Open chat / Berlin: DOES IT HAVE MAGICAL POWERS??!??? / pharren 14 years ago

Berlin: DOES IT HAVE MAGICAL POWERS??!???

I know Berlin is a major European city and all, but I thought it was more like a banking and technological center with maybe some university research going on. Is it also some cultural center like NYC and Paris, with art/music/fashion coming out of it?

I ask because one of my favorite musicians moved there from London or somewhere else in the UK, and then came out with a really good album with at least 1 song about leaving England, and scattered verses throughout about Berlin. Then he came out with yet another album, with 2, possibly 4 songs about Berlin.

And yet another artist I like, who has lived all over the damn place, apparently just moved back to Berlin and came out with a new album just recently, named after Berlin, and with 3 (?) songs about Berlin or Germany. It's my favorite of his albums so far.

WTF BERLIN???? DO YOU HAVE MAGICAL POWERS??? One of you Deutschlanders let me know what the deal is!

Kelefane 14 years ago

Douchelanders?

Gongaa 14 years ago

I lived there (actually in Oranienburg, Brandenburg, just outside) a bunch of years back while they were relocating the capital from Bonn, and it was definitely neat. It's got a unique feel since it developed as two independent cities for a while during the Cold War. Maybe that attracts a lot of artists? I dunno. Also, it's "chunky." It's like, you're in the middle of the city and there's these HUGE wide open spaces, and then you go a little further and shits are all piled on top of each other. It's weird.

I'm not a club person at all, so I can't tell you what it's like inside these places, but I do know that there's a fucking shitload of clubs that do electronic music. And for non-electronic stuff, it was a big player in the New German Wave in the 80s, and David Bowie and Iggy Pop lived there for a while around that time, too. And then there's the whole heroin scene around the Tiergarten which pretty much everyone has written a song about. Also, if you're a professional orchestral musician, move to Berlin.

I found this on Gewgle, which seems more helpful than the shit I wrote: http://www.beatportal.com/feed/item/berlin-the-electronic-music-commune/

Gongaa 14 years ago

Kelefane;105816

Douchelanders?

"Deutschbags"
-- Beerfest

pharren 14 years ago

Random quote from an interview with a biologist of some sort who specializes in animal cognition, talking about bees in Jeremy Narby's excuse for taking massive amounts of hallucinogens in the name of science, Intelligence in Nature: An Inquiry Into Knowledge.

Vulash 14 years ago

A fun fact. Honey bees will send out scouts to search for food sources. When these scouts return, they "tell" the other bees the direction and distance by flying in a figure 8 form except that one edge of the 8 will be straight. (one of the parts where it crosses). This straight portion points in the direction the others need to go, and the relative size of the 8 (or length of that portion I guess) is tied in to the distance.

pharren 14 years ago

They are also apparently capable of abstraction; the guy interviewed there set up an experiment wherein there was a Y-shaped "maze", with a reward of a vial of sugared water at one end of the "Y". They would mark the entrance, either with a color, or a shape, or a pattern, or even a smell, and then mark the two "entrances" from the vertex "decision chamber"; the "reward" one with the same color/shape/etc as the entrance to the maze. The bees not only learned to associate the entrance marking with the reward corridor marking, but they passed this information on to the rest of their hive. NEAT! It was probably due to the magical properties of Berlin.