Filed under: club, concerts, dance dance fun for nights, music, party, style | Tags: CTM, electropop, glass candy, Ida No, Italo disco, music, Planningtorock, Transmediale, wmf
Curses how is it possible that I have let fully two weeks go by without providing any sort of update on my comings and goings? I hope you weren’t worried about me. My withered soul was only huddling indoors feeling horribly depressed about the hopeless glacial permafrost darkness aka Berlin in January. Did you know they don’t clear the sidewalks here? Haha! I didn’t! What a zany surprise.
ANYhow now I have gained access to one of those fake sun lamps by mysterious means which I won’t explain here, I am throwing caution to the icy gale force winds & staring straight into its UV glory, my vitamin D levels are through the roof. I am feeling fresh, my typing fingers are nimble and limber, it’s blogtime yall.
So on the itinerary in Berlin right now is the Transmediale festival for art and digital culture. It will run from Feb. 2-7. Running sort of parallel to this is Club Transmediale (CTM) which is all about “adventurous music” (wha? I know.) and started on Jan. 28th. So the upshot of all this is that Glass Candy and Planningtorock were playing at WMF last night. WMF which btw I have decided is not that cool per se but anyways moving on.
The only thing I know about Planningtorock is that she is really named Janine Rostron, lives in Berlin, and just collaborated with The Knife on an opera, “Tomorrow, In a Year“. Awesome? Check, check, check. So obviously I was stoked to see her and really sad when I got distracted by things like prosecco, chatty Lufthansa employees, and vietnamese spring rolls and missed the whole thing. Gah.
Glass Candy though has gotten some blog love from me before, they were in Berlin this summer, and I was not about to miss them again.
It should probably come as no surprise that I love singers who a) wear sequins b) prance around like ponies on stage and generally just bask in their own glamor as if being beautiful and crazy were the ultimate answer to everything.
Check, check, check. Ida No is not messing around.
She was fabulous in leopard print and and sparkles and a flowy platinum mane and knew it. This sort of creepy dude had his iphone camera all up in her george foreman all night and she was all about it.
You’ll notice I kept my iphone camera at a tasteful distance.
Glass Candy is a weird and stylish duo. Their spooky Italo-disco-electro-pop makes my dance muscles tingle in a dangerous way. I was not to be stopped on that floor, friends, especially since it was not so packed and there was room to whirl and twirl — taking brief pauses to make pretty pictures (apologies for the fuzzy phone pics, they’re ’shopped with love).
Forget fancy sun lamps. I can & will survive this winter on champagne, disco and sequins.
Filed under: music, songs on the internet | Tags: Micachu & the Shapes, mp3, music, pregame playlist
Woo! Happy Saturday! So I’m not even going to pitch this like dudes I just found this cool new band because, realtalk, I’m a little late on the uptake here.
Really the most disappointing thing about this whole scenario is that Pitchfork beat me to the Pokémon joke. bastards!
Not only p fork of course but everyone else who talks about music on the internet has already been losing their cool over Micachu et al since their album came out last summer.
All of this being said, I still felt the need to write about this band because I am feeling very good about them on so many levels. Their frantic, jumpy electrobeats make me think of Le Tigre or something, and that fiercely wide-eyed, technicolor spunkiness is a little bit Alphabeat-ish…
…but finally the music that the apparently immensely talented and classically-trained Mica Levi and her Shapes are making on their weird menagerie of homemade instruments is really just doing its own thing. Sometimes it’s pop for just a second, but then it clicks or it bloops or it sizzles or they shout something like “after this we’ll slip your disc” and suddenly you realize you’re at a birthday party in the 4th dimension.
Also, she looks like a boy but that’s ok.
You can buy all their records through their label’s website. Plus not that I condone this but pretty much all the songs off their new album are to be gotten free on various music blogs. Just ask the hypemachine.
PS Also props for not putting a ‘Crystal’ in their name like all the other little electropoppers are doing these days. Micachu and the Crystal Shapes? Nope.
Filed under: the internet & things we find there | Tags: blogging about blogs, blogs, music
Sometimes people ask me, Lis what is the secret to having a cool blog? Yikes! I Don’t Know!, I tell them bashfully. Mostly I think it is all about reading lots of cool blogs. Well today I am here to tell you about my favorite ones.
It’s like reading books only REALer, cuz I know u are sick of all that “using your imagination” bullshit.
*****
NE-Ways here goes, #1: here is the post that inspired this post about posts. It’s just too good to let it go by without some mad props.
IMBOYCRAZY is a blog by a girl named Alexi Wasser who lives in LA. she is funny and sassy as all sassafras. Here she writes to smartypants boys who are too obsessed with themselves to make moves for a quality girl.
You probably aren’t richard gere are you? Then you should probably read this!
*****
Next in line is Tom Oatmeal. I forgive him for only having a tumblr. because he is one of my favorite writers and a comic genius.
sometimes (#2) he talks to us about 2pac, but try not to get confused when he calls him 2-Pack.
*****
I’d be misrepresenting my internet self if I didn’t mention at least one blog about clothes and jewels. One of my favorite ones is Style Rookie which is written by a 13 year old girl called Tavi who seems like she is probably smarter and cooler than most grown ups.
No joke: we could all learn a lot from Tavi.
Here she is ( #3) making fun of that font “Curlz”. Dude why u gotta ack like u don’t know exactly what I’m talking about.
*****
I would also just be kidding myself (and all yall) if I didn’t say anything about Carles – the voice of Hipster Runoff, who is here to talk us through it when we struggle with defining our personal brand, or maybe our internet presence experiences an existential crisis.
He’s there when you need to ask yourself the big questions, like: do these child predator glasses (#4) make me look cool, or scary?
*****
And this post wouldn’t be complete without at least one music blog, but don’t worry! I’m not going to tell you about Gorilla vs Bear or (god forbid!) Stereogum. Said the Gramophone is the real deal. Writers writing about music.
Here is a great post which is just a list their fave songs of 2k9 (#5). Don’t miss it, plus (sssh) all the mp3s are right there for you to right click download. Careful there’s a lot.
*****
So there are 5 of my all time favorites from the past year — what does the blogosphere hold in store for 2010? What will be the next ‘it’ blog?
Haha! This one, of course. Or maaybe our macbooks will break and we will all go back to reading normal books?
Filed under: travels | Tags: air sickness, blizzard, LOT Polish Airlines, NYC, Toronto, Warsaw
We’ve already learned that Berlin doesn’t really like it when I leave, and tends to throw childish tantrums. This time, mad blizzard action in NYC meant my Christmastime homeward flight was canceled. What to do? How about paying twice as much to fly last minute with LOT Polish Airlines via Warsaw? Oh boy, buckle your seatbelts kids.
Where to begin? I should probably start by noting that I was running on 3 hrs of sleep and a Red Bull going in. So there’s that.
I had the foresight to arrive at Tegel 1.5 hrs early, this gave me just enough time to locate more caffeine, then find an electrical outlet where an auto-check-in machine was once plugged in, huddle next to it, and watch the entirety of natural born killers on my laptop. Which turned out to be a great choice, because it’s physically impossible to fall asleep while watching this movie.
When you’re living fast, you might wake up one morning and find that you don’t exactly recall the details of your journey home the night before. It happens. On Tuesday I learned that this feeling is considerably weirder when, instead of being in your bed, you’re in Warsaw. So apparently I made it there somehow.
My contribution to the Polish economy was 5 EUR; for this I received a bottle of water and a duty free mini bottle of Belvedere (a souvenir! and, in a pinch, first aid kit).
LOT flight 41 to Toronto, scheduled to take off at 12:20, did not take off at 12:20.
They did finally let us on the plane, but they weren’t happy about it, and it was like an hour late. At the front of the line, my passport disappeared for 5 minutes without explanation before they grudgingly decided there was absolutely no reason that I shouldn’t be allowed to walk down that gangplank.
Congratulations, LOT, on operating your very first flight! Boarding was only kind of a clusterfuck.
Don’t worry, it gets better. The interior of the plane had been haphazardly salvaged from 1980s Lufthansa machines. We were going into the stratosphere in a trash can.
The flight attendants were not even trying to be cheerful, they were so over it. How about some optimism, I thought, your life is OK if you compare it with the slave-model-robots of the 50s…
I KNOW! HAHA!
At some point an Asian girl moved past me. I noticed only because a) even though she said excuse me like a polite person, she got this death glare from the girl across the aisle, b) there were no seats back there; I was, as I may have mentioned, in the last row. But I was super busy trying to get less uncomfortable so I totally forgot about her and her life.
Until, 20 minutes later — still sitting on the tarmac of course — the scary kind of police clomped officially toward the back of the plane. They were strapped in, they were locked and loaded. They were all in black, bristling with guns and electronics, thudding down the aisle in tight-laced skull stompers.
This is not good news when you are wedged into the back row of some Polish airplane. The Tourette’s-sufferer inside your head has already lost it, is already screeching something about terrorists and different kinds of violent death. Meanwhile your body sits very very still.
They breezed right past me, opened the toilet door on somebody whimpering with rising panic. She really said this, I wrote it down: “No! I don’t have family here…my flight was canceled. I will die!” Whether she really was going to die isn’t clear; she was having some kind of panic attack. But her voice was pure, desperate, frantic terror. She was crying and I had the kind of cold heavy feeling in my gut like you get when something really bad is happening. She was actually afraid for her life.
Her English was also really bad, which made the whole thing extra tragic.
After like 5 minutes of this they must have just been like fuck it, we’re like, death squad troopers, bitch. #1 grabs her feet, #2 grabs her arms, they hoist. (At this point I saw her face and realized it was definitely the Asian girl who had disappeared into the back of the plane about 20 mins before.) And they dragged her, literally kicking AND screaming, all the way back up the aisle and off the plane. She totally lost her shit, in the sense that she was out of control flailing, also in the sense that she dropped her backpack and a flurry of papers: “Oh my GOD! My documents!” But I think someone picked it all up for her.
What in tarnation? Whowhatwherewhenwhyhow the fuck?
So what did we learn from this, campers?
Alls I know is, next time I’m defs taking the G-IV.
PS I knowwww this post was mad long; I felt like I needed to spread some of the suffering around. Anyways, Merry Christmas lol!
Filed under: food, holiday boozing, made in berlin | Tags: Alexanderplatz, Gendarmenmarkt, Glühwein, Opernpalais, Seasonal Affective Disorder, Weihnachtsmarkt
Here’s something you might not know about Berlin, if you don’t live here: around the same time as Christmas, the sun does this nasty thing where it sets around 3 pm.
If you blink…or if it happens to be Saturday and you don’t even open your eyes at all until 2 pm….you’ve already missed the precious precarious window of sonnenschein. Might as well just go back to sleep without even getting out of bed. Somebody told me that that is actually how clinically depressed ppl act. Haha! What a kooky coincidence!
How to deal? Let’s brainstorm together for a minute…suicide, a tropical vacation, scrapbooking (?),
BLERGGG i’m too depressed & cold to think of any more ideas……..
Trudge trudge trudge. Shuffle. Are we out of cooking sherry again? Dammit.
Saayyyy! What’s this lil’ ol’ place all lit up like fireworks on the fourth of july?
OMG it’s the Christmas Market! The Germans call it a Weihnachtsmarkt and it is like their version of mall santa…or something. Berlin, being big and fancy, has something like 102 to choose from.
As long as you don’t accidentally stumble into the technicolor train wreck at Alexanderplatz, these concentrated epicenters of Holiday joy and goodwill are guaranteed to fill you with warm fuzzies.
Basically, the Weihnachtsmarkt is like a big fuck you to winter. It’s cold and wet and dark, but whatever we’re going to stand around and get drunk outside! It’s a Christmas tradition bitchez!
To be specific, they have other stuff too, but since all the tchotchkes they sell there are T-R-A-S-H trash, I’m pretty sure it’s all just a flimsy front to push as much Glühwein as possible on the frozen huddled populace. So my team and I did our best to help them out with that.
We moved in on each market with a mission: we got our Glühwein, we got our second Glühwein, we assessed the situation. Did we want a third? Based on this systematic and highly scientific testing of Berlin’s finest Weinachtsmärkte, finally the one at the Opernpalais on Unter den Linden came out as sort of a hands down winner. So cozy and bright!
(Plus it ended randomly in a cocktail lounge with an all-female jazz ensemble in matching white suits, which in retrospect may have been what tipped the scales…)
Gendarmenmarkt probably takes second place, because it was actually very pretty. But it scored some major minus points, unfortch: the Maronen were sort of crunchy, the people were a little bit snobby, we had to pay 1 EUR admission for the privilege of spending our money there, o yeah and the band sucked. yeah i said it.
The great thing about the Weihnachtsmarkt, though, is that the Glühwein, true to its name, Photoshops the whole scene with a warm & tingly glow.
Back at Alexanderplatz, it is raining big, wet, icy drops. The vendors are quietly contemplating suicide. A soggy little boy is looking at you with big eyes and his hand out, but you reason that you’re too miserable and cold to take your hands out of your pockets. What’s that you say? Another Glühwein? Whyyy yes, I think I will! Whaaat a shot of rum in it? You so crazy! Ah, what the hell, it’s Christmas! Best drink it before it gets cold! O God I love this place let’s come here every day and be friends forever and ever!
Merry Christmas, Berlin! O, and Happy Hanukkah, even though I think you maybe don’t understand what that is! See you in 2010! I love you!
xo
Lis
BTW: All the lovely sparkly images in this post, besides the very first one, © Rachel Prince. Thanks RP for leaving both my hands free for Glühwein!
Filed under: concerts, music, songs on the internet, travels | Tags: electropop, Fever Ray, Hamburg, Heartbeats, Kampnagel, The Knife
Boys and girls, a momentous moment in the short but glorious history of glow.like.berlin: I left Berlin.
dramatic pause
If this doesn’t make you shudder & gasp as it should, let me point out that it was the first time Berlin & I have spent apart since we made it official, when we moved in together in May. Tru Story!
It doesn’t help matters that my little indiscretion took place in Hamburg, of all places!
Let me start at the beginning. It was a classic Friday night; lounging in the kitchen, expecting calls & company, but tired of waiting — one hand on the cell phone, the other idly hitting the ‘next’ button on the Facebook photo album of the drunken suburban shenanigans of a person you don’t know just because someone you went to high school with is tagged making a kissy face in one of the pictures — my housemate and I started the party ourselves. There was wine, there were cookies, it got later & later. Very soon we were feeling cozy: candlelight and “Heartbeats” by The Knife.
We were seized by a fervor for Swedish electronic pop music. In just minutes we had booked tickets to see Fever Ray in Hamburg, on a Wednesday night weeks away. Confirm! Done and done.
File this under: split second drunken decisions turned epic adventures.
AKA the best kind.
Enough talk! I need to learn to shut up. The concert was mystic, tribal, hypnotic electronic swedish enchantment.
There were lasers and mirrors
there were kooky lamps that blinked on and off, like confused jellyfish in a sea of artificial fog and neon light
and there was Fever Ray, deeply cooing electropriestess.
Did i say lasers yet?
(is he throwing up the jay-z diamond?)
As an added element of surprise and suspense to our little one-day adventure, the ride home we had planned backed out at the last minute, leaving us trapped like rats in Hamburg! My heart was hurting for Berlin and I was scared and confused. BUT they redeemed themselves by hooking us up with an apt to crash at. As we battled the coat check mob and spilled out the venue into the frosty night, in my head I was already preparing myself for a brown pull-out couch and a sticky bathroom floor. What we got were freshly ironed sheets & a soft guest bed, impeccable taste, and a pair of gracious architect hosts.
Made it extra hard to slither out of bed at 5 am to jump the train in time for work.
I really wanted to give Fever Ray the last word, but I can’t figure out how to embed video from pitchfork. Somebody needs to talk to WordPress about that.
just CLICCKKKKK fools
***Fever Ray – Keep the Streets Empty For Me (video)***
Filed under: art, museums, streetart | Tags: friedrichshain, Hamburger Bahnhof, ubiquitous streetart
For a girl who likes to think she’s real shiny and smart, it’s always kind of a dark jolt to the solar plexus when things happen in a way she can’t explain. It’s not pretty to feel naïve.
In such (rare!) situations, she likes to cruise blackly through the afternoon with a camera, Nirvana grunging out of the ‘Pod, then get drunk in some glittering sweaty disco cave and wink at handsome strangers until something takes. (This post is trying to focus on Part I of this scenario, o my butterflies, but more on grooving and intrigue shortly.)
<<Berlin is plastered with El Bocho’s doings; this one is lookin pretty good.
<<kinda hard to articulate what I like about this whole situation.
<<what about this one? do we like it, or is it annoying?
<<i KNOW that i feel good about the Zeebs.>>
Feeling exhausted by hours of staring at street trash until it looked like art, I moved the whole operation to the Hamburger Bahnhof, where they have little signs to TELL you politely that the two basketballs floating in a fish tank are DEFINITELY ART.
But I didn’t come here to hate on the Bahnhof. Somehow I think an hour of the looming abstracted weirdness of Warhol and Beuys and Twombly were just what I was wanting. Sometimes, shit ain’t tryin to make sense, they told me. Word, I said.
Emerging freshly cultured into an unexpected blue neon glow was the moment that saved me. Feeling deliciously solid & self-contained, I light the evening’s first cigarette; then time starts up again, I take a drag and I stride on into Saturday night, beaming electric blue poise.
Filed under: dance dance fun for nights, music, party, songs on the internet | Tags: Birds & Batteries, electropop, mp3, music, pregame playlist, San Francisco
O MY! How have I left you alone in a world of silence without giving you any new music to listen to for so so so long? Were you bored? I’m sorry!
Here is something fresh for your atrophied ears.
Birds & Batteries are from San Francisco. All the leading authorities agree that no one can agree what their style is. They are like a kaleidoscope of twangy clangy folk, rushing American rock, something kind of psychedelic, a bouncy chunk of funk, the tendency to sound a little bit spooky, and a healthy jolting current of electropop lighting the whole gig up like christmas.
I’m not going to say any more, because I want you to listen. This song is on my workout playlist and releases breathtaking adrenaline cascades whenever it comes on. I kick into hyperdrive and run all the way to next Tuesday. But you can stay right here in Saturday where the party is. Everybody wins.
**Birds & Batteries – Lightning (UTNG Version)**
This is off their new EP, “Up to No Good”.
Filed under: made in berlin, style, travels | Tags: 032c, exhibitions, Goethe Institut, magazines, New York
THIS might be of interest
Filed under: bar, club, dance dance fun for nights, made in berlin, party | Tags: appartement, haus am köllnischen park 6, kitsuné, martini, music, partyy
TO DO:
<<i sincerely hope this isn’t some kind of sassy symbolism.
my fingertips are feeling the first phantom sting of subzero glass, i’m seeing the fiery candlelit twinkle of microscopic ice floes on glacial grapefruit-juniper tanqueray deeps. that slick slide of poison over frostbitten lips before it bites my tongue and anaesthetizes my esophagus.
<<and then there’s this.
update: the location for the kitsuné biznass has CHANGED. see here. plusss there’s like posters EVERYWHERE; i think it’s going to be a mess (or LAME, blerggg) and probs won’t go, fyi.
