New Publication, New Gig, Still in Berlin

Front cover of Musical Performance and the Changing City (2013), edited by Carsten Wergin and Fabian Holt.

ikes! It’s been embarrassingly long since I last posted something on here. If you’re still reading, thanks for not abandoning this blog out of boredom. As you might have guessed, things have been very, very, very busy over the last few months. The last major post I had put on here had been about all of my troubles getting a !@#$ing residency permit for Germany, and I’m happy to state that this has been more or less resolved—although not precisely in the manner I had intended.

In any case, I have a great deal of updates for this blog, far more than I can fit into even a week of daily blog posts. It’ll take me a while to get through the backlog, but I should post the two most important pieces of news first: 1) I have another publication fresh off the presses, and

GEMA en français: French Coverage of the Anti-GEMA Protests

Screenshot from the front page of SACEM, the French equivalent of GEMA

eyond Germany’s borders, the debates over GEMA and its new tarif system rarely get much coverage, only spawning the occasional under-researched, “Will Berlin’s Nightclubs Perish?” sort of articles in the foreign press. But Berlin is an increasingly international city full of expatriates—many of them “creative” workers that have personal and professional links into the local music scenes here—and some of them have been blogging about this issue in their own language, explaining the issue to readers in their countries of origin while also informing their fellow expatriates in Berlin. I’ve been up to a bit of that myself in English, writing on recent anti-GEMA protests and translating pieces of German–language news items. But I can also translate from French and Spanish (among others).

So today, I thought I’d move laterally and

The Post-Conferences Round-Up

Magnolias blooming off of Washington Square, NYU Campus, during the IASPM/EMP 2012 conference.

oly crapsticks! I’ve been away from LMGMblog for an inexcusable amount of time. I’ve been quite the busy bee, though. I got a few things published here and there, did some editing on a dissertation chapter that should hopefully turn into a journal article, gave two different papers at two conferences on either side of the Atlantic, and started a new research phase for my current “techno-tourism” project. Oh, and I saw Laurent Garnier play in both Berghain and Panorama Bar last month. I’ve been very busy.

So, here’s a more detailed list of what LMGM’s been up to these past two months, with relevant links and pretty pictures:

The Other Acknowledgements

A fairy-ring of mushrooms grew overnight on the lawn during the NEH Summer Institute at Wesleyan

uring the preparation of the final, revised, post-defense version of my dissertation, I finally had to flesh out all of the “front matter” of my dissertation. The front matter usually includes things like an epigraph, a dedication, acknowledgements, a table of contents, lists of tables/figures/maps/etc., and an abstract of the dissertation. Writing the acknowledgements was surprisingly hard, and there were a lot of people, organizations, and things that I couldn’t acknowledge in a scholarly dissertation. But this is a blog, and I have considerably more freedom to shift between levels of formality and punch through layers of politics and politeness. So here are all the other things for which I am grateful, dissertation-wise.

Party in Chicago? Survey Time!

ey folks, do you party in Chicago? Are you (or were you) a part of any of Chicago’s Electronic Dance Music scenes? Well, then LMGM’s Super Funtastic Surveygasm is just the thing for you!

Well, OK, maybe it’s not as funtastic as the title suggests; and it’s probably not going to give you an orgasm (if it does, don’t tell me). But you will be helping me out and contributing to a better understanding of the Chicago scene(s). This survey is primarily background research for a magazine/journalism article I’ll be writing soon on “Clubbing in Chicago,” but I’m also planning to use the results as another source of data for my own dissertation research (for which Chicago is one of 3 main research sites). As an added plus for all those who participate, I’ll be publishing some of the preliminary data on this blog; also, on the survey form, you can opt-in to be contacted when I publish the results.

The survey is anonymous and should take no more than 15 minutes. So, grab a drink, make yourself comfortable, and click on the image of Mr. HappySurvey below to begin:

2010 in review

Yay! The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how LMGMblog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 20,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 4 fully loaded ships.

 

In 2010, there were 23 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 25 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 6mb. That’s about 2 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was August 26th with 2,894 views. The most popular post that day was The DJ Anti-Profile: How not to write a DJ bio.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were residentadvisor.net, facebook.com, andaringallardo.com, twitter.com, and s.beatport.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for berghain, berghain plan, dj bio, how to write a dj bio, and berghain dark room.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

The DJ Anti-Profile: How not to write a DJ bio August 2010
36 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

2

Draft Profile: Berghain / Panorama Bar July 2010
16 comments and 3 Likes on WordPress.com

3

Getting in, getting friends in: Two nights at Berghain / Panorama Bar July 2010
15 comments

4

Last Weekend in Berlin October 2010
9 comments

5

After DJ Bios, Comes Guest-List Etiquette August 2010

Pathologizing Crowds: Love Parade 2010, Death, and the Problem of Crowds

es, yes, I’m a bit late to be commenting on the tragedy at Duisburg. The story has been covered in print and online endlessly since the event last Saturday, and the German press has been reporting daily on the personal and political aftermath. There’s even a Wikipedia page devoted to the disaster already. In a nutshell: there was a huge turnout at the Love Parade last Saturday (July 24), which was held in Duisburg this year, and overcrowding in the tunnel which served as the only entrance and exit to the even site led to a panic and a stampede, killing 21 and wounding more than 500 (note: initial reports counted 19 dead, but two others succumbed to their wounds a few days later).

I’m not planning to describe the event in any detail. Der Spiegel has been providing thorough English-language and German-language coverage of the event and its aftermath, including descriptive details and arresting photography. I’m also not writing here to respond to the disaster from the point of view of the Electronic Dance Music community; Will Lynch has already provided a clear and concise report of the event at Resident Advisor, and Emmy over at What Time Is Your Flight? has reflected on the impact of this event on dance music/festival communities and has gathered together news coverage and video from the event.

What I want to talk about here is crowds.

Draft Profile: Berghain / Panorama Bar

INALLY, I’m en route to Berlin for a couple of months of follow-up research, fun, and writing. I’ve got a few things up my sleeve for the days ahead, and I’ll definitely be writing reports of where and I and what I do (and with whom) while in Berlin. But for now, I’m going to present something a bit different.

I’d like to try creating profiles of places, events, organizations, and so on that are important to my work. The idea here is to develop them in a semi-wiki fashion—that is, I publish an initial draft of the profile and ask you all to post additions, corrections, or alternate opinions in the comment thread below the draft. Then, I use the feedback to create a static page with a revised version of the profile. The profile will be “finishing” rather than “finished,” in the sense that it will strive to have the coherence and breadth of a definitive encyclopedia entry, while always remaining open to new material as it develops (or as it is suggested by other readers). What do you think of the concept? Let me know in the comments below.

In the meanwhile, here is my first profile. It’s of Berghain / Panorama Bar, which is a nightclub in Berlin and the epicenter of much of my fieldwork there. I’ve taken the text for this from an essay entitled, “Vagueness and Liquidarity: Solidarity, Belonging, and Ethics on the Dancefloor in Paris and Berlin,” which will appear in the forthcoming collection Music and Sociality in Urban Europe, edited by Fabian Holt and Carsten Wergin. So, you can consider this something of a sneak-peek (this essay is also a pared-down version of one of my dissertation chapters). In preparing this for press, I had to pare down my description of Berghain substantially, so this profile is also my way of making use of all of the text I had to discard during the editing process.

Berghain / Panorama Bar (2004–present)

Berghain viewed from the street, from Wikimedia Commons

Official Web Site: http://berghain.de

A nightclub that has become an institution of the Berlin techno scene, also taking on mythical proportions in the global techno and house scenes. The club is in fact a reincarnation of an earlier Berlin nightclub, Ostgut (1998-2003), which was located in the empty Ostgüterbahnhof railway shipping warehouse near the Ostbahnhof S-Bahn/railway station in the Friedrichshain district (in former East Berlin).

Nigel Thrift, gatherings, and light-touch intimacy

ne of the things I’ve promised on this new version of my blog is reviews/summaries of scholarly texts that I’ve been working with, so here is my first attempt. Lately, I’ve been really inspired by Nigel Thrift’s work. He’s a UK sociologist geographer (thanks, LB!), working in urban studies, who has been championing what he considers a non-representational theory of urbanity—that is, a concept of the urban that takes into account things like affect, speed, and spaces animated by action. I’ve been particularly interested by his concept of “light-touch intimacy,” which appears in his essay:

Thrift, Nigel. 2005. But malice aforethought: cities and the natural history of hatred. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (2):133-150.

[This essay also forms a chapter in his monograph: Thrift, N. J. 2008. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London and New York: Routledge.]

Thrift begins by noting that there is a long history to the trope of the city as doomed;