April 2011
4 posts
And another book quote...
Once you decide to leave, you view a city through an entirely different lens. The simplest of actions, actions you have repeated one hundred, maybe a thousand, times swell in significance since each time may now be the last: the last time you buy bread at the bakery, the last time you ride on the U-Bahn Line 2, the last time you get your boots fixed at the cobbler, the last time you go to the...
3 tags
How to Speak and Write Postmodern
First, you need to remember that plainly expressed language is out of the question. It is too realist, modernist and obvious. Postmodern language requires that one uses play, parody and indeterminacy as critical techniques to point this out. Often this is quite a difficult requirement, so obscurity is a well-acknowledged substitute. For example, let’s imagine you want to say something...
3 tags
Desperately Seeking Berlin
Spring has finally arrived in Berlin and the city’s veritable army of urban bohemians and perpetually-broke Mac owners have colonised terraces and parks, all airing their totally unique and identically cropped leather jackets. Individualism never looked so uniform. These very public displays of mainstream disaffection occasionally make me wonder whether I am the only Mitte resident under 30 that...
The Romantics: Wagner, Techno and Additive-Free...
What do Wagner, techno and American Spirit tobacco have in common? Apart from the fact that they should all come with a health warning. Their continued popularity and appeal throughout the years flies in the face of logic, defies all explanation. It has been taunting my - admittedly scant - rational self for some time. Where is this famed Teutonic rationale? And why would it willingly subject...
