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Material 2024
Berlin, Germany
Here are some of the coolest posters I saw in the city this year. Here's the collection from last year.
Reading 2024
I read 74 books this year. I'm not reviewing them all; I don't remember them all. However, a few of them stuck with me for various reasons. Did nobody think to tell me about Doris Lessing? The name had a familiar ring, the kind of sound a name gets when it's called great, but only ever in the middle of a list of other great names. I can't really understand how I made it this far without somebody insisting I read this book. The setup is ostensibly simple: semi-autobiographical protagonist Anna is an author and an active leftist in 30s,...
Not now
For the past few months the days have been long and dark. Somewhere in the middle there it snowed and it stuck for a couple of weeks, slowly hardening into sheet ice. We're through most of it now. Last week, in the courtyard behind the apartment the trees started to bud, and now there's sun enough to catch the green rippling along all their branches. Spring, maybe. In the dark months I kept my head down and worked. Ugly, stupid work. Pointless work. Now just as spring comes I'm sick. The other day I was in the office and I...
Material 2023
Berlin, Germany
Berlin has cash only bars, stickers to put over your phone's camera before you can come into the party, and a strong poster culture. The surfaces of the city are covered in a growing, shedding, and regenerating skin of posters. Most are good. Here are the ones I liked this year.
Notes from Granta 165 (Deutschland)
The Granta office in Berlin is located in the district of Friedenau. It’s a neighborhood of shuttered vinyl record shops and thriving funeral parlors that few visit, and fewer seem to leave. In the 1970s and 1980s, Friedenau became home to a concentration of West German writers, several of whom would make significant contributions to Granta: Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Günter Grass, Herta Müller. Today, on Niedstraße, in Enzensberger’s old building, piano lessons are offered on the ground floor; in Grass’s stout brick house next door, his widow runs an Airbnb (€145 a night). The residue of the Cold War is thick on the ground.
It's enough to make you crazy
The world is enough to make you crazy. The city is enough to make you crazy. The building is enough to make you crazy. The way lint builds up on the desk right in front of you, given enough of everything else, is enough to make you crazy. I've deliberately contracted in the past couple of years. I've tried to become less of a jangly ball of reactive nerve endings. I think I used to be a gaping maw that inhaled current affairs from near and far and exhaled analysis and anxiety. I try to do less of that. Touch...
Wartime reading
It feels like there's a lot of war going on. Whenever that happens I really feel my ignorance; it seems like if thousands of people are dying about something, I should understand what that something is. So here's what I've been reading lately about war. I didn't start reading Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte because of the present wars but because it was recommended to me by a friend. However, it's been instructive. Malaparte was a fascist, which gave him access to all kinds of people during WW2 who I haven't really seen close up before. Kaputt is a brilliant book...
Links, November 2023
Right now I am in England. It's the first time I've been back since we moved away to Germany and being here has immersed me back in some old themes... like the British class obsession. A little while ago I read Bright Young People, about a certain set of upper class enfants terribles who were the first of a kind of person that is now splashed all over Hello magazine. One of that set was Evelyn Waugh, who wrote a send up of the whole gang that I've just finished reading: Vile Bodies. The book is full of social climbers,...
Links, October 2023
First here's Sequel, which is one of those apps for tracking the stuff you watch and read and listen to, and the stuff you want to watch and read and listen to. I do a lot of that, and this app looks slick, but I probably won't switch to it because it's iOS only. For you, maybe that's perfect. I always wondered at how many tunnels snake their way through the soil in central London. I always thought: there's so many that the earth must be practically a sponge. This write up of a single development near Victoria train station...
Links, August 2023
While I claim that the reason I haven't emerged as the foremost British emigré writer of our times because I simply don't have time between watching movies and drinking beer: Franz Kafka wrote stories on the side, at night, when he was tired. Enjoy this profile not of his literature, but his day job: "I am more interested in his insurance affairs." A dragon guarded the literary estate of Borges and made anybody who wanted a part of it suffer. I think I love her. In shocking news that nobody could have predicted, it turns out that the women of...
Links, July 2023
I increasingly hate computers and the world inside them that my brain is trapped inside of. That said, here are some things about computers. Let's be practical, with another resource to get you to stop screwing up shell scripting. Once you've figured that out, why don't you train an AI homunculus to reflect your own neuroses back at you, and start a conversation? It's time for a vibe shift. The unfortunate truth is that the digital world is the real world is the digital world. Culture and reality do not reside cleanly in a single realm; they slosh back and...
Bells
The church bells in this place, my god. They toll for 10 solid minutes every week night and for God knows how long on a Sunday morning. For a short time today there was a relentless tolling of the bells and a old timey horn honking at once. Chaos. This sort of thing is charming and atmopheric out in the countyside where the sounds have space to drift from afar. They are apocalyptic in the city where people live next to, under, on, and indeed inside the belfry. We're all heathens here anyway.
Building a computer
I was a real life, buck-toothed nerd when I was a child. I liked video games, didn't play outside enough. I spent a lot of time playing around on a computer. But I never built one. As an adult, I pay for the convenience of not having to be in one place to do computer things. I have been subscribed to Dropbox, iCloud, and many TV and movie streaming services over the years. Those are becoming less and less of a good deal, and the geeky voice at the back of mind is saying louder and louder: why not do...
Build a box
Despite being a dictionary-reading, computer geek, gap-tooth nerd as a child... and mostly into adulthood, I never did do any PC gaming or building. I think by the time I would have gotten into that I harboured illusions about myself as a creative, artistic person, who probably ought to use a Mac. Thus, I used a MacBook from a relatively early age and never messed around with building the things. Recently though, I finished building a PC for the first time in my life. I've been running a Plex server for a long time, and I've slowly been building up...
Links, June 2023
I think I've given up on systems that organise the world, even the world right around me. Even so, it's nice to dream about a way of living where everything is fast, smooth, organised... easy. That's why I still look at consumer electronic products and software even though I have long accepted none of them will make me happy in an enduring way. Picture then, a world where everything (everything) I have is organised into numerical folder trees. Johnny Decimal, everybody. A fellow foe of the Grand Narratives that organise our collective consciousness is Roland Barthes, who as it turns...
Boating
Berlin, Germany
When the sun came out in Berlin, people started climbing into the canals in their inflatable boats. When I rode my bike over Elsenbrücke, I even saw them floating along the Spree in their dinghies, with a bag of beers and a fishing hat. One evening, I saw a lone paddle boarder in the middle of that wide river. It is the done thing, I learned. The Excursion 5 Schlauchboot is available for less than €200 and can be fitted with a little electric motor, or a floating beer cooler that you tow along behind you. By June, I was...
BuzzFeed News
I'd like to pour one out for BuzzFeed News, which was unceremoniously taken behind the woodshed this month. I have shared my thoughts about my time at BuzzFeed, much of which was spent with the News division, and most of which was motivated by that division. Now they've finally gone and killed it, the most worthwhile thing that media corporation ever did. I have a lot of fun and messed up memories from my time at the Fun Internet Company. Those times are well and truly over, both at the personal level and the macro economic level. The backbiting merry-go-round...
Links, May 2023
First, whimsy. I like it when people do something that could have been straightforward and to the point, but instead they inject a little bit of charming madness in there, the unpredictable human touch. Here is a band website that is old fashioned, simple, and yet deeply weird. Give it a minute. Here is a clock website that shows an excerpt from a book for every minute of the day, a bit like my favourite film installation, The Clock by Christian Marclay. Here is a hand-curated archive of fictional brands that appear in media. Here is a man who invented...
Naughty
We got a nasty letter from some lawyers. We had some lawyers send a nasty letter. Why are people so up in our business here?
Good screen, bad screen
We are about to share a media experience together. Please switch off and put your phone away. Please switch off your smart watch and annihilate any other illuminated sources of time. Please strive to be entirely within the world created by the shared experience rather than in your own life or even your own body, whose use should be constrained to the sense organs need to consume the experience and the parts required for breathing, crying, and perhaps laughing. Limit then, itching, fidgeting, coughing, sneezing, farting, and throat clearing. I, of course, might start scrolling through my phone if I...
Overwhelming good
This morning I was sitting at my desk with my eyes half closed. I started to yawn and I stretched my arms out and back. Something in my chest, around my sternum, made a dull pop. I didn't realise I had anything to pop in there. The last couple of weeks have been full of great new things, and I've totally worn me out. We moved into our new, more permanent home in Berlin. We've had lots of help with the entire process, and we've thrown money at the appropriate parts to try and make things easier. I am still...
Lucian, Ann, Fred
So Popbitch (a very catty UK media gossip newsletter) reports that Fred Again's people have been trying to keep the fact that he is minor gentry out of his Wikipedia article. Fair enough. I understood his story to go as follows: young South London guy makes poppy dance songs during the pandemic, goes viral, becomes instant stadium-packing act once the restrictions lift, and boy he just can't believe his luck. Shucks! No doubt this narrative has been carefully shaped by him and his people, and the truth does endear me to him less. His daddy is a Baron and a...
Cinema unlimited
Moving to a new country with a new currency, one of the things we've been thinking about is, "is it cheaper?" It's a very intangible thing. I'm too stupid to do quick currency conversions in my head, I'm earning a different amount of money (is it more, is it less, yes!), and different kinds of costs work out very differently. Recently we had an incident with an outrageously expensive (or was it?) iceberg lettuce from Lidl, a budget supermarket, 2€! Unlimited metro usage is 29€ a month (until it possibly doubles in a couple of months, or doesn't). We're getting...
Links, February 2023
Well, we moved to Germany (we know!), so I've been correcting some of my gaps in recent German history by reading the lengthy Wikipedia page on German reunification. In terms of online life, that's the only real giveaway that I've moved in the real world. The rest of the anglophone media roar rolls along as before with two notable edits. I've completely cut out the very high volume Westminster insider newsletter I used to read first thing every morning (why?) and I've generally reduced my intake of UK news to a minimum. In other non-English news, AI has been used...
Rixdorf
We've been living here together for a couple of weeks. It's a quiet Sunday in our place in the city, the first of its kind. We found our long-term apartment and we'll be there soon. We're engaged; everybody knows. We made sure of that. We're going to get married. Did you hear, we're going to get married. Roots are going down. We have our grocery shops, our first couple of bars and cafes that might one day be considered our places. Most of them are going down in Rixdorf, a village in Berlin, they say. On Sunday the church bell...
Leaving London
I'm leaving London after living here for half a dozen years. I've been too busy with the leaving to feel sentimental about it but I’m making myself reflect. I used to find myself arguing London's case all the time. Now I'm ready to leave it and barely look over my shoulder. I tried very hard to get here. I built a life around keeping hold of my perch here, so I have passion for the place. When I first moved here I wasn't alone, but I left the quiet county I grew up in for the opposite end of the...
The return
Max dropped bread in the toaster without looking. He read the jagged little letter again from the beginning. It arrived at some point last night, shoved through the letterbox with no envelope, a loose sheaf of note paper ripped from a spiral spine. It had been two days since the final blow up. Beginning again at "liar", he wandered into the bedroom and dug his phone of the sheets with his spare hand. Putting the charger into its corresponding place at the bottom of the device was at first slight resistance and then a satisfactory give. It made him think...
Berlin like you mean it
We are moving to Berlin. I've been making that statement of intent to anybody who will listen for the past few months. I think (hope) we're past the stage where I need to make that statement over and over to make it happen now. It has an inertia of its own. I have a job out there. Sarah has a job out there. I think it's happening. By the end of January 2023, we should be living in Berlin. I've wanted to live somewhere other than here for a few years now. I am putting my money, my body, my...
Links, October 2022
First off, here's a DJ set I liked. Right now a lot of people are talking about leaving Twitter (here's mine). Many of those that go ahead with it and turning up in Mastodon (here's mine) and talking a big game about how the collapse of Twitter will beget a golden age for the decentralised internet. That's nice. I don't believe it's really going to be that simple, though. On the topic of decentralised internet things: the FBI seized the Z-lib ebook archive! That's a big pity given how hard it is to get ebooks without giving Amazon money. The...