Aug 20, 2010 -
29 comments
A family traveled to France and Germany in 1938 and shot
this footage which features two appearances by Adolf Hitler. It's creepy seeing this Nazi spectacle shot by an amateur. It's a perspective I don't know if I've ever seen. The video opens in France and the Nazi footage starts around 1:45.
The collector writes: "The Basement Collection presents: An 8mm film bought at an estate sale back in the 90's. This reel is part of a series of a family vacation movies to Europe in 1938. On this reel the family visits France and then Germany. The footage of Hitler is from a celebration in the Berlin Stadium on what I think is a May Day celebration (May 2, 1938) then another celebration at Berlin's Lustgarten. (on May 1st). (I think the reel was edited together out of order)."
posted by zzazazz
on Aug 12, 2010 -
95 comments
Nabokov in Berlin. 'Vladimir Nabokov was starting his career as a writer when he found himself in Berlin. "It is clear, for one thing, that while a man is writing, he is situated in some definite place; he is not simply a kind of spirit, hovering over the page...Something or other is going on around him." The short 1934 novel Despair from which this quote comes is already heavily self-ironising compared with the stories of the previous decade. But like them it is studded with incidental Berlin experiences, from the shape of the city's S-Bahn train line on the map to the comedy of a German misspeaking English. "I suppose only the pest. The chief thing by me is optimismus." If Nabokov's Berlin was in his head, it was nevertheless not invented.'
[more inside]
posted by VikingSword
on Jun 30, 2010 -
6 comments
On Sunday,
Karmanoia, one of Berlin's most interesting underground clubs, closed its doors for the last time. Although not as storied or well-known as
Tacheles - also facing
tough times - and easy to pass without noticing, Karmanoia had a loyal crowd of oddballs frequenting it, and was notable not just for its pirate-ship-like interior, but also for the full Labyrinth built into its upper portions. The club's funeral took place directly after locking the doors at midnight on Sunday, with an orchestra dressed like skeletons leading a parade to a nearby canal to bury the key in a watery grave.
[more inside]
posted by mannequito
on Apr 1, 2009 -
23 comments
We are in the midst of a Ferris wheel craze. In 2009. "This year, Germany will unveil the
Great Berlin Wheel. Upon its completion, the wheel will be 606 feet high — as high as two football fields are long, as high as three Niagara Falls. It will be taller than what’s currently the tallest Ferris wheel in the world, the
Singapore Flyer, a soon-to-be-disappointing 541 feet high. This year, China also plans to unveil the
Beijing Great Wheel. At an awesome 682 feet high, it will be taller than both the Great Berlin Wheel and the Singapore Flyer (which only debuted as the world’s tallest Ferris wheel last year) ... China has, in fact, built wheels in six cities since the start of the new millennium."
posted by geoff.
on Feb 12, 2009 -
52 comments
Food Fight! For reasons unknown to mankind the people of Kreuzberg fight the people of Friedrichshain (two Berlin precincts) on the Brigde that connects them. Their ammunition is rotten vegetables, diapers, rotten fruit and everything else you'd find in your bio-trashcan.
More (sorry only a Trailer),
more and still
more (in german only).
posted by namagomi
on Jul 31, 2008 -
24 comments
Twenty years ago this week,
the biggest escape ever over the Berlin Wall took place, but the
event went nearly unreported outside of the two Germanies. The 182 persons who jumped over the Wall in the early morning hours of 1 July 1988, instead of leaving East Germany,
fled in the opposite direction (
scroll down to "Wolfgang Ritter") to escape the West Berlin police. East German border guards waited with trucks on the other side of the Wall in the middle of the death strip to pick up the wall-hopping protesters; they were driven to another location, served breakfast, and then taken to the Friedrichsstrasse crossing to West Berlin with the admonition to "use the usual border crossing next time."
[more inside]
posted by sister nunchaku of love and mercy
on Jul 3, 2008 -
16 comments
Forgotten Architects: In the 1920s and early 1930s, German Jewish architects created some of the greatest modern buildings in Germany, mainly in the capital Berlin. A law issued by the newly elected German National Socialist Government in 1933 banned all of them from practicing architecture in Germany. In the years after 1933, many of them managed to emigrate, while many others were deported or killed under Hitler’s regime.
Pentagram Papers 37: Forgotten Architects is a survey of
43 of these architects and their groundbreaking work.
[more inside]
posted by sveskemus
on Jun 16, 2008 -
10 comments
Do you like Berlin? The hippest city on the planet has some interesting video blogs. My personal favorite is
First We Take Berlin which is pretty off-beat and covers a lot of not so hip areas of the city. In their current episode they go to the annual may riots in Kreuzberg (after a weird little mouse story). Then there is
Mayda3000 which is the longest running video blog about Berlin.
Watch Berlin is a sort of compilation of many different video blogs most of which are in german but there are some are in english as well. And last but not least there's
Verbundstoff which is in german only and takes a look at the very underground Berlin electronic music scene.
posted by namagomi
on May 20, 2008 -
47 comments
With the grounds it was built on having hosted the first demonstration of airplane flight in 1909,
Tempelhof International Airport, the world's second-oldest working commercial airport, was officially opened in 1923. Also known as City Airport, it takes its official name from the Tempelhof neighborhood of Berlin, itself named for the
Knights Templar who owned its land in the Middle Ages.
[more inside]
posted by Your Time Machine Sucks
on Apr 25, 2008 -
36 comments
Brigid Berlin makes today's
hollywood train wrecks look lame.
"In the early 70s, I went to Woolworth's and bought a jigger so I could have just one getting-dressed drink. By the time I left the house, I'd had 20. One time, I was in a hairdresser under the dryer getting bored. I went to the bar across the street in my rollers and had a glass of white wine. Then another glass of wine and another. I can't remember anything else until I woke up in a Howard Johnson near La Guardia Airport. And there were pancakes and maple syrup. There was a cute boy in the room watching Kids Are People Too. I think I thought that Andy would put him on the cover of Interview. He didn't."
posted by bustmakeupleave
on Sep 10, 2007 -
14 comments
Ruttmann vs. MilantAlexis Milant has composed scores for three experimental animations realised by Walter Ruttmann.
The pleasure in watching and [listening to] this come from the reactivity in the same temporality between sound and picture. [more inside]
posted by carsonb
on Sep 9, 2007 -
8 comments
Berliner Trance. A 1993 documentary tracing the origins of modern trance music in East Berlin. Featuring interviews with many of the biggest names in trance, including a very young
Paul Van Dyk, now currently
ranked as the #1 DJ in the world.
posted by empath
on Apr 7, 2007 -
49 comments
On September 9th 2006, 112 of the world's writers, artists, activists, and social entrepeneurs (
nominees here) will gather for a
Table of Free Voices in Berlin, Germany, discussing questions about the important issues of today. Who provides those questions?
You.
posted by divabat
on Jul 24, 2006 -
6 comments
Everybody knows that gangsta rap promotes sexism, homophobia... and fascism. Take
Bushido, for instance - the Berlin rapper of Tunisian descent that all the neo-Nazis love.
Confused?
(nyt) Well,
so are the Germans. And then we're not even talking about
Fler, whose
"This is black-red-gold, hard and proud!" nationalist lyrics never fail to piss off the
German papers (in German), and who likes to pose in his videos with a nice symbolic eagle. (Then again,
Helmut Kohl didn't mind.)
Still, Fler's flag-waving, eagle-loving rhymes are no match for Bushido's
"Salute, stand to attention, I am the leader like 'A'". The A stands for Adolf, you know.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane
on Jan 12, 2006 -
28 comments
‘No one should be imprisoned – not even for a second – for expressing an opinion’ Akbar Ganji announced his hunger strike on May 20 with these words.
Ganji, an Iranian journalist and writer, was arrested on April 22, 2000 following his participation in an academic and cultural conference held at the Heinrich Böll Institute in Berlin on April 7-9 entitled "Iran after the elections," at which political and social reform in Iran were publicly debated. He was sentenced on January 13, 2001 to 10 years imprisonment plus five years internal exile.
He is now on 50th day of hunger-strike, weighs 52kg, is unconscious much of the day, and
may die soon.
[more inside]
posted by lenny70
on Jul 31, 2005 -
12 comments
Wladimir Kaminer represents an emerging Russo-German culture. He is a
DJ spinning Russian wild ska-punk club music, he is a radio talk-show host, the author of several best-selling books depicting the life of Russian immigrants in Germany, and a sort of good-humored emblem of the emerging hybrid culture of Berlin. In
a fascinating interview, he reveals post Soviet Russia, and Russian lives and literature in the West; you can read his stories,
Paris Lost, and
Animal Transport, and the usual
overview of his works and of his significance, in the NYT
Books section.
posted by semmi
on Dec 24, 2004 -
5 comments
Superman born in Germany? It appears that "the boy's mutant DNA segment was found to block production of a protein called myostatin that limits muscle growth."
"Now we can say that myostatin acts the same way in humans as in animals," said the boy's physician, Dr. Markus Schuelke, a professor in the child neurology department at Charite/University Medical Center Berlin. "We can apply that knowledge to humans, including trial therapies for muscular dystrophy."
Or other things...
posted by andreaazure
on Jun 24, 2004 -
17 comments
