Unscene Berlin

This week, I'm taking a short break from talking about Berlin to discuss an issue that is weighing heavily on everyone's minds, here: the Amazon rainforest fires. Who's to blame and what we can do to stop them? It's easy to forget when you're watching emotive videos of people helplessly fleeing the hellscape of the burning rainforest, but figuring out who has caused these fires - and stopping those people - is as important as putting the fires out. Otherwise, the destruction will begin all over again the moment the world looks away. Most reports will have you believe that it's Bolsonaro or greedy ranchers acting on their own who are doing all the burning. T he truth is, they are all just agents of a bigger, much uglier enemy of our global environmental health. No, I don't mean Trump, but the Brazilian beef and chicken industry. It's an industry that many of us innocently  support whenever we buy a burger or a chicken salad sandwich o

Flow Cafe, Schoeneweide Last week, while cycling through the eastern borough of Schoeneweide for the first time in years, I saw streetart, scrap art, industrial-residential hybrids, new pedestrian bridges, squares and all kinds of sophisticated little urban touches that I have never seen in the utilitarian streets near my place, before.  As they race relentlessly away from the Mitte, gentrification's stylistic enhancements seem to have shot straight past poor, fugly (yet still not managing to avoid those rent hikes) Lichtenberg, and carried on to the admittedly more scenic environs around Schoeneweide, where they have settled in like a hand in a glove. The area is a nice mix of natural open spaces, derelict buildings and cute little residential streets that seem to have survived by sheer virtue of the fact that nobody remembered they even existed, until recently.  Stuff to do in this area include the Flow Kaffeehaus , the Funkhaus , and nearby  Sisyphos . There are

"Come, and trip it as you go / On the light fantastic toe" John Milton 's famous poem seems to have been written as a prophetic motto for the  Garbicz Festival . The creators of this "art festival" like to merge patterns of light - both natural and manmade - with trip-a-delic techno, house, ambient and experimental sounds, to create something that feels like a waking, five-day dream. This photo essay captures a few snapshots of what it was like there, this year. Enjoy!