raskal trippin

from the folks at Spiegel Online

2006-03-24T10:43:00.000+01:00

A quick note to our friends out there in the blogosphere. As you've probably noticed, we began a partnership last fall with Technorati to provide citations and links to blogs that write about our stories. The feature has proven incredibly popular with our readers and we're hoping to expand our cooperation with them in the near future.

In the meantime, however, we have another new opportunity for expat and German bloggers here. On Friday evening, we launched a new project at Spiegel Online: The Germany Survival Bible (http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,k-6896,00.html). The plan is to create an irreverent online guide to German culture -- the good, the bad and the ugly. It'll cover the shit shelf, the appallingly small selection of products at grocery stores, weird cultural traditions like greeting people in elevators or the absolute taboo of crossing the street on red. But our aim here isn't just to have fun at the expense of Germans and our adopted home country. We also want to include the cool quirks -- like the fact that things actually work here. Public transportation is reliable, obsessions with the environment, clean energies and the environment.

We'll be posting contributions from our readers regularly, but we would also like to open this up to bloggers. If you have any existing blog entries that would be interesting to SPIEGEL Online, please submit them to us. If we republish the blog, we will also include your blog's name and a link back to your site. You've got the content and we've got the traffic and the platform.

If you're interested in participating, please send your links and editorial contributions to spon_feedback@spiegel.de. Also, I don't have email addresses for everyone in Germany and would be grateful if you could pass this on to other bloggers in Germany or post it to your site.

Thanks and happy blogging!

(hopefully this will show up on berlinblogs.com)

ursula rucker in berlin

2006-03-02T23:10:00.000+01:00

east coast represent

ursula rucker starts her ma'at mama euro tour today. all you londoners go check her out at the jazz cafe tonight. berliners, we get lucky on this tour. quasimodo, again, next monday, 6 march. be there or be somewhere else but you will have missed out.

in the meantime, i'm contemplating migrating to wordpress or some other less flaky host, getting ready for the big three oh celebration coming up tomorrow, and wondering how all of these empty boxes are going to get packed. so blogging may drop off for awhile and start back up from another side of kreuzberg. anyone going to the rucker show, hit me up beforehand or wave or something.

and a safe repatriation for berlin blogger and his fam. going through customs should be fun. one day that will be me...

[edit: blog will be moving here.]

spring cleaning

2006-02-28T01:08:00.000+01:00

spring cleaning

and moving.
the new blog is at http://raskal.typepad.com
still working on it

thanks in advance for updating your links

WM2006

2006-02-27T10:21:00.000+01:00

new URL: http://raskal.typepad.com we are moving...

ich bin dabei!

i signed my contract for the Berlin WM volunteer team this weekend. i have a training program in place to get my smiling muscles in shape and tone down that pesky sarcastic reflex. last year was a rebuilding year. i think i'll be ready to go by May if klinsi ever comes back from cali and the bird flu stays away.

WM Volunteer links:

what WM volunteers will be doing

another WM volunteer blog from Dortmund(DE)

where you can still volunteer during the WM: Street Football World Championship in Kreuzberg

blogstats

2006-02-27T10:12:00.000+01:00

blog stats

since the der spiegel episode, i haven't checked the stats too often and realized i've been missing out on stat comedy.

my favorite 3 recent searches:

"is robert de niro hung like a horse"
"can i eat pancakes after having teeth out"
"turkish kids fighting kreuzberg"

people are strange.

Berlinale wrap-up

2006-02-20T12:31:00.000+01:00

Berlinale wrap-up

It didn’t end up as well as it started off. Apparently, I mixed up a title or a description or something and ended up in a movie with two scenes repeated over and over and over again. In one scene people were clothed and in the other scene they were naked. In neither scene was dialogue a priority. More ass and penis than I ever expected to see in one setting. Half of the audience was gone by the time the credits were rolling. Later that night, the director of this unfortunate movie was spotted at a bar in Kreuzberg. I was at home and missed out.

Even though I missed out on that star sighting, I did run into Berlin Blogger at the last film of my Berlinale 2006 expedition, which was a pretty funny surprise. Block Party was all and more than I expected. Dave Chappelle had me rolling. I loved it. It was better than Cats. I was depressed for about a month after it happened for real, thinking why am I living in Europe? what have I done? So now I can go on with my life. I really need to see Jill Scott in concert though and yall need to go see this movie. March 3rd at a stateside theater near you.

Until next year…

tips for berlinale

2006-02-15T07:52:00.000+01:00

tips for berlinale

1. don't laugh at the people who had to stand in line to buy/pick up tickets. even if you have the hook-up, you may eventually have to stand in line too.

2. realizing you have to wait and then trying to cut in front of half of the people already in line is a no-no. it is likely that there will be a taz reader present who will insist on explaining the process of line formation and its benefits to modern civilization loud enough for everyone to hear. (i was not a part of this interaction)

3. if you don't really understand the language of the film you want to see and there are no subtitles, stay at home. do not bring your friend to perform simultaneous translations in a loud whisper. if you can't wait for the DVD, learn sign language.

4. don't kill yourself trying to think up questions to ask the director. it's true he/she probably travelled a long ass way but berlin is not such a shabby place to be. i'm sure the director could be using his/her time more fruitfully than answering gems like, hey so are you from south africa? ok thanks... or watching someone totally ignore an answer to come up with their enlightening (as in 18th c.) hypothesis: maybe it's the african culture?

5. if you don't have paparazzi following you around, you can always get a stalker. mine showed up on the bus yesterday with an open bottle of beer, woozily stating that he'd seen me exactly 2 1/2 hours earlier on the bus. does that mean anything? he asked. yea it means you need help and probably should not be trying to create your own version of the berlinerfahrbar in the middle of the afternoon.

all that being said, conversations on a sunday afternoon was great. even with the disconnect of almost wanting to cry while 99% of the audience was laughing.

Valentine’s day in berlin

2006-02-13T10:33:00.000+01:00

Valentine’s day in berlin

Passion lives here! Oh wait, that's Torino. Do people do that here? I’m not the best person to be reporting on cultural differences on this particular holiday. I don’t remember a single Valentine’s Day celebration growing up. February was Black History Month. If anything, on Feb. 14th, we had a birthday cake for Frederick Douglass. My parents did not play.

In Berlin, flowers are shockingly cheaper than other cities I’ve been to. In Paris, there is clearly some sort of flower mafia at work behind the scenes. We never did Valentine’s Day there either. I’m not really a fan of flowers and we have too many other things to celebrate: first date, civil ceremony, church ceremony, the US side reception, that day we had a fight in the esoteric section of Barnes & Nobles… things like that. But if you wanted to indulge in such sappiness here, it wouldn’t totally kill your wallet.

More love: JDilla/Jay Dee tributes were taking place online this weekend. If you listen to hip-hop, you know JDilla probably without knowing it was him. This man straight overworked himself to death. At 32. For Valentine’s Day, love yourself. Go schedule your check-ups, annual pap smear, blood work including STDs, mammogram if you are old enough… I’ll be trying to get done with the dentist finally.

No love: moving… definitely not in time for V-Day. This is turning out to be the longest move ever. We’ve had the keys since December and the only things that have made it to the new place are most of my books and a mirror. I’ve moved to other continents faster than this. First some rest, 2nd movies, 3rd back to the dentist, some more IKEA/Bauhaus excursions and then and only then we are packing it up and moving out of Graefekiez. By mid-March *fingers crossed*

goodbyes/back for berlinale

2006-02-07T10:02:00.000+01:00

goodbyes/back for berlinale

eventually i'm going to have to say goodbye to the neighborhood but right now it's being drawn out as long as possible. this weekend was another all-star kiez weekend, interrupted by one trip to steiglitz.

old neighborhood

tire-bouchon and lebmel on dieffenbachstr.
la maison blanche on körtestr.
mini-bar, the room 77, die kleine kneipe on graefestr.
~~kado~~, the licorice store finally... which i can't say i'll ever patronize due to the sambos adorning the finnish licorice.
emerald isle on erkelenzdamm for the france/scotland rugby game. the only screen i could see was playing chelsea/liverpool which was quite entertaining so i didn't feel like i was missing out. replacement goalie. comedy.

new neighborhood

enoteca bacco
and knofi where "wir hassen fleisch." not the place to be looking for italian sausage.

now that our weekend visitor, the dubliner famed for missing planes, is gone, i can get on planning a starless, redcarpet less but very international Berlinale and drinking the liter of bailey's we received as a present.

movies i'm going to see:

Dear Pyongyang, Japan
Casa de areia, Brazil
Shisso, Japan
Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon, South Africa
El cielo dividido, Mexico
and my personal highlight
Dave Chappelle's Block Party, USA

a ripple in the internet

2006-01-27T09:48:00.000+01:00

a ripple in the internet

what started out as one of those e-mails which should have stayed in the draft folder is reaching epic proportions.

Latest developments:
mike’s article in Spiegel Online (which includes a link to the top ten list that doesn't seem to want to die)
Du bist Deutschland and klowände are now the top searches on technorati
which lead to an explanation for non-German speakers on the technorati blog.

it's like wildfire over here... i'm convinced it's all due to the fact that wikipedia.de is down (due to a lawsuit involving a deceased hacker's parents) and folks just don't know what to do with all that time they used to dedicate to creating their own skewed version of history.

i know i need to rededicate my time... this post is all about procrastination. happy friday!

February in Berlin

2006-01-25T14:12:00.000+01:00

February in Berlin
Black history and berlinale

The Berlinale posters are already up at Potsdamer Platz. Here’s a poster for Black History Month events in Berlin next month.

On Tuesday night, I got a call right around 8pm, Check out the thema-abend on Arte. So I did. The films shown were: Black Deutschland and Frankreich, Schwarzes Vaterland.

Irony from the French version of the Arte website:

Les Noirs d'Allemagne, qu'ils soient ou non naturalisés, ont l'impression d'appartenir à une toute petite minorité, que sa couleur de peau désigne comme "étrangère". // German Blacks/Blacks in Germany, whether naturalized or not, …

Funny. I don’t remember the first film mentioning naturalization at all. Maybe I missed something. Compared to France, Germany's laws on naturalization/dual citizenship are quite strict. Children born in Germany to foreign parents receive citizenship only if one parent has been living in Germany for at least 8 years with a valid resident permit to account for that time. And that's only a pretty recently change (2000). Dual citizenship for naturalized adults is only allowed in special cases. So who are the naturalized people?

I thought it was supposed to be self-evident that the Germans in the film were not naturalized. Wasn’t that central to the whole point? None of the non-German Black people said nary a word about being interested in German citizenship. If the French side of ARTE’s head couldn’t figure that one out, then the audience probably wasn’t doing much better. Some context (historic/legal/biographic) and clarity would have helped out. The jus solis/sanguinis difference between the two countries seems pretty important to me.

The film on France brought me back to the days when I thought Christiane Taubira was the only Black person on French TV not singing. Mohamed Dia is still making me shake my head, a day later.

I was waiting to see what Louis Georges Tin from the CRAN (Conseil Répresentatif des Associations Noires) had to say in the fake debate at the end. If that random dude from EHESS wasn’t there, the conversation could have gotten interesting.

stalking.cold.humor.truth

2006-01-24T08:09:00.000+01:00

stalking.cold.humor.truth

but not in that order.

.cold
on the positive side, i'm not in russia.

.stalking (WM related)
as most politics & law obsessed folks know, the anti-stalking bill which previously flopped is back again as a pet project bringing CDU and SPD together as one big happy family. no one likes stalkers.
until the law is passed, consider yourself a groupie. here's a list of where the football teams are staying in Germany for the World Cup.

.truth
How to write about Africa by Binyavanga Wainaina at Granta.com

someone should translate this whole piece into german, french, scratch that... every european langauge, esperanto and braille.

excerpt: In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn't care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

.humor
Paul Beatty in the NYT. he's always quite, well mostly, amusing.

blogosphere

2006-01-20T14:02:00.000+01:00

in the blogosphere

what's been happening?

the e-mail (supposedly) from the mind behind the Du Bist Deutschland campaign is making the rounds on german blogs. in it, the author calls blogs the bathroom walls of the internet, die Klowände des Internets. what's funnier the ad or the e-mail? toss up.

the other big copy/paste of the moment are the ridiculous 30 questions required for baden-württemburg's muslim residents who are applying for German citizenship. the question list in its entirety in german. a black woman Somalian shows up for question number 28. how did black folk get in the mix? is it because she is Black or African or Somalian or assumed muslim? i have no idea. i'll assume if the applicant is offended and insulted that a black person got the job, they automatically qualify. it's all about outsourcing institutionalized racism in the new millennium.

palast der republik

2006-01-20T12:48:00.000+01:00

palast der republik

the votes are in.
the palast der republik is finally coming down
for another castle!

if you love demolitions, like i do, but fear lingering asbestos
you can watch it being destroyed from the german history museum webcam.

WM country flag

2006-01-20T11:26:00.000+01:00

WM preparations

the premise of taking a video camera and a microphone and interviewing random people about random things is a good one. when is this not funny?

i was watching some tv last night and came across olli pocher of media markt fame interviewing folks about the upcoming world cup.

he had big poster board images of flags. apparently he'd asked people to identify the respective countries.

one woman looked skeptically at this image, snuck in between the rest of the flags:

her response: is that Greece?

eh no it's not.

more TV

2006-01-16T10:57:00.000+01:00

The Collegium (Part II)

Harry Louiserre, from Classic in Black, and I have been working together on a French language presentation for Black History Month for high school audiences here and abroad.

Our readings on the Collegium, Voices in French and English, will be rebroadcast on Offener Kanal next Sunday at 9pm.

On the show:
He read from the French translation of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time.
I read Claude McKay’s poem If We Must Die in both English and French.

In the State of Affairs portion of the program, Donald Griffith talked to Otu Tetteh about his experiences as a filmmaker, his travels to Ghana, and his upcoming projects. Check out his website, Own Productions, for more information about him and sponsoring his work.

Way too much comedy on the back end of trying to do live television. I can’t wait for the blooper reel.

Once we were done, someone from Offener Kanal Radio came down to get volunteers to do sound bytes for some publicity spot. I’ve learned when someone asks Do you speak…. ? to always answer hmm a little until you find out exactly what they want. He only wanted a few seconds of time to record Offener Kanal, Ich mache mit! and Offener Kanal, meinung äußern. I could do that.

wintery german conundrum

2006-01-16T10:52:00.000+01:00

Ski/Schi - A wintery german conundrum

After watching some rather skinny people on ZDF repeatedly jump into the air with slats attached to their feet, it got me wondering. Just why exactly is Ski pronounced Schi? I understand that the word ski in German is also der Schi. Fine. But clearly Ski is Ski not Schi.

Sk is for Ska and Skandal and Skizze and Skiff. Not Scha and Schandal and Schizze and Schiff. Why are Ski and Schi pronounced the same? This is not logical. I protest.

For MLK Jr Day

2006-01-16T10:51:00.000+01:00

For MLK Jr Day

Same as last year.

A Time to Break Silence.

edit: even google is up on it this year.

multimedia friday

2006-01-13T10:38:00.000+01:00

multimedia friday

proof the internet is a truly wonderful thing
this James Brown/MJ/Prince video is classic (but blurry).

back on tv on offener kanal berlin - sunday at 9pm. reading some claude mckay. hopefully with a meshell outro from the cookie cd. i love that joint.

perusing a loaned book: augusto boal - theater of the oppressed.

working on a french language theater improv with a friend.

and really i need to be writing too... but it's almost the weekend. happy friday the 13th.

christmas still in the air

2006-01-11T09:50:00.000+01:00

christmas still in the air

throwing the christmas tree out of the window seems to be the routine procedure around here. somehow things didn't go as planned with this one. this great feat was probably the handiwork of the same let's shoot rockets into the building across the street folks from new year's eve.

brilliant.

if you hear of anyone in berlin dying from injuries sustained from a christmas tree falling out of another tree, that was my neighborhood.

word of the day: verpachtung

2006-01-10T12:31:00.000+01:00

word of the day: verpachtung

my second home is now at the finanzamt. it's a very intimidating building that looks like it could be holding gold reserves or other treasures behind its fortress. unlikely since we are talking about kreuzberg here. once you've found the door, it's not all that bad inside especially if you don't have to talk to anybody. it looks like every other government building i've been to in germany.

i used to be up on things like cultural events in berlin now i'm only aware of very sexy news like the 2005 tax forms came out this week. i guess that could count as a cultural event since there were a whole bunch of people hovering around the forms in a strange, grim ritualistic fashion.

the last time i was in the finanzamt i noticed that you have to pay dog taxes/hundesteuer here. there's an office just for the dog tax with a little dog pasted on the door. each time i see someone walking their little fur covered rat, i think to myself you are really paying taxes on that? maybe there's something i'm missing and you can deduct ziploc bags and dog food or something.

picking up the forms i needed probably would have been a lot simpler if i knew the meaning of words like "verpachtung" but i didn't. i haven't leased anything so luckily i don't need that form. the other option would have just been taking every single form with 2005 on it.

maybe next year, in between LEO and ELSTER, i'll be tapfer enough to do it online. figure out how much you owe and what percentage goes to münte's eyebrow archer here.

(yes, the sky is really that blue)

immigrants

2006-01-03T12:05:00.000+01:00

From the IHT: In Germany, immigrants face a tough road

despite the link, islam8.php, it's actually about the educational system.

in a foreign land

2006-01-03T11:11:00.000+01:00

blogging abroad

armin keeps a crazily growing list at ministry of propaganda (recently updated). it's becoming so long that some people have been abroad and returned home, creating another category.

this is one of my favorite lists, mostly because of the flags. i joined a couple of years ago when i was blogging from paris. link of the day: another black girl in paris blogs.

a linguistic wish for 06

2006-01-03T10:02:00.000+01:00

a linguistic wish for 06

from the last issue of die zeit - 100 wishes from the redaktion/editorial staff:

#14 from jeannine kantara

Ich wünsche mir, dass der deutsche Duden 2006 das Wort "afrodeutsch" aufnimmt. Das wären dann genau 20 Jahre nachdem es ursprünglich geprägt wurde. Und gleichzeitig sollte der Begriff "Neger" als das benannt werden, was er ist: ein Schimpfwort.

I wish that the German Duden 2006 would incorporate the word "afrodeutsch". That would be exactly 20 years after it was originally coined. And simultaneously the term "Neger" should be designated as what it is: an insult.

and wie kommt eigentlich ein Wort in den Duden?

you know how that goes. maybe Blind Date and After-Sales-Service were more important. or maybe afrodeutsch is in the secret database with words a-waiting, like Bling-Bling and Weblog (no joke). you can always contact Duden to let them know about any word you feel should be included and add to the 200 requests Duden receives daily, of which 196 are trying to figure out whether Bling-Bling has a hyphen or not.

new year's in berlin

2006-01-01T12:48:00.000+01:00

new year's in berlin

i've been a few places on new year's eve and nothing beats berlin in terms of individual use of pyrotechnics. i use to associate fireworks with a radio and tv simulcast of corny, melodramatic music. walking over to the fdr drive with droves of humanity. personal (illegal in nyc) firework displays were reserved for members of organized crime and their acquaintances.

the first time i was in berlin for new years, it was just scary. if i had any personal memories of armed conflicts, i'm sure i would have gone into post-traumatic shock or something. people were shooting rockets at each other from one side of the street to the other. even with the constant ducking reflex, i still managed to have the best new year's ever, evidenced by the picture tacked above my desk of us sitting on a swing at some club, bottle of champagne in hand.

last year, new year's was also scary but it was mostly the bizarre people. while trying to devise an exit strategy, about as successfully as W., we realized that we could probably see the fireworks from our own apartment, sans the scary people, but it was too late.

this year, when the fireworks started, it was all good. no stress, just wonder and awe about the amalgamated cost of each sparkle shimmer and boom. all good until i opened the window. bad move. simultaneously my lungs filled with smoke and the phone rang. the callers thought the same thing as i did: where the hell are you? baghdad? someone with serious neuromotor damage was shooting off rockets from graefestr. nothing went straight up into the air. the building across the street kept getting hit, sparks falling into folks' balconies and setting off car alarms, the clueless lone bird trying to escape from the roof.

nothing like a good adrenaline rush to start off the new year. at least nothing flew into our window.

my big goal for 05 was tokyo. it started out as a crazy idea but ended up falling into place. for a change, none of my goals for 06 have anything to do with travelling but hopefully they will eventually fall into place.

basically i'll be here. if you will be coming through berlin in 2006, take a look at what's up and coming.