Will bar25 ever die? Let’s hope not, as long as it moves with the times. We all shed a tear at the saddest music in the world contest last year which closed bar25 once and for all and seemed to mark the turn to a gentrified Berlin. But the subculture that has become a victim of its own appeal, and which has ironically and beautifully become the trademark of the city is fighting back. An perhaps most surprisingly of all, landing on it’s feet!

May 1st 2010 will mark a small victory for the endangered species of locations that, like Mauerpark, are being recognised for their cultural worth. A cultural worth which caused the MediaSpree development to want to be there in the first place. So go figure why someone would want to park their ass right on top of what they covet and supress what makes them look good.

So, May 1st, and another season blasts off for Bar25. Personally, I just like to go in the early evening and have a beer on the swing overlooking the Spree.

If you really can’t wait, then you can listen to their radio online here and get into that spring mood cause it’s 13 degrees today and now I’m off to the park!

It squeaks and crunches and wobbles and booms and scuttles and grinches and bellows and bams and schmeeks and there are so many more words to go with the sounds that Blake Worrell has injected into his first solo album, The Second Coming. Welcome to music that moves…

Recorded as a soundtrack to an imaginary movie, the tracks are sewn together with nine skits, bringing back an old-style hip-hop drenched with humour which reminds me of the Handsome Boy Modeling School days. The many voices Blake impersonates to bring the story to life are equally delicious and ear-tickling and the effort that has gone into the making of this is just crazy. One can only wonder how he didn’t actually go crazy as some tracks feature up to 12 different characters talking and singing with one another.

Blake’s background in sound engineering for ads and TV shows, and six years working with Puppetmastaz, delivers a cinematic mix to which I can only now do justice by giving you a straight download link to listen to and share.

Oh, did I not mention it’s free?

I misanthropically shunned Mauerpark after my first visit there about a year and a half ago, as it is the Sunday rendez-vous par excellence in Berlin, and on a sunny October Sunday it choked and disappointed my desire for green space as every inch of grass was occupied by hoards of beached berliners, the excentric, vintage-wearing types that I usually love. In small doses. I vowed only to return for the flea market. Someone once told me the strongest realtionships are those that start as dislike and migrate to like, and in that respect I am now lovingly over-protective of Mauerpark. All week long it has its moments, and moods and changing demographics. It is the theatre for so many of the city’s outdoor activities and I have so much I want to say about it that I have decided to do a focus on the park in future posts, especially in light of the changes it faces in the coming months.

As I write, Mauerpark is at the centre of a battle that represents the changing Berlin: gentrification. This is a huge topic that fascinates me, and one rock I definitely stand on is the crucial role of green spaces in any capital. In the top 5 reasons for my love of Berlin, one is without a doubt the abundance of green. The Tagesspiegel today features an article about the compromise that is being reached over planning permissions around Mauerpark, and as I understand the park is to become… bigger!!! I’m keeping an eye on this, I hope Berlin will confirm its place in my mind as the capital city that thinks. That is, if it is ready to make decisions that are not solely led by real-estate developpers.

You can befriend Mauerpark on Facebook and checkout what’s going on online here.

The duo have renovated and settled.
In Neukölln.
In a former water pumping station.
With the help of architects Nils Wenk and Jan Wiese.

The result is stunning, and their art collection is truly at home.

See and read more in the NYT

Sound and video comming soon…

Theirspace here. View the photo gallery here.

Hundehalskrause Hasso & Friends
by Astrid Weber, Dorothea Koch, Bernd Reuss, Arndt Menke-Zumbrägel

The Design Reaktor at the Universität der Künste in Berlin has sparked off some crazy ideas. I am a sucker for innovation, and any faith in the power of design is sometimes manifested by a sigh and some head-shaking at certain ideas when one can only wonder “whatever next?”. But hope manages to survive through many past success stories, the serendipitous creation of the post-it, for one, or the marketing directors who thought the Walkman would never catch on.

Straight from the Design Reactor:

Noa Lerner’s Music Drop

The music-drop which fits snuggly in your ear and holds enough memory for one song to be played once. A definite marketing winner. Let’s just hope they’re 100% recyclable, I can see tons of these invading our lives very soon.

Elisabeth Warkus, Marc Pohl, Michael Jonas’s Treibgut

And I can totally see myself floating down the Spree on a Treibgut next summer, endlessly playing backgammon under the stars…

Annalisa Gottardo’s Seat Here!

Or then there is Seat Here! The long-awaited solution for those who go to events early and alone and are afraid to go to the toilet in case they lose their seat. Come on, we’ve all felt that way before. (You do loose the option of asking the hunk next to you to save your seat though)

And sometimes the “merging two ideas and seeing what happens” is a bit too random. For me. Unless you have a sick dog, as well as a fashion-logo fetish (maybe they can cutomise them to match your bag?), or very long legs, a penchant for bird patterns and ride a bike at night, and last but not least the mighty Mozzabrilla, food packaging for puffy eyes.
Keep the faith, remember the moral of the Post-it story.

More about the process and future possibilities in a book
Available for 32.40 €

Corpulent. Sexual. Horror. Ferile. Misogynous. Traditional. Flesh. Bestial. Mythical. Glistening. Trapped. Sensual. Invertebrate. Death. Red. Blue. Insect. Hooked. Nature. Noble. Cold. Birth. Fetish. Fear. Sublime. Pain. Erotic. Pornographic. Symbolic. Beautiful. Alien. Disgust. Legendary. Instinct. Wet. Capture. Primal. Visionary. Disgust.

And yet always clean, the luminosity perfectly balanced, Daikichi Amano is in total control of the visual he gives us, which provokes a beguiling synesthesia. It feels like a meat chamber, but the images are humid, a warm breath gone cold, the paradox of life is present throughout in a fantasy that takes you beyond its surreal form, and the brief lapses of reason that pierce the viewings whisper, in horror and amazement, this is no photoshop job.

Quelle douleur exquise.

The exhibition runs until 24th October@ the Bongout Showroom

As humans proved resilient to recognising their creature-likeness during the takeover, the Puppet resistance regime started to crack from within. With more and more talk of going solo, the Puppetmastaz release a last album in union. The Break Up, featuring all solo pieces, is a spicy mix, maximising all the various talents involved.

Here is a teaser to whet your appetites and set your hearts racing.

The Break Up tour is currently under way through France and Switzerland until the 17th of October and if you haven’t seen them yet, well, precious little time left!

The Outlet Wall, courtesy of Ironic Sans

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Going Wireless

Whether by convenience or by design (or by desperation) I have been on a wire-war ever since my first hairdryer, and I find one solution which has been grossly under exploited in recent times is the simple good old coil. It worked so well on phones before we went wireless, one can only wonder why this has not been more generally applied and updated with more modern materials and solutions? Unless you want to DIY it.

But the world, to my great relief, is going wireless, fast. The only kit that I never want to see without a wire is my mouse. One asks so little of this vital piece of gear and yet none of these qualities are found in wireless mouses (this is indeed a correct plural aberration). And so I stumble on the Wireless Power Consortium, which not only sounds like a very serious enterprise, it is. Setting international standards for wireless charging, developing technologies, researching efficiency and with a “Linked but not tied” motto, I can’t wait to sign on the dotted line for a wireless relationship. Their website is wonderfully accessible as all their articles avoid confusing jargon and take you through their coherent development process. Surely better late than never, it does seem slightly ironic that we are finally asking for global compatibility as a standard whilst going wireless.

Nonetheless, Nokia will soon give us a wireless charger, whilst others are looking into simple methods of developing self-generated portable energy…

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In the meantime, the « doing with » option

But for now, I need to clean up my office. Tidying cables, hiding cables… Again, I wonder why computer appliances and chargers aren’t better equipped with integrated cable-hiding? This has had no problem in the kitchen appliances’ evolution: both my toaster and water boiler have space for coiling away extra length. For me, it’s the design’s equivalent of natural selection, given common sense, as my euros will go to the most wire-friendly apparel. The Xbox has also quickly grasped the need for hide’n tidy, although I shan’t speculate why here…

Integrated storage: this desk only lets the wires you need out.

Power grommets are a great solution but I don’t have time to DIY, I’d almost rather buy a new desk with integrated cable storage. Failing that, I could always shove’m all in a box, or I found Ikea has a simple unpretentious and affordable solution.

Ikea’s no fuss solution

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If you’ve got ‘em flaunt ‘em solution

Going by one of my favourite design solutions, if I hate a compulsory element, I put a neon sign on it or obsessively repeat it, and all of a sudden it looks quite sexy.

Julia Wolf’s wall stickers

Here, you can go for Lacie ‘s coloured cables, or some fun socket stickers by Julia Wolf, a Berlin-based designer. I also liked this eye-catching and honorably-designed variable to the multi-plug, but my definite favourite has to be the outlet wall. I want one.

If it feels too daunting and you have kids running around, I also found the idea of drawing with cables quite cute, or keep those kids busy while you work and get them to bead your cables or get fancy and braid you wires, although I think the skill set for that is a profession unto itself, and doesn’t leave much room for going mobile afterwards.

Use the potential of your city! Recycling Neukölln is a project which raises many interesting questions about a city’s urban ownership and interaction with the local population, a theme which is central and typical to Berlin’s history and development, for example Kolonie Wedding‘s collaboration with Degewo to utilise empty commercial space, or the initiative of Experimentcity as part of Europa 2009 Year of Creativity and Innovation. Recycling Neukölln is presented by Technical University Berlin at the 4th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, selected for their Parallel Cases exhibition, along with submissions from 28 other universities. One of these will receive the Parallel Cases Biennale Award, which aims to encourage creative thinking within urban projects that promote social cohesion.