Volker Gerling journeys from town to town, carrying a hawker’s tray full of flipbooks, reviving the tradition of hobo craftsman in his own way. A film academy graduate turned self-proclaimed flip-bibliopegist, he entertains people with a one-man motion-picture theater. Remember that photography was a gateway drug into motion pictures–and when you take it back to flipbooks, time can actually flow through your fingers, he says, and he’s fascinated with the gaps. Read more »
Posts Tagged ‘berlin’
How many babies does Berlin not want?
The crisis, the fucking crisis, over and over. Now it’s come to the point where they had to close down a dog hatch (basically a McDrive, except that it’s the other way around and the critters are still alive) they just opened in Dallgow-Doberitz because the animal benefactors couldn’t accommodate the masses of dogs people wanted to get rid of. But what about children? I mean the human kind. Who cares about them?
Germans are better at stealing than me
German anti-theft watchdogs believe that every twelfth person to enter a supermarket in Berlin is a shoplifter. The first time you’re caught they stick you with a €50 fine. Therefore, statistics tell us that the average shoplifter gets caught every fiftieth time. So as long as you’re stealing more than a euro worth of merch every time you hit up the supermarket, you still come out of it in the clear. There is the nasty aspect of a criminal record, but who on earth is ever going to find out about that? (I’ve never even seen my birth certificate.) Anyway, I’ve just moved to Berlin so I thought I’d join in. Read more »
Berlin’s space station
In Berlin’s underground there are ruins of a 4.5-million-year-old space station that uses the local TV tower as a transmitter. This space station is called C-base because it is shaped like a C; about 300 people live in the different areas, which are divided into seven rotatable rings, each with some strange kind of meaning. Right after we entered the space station one of the young astronauts asked us to test a game he just programmed. So we ended up in a color fight on a huge touch screen. The kid spent the rest of the night sitting on his computer to optimize the game. Those C-base-members fulfill every nerd cliché you can imagine: They are wearing kilts the traditional way and are actually pretty nice. We talked to one of their leaders, Hein-C.
Everyone loves break-up gifts
Break-up gifts generally follow two streams of logic. They’re either a flaming butcher knife punching through your crumpled heart (worst case: under the flag of becoming “friends”) OR the act of breaking up is the one divine gift you were secretly waiting for and to which no accompanying trinket will ever compare. Here is a representative sample of the most break-uppy break-up gifts the folks in our Berlin office have been broken up with.
Burning Berlin part 3: Fight Night
Burning Berlin pt2: The Nazi tea party
Continued from here.
It wasn’t only anarchists who were holding protest events on the 1st of May. This year the National Democratic Party of Germany (think the BNP, only with real-life Nazi grandads) had decided to hold a family fete. If it was an attempt to make them seem more sober and legitimate than the kerazy leftist cop-fighters, they fucked it up by booking two former members of the SS, including this lovely guy, to make rivers of blood speaches while children ate cupcakes at their feet.
Burning Berlin: part 1
English people may have forgotten that they were once anarchic enough to chop a king’s head off and have turned protesting into a fete for the mentally ill, but in Germany May Day is still a hugely violent festival of fear. Read more »
The Olympic torch of punk ended up in Berlin
Look at this video. I imagine it must have been constant madness (not the band) to have been a punk in Berlin during the 80s. Anyone who wasn’t sitting on the street scrounging a handful of Deutsch Marks for his next Sternbourg must have been a terrible person. I don’t have to tell you it’s not like this anymore–nothing is–but just to see what it really is like now I visited the last remnants of a once majestic scene in one of Berlin’s last remaining squats, the Tommyhaus. At this point I sadly have to say, they’re old. Seriously old. Read more »
