2023-12-28
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. A flyer for the 2030 Berlin Klimavolksentscheid, which did not pass An exhibition, an experiment. Poster on the bridge over the Treptow/Neukölln/Kreuzberg canal corner Matrix Nightclub hiring poster, Warschauerstr Brutalismus 3000's Ultrakunst Tour, poster at Warschauerstraße.berlin
Notes from Granta 165 (Deutschland)
2023-12-27
p8 WG Sebald was the last German author to make an international breakthrough. He grew up a few miles from the Austrian border, grew up in England, and considered himself a student of Peter Handke of the Grazer Gruppe. Wenderoman authors Monika Muron and Uwe Tellkamp turned to The New Right. Later authors of the genre bucked the trend: Lutz Seiler, Jenny Erpenbeck, and Felix Stephan. p9 The best West German art came from people who saw the Americans not as liberators but as those who ran a system that allowed the Nazis to integrate into the new government and elite: Gerhard Richter, Jörg Immendorf, Alexander Kluge.
2023-06-25
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.