La Mission’s mail logo / revolutionary symbol.
a Mission has been a big part of my life here in Berlin since last summer, but strangely enough it’s taken me nearly a year to get around to writing about it on this blog. Maybe I wanted to wait until the first round of multimedia craziness emerged from this performance art collective / music label / magazine, before I started crowing about it. Maybe I was too shy about discussing my own creative work. No, wait…I remember why: I was on the academic job market last fall, which meant that I got nothing else done.
La Mission is a lot of things, including a satirical doomsday cult, a music label, a magazine, an art collective, and a group of dance-music-lovers with a very dirty sense of humor. La Mission’s identity is perhaps best summed up by cult-leader El Jefe’s manifesto/sermon, “The Sermon for the Steps of the Ziggurat in our Hearts,” published in our first La Mission magazine: (more…)
olks, I need your help. I’ve been seeing a trend in indie and eletro-ish music videos towards scenarios that involve ostensibly “straight” young men and older drag queens, usually involving some sort of wordless, eye-to-eye communication that causes some sort of transformation or breaking of boundaries. I want to figure out what this is about and why this is a popular theme right now, but first I need to build an archive of them. You can help me by posting links to music videos in the comments (or emailing me if you prefer), and then I’ll update this blog post and add your suggestions.
renada! I’ve been here for a few days with my mom, who has this lovely gig where she guest-lectures at the university here for a week, and in exchange she’s flown out here with one companion and put up in a nice hotel. In previous years, it was my dad or my sister who went, but this year it’s my turn (as a post-dissertation reward). Yay! It’s wonderful, but I’ll admit that my blog-productivity has taken a hit this week. I’ll be back next week and hopefully back to blogging (if selling off/packing my whole apartment doesn’t kill me first), but here’s a little something to tide you over until then. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Grenada Nighttime Soundwalk:
lthough the 
ack when I had just returned from my second year of fieldwork in Paris, I had 
o, just a few days after posting the request for tracks for the 
erhaps it’s too late for your hazy memories, but: what were your tracks of the summer of 2010? Much like the project I started 
o, I’m thinking of putting together a podcast of tracks from the summer of 2008 in Berlin. These are, essentially, the tracks that I heard EVERYWHERE when I went out to party. But I can only recall so many, so I NEED YOUR HELP! Vote for your most memorable and/or favorite tracks from 2008 (especially ones that were making the rounds in deep/minimal house circles) in the comments below. Even if the track was released before 2008, I’m focusing on tracks that were ubiquitous at that time. Here’s what I have so far:
LMGM, The Blog 