The streets are covered with frozen waterdrops. The intensity varies, so anything from a firm step in 1 g to a pedestrian powerslide to a can happen.
NP: Giant Robot – Breaking Bones
Update 7 Jan 2008:
I just heard this sort of ice is called Blitzeis.
Berlin’s other city magazine Tip just ran a story on the raising chuch attendance especially in the district of Prenzlauer Berg. It also happens to be the neighbourhood I’ve used to live.
As for religious denominations, the population in Germany can roughly be split up in thirds: the Catholics, the Protestants and the Undenominational occupying almost equal shares. As usual, Berlin doesn’t quite conform. Here 60% of the people (pdf) remain outside organised religion. Part of this can be explained by the legacy of the secular DDR.
The surge into the church and to its activities comes from migrant “middle-young” adults with families. Babycarts are more common than SUVs on these narrow streets. This can be cross-checked from reports, that books about baptism and guardian angels are bestsellers in Christian bookshops.
Lately they discussed the notion of miracle in my favourite YLE Radio 1 programme Merkkituote. In response to the in Sao Paulo, Matti Myllykoski closed the discussion with following words (translation mine):
That is interesting. I’d personally expect – and would take it as a mirale – a counter-reaction to all this dumbness… that against the dumbness, man would choose less, which is more. That we’d concentrate more in being selective about the offerings of the surroundings, and would dig deeper into it. In the old times it was called mysticism.
I wouldn’t say it’s mysticism that’s happening in the neighbourhood, but it is nevertheless an interesting development I’ll keep an eye on.
The other day I flexed some muscle with php scripting and comma separated values. Before you see the results I can safely confess that programming is quite nicht mein Bier, but definitely on the long-term self-development list.
The whole thing ricocheted from an observation, that we often have very little vocabulary about birds. Last month there was a bird nest on the balcony. A new batch of blackbirds, I learnt. In May I freehandedly spied on some woodpeckers. Even megapixel’d pigeons led to some nice discussion on Flickr.
With visual motif at hand it’s smooth to communicate, but what happens when we single out a bit more difficult birds and we don’t know their names in any language? Then we describe how they look like, sing or behave. It can get quite creative and funny.
After picking up a dictionary it doesn’t take long to notice, that the bird names are works of art in themselves. Who came up with Bohemian Waxwing? Certainly no innovation-driven government agency. N
Fuckparade 2007 from Mesq and Vimeo.
A chance event led me to visit the memorial site in the Bendlerblock. Situated near Tiergarten, the building is famous as the centre of resistance among the military of the Third Reich. The most famous of them was Colonel von Stauffenberg, who planted a bomb to a meeting Hitler was attending.
Director Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects) is currently shooting a film about the conspiracy – with Tom Cruise starring as Stauffenberg. The city officials have denied Cruise’s request to shoot in Bendlerblock and at some other locations. They are at odds with The Church of Scientology figureheaded by Cruise. Berliner Zeitung reported, that the cult leaders regard Germany as the most critical beach-head to Europe. The other front being the Beckhams?
I also ran into the Fuckparade (hence the video above). The beaty street party started in 1997 as an underground alternative to the Love Parade, but is also associated with political activism against state control.
In the wake of G8 summit earlier this summer, the anti-terror enforcement has now invoked Section 129a – a paragraph in the German Criminal Code law dating back to the days of RAF. The paragraph was used to arrest a non-conforming sociologist Andrej H. and three others suspected of “supporting” a left-wing extremist group Militante Gruppe (MG).
Let’s see how this mess sorts out. It’s been in the regional news, at least. In any case, if accusations are based on such conspirational behaviour like – ‘not taking his mobile phone with him to a meeting’ or ‘having access to libraries which he can use inconspicuously in order to do the research necessary to the drafting of texts of the MG’ – it’s needless to say, that something profound is in danger here.
Our shared flat in Prenzlauer Berg dissolved and I’ve moved a bit further uptown to Pankow for some time now. The flat is from 1920s, so it dates back to the Weimar Republic, instead that Imperial Germany’s final year 1918 of the previous address.
It’s nice to have new surroundings to explore. So far I’ve run into a women’s prison, a Jugendstil church, a small-time mall, blockhouses as usual, and a wasteland which I think is an out-of-order Red Army cemetery. All in all it seems I’m in brackish waters where new, old, urban and suburban intertwine.
The best thing of course is, that the flat is curiously located on the exact same latitude as Mega.
Mega is a location near H
Returning to the world-view after two and half months.
Cleaned up an old sketch of that four-fold table above from my notebook. Using it as a tool for thought, hope it works for you too. Axial topology offers what one would expect – typical left-right, up-down classification. Then, I’m using circles to represent the strength of faith: smaller the circle, more defined and stronger the faith. Then I exemplary populated the table off the top of my head.
What’s most interesting to me is the notion of faith. Faith in anything: one god, absence of god, market economics, unconditional love. Regardless of its denomination, praxis is built on faith.
Where there is faith – there will be chutzpah, sisu, cojones.
Almost two years of (mostly) Germany now and the love/hate relationship with the language goes on. From a non-native speaker’s perspective German is in its complexity a frightening instrument of power, but also an infinite source of linguistic pleasures. In my case, especially in its written form.
Frustrations mostly deal with the spoken word, especially on TV, on stage or such. To battle this, I had taken up a tradition to go see the latest transmission of Tatort with a friend every Sunday. These 90-minute murder mysteries have been on air since 1970 and have become quite an institution. I’ve come to believe, that Sunday Tatorts have taken the place of Sunday Sauna in my weekly rhythm. Both are somewhat purifying and masochistic experiences.
I discovered help from an unlikely source. Recently I voluntarily watched an English language film dubbed into German – not Die Hard 4.0 but V for Vendetta. No problem whatsoever, everything was loud and clear. With the mandate given by the results of the revered PISA study, I’ve had a bit of a stuck-up outlook on the culture of dubbing, but now the tables turned. There, I may have found the missing link.
I was cycling home around one sunset and suddenly came across a fox. First I thought it was a dog from one of the allotment gardens in the area. Just as I got close enough to realise it wasn’t, he fled through a hole in a fence. I peered through the hole and found him standing there.
In the countryside I had only seen foxes in fur farms, as we made casual class trips to local economies (although they’re not the same species, to be exact). The first time I spotted a red fox was in Helsinki’s Kontula when I moved in for the first time. The second spotting took place in East Helsinki as well.
More photos and story snippets on Flickr.