https://www.marcelwinatschek.com I’m an artist, writer, designer, photographer, hacker, typographer, illustrator, director, traveler, and popular culture enthusiast who has lived, worked, and studied in Germany, Japan, China, Spain, France, Britain, Italy, Canada, Portugal, and the United States, among other inspiring places. My passions include apocalyptic cinema, millennial tunes, and deliberate sustenance. This notebook is a collection of my stories, thoughts, and experiences, including philosophical essays on life, art, music, books, technology, movies, fashion, travel, games, and food, as well as photos, videos, and interesting discoveries I stumbled upon on the internet. en https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2026/4/1/websites-i-like/ Websites about life that I like: Be Wrong, Bix Frankonis, Brian Koberlein, Conception of Concepts, Coda, Cory Doctorow, Craig Mod, Culture: An Owner’s Manual, From Jason, Go With the Flow, How to Japanese, Jose M. Gilgado, Kai-You, Keenan, LessWrong, Longest Voyage, Lux Magazine, Matt Alt, Manuel Moreale, Monocle, New Scientist, One From Nippon, Open Culture, Pink Tentacle, Pluralistic, Popular Science, ProPublica, Quanta Magazine, Read Something Wonderful, Real Life Magazine, Rest of World, Sabukaru, Scrmbl, Secretorum, Some Studies, SoraNews24, Starbreaker, Tatsumoto, The Atlantic, The Creative Independent, The Dial, The Guardian, The Intercept, The Japan Times, The Nonfiction, The Stone Bridge, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Public Domain Review, What Japan Thinks, Wikipedia, Work in Progress, Yokogao Magazine. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2026/4/1/websites-i-like/ Wed, 1 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2026/3/11/the-depressed-girl/ “Chiaki’s dead,” a quiet voice comes from the other side of the table. Ichika’s eyes search for sympathy, but Kana doesn’t understand a word. “Chiaki… which Chiaki?” “Chiaki Sano?” Ichika replies. “We were in the same class.” “The curly-haired one?” Ichika nods. “What happened?” “I don’t know. She didn’t leave a note.” “She killed herself?” “Yes. With a door handle, at her parents’ house. She used her Mac charger.” “Was the cable long enough?” “No idea.” https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2026/3/11/the-depressed-girl/ Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2026/3/10/a-weekend-among-dreamers/ Video games are the only art form that can distract my self-diagnosed ADHD brain to such an extent that I don’t constantly slip into self-destructive thoughts or reach for my phone to let pseudo-social media wash over me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2026/3/10/a-weekend-among-dreamers/ Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2026/3/8/the-man-between-masks/ Philipp has probably long since forgotten why his evenings consist of sitting alone in his small apartment somewhere in Tokyo, enjoying a modest bento box with a cold canned beer, staring out the window and watching people on the other side whose lives have taken different directions. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2026/3/8/the-man-between-masks/ Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2026/3/7/my-only-constant/ The questions that occupy me most when designing this website are: Who am I? What do I want? And what’s the point of any of this? The answers to these self-centered existential crises are not easy to find, because they shift depending on my mood and emotional state, and reveal themselves as traps whenever I finally manage to corner them and practically beg for mercy—and the enlightenment that should follow. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2026/3/7/my-only-constant/ Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/9/22/20-nights-in-tokyo/ I’ve decided to use Japan as the thematic foundation for my upcoming bachelor’s thesis in design. How exactly I want to approach this is still somewhat uncertain. At first, I intended to shoot a documentary about the colorful underground cultures in the Land of the Rising Sun. Cultures permeated by depression, anxiety about the future, and a kind of resentment toward society by their followers. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/9/22/20-nights-in-tokyo/ Mon, 22 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/9/19/goodbye-kumamoto/ My time here in Kumamoto is now coming to an end. For a full year I have been an exchange student at the Faculty of Design of Japan’s Sojo University, exploring new ideas in both artistic and technical fields. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/9/19/goodbye-kumamoto/ Fri, 19 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/9/10/one-year-in-japan/ For exactly one year now I have been living in Japan. I have a Japanese phone number, a Japanese bank account, a Japanese social security number. As a student at the art faculty of a Japanese university, I have met many local creatives as well as wonderful people from all over the world who, like me, are trying to find their place in this demanding society. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/9/10/one-year-in-japan/ Wed, 10 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/9/6/a-midsummer-nights-dream/ On a warm summer evening, when the cicadas were diligently chirping away and the moon was slowly pushing itself onto the stage of the sky, a friend and I were on our way home from an exhibition when, not far off, we first heard music and shortly after cheerful laughter. Because we were curious and still had a bit of energy left, we decided to see what was going on there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/9/6/a-midsummer-nights-dream/ Sat, 06 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/9/3/the-samurais-grave/ We arrived at the foot of Mount Tatsuda, the site of the Hosokawa family temple, Taishoji. Today the grounds belong to Tatsuda Nature Park, green, wide, and quiet. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/9/3/the-samurais-grave/ Wed, 03 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/30/embracing-the-escapism/ Sometimes I wished I could muster the courage to leave everything behind, lock myself away forever in an apartment, and devote the rest of my life to a single online role-playing game. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/30/embracing-the-escapism/ Sat, 30 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/29/happiness-between-two-buns/ Japan is a country full of treats. Those who want to fill a hungry stomach efficiently and cheaply can find sushi, tempura, and ramen on every corner, in different price ranges, in hidden restaurants or crowded supermarkets. But Japan would not be Japan if it hadn’t absorbed other culinary cultures and made them its own. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/29/happiness-between-two-buns/ Fri, 29 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/28/for-the-alliance/ My journey begins in the Northshire Valley, enclosed by high mountains, somewhere in the thickly wooded Elwynn Forest. Before me stands not only the abbey of the local brotherhood but also an adventure that will take me into frozen deserts, bubbling volcanoes, and creepy ghost towns. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/28/for-the-alliance/ Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/25/my-summer-in-japan/ Summer here in Japan is slowly drawing to a close, though no one has informed the sun. It remains so hot and muggy that every step outdoors becomes a sweaty ordeal, at least when I dare to leave the house in broad daylight. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/25/my-summer-in-japan/ Mon, 25 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/21/my-favorite-cinema/ The other night over dinner, a friend asked why I love lesser-known films so much. Her favorites are American action blockbusters like “Die Hard”, “The Transporter”, and the high-octane “The Fast and the Furious” series with Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, and Michelle Rodriguez, while my patchy watchlist includes titles like “Nightcrawler”, “Melancholia”, and “My Small Land”. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/21/my-favorite-cinema/ Thu, 21 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/20/arrow-in-the-knee/ Staggering from the cave on my last reserves, I let my eyes adjust to the harsh sunlight as a vast, mountain-studded snowscape unfurls before me. In towns clasped by timber and stone, merchants, thieves, and kings ply their trades. Dragons, werewolves, and vampires wake. Bright hoards and darker magics hide from the gaze of a budding civil war. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/20/arrow-in-the-knee/ Wed, 20 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/19/magazine-for-city-boys/ Although my chest houses the heart of a digital minimalist and light-footed traveler who thinks in bits and bytes and has gradually moved the baggage of his not-so-young life into the cloud, I have nonetheless kept a soft spot for printed media. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/19/magazine-for-city-boys/ Tue, 19 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/16/after-the-rain/ The weather over the past few months here in Kumamoto seems to recognize only two possible settings. Either it strives to mimic the lava-laced dungeons of hell and cook us alive, or it bombards us so mercilessly with rain, gales, and typhoons that building an ark seems the logical step for ferrying ourselves, and a few stray animals, to safety. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/16/after-the-rain/ Sat, 16 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/15/king-of-the-monsters/ There are certain Japanese subcultures to which, to date, I’ve never really found an entry point. Among them are animated VTubers, masked superheroes à la Kamen Rider, and kaiju—giant monsters that, at regular intervals, stomp Tokyo flat. Well-known examples include Rodan, Mothra, King Ghidorah, Gamera, and of course the universally beloved Godzilla, brought to life by Ishiro Honda. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/15/king-of-the-monsters/ Fri, 15 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/14/a-smoky-smell/ Summer in Japan is barbecue season. Partly that’s because it is, let’s say, bold to leave raw fish outdoors for longer than three seconds in these godless, blistering temperatures, let alone try to serve it to anyone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/14/a-smoky-smell/ Thu, 14 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/12/want-to-come-down-with-mea/ Sometimes I refuse to consume media that has become too popular. Whether films, shows, or video games, once the hype train really gathers speed and it feels as if the entire planet is trying to convince me that I have to watch, listen to, or simply experience this thing because it’s the finest achievement humanity has produced in its more than 300,000-year history, I react almost reflexively with a defense mechanism that looks suspiciously like an allergy. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/12/want-to-come-down-with-mea/ Tue, 12 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/9/my-odyssey/ The Japanese language is a mountain that can be climbed only through perseverance, diligence, and the support of people who have already mastered it. Step by step, piece by piece, and word by word, I haul myself from one ledge to the next. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/9/my-odyssey/ Sat, 09 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/6/the-maddest-obsession/ From early youth, my life was divided into chapters named for the women I happened to love at the time. Whether in Berlin, in Tokyo, or wherever I drifted, and whether anything became a relationship, whether intimacy happened or not, it was always too easy for me to become so intent on one woman that she defined an entire era. From this came obsessions that at times stretched across years, fed by depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, and a self-diagnosed borderline condition, and they often ended in an emotional detonation. After a few quiet weeks or months, another woman would appear. Hopes, dreams, and fantasies were projected onto her, and the cycle began again. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/6/the-maddest-obsession/ Wed, 06 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/4/hobo-horror/ Good stories put a quiet spell on me. Whether they arrive as books, films, or video games, what lingers afterward, often for far longer than I expect, isn’t the glossy, polished shell so many media try to sell these days, but the people inside and the moments that temper them into something tougher and wiser. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/4/hobo-horror/ Mon, 04 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/1/wurstcutters/ I never thought of myself as particularly attached to home, yet staying away too long causes a small ache that points, stubbornly, toward Germany. Sometimes it’s nothing more than the sound of the language, its clipped edges and sudden softnesses, absent from the air around me. At other moments a single habit or custom goes missing, and the day stumbles. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/8/1/wurstcutters/ Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/7/31/fellowship-of-the-fat-dragon/ It’s no secret that, deep in my heart, I’m a nerd. I love wacky video games, quietly vibe to anime soundtracks, and enjoy stories in which foolish villagers become true heroes. Pen-and-paper adventures draw me in, and I gladly take part. Among mixed groups of barbarians, mages, and warlocks, I fight monsters, find great treasure, and rescue fair maidens. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/7/31/fellowship-of-the-fat-dragon/ Thu, 31 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/7/30/weightless-wanderer/ Everyone seems to hold a different idea of minimalism. For me it means freedom. Freedom from objects that weigh on me, distract me, or hold me back. Consciously and unconsciously I try to remove, or at least shrink, anything that blocks spontaneity or agency. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/7/30/weightless-wanderer/ Wed, 30 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/7/28/french-fantasy/ Since my earliest days I have loved Japanese role‑playing games. No other genre draws me so deep into hidden worlds, deliberate stories, and mentally unstable characters. “Dragon Quest”, “Secret of Mana”, “Chrono Trigger”—whenever little boys rise to become god-slayers, I remain before the glowing screen for hundreds of hours, tracing each dialogue box while the world outside steadily burns to the ground. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/7/28/french-fantasy/ Mon, 28 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/7/24/fishers-of-men/ I have lived in Japan for almost a year now. The steady scrutiny that accompanies the life of a so‑called gaijin outside the big cities no longer unsettles me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/7/24/fishers-of-men/ Thu, 24 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/1/31/konbinis-are-churches/ I was living on FamilyMart rice balls and low blood sugar dreams. Tokyo nights too hot to sleep and too cold to stay awake—it’s always 3:47 a.m. when you walk into a konbini. The neon light like a kiss from a dying god. The buzz of the fridges like the sigh of someone who’s given up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/1/31/konbinis-are-churches/ Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/1/22/food-and-the-city/ I’m collecting places like bruises, and Kumamoto is teaching me how to hold them. I want to swallow this city whole—its bars, its noodle shops, the grease-stained counters where old men nurse their drinks like they’re the last thing keeping them tethered. I want every corner that smells like soy and sweat, the kind of sweat that comes from standing over boiling broth all day. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/1/22/food-and-the-city/ Wed, 22 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/1/13/a-serene-fairytale/ Who gives a shit what Hollywood’s golden boys are sweating over in their hot rooms with their endless rewrites and plastic champagne. Because at the beginning of this millennium something happened. Something too soft to scream and too sharp to forget. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/1/13/a-serene-fairytale/ Mon, 13 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/1/10/my-plum-ghost/ I participated in an art contest. Nothing serious, but it swallowed me whole. The theme was “Yokai”. Japanese spirits, monsters, the beautiful weirdness that lives between shadows and dreams. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/1/10/my-plum-ghost/ Fri, 10 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/1/6/call-me-ishmael/ I was drifting, low blood sugar, the air like soup. I hadn’t eaten all day, or maybe I had—I don’t remember anymore. Walking through this supermarket in Japan, one of those blindingly clean ones with neon light and weird elevator music playing overhead, and it was so cold. So cold. Fish eyes staring at me from slabs of ice. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/1/6/call-me-ishmael/ Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/1/3/a-neon-disease/ I watched “Akira” and it never left. That’s the thing nobody tells you about movies like this—they don’t just exist in those two hours in the dark. They become part of how you see everything after. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/1/3/a-neon-disease/ Fri, 03 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/1/1/the-wandering-mind/ Sometimes I’m not sure whether the world I currently find myself in is real. Then I strain to search for glitches that the simulation around me may have overlooked—only to eventually give up in frustration and realize, disappointed, that I’m not permitted to catch even the slightest glimpse behind the curtain. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2025/1/1/the-wandering-mind/ Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/12/30/culture-isnt-a-museum/ I was determined to squeeze every last ounce of experience out of Kumamoto before time did what it always does—slip away like it owned the place. When my friend mentioned a classical concert, I said yes before my brain caught up to my mouth. Something about that city made me say yes to everything, like I was collecting moments like they were currency I’d need later. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/12/30/culture-isnt-a-museum/ Mon, 30 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/12/25/bubbling-like-a-fever/ Kumamoto wasn’t mine when I got here. It was just gray concrete and train stations and the specific kind of noise that makes you feel invisible. But then something shifted—maybe it was just time, or maybe the city decided I was worth knowing. Suddenly there were colors everywhere. Temple eaves catching the last light. Vending machines glowing at three in the morning. The kind of small details that make you feel like the place is actually alive. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/12/25/bubbling-like-a-fever/ Wed, 25 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/12/22/love-machines/ Being in Japan feels like existing inside a dream that keeps restarting. There’s neon bleeding into everything, this dazed quality to how people move through the world, and I’m just wandering through it all not quite sure if I’m understanding anything correctly. Tokyo’s electric streets, Osaka’s weird late-night energy, Kyoto’s temples that feel less like buildings and more like something breathing slowly—I think I’m free here. I think I’m just passing through. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/12/22/love-machines/ Sun, 22 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/12/20/memoirs-of-a-samurai/ I wasn’t expecting Kumamoto Castle to hit me the way it did. I mean, I knew it would be impressive—it’s famous for a reason—but standing at its base, looking up at these walls that had literally been destroyed and rebuilt, something shifted. The earthquake happened. The ground actually split open. The walls crumbled. And then people just... put it back together. Stone by stone. It’s wild to think about that kind of persistence. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/12/20/memoirs-of-a-samurai/ Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/12/17/last-night-i-dreamt-of-flowers/ Tokyo swallows me in its heat. The asphalt quivers, glass panes tremble. Neon lights flicker in my eyes like broken memories. I drift with the crowd, let myself be pushed, my body feverish, my head full of everything and nothing. Then I’m inside—inside the world of teamLab. Borderless—no walls, no doors, no boundaries. Only light. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/12/17/last-night-i-dreamt-of-flowers/ Tue, 17 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/12/14/one-night-in-ikebukuro/ I’ve spent a lot of time in Ikebukuro after dark, and honestly, I think you have to go there at night to really get what Tokyo is doing. It’s intense in a way that feels almost necessary—like the whole city needs somewhere to let loose and just breathe differently. Everyone’s there after work with their colleagues or alone or with people they probably shouldn’t be with, and there’s this palpable sense that anything could happen, or nothing will, and either way nobody’s really checking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/12/14/one-night-in-ikebukuro/ Sat, 14 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/12/11/lifes-a-bowl-of-ramen/ One of the favorite pastimes of people here in Kyushu is asking me about my favorite Japanese food. My answer depends on the day, but I usually say ramen. And no, I don’t mean the cheap instant kind you find in supermarkets. I mean real ramen—made with real ingredients. The kind you find in a tiny restaurant tucked away in some unknown back alley. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/12/11/lifes-a-bowl-of-ramen/ Wed, 11 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/12/8/fonts-turn-words-into-stories/ I adore good typography. The bigger, bolder, and more brutal it is, the more I fall in love with it. Whether classically placed on a snow-white background or chaotically scattered across colorful illustrations, typography is truly effective only when it snaps people out of their wandering thoughts the moment they see it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/12/8/fonts-turn-words-into-stories/ Sun, 08 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/12/7/me-at-the-zoo/ They said it was for our Japanese Arts Class. Something about sketching wild animals to improve our line sensitivity. But in reality, it was about sunshine, good company, and getting to know some new place—at least for me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/12/7/me-at-the-zoo/ Sat, 07 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/12/5/to-the-lighthouse/ The lanterns outside 老之倉庫 glowed with a soft, amber light, cutting through the early evening haze like scattered fireflies. It was the kind of place you’d pass a hundred times without noticing until someone told you it was worth stepping inside. That someone, in my case, was a group of classmates from Sojo University. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/12/5/to-the-lighthouse/ Thu, 05 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/12/2/the-school-festival/ Over the weekend, my Japanese university transformed into a vibrant school festival. Students from all faculties buzzed around the campus like busy bees, setting up tents, stages, and stalls, and filling them with life, color, and energy. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/12/2/the-school-festival/ Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/11/28/at-the-soy-sauce-brewery/ So we went to visit this soy sauce brewery in this small town called Ashikita, down in Kumamoto, and honestly what struck me most wasn’t the production methods or even the whole complicated history of how they’ve been making soy sauce since 1909. It was the story behind why we were even there in the first place. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/11/28/at-the-soy-sauce-brewery/ Thu, 28 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/11/24/day-at-the-museum/ Few places in the world exude a more peaceful aura than museums and galleries—though perhaps supermarkets at 4 o’clock in the morning come close. These sanctuaries of natural wonders, historical milestones, and cultural achievements stand apart from the chaotic events of the outside world. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/11/24/day-at-the-museum/ Sun, 24 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/11/20/gotta-catch-em-all/ There’s always something interesting happening in the center of Kumamoto. On my way to the city’s downtown museum with a friend to check out a few free public exhibitions on a special open day, we stumbled upon a toy swap meet in front of a popular shopping center—and the runtish crowd that came with it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/11/20/gotta-catch-em-all/ Wed, 20 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/11/18/draw-me-like-one-of-your-yokai/ I recently joined a drawing class here at my university in Kumamoto. After learning the fundamentals of Japanese painting over the past few weeks, it’s now time to put that knowledge into practice. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/11/18/draw-me-like-one-of-your-yokai/ Mon, 18 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/11/13/ghosts-in-the-city/ A few years ago, I snuck out of the house on Halloween night and wandered through my dark, foggy, and eerily deserted hometown. With a scary story by ghost hunter John Sinclair playing in my ear, this one about a brothel haunted by vampires, it felt like the perfect entertainment for such a spooky night. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/11/13/ghosts-in-the-city/ Wed, 13 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/11/10/trick-or-treat/ My Japanese exchange university regularly organizes events on special occasions to bring Japanese and international students together. These include excursions to fascinating places around Kumamoto, like bridges, breweries, and golden “One Piece” statues, several competitions to improve participants’ English language skills, and farraginous festivities celebrating special cultural holidays. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/11/10/trick-or-treat/ Sun, 10 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/11/8/street-by-street/ So, honestly, my days here in Kumamoto kind of rotate around the same few places—my apartment where I sleep and work and do laundry, campus where I run between lectures, and downtown, which is where I actually live, if that makes sense. That’s where everything happens. That’s where the city feels real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/11/8/street-by-street/ Fri, 08 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/11/6/barbecue-and-fireworks/ The Land of the Rising Sun is not only renowned for its, let’s call it, alternative entertainment industry but also its breathtaking fireworks festivals. And one of the most stunning takes place every October in southern Kyushu, in the town of Yatsushiro in beautiful Kumamoto Prefecture. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/11/6/barbecue-and-fireworks/ Wed, 06 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/11/4/the-otaku-dungeon/ I realized very early on that Japanese entertainment is far superior to its Western counterpart. As a small child, German television introduced me to series like “Maya the Bee”, “Vicky the Viking”, and “Heidi”, which were far more heartfelt, emotional, and exciting than anything Disney and its contemporaries offered. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/11/4/the-otaku-dungeon/ Mon, 04 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/11/1/lets-make-curry/ At Sojo University in Kumamoto, where I am, as you all know by know, spending a semester abroad, a two-day festival with all the trimmings is set to take place in just a few weeks. All the faculties will participate, putting on a vibrant showcase of activities. At least, that’s the plan. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/11/1/lets-make-curry/ Fri, 01 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/10/30/shake-it-off/ Japan is not only known for its eye-catching fashion, delicious food, and captivating animation art but also for its frequent earthquakes of varying severity, a consequence of its geographical location. Ever since the Great Kanto Earthquake in the year 1923 and, more recently, the Tohoku Earthquake in the year 2011, both the inhabitants of this East Asian island and visitors alike have been acutely aware of the ever-present danger simmering beneath their feet. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/10/30/shake-it-off/ Wed, 30 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/10/27/autumn-flower/ Autumn showed up in Kumamoto, and honestly, it’s been doing something to me. There’s this moment every year where the heat finally breaks and the whole city just exhales, and I’m finding myself walking around way more than I used to, taking streets I’ve never seen before, just watching how everything shifts. Sometimes there’s a cat lying in the sun somewhere stupid. Sometimes I find a tiny shrine wedged between two buildings or a café that feels like it’s been waiting for someone specific to walk through its door. It’s the kind of place that makes you feel like you’re constantly discovering something that was always there, which is maybe the best feeling. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/10/27/autumn-flower/ Sun, 27 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/10/24/the-art-of-cheap-eating/ You know how you go to Japan thinking you’re gonna eat healthy, all that sushi and fish and perfectly portioned everything, and then you immediately get knocked over by the sheer abundance of delicious things waiting to be eaten? Yeah, that happened to me. Somewhere between my first bowl of ramen and discovering okonomiyaki, I just kind of surrendered to the fact that I was gonna try literally everything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/10/24/the-art-of-cheap-eating/ Thu, 24 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/10/21/painting-is-poetry/ When I showed the last art teacher who had to put up with me my sketches of naked bodies, which I had more or less painstakingly created in the months prior, he said to me, and I am not exaggerating here, that they were the worst works he had ever seen. In. His. Entire. Life. This man certainly knew no mercy. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/10/21/painting-is-poetry/ Mon, 21 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/10/19/design-is-everything/ The other day, I asked myself whether I had ever consciously decided to become a designer. The answer was a perplexed shake of the head from one of the little men that haunt my mind. Like much of my life, it was more by chance than sheer will to succeed that I found myself on the path of those who make a living from creative work—or at least try to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/10/19/design-is-everything/ Sat, 19 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/10/13/reborn-as-a-student-at-a-japanese-university/ Guess who is now officially enrolled at Sojo University in the beautiful city of Kumamoto? That’s right—this guy. Founded shortly after the Second World War, the academy evolved from a technical high school and now offers courses in art, architecture, and various sciences. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/10/13/reborn-as-a-student-at-a-japanese-university/ Sun, 13 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/10/11/a-new-language-a-new-life/ As I prepare to spend the foreseeable future in Japan and am passionate about the culture of the Land of the Rising Sun, it feels only natural to learn the language. And where better to embark on this journey, one I hope will ultimately broaden my intellectual horizons, than in the heart of Japan? Exactly. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/10/11/a-new-language-a-new-life/ Fri, 11 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/10/9/city-of-bears/ Welcome to Kumamoto, a city nestled in the westernmost part of Japan on the beautiful island of Kyushu. Known as the “City of Bears,” this charming locale will be my cozy home for the next six months as I embark on my exciting semester abroad at the Faculty of Design at the private and prestigious Sojo University. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/10/9/city-of-bears/ Wed, 09 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/10/7/their-eyes-were-watching-girls/ When I’m not enjoying the crème de la crème of the musical entertainment world, characterized by Italian operas, French chansons, and South American jazz, I immerse myself in the underground bunkers of Japanese idols. From internationally renowned classics like AKB48 to the nostalgic sounds of Morning Musume and short-lived Eurodance groups such as SweetS, D&D, and Folder 5, I know, listen to, and love them all. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/10/7/their-eyes-were-watching-girls/ Mon, 07 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/10/4/some-people-walk-in-the-rain-others-just-get-wet/ Nothing makes me happier than walking through the rainy streets of Tokyo. After the hot days behind us, with concrete and bones alike melting, I wanted to cheer naked and weep with joy at the sight of the first gray cloud creeping over our heads. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/10/4/some-people-walk-in-the-rain-others-just-get-wet/ Fri, 04 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/30/the-emperors-shrine/ Tokyo is a grab bag of emotions and experiences. Every turn in a new direction brings a fresh adventure and another story to tell. I love wandering through the bustling streets, shops, and cafés of the Japanese capital. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/30/the-emperors-shrine/ Mon, 30 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/28/tower-of-my-heart/ Though the Skytree has been a colorful rival towering over Tokyo’s skyline for years now, when it comes to captivating the eyes of residents, tourists, and the occasional bird, the Tokyo Tower remains the landmark of this East Asian metropolis for me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/28/tower-of-my-heart/ Sat, 28 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/26/its-hot-in-tokyo/ If there’s one unsettling truth I hadn’t anticipated, it’s that Tokyo will become a blazing inferno this fall with a single goal in mind: To kill me. The moment I step out of my air-conditioned hotel, I’m transformed into a soaked creature, my sweaty silhouette a testament to a body in agony. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/26/its-hot-in-tokyo/ Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/25/winds-howling/ As I leave the grimy swamps of Velen behind and stride through Novigrad’s gates, a city brimming with possibilities opens up before me. Cheeky rascals dart through the winding alleys of this bustling harbor metropolis, under the watchful gaze of the Eternal Fire that looms over its inhabitants. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/25/winds-howling/ Wed, 25 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/24/where-the-trendy-things-are/ Of course, Tokyo has its ordinary side, its normal, even boring aspects. Men in dark suits, towering walls of skyscrapers, and loud, crowded subways. But then, I step through a door and suddenly I find myself in a sugary Tokyo, where everything around me is glossy, fluffy, and overwhelmingly gaudy. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/24/where-the-trendy-things-are/ Tue, 24 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/22/the-cozy-neighborhood/ There is no place in Tokyo that feels homier than Shimokitazawa. The alleyways are lined with cafés, second-hand shops, and record stores. A few years ago, the neighborhood in Setagaya was considered a hipster haven, but it has since become a meeting point for those who find Shibuya, Harajuku, and Akihabara too crowded, too loud, and frankly, too mainstream. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/22/the-cozy-neighborhood/ Sun, 22 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/20/the-electric-town/ There’s probably no place in the world that makes weebs’ hearts beat faster than Akihabara. Enthusiasts of Japanese pop culture will find everything they could dream of in this district, known far beyond the borders of Tokyo. From anime, manga, video games, and J-pop CDs to books, trading cards, figures, model kits, cosplay costumes, and even hentai, it’s a paradise for otaku. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/20/the-electric-town/ Fri, 20 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/18/open-your-eyes/ As with every nineties nerd, “The Legend of Zelda” is one of the game series that has accompanied me since childhood. My real entry into the series was the third installment, “The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past” on the Super Nintendo. I played this adventure so many times that I knew every area by heart. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/18/open-your-eyes/ Wed, 18 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/17/the-nostalgic-paradise/ Tokyo is much more than just Shibuya, Akihabara, and Harajuku. If I want to experience different places than the usual tourists, I have to go to places that are less well-known but no less exciting. For example, Odaiba, the artificial island in Tokyo Bay, which is a popular entertainment and shopping area for locals. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/17/the-nostalgic-paradise/ Tue, 17 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/14/a-journey-into-the-past/ Tokyo, once known as Edo, began as a small, insignificant dump. It only grew into the most important city in Japan when Tokugawa Ieyasu, the third feudal ruler after Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, built a castle there in 1590. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/14/a-journey-into-the-past/ Sat, 14 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/13/that-could-have-been-us-but-you-dont-care/ For many years now, I wanted nothing to do with German culture. I switched all my consumption habits to English and looked down contemptuously on anyone still crawling through the oozy cesspool of German-language entertainment because they didn’t know any better. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/13/that-could-have-been-us-but-you-dont-care/ Fri, 13 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/12/center-of-my-world/ When I think of Japan, I picture the bustling intersection at the heart of Shibuya. As the traffic lights at each corner finally turn green, crowds of uniformed salarymen, laughing schoolgirls, and amazed tourists stream toward one another, briefly merging into a homogeneous mass before dispersing back into their daily routines. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/12/center-of-my-world/ Thu, 12 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/11/all-the-worlds-a-stage/ When Hikari is thrust onto the recently set up stage of a seemingly innocent chamber play, fate strikes a desperate blow against the most stubborn and dangerous form of conservatism—the one powered by pure fear of being alone. The audience demands change before it is suffocated by the dreariness of the powerful. Fresh blood must pave the way for a new future. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/11/all-the-worlds-a-stage/ Wed, 11 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/10/journey-to-the-east/ The plane I’m on is taking me to a place that couldn’t be further from home. Am I running away from myself, or am I simply longing for another world that will make me love my own again? Those who share my destination feel understood only from afar. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/10/journey-to-the-east/ Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/6/goodbye-augsburg/ Exactly one year ago, I moved to Augsburg. I wanted not only to be closer to my university but also to the people I had spent most of my time with since starting my studies. The city in the far south of Germany welcomed me with open arms, gradually drawing me into its most remote corners thanks to the warmth of various friendly faces. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/9/6/goodbye-augsburg/ Fri, 06 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/8/31/an-evening-with-friends/ Before we part ways for a while due to our upcoming semester abroad, I spent a few memorable evenings with my friends. Investing quality time with people I care about is incredibly important for maintaining mental stability and avoiding the depressive phases that tend to creep in when I’m left alone with my thoughts for too long. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/8/31/an-evening-with-friends/ Sat, 31 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/8/21/one-mans-trash-is-another-mans-treasure/ I pride myself on having excellent taste when it comes to cultural offerings. The more East Asian indie films from the late nineties I watch, the more superior I feel to the world out there. Although I often have no idea what exactly I’ve just gotten myself into, I like to compare it to jazz: the more I think of tortured cats when I listen to it, the more profound, creative and adult it must be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/8/21/one-mans-trash-is-another-mans-treasure/ Wed, 21 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/8/16/do-you-wanna-play-a-gamea/ As someone who typically enjoys gaming with a controller in hand or a keyboard under his fingers, sitting in front of a screen, and snacking while exploring old ruins, bustling towns, or enchanted forests with my illustrious group of virtual adventurers, I’ve found myself more frequently gathered around a table with others in recent years, passing balls, cards, and dice. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/8/16/do-you-wanna-play-a-gamea/ Fri, 16 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/8/12/how-to-cook-for-forty-humans/ I enjoy cooking with others because I love combining good food with even better company. Of course, I don’t do this with just anyone, but with people who are either close to my heart or just kinda hot. We go to the nearest store together, decide what to prepare while browsing the colorfully stacked shelves, pick out fresh, delicious ingredients, and then head home with our jam-packed bags. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/8/12/how-to-cook-for-forty-humans/ Mon, 12 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/8/7/cute-girls-doing-cute-things/ Kaos doesn’t have it easy. Not only does the teenage manga tryhard look like a primary school student and have no friends besides some curious animals she meets on her way home, but she’s just learned that her four panel artworks came last in a survey among national comic book fans. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/8/7/cute-girls-doing-cute-things/ Wed, 07 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/7/23/is-beer-arta/ Every semester, the Werkschau is the grand finale at the Faculty of Design. At this vernissage, students from Technical University of Applied Sciences Augsburg present their final projects from all areas of analog and digital art. From photography, books, and drawings to computer games and interactive installations, everything that’s new, cool, or just fun is included. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/7/23/is-beer-arta/ Tue, 23 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/7/15/the-illegal-girl/ My collection of Japanese indie movies has grown considerably in recent years. What I appreciate most are the quieter slice-of-life titles that provide intimate insights into the small and large everyday problems of East Asian inhabitants. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/7/15/the-illegal-girl/ Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/7/14/pen-and-paper/ I embrace my nerdy side not only through my limitless Japanophilia, which manifests in an arguably unhealthy consumption of anime, manga, dramas, books, and pop music I can’t even understand, but also through my love of geeky tabletop role-playing games. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/7/14/pen-and-paper/ Sun, 14 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/7/7/public-viewing/ Anyone who knows me even a little bit understands that soccer doesn’t interest me in the slightest. During some World Cups, I am a vague fan of the Japanese national team, but only to the extent that I follow their wins and losses from the sidelines. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/7/7/public-viewing/ Sun, 07 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/7/5/my-heart-is-a-ghost-town/ Although I’ve always considered myself a global cosmopolitan who has long since cut ties with German pop culture, Paula Hartmann’s “Kleine Feuer” has been my most-listened-to album over the past few months. There were days when nothing else played in my AirPods all day but these 15 songs, from beginning to end, over and over again, morning, noon, and night. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/7/5/my-heart-is-a-ghost-town/ Fri, 05 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/7/3/hollywoods-calling/ My favorite project of the semester, which is slowly coming to an end, was a short film I created for the compulsory elective course “Motion assets”. The topic was “Young People and Old Trees”. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/7/3/hollywoods-calling/ Wed, 03 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/7/2/chaos-nation/ I love dystopian movies. “Children of Men”, “The Road”, “Snowpiercer”—the more hopelessly the future is depicted, the happier I grin. Classical psychoanalytic theory would attribute my passion for the end of the world to the death drive, the urge for doom and destruction. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/7/2/chaos-nation/ Tue, 02 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/7/1/too-many-people/ A few friends and I were out and about at the Augsburg Summer Nights over the weekend. For a few days, the city center transforms into one big party with all kinds of music stages, food stalls, and even a silent disco. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/7/1/too-many-people/ Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/6/27/no-part-of-my-life/ It’s an afflicting feeling to know people with whom I once felt very close, but who are no longer part of my life. It’s not as if they’ve moved away, disappeared, or even died, but our relationship has changed so much from one day to the next that we no longer communicate. Not even when we are literally standing next to each other. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/6/27/no-part-of-my-life/ Thu, 27 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/6/26/studying-in-japan/ The idyllic town of Kumamoto is located on the island of Kyushu in the southwest of Japan and has not only a beautiful castle, an old samurai house, and a colorful landscape garden to offer but also a university that happens to be the partner institution of my college. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/6/26/studying-in-japan/ Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/6/19/just-fun/ I’m not sure if it’s my diet, the sun, or my antidepressants, but lately, I’ve generally been worrying less about my life. Whereas I used to spend weeks, months, maybe even years, doing nothing but creating as many sorrows as humanly possible in my mind, I’ve recently been blessed with a stoic calmness that is almost uncanny. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/6/19/just-fun/ Wed, 19 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/6/15/cheers-to-the-house-party/ Last night I found myself at a house party in a part of town I haven’t been before, where half the girls in attendance seemed to be called Julia. I like house parties. They’re much more cozy than clubs. And you can have intense conversations there, often with people you’ve just met. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/6/15/cheers-to-the-house-party/ Sat, 15 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/6/9/i-am-europe/ I voted in the European elections this morning. After I bought a coffee at the nearby coffee shop and went for a walk to the next elementary school, where the voting took place, I chose the Green Party because they most closely represent my political views on environmental protection, digitalization, and human rights. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/6/9/i-am-europe/ Sun, 09 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/4/30/war-in-my-head/ When I was younger, I used to attribute my emotional shortcomings to being a spoiled only child. I had to be the center of attention in every group I was part of. If that didn’t happen, I would go to great lengths to convince everyone around me that I was the focal point of their otherwise unbearable lives. I was an obnoxious drama queen with a distinct main character complex—or maybe I was just bored as hell. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/4/30/war-in-my-head/ Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/4/19/going-places/ Although life feels like it will drag on forever, and I’m convinced of my own immortality anyway, a bitter truth hangs over my head like the proverbial sword of Damocles: I will die. I’m not sick, at least I hope not, but the day I die will come, without a doubt. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/4/19/going-places/ Fri, 19 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/4/15/my-britney-moment/ This event has been planned for weeks in my mind. I storm through the front door, undress, and throw my clothes on the white sheets and pillows-covered bed. I enter the now brightly lit bathroom with a fully loaded electric razor and stand in front of the mirror. A little push in the right direction and the machine starts to buzz. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/4/15/my-britney-moment/ Mon, 15 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/4/14/unrequited-expectations/ I firmly believe that expectations are the root of all disappointment in interpersonal relationships. Expectations will always let me down, no matter who or what they’re directed at. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/4/14/unrequited-expectations/ Sun, 14 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/4/9/self-destructive-tendencies/ Hello. My name’s Marcel, and my various hobbies include reading, cooking, and sabotaging my own life. Then I chase away friends, place obstacles in the path of my success, and sacrifice myself for irrelevant beliefs. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/4/9/self-destructive-tendencies/ Tue, 09 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/4/7/welcome-to-the-club/ Each faculty at our university has its very own student council. There is one for computer science, one for humanities and natural sciences, one for architecture and civil engineering, one for electrical engineering, one for mechanical and process engineering and one for economics. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/4/7/welcome-to-the-club/ Sun, 07 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/4/2/the-wandering-mouth/ We’re at a party. Strange and familiar faces hover around us, drinking and shouting. Cheerful music fills the air. The garden where we celebrate is lit up in bright colors. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/4/2/the-wandering-mouth/ Tue, 02 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/2/4/meeting-a-master/ This semester, we took part in a workshop with the popular Hungarian artist István Horkay as part of our Werkwoche at Technical University of Applied Sciences in Augsburg. His collage posters are famous and have been exhibited in galleries all over the world. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/2/4/meeting-a-master/ Sun, 04 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/1/8/time-to-grow-up/ Since the beginning of my college attendance and the subsequent move to a new city, my entire circle of friends consists of my fellow students. That wouldn’t really be a problem. After all, they are all great people with their very own dreams, hopes, and goals. And I’ve grown very fond of some of them over time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/1/8/time-to-grow-up/ Mon, 08 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/1/5/midlife-crisis-outfit/ As of today, I am 40 years old. So it’s about time to talk about my midlife crisis. Strictly speaking, I’ve been in it for four decades now, but in order to have a good starting point for today’s topic, let’s just assume that it’s reached its peak today. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2024/1/5/midlife-crisis-outfit/ Fri, 05 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/12/25/the-death-of-social-media/ When websites like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter emerged in the early 2000s, I was fascinated by the possibilities they brought. Whether I was chatting with buddies, flirting with girls, or discussing the latest “One Piece” episode with other fans, social media turned the internet into a place where strangers could become acquaintances, and acquaintances could become friends. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/12/25/the-death-of-social-media/ Mon, 25 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/12/13/men-of-culture/ When a brave adventurer has spent the entire day climbing mountains, recovering treasures, and battling giants, while trying to keep every single one of his limbs attached to his body, there are three things that drive him to look forward to the next day: Beer. Meat. And sex. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/12/13/men-of-culture/ Wed, 13 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/12/11/blessed-blow/ God had the best cocaine. My friends assured me of that. Nothing was as clear, pure, and effective as the contents of the transparent bags she carefully placed on the table at weekends. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/12/11/blessed-blow/ Mon, 11 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/12/9/jump-jump-jumpa/ When I think of Japan, my mind drifts to sushi, manga, and suicide. It’s a country of pure contrasts, where neon lights pulse with life, yet shadows loom just as brightly. Recently, I watched Sion Sono’s cult masterpiece “Suicide Club”, a delirious descent into the bizarre phenomenon of mass suicides sweeping the East Asian nation. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/12/9/jump-jump-jumpa/ Sat, 09 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/7/25/beer-beer-and-more-beer/ The second semester of my studies in “Interactive Media” has just said goodbye to me. Officially it doesn’t end until the end of September but with the semester break starting in the next few days, I can justifiably say that my first year at college is now over. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/7/25/beer-beer-and-more-beer/ Tue, 25 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/7/25/i-lost-my-heart-in-tokyo/ Japan is not only a land of cultural traditions, technological achievements, and historical, social, and geographical challenges, but for many enthusiasts it is a nation of great and small wonders waiting to be discovered and explored. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/7/25/i-lost-my-heart-in-tokyo/ Tue, 25 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/3/26/if-i-cant-be-a-part-of-your-world/ Of course I can’t always have what I want. That would be far too easy anyway. My own happiness sometimes collides with the dreams and wishes of others. And I have no right to hurt them just because I hold the questionable belief that I absolutely must be the main character in every single story that is told. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/3/26/if-i-cant-be-a-part-of-your-world/ Sun, 26 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/3/13/round-two-fighta/ Well then, are you all already as excited as I am? Of course you are. Because this week my second semester in the “Interactive Media” degree program at Augsburg University of Applied Sciences is beginning. And ahead of me—and my daring fellow companions—lie a few months full of fun, excitement, and… very… nice… other… things. The main thing is that there’s something with alliteration. Because that always sounds good. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/3/13/round-two-fighta/ Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/3/8/hope-dies-last/ From up here you can see the lush green meadows, the azure-blue sea, and the clear, sunny sky. Gentle piano melodies echo through the overgrown high-rises. The decaying buildings are the last memorials to a civilization that was not prepared for its sudden departure. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/3/8/hope-dies-last/ Wed, 08 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/3/6/what-i-talk-about-when-i-talk-about-walking/ I love walking. Drop me anywhere on this round ball of Earth, point me in any direction, and I’ll set off. From A to B, crisscrossing, straight ahead or in circles. The main thing is to keep going, always further. And when I talk about running, I don’t mean jogging, racing, or sprinting—good God, no—but the most relaxed form of human locomotion: walking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/3/6/what-i-talk-about-when-i-talk-about-walking/ Mon, 06 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/3/5/dystopian-decadence/ A misaligned photograph of the future, born in the fever of Japan’s growth in the sixties and seventies. Traditions, quiet and fine, threaded through with wabi-sabi as an inner pulse, keep time beneath the noise. Buildings that refuse to shed their rust, that keep a film of dull gray on the fingers, stand as patient witnesses. A floating consolation, and a smell of open country, move down the lanes and linger in the alleys. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/3/5/dystopian-decadence/ Sun, 05 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/3/3/cool-guys-in-their-hot-rods/ Vroom, vroom, vroom—off they go, those daredevil devils in their souped-up death machines. At the Redline, after all, anything goes. The greatest racing competition in the universe only takes place every five years, and that’s exactly why absolutely everyone wants to claim the glory for themselves. All while organized crime and militaristic governments try to exploit the spectacle for their own purposes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/3/3/cool-guys-in-their-hot-rods/ Fri, 03 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/3/1/something-beautiful-is-going-to-happen/ The vacation spot outside Vaasa devoured the four Lund girls. With their tiny bones and their tanned skin, an entire era disappeared. Six kilometers of winding coastline, a popular bathing resort in the fifties. Rows of changing cabins, tall reeds rustling in the wind. Here one finds the era the conservatives long for: when parents could send their children to the beach unsupervised, two dollars for ice cream and a bus ticket in the pockets of their summer trousers. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/3/1/something-beautiful-is-going-to-happen/ Wed, 01 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/27/the-empty-heart/ If I want to, I can become friends with a great many people in a very short time. No matter where I am, no matter the situation, no matter who I’m dealing with. Then I’m funny, captivating, and so incredibly openhearted that it feels as if we’ve known each other for a lifetime. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/27/the-empty-heart/ Mon, 27 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/23/adventures-on-the-sand-planet/ In the future, our planet will transform into a strange new world in which humanity must endure on an Earth without rain or oceans—only vast, desiccated deserts where two teenagers struggle to survive and search for hope. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/23/adventures-on-the-sand-planet/ Thu, 23 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/22/the-modern-diet/ Honestly, I don’t even know why I’ve been eating less meat in the past few weeks. And when I say less, I actually mean a lot less. It just happened that way. At lunchtime, the cafeteria always served a portion of French fries with ketchup and mayo for a buck—and that was enough for me. Out of curiosity, I picked up a pack of vegan salami at the supermarket, which was actually quite good. And a little avocado, hummus, or pickles with the cheese sandwich: Best. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/22/the-modern-diet/ Wed, 22 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/21/terror-of-the-underworld/ When Arano steps out of the station in Shibuya, his fate is already sealed. The young man came to Tokyo to make his dreams come true: he wants knives to rain down—preferably into the hearts of the Yakuza, toward whom he harbors an inexplicable and ruthless hatred. “There are too many superfluous elements in this world,” is the credo he keeps murmuring to himself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/21/terror-of-the-underworld/ Tue, 21 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/19/i-only-dreamed-of-you/ Mima Kirigoe is ready to leave her career as a celebrated pop idol behind and pursue a dazzling future as an actress. However, shedding her former image proves far more difficult than she ever imagined, and the dark world of show business threatens to drag her into the depths of despair. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/19/i-only-dreamed-of-you/ Sun, 19 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/18/the-pop-terrorists/ While the whole world celebrates South Korea’s cultural boom and it seems like half my classmates are studying abroad in the country’s colorful capital because of it, we must remember a unique collective alongside veterans like Blackpink, Red Velvet, and BTS, and newcomers like Ive, Le Sserafim, and NewJeans: Balming Tiger, the quirky pioneers of Seoul’s idiosyncratic rap scene. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/18/the-pop-terrorists/ Sat, 18 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/17/dont-stop-shootinga/ I finally watched Shinichiro Ueda’s 2017 film “One Cut of the Dead” the other day. And what can I say? It is, as anyone who has seen it can attest, absolutely fantastic. The big problem is that I really shouldn’t reveal anything about it, not even the genre, because otherwise I strip away all the fun. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/17/dont-stop-shootinga/ Fri, 17 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/15/rebellious-girls/ The Japanese music label Wack, itself belonging to the J-pop giant Avex, is famous for its eccentric groups, among them BiSH, EMPiRE, and Gang Parade. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/15/rebellious-girls/ Wed, 15 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/13/four-sisters-and-a-funeral/ The three sisters Sachi, Yoshino, and Chika live together in a large old house in the Japanese coastal city of Kamakura. When they learn of the death of their estranged father, they decide to travel to the countryside for his funeral. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/13/four-sisters-and-a-funeral/ Mon, 13 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/12/the-pointless-love/ As she sets off for home, I call after her with the first stupid remark that happens to come to mind. The slender girl dressed in black, wearing white sneakers marked by life, turns around one more time, grins, calls back, and raises her hand. I wave too, and then she steadily becomes a little smaller—smaller still than she already is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/12/the-pointless-love/ Sun, 12 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/10/god-is-chill/ To live up to my rediscovered campaign of unconditional openness, I of course don’t want to withhold how my first semester in the “Interactive Media” program at Augsburg University of Applied Sciences went. After all, we’ve just received the grades for our exams. And let’s put it this way: it went better than expected. Really. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/10/god-is-chill/ Fri, 10 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/9/a-single-moment/ Sometimes all it takes is a single instant, a moment, even the tiniest thought—and suddenly I’m falling again. Just a second ago I was laughing, content with my life because, for once, something had finally worked out the way I had always wished it would, or at least I had no reason, for a change, to hate the world and every single person in it. And then, a second later, I plunge back into the same old, worn-out abyss from which it becomes a little harder to climb out every time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/9/a-single-moment/ Thu, 09 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/8/literature-for-sheep/ Japanese music is a collection of anthems for my own little messed-up world. Whether it reminds me of sad anime episodes, the churning background music in video games, heartbreak, or my first few moments at Narita airport, stepping through the “Welcome to Japan” banner into an universe of cultural, technological, and human wonder, J-pop and J-rock are always there for me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/8/literature-for-sheep/ Wed, 08 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/7/i-can-have-alone-time-when-im-dead/ When I started my studies, my biggest concern wasn’t the course material, the professors, or fears about what the hell I would do with my degree once I had it in my pocket, but rather how the other students would react to me. After all, at the end of my 30s, I was twice their age. Most of them could have been my children. Maybe they were. One or two faces did look familiar… https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/7/i-can-have-alone-time-when-im-dead/ Tue, 07 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/6/the-boy-and-the-murderer/ Mr. Long is not a man of many words. In fact, he hardly speaks at all. His talents lie more in… let’s say… practical work. Mr. Long is a Taiwanese contract killer. One of the good kind—someone who doesn’t ask questions when you give him a place, a time, and a target. Mr. Long simply does what needs to be done. And he’s pretty good at it. Usually. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/6/the-boy-and-the-murderer/ Mon, 06 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/5/feelings-without-a-name/ In the most unexpected situations, I encounter girls whose sheer existence fascinates me so much that I can hardly comprehend it. It’s not as if I’m overwhelmed by love, hate, or pity, because the tentative affection I feel for the girl on the other side doesn’t fit into the emotional templates into which I’ve almost instinctively pressed all my previous encounters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/5/feelings-without-a-name/ Sun, 05 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/1/a-student-for-life/ After the more or less sudden end of AMY&PINK, I felt lost. For fifteen years, I had put all my energy into a project that was full of fun, passion, and hope at the beginning, but by the end had become nothing more than a slowly fading burden. When the bright lettering finally disappeared, I didn’t know what to do with myself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/2/1/a-student-for-life/ Wed, 01 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/1/31/men-who-stare-at-streets/ Yusuke looks out of the window. Accompanied by the voice of his deceased wife, houses, trees, and the sea fly past him. He doesn’t notice that there is another person sitting in the red Saab 900 Turbo in front of him as he fills in the gaps in the sentences with his own words. Misaki will soon drive him to a place where he can finally find himself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/1/31/men-who-stare-at-streets/ Tue, 31 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/1/27/songs-of-rebellion-and-loneliness/ I recently watched the documentary “Our Lies and Truths” about the rise and downfall of the Japanese girl group Keyakizaka46. After all, in recent years Techi and her comrades have been the idols I listened to most. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/1/27/songs-of-rebellion-and-loneliness/ Fri, 27 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/1/16/when-the-voice-of-an-entire-generation-fell-silent/ Even today, people I don’t really know still ask me—by email, letter, and by shouting through open windows—what actually happened to AMY&PINK. The portal of good cheer. The party ship of Berlin’s newcomers. The voice of a generation that never wanted to grow up, partied for three days straight at Berghain, and woke up one morning in the ruins of their own denial of reality. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/1/16/when-the-voice-of-an-entire-generation-fell-silent/ Mon, 16 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/1/1/the-transience-of-written-words/ This website has undergone many changes over the years. From a small blog by a Bavarian media designer to a collection of stories by creative minds from all over Germany. From the Bible of Berlin nightlife to a gonzo magazine for hipsters. From a digital news site to a never-sleeping ticker of viral events. Until, at some point, I was faced with a sheer monster of false expectations and hopeless prospects. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2023/1/1/the-transience-of-written-words/ Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2021/7/29/fantasy-for-pedophiles/ Have you ever sat in front of the TV or your laptop and wondered what the dumbest thing to watch might be, after binging every single episode of “The Big Bang Theory”, “Two and a Half Men”, and “How I Met Your Mother”? The answer is: “In Another World with My Smartphone”. That’s the dumbest thing. Not the dumbest anime—no—but simply the dumbest thing that has ever been created and then broadcast anywhere, at any time, in any way. By a mile. By a mile the dumbest. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2021/7/29/fantasy-for-pedophiles/ Thu, 29 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2021/5/25/of-beasts-and-breasts/ Let’s get this out of the way right away: “Monster Girls” is not exactly the deepest, smartest, or even remotely the most beautiful anime under the sun. Quite the opposite. The utterly idiotic story fits on a cum-stained biscuit, the dialogue mostly consists of swearing, screaming, and moaning, and the illustrations look like they came straight out of one of those seventh-rate hentai dating simulations made by some Russian backwoods developers that you regularly get thrown at you on Steam in ten-packs for about two bucks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2021/5/25/of-beasts-and-breasts/ Tue, 25 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2021/4/5/fuck-the-teacher/ As Rui lies sweaty on her stomach in bed in front of Natsuo, her bottom clad in skimpy underwear thrust toward him, his heart begins to beat faster with every passing second. Rui coughs. The cold seems to be bothering her. The only thing that will help now is the freshly unwrapped suppository that Natsuo is holding in his hand. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2021/4/5/fuck-the-teacher/ Mon, 05 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2021/3/13/in-love-with-a-goddess/ Back in the day, as everyone knows, everything was better. The music. The weather. The food. The love. And of course television, too. These days it’s nothing but crap. But were anime better back then as well? You might think so. “Sailor Moon”. “Cowboy Bebop”. “Neon Genesis Evangelion”. All classics from that era that still convince today through their likable characters, their great stories, or simply their sheer epic scale. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2021/3/13/in-love-with-a-goddess/ Sat, 13 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2021/3/7/maybe-not-today-but-a-huge-sun-may-rise-tomorrow/ Tatsuya Egawa’s “Golden Boy” was the first anime that made me realize that Japanese cartoons weren’t just for little boys and girls but could also go in a more adult direction. This was despite the fact that the series aired on MTV in a heavily edited version—if you still remember MTV. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2021/3/7/maybe-not-today-but-a-huge-sun-may-rise-tomorrow/ Sun, 07 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2021/3/4/the-queen-of-j-pop/ What Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, or Mariah Carey might be in Western realms, that is what women named Hikaru Utada, Namie Amuro, and Seiko Matsuda are in Japan. Grand shows, powerful voices, and an abundance of feminine energy—this is how the Far Eastern audience knows and loves its female superstars. They dazzle with charisma, glamour, and emotional performances that blend strength with elegance. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2021/3/4/the-queen-of-j-pop/ Thu, 04 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2021/3/1/d-is-for-dragon/ It is well known that when you’re drunk, you do the stupidest things. Sending your ex a WhatsApp message with a shirtless selfie attached, for example. Convincing yourself that one more vodka Red Bull will go down just fine and that an hour later you definitely won’t be vomiting into your own pillow at home. Or getting into a fight with a bouncer. All three very stupid things. But you do what you have to do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2021/3/1/d-is-for-dragon/ Mon, 01 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2021/2/28/a-balm-for-depression/ Sure, sex is pretty great. But have you ever watched all the episodes of “K-On!” in one sitting, only to feel such a massive void in your heart afterward that you immediately started all over again just to even begin to fill it? Exactly. “K-On!” is pure joie de vivre, a love letter to cheerfulness, to carefree days, to the plans and hopes we all once had at some point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2021/2/28/a-balm-for-depression/ Sun, 28 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2020/2/5/songs-from-another-world/ When I finally got my driver’s license in my early 20s and raced through the streets of my uptight hometown in my mother’s bright red Seat Ibiza, criss-crossing back and forth, there was no hip hop, no techno, and no Britney Spears shouting from my speakers. No. It was the then-new single by a Japanese pop musician. Her name was Kumi Koda. The song was “Butterfly”. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2020/2/5/songs-from-another-world/ Wed, 05 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/27/tokyo-clear-light/ Novelty gets in the way when you’re traveling with a camera. Especially in Tokyo, where there’s so much visual noise that you think the place will do the work for you. It doesn’t. What matters is whether you can get quiet enough to actually see. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/27/tokyo-clear-light/ Fri, 27 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/27/sidos-softening/ There was a time when Sido was actually dangerous. I mean, he had that mask thing, some distance between himself and Paul Hartmut Würdig, whoever that guy actually is. But the music came out mean and sexual and he didn’t care what anyone thought about it. The early stuff, “Mein Block,” “Strip für mich,” “Fuffies im Club”—crude as hell, meant for people living in Berlin on the margins, kids who had nothing going for them. That was real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/27/sidos-softening/ Fri, 27 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/27/writing-on-the-wall/ Smooth. That’s the first thought when Cardi B’s voice comes in on “Writing on the Wall.” French Montana’s got a new album coming in November and this is the preview—nothing rough, nothing uncertain. Post Malone’s on it too, which you pretty much figured before clicking play. These three together don’t leave room for mistakes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/27/writing-on-the-wall/ Fri, 27 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/27/stuck/ “Chicken Noodle Soup” is stuck in my head and I’ve made peace with it. It’s the J-Hope and Becky G song—J-Hope from BTS, Becky G who shows up in collabs and does solid work. The track is simple and bright and totally designed to lodge itself in your skull. *Chicken noodle soup, chicken noodle soup, chicken noodle soup.* There it is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/27/stuck/ Fri, 27 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/27/like-a-virgin/ There’s a cream called “Like a Virgin” for about twenty-five euros that you apply daily and it’s supposed to tighten your vagina back to adolescence. The active ingredient is alum. The marketing is refreshingly blunt: you’ll feel younger and your partner will feel bigger. I have no idea if it actually works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/27/like-a-virgin/ Fri, 27 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/27/pixel-penance/ I’ve spent more cumulative hours dying in Dark Souls than finishing some entire games. There’s something specific about that kind of consistent destruction - you either come out of it fundamentally changed, or you quit. The saying goes what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, which is obviously bullshit most of the time, but Dark Souls actually proved it could be true. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/27/pixel-penance/ Fri, 27 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/27/vanishing-point/ You make a lot of money in China and suddenly you’re not just rich, you’re exposed. Somewhere on the party’s ledger, your name gets flagged as a problem—too much power, wrong kind of influence—and then you’re gone. Overnight, no explanation. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/27/vanishing-point/ Fri, 27 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/26/seventies-japanese-jazz/ I found Japanese jazz from the seventies by accident—Sadao Watanabe, session players backing singers I’d never heard of—and it rewired what I thought the music could do. There’s a formal precision underneath something loose and exploratory, Western sophistication filtered through Japanese restraint and taste. The production is warm and muffled by today’s standards, and it sounds like it doesn’t care if anyone’s listening. I can’t stop reaching for those records. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/26/seventies-japanese-jazz/ Thu, 26 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/25/summer-walker-takes-her-time/ Summer Walker popped up from Atlanta with this slow, thick R&B that just hangs on you like humidity. Her song “Girls Need Love” was the thing that changed everything—Drake heard it, sent her a message, and suddenly everyone knew her name. But what actually stuck was the way her voice just sits in a track, patient and unhurried, like she’s got nowhere else to be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/25/summer-walker-takes-her-time/ Wed, 25 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/25/they-made-it-anyway/ The Last of Us didn’t need a sequel. That was the clearest thing about it. The first game ended in a way that broke you—you weren’t sure if what Joel did was right, and that uncertainty was the whole point. Continuing that story felt like it could only fail, either by explaining away what made the ending so powerful or by repeating the formula that had already been perfect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/25/they-made-it-anyway/ Wed, 25 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/24/the-game-boy-never-left/ I’ve probably played “The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening” more times than I care to count. Game Boy first, then Game Boy Color, then the 3DS. There’s something about it that sticks—the island setting, the dreamlike tone, the way it tilts the Zelda formula. The crocodile that needs dog food. Marin. The whole strange vibe of it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/24/the-game-boy-never-left/ Tue, 24 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/24/small-night-thought/ There are stretches where I could almost convince myself you’re gone in a normal way, the way people move on. Then something small catches me—your name still in my phone, a laugh that sounds like you, someone asking the question you used to ask—and I’m reaching for my phone thinking I should text you. Ask what you’re doing. Ask why you haven’t posted anything new. A photo. A quote. Some song that would matter to you. And then it hits: you’re not going to post anything. Not ever. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/24/small-night-thought/ Tue, 24 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/24/georgie-riots-backyard/ Came across these photos Jase Holzer took of Georgie Riot—model, actress from Manchester, runs her own company. Just her and her dog at home. She’s in the bath, on the grass, standing on a red Supreme carpet so red it feels almost aggressive. The whole shoot has this quality of not trying to convince you of anything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/24/georgie-riots-backyard/ Tue, 24 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/23/coming-home/ I burned through entire summers in those early SNES RPGs. Secret of Mana, Terranigma, Chrono Trigger—games where you could lose yourself in a pixel world with a band of companions, where magic mattered and the story felt inevitable. I’d disappear into a single game for weeks, not because I was chasing the ending but because I didn’t want to leave. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/23/coming-home/ Mon, 23 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/23/nani/ Anime pulls in everyone—brilliant creative people making something beautiful, and complete losers whose entire identity is defending a character pillow. You learn to ignore the latter. The art is what matters, and when you find an anime that hits, everything else disappears. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/23/nani/ Mon, 23 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/23/she-knows-what-shes-doing/ I put on “Supersize” and immediately understood why this was inevitable. Shirin David spent years on YouTube building an audience around her image—Hamburg, early twenties, Lithuanian and Persian, knowing exactly what works. The album is just the obvious next step. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/9/23/she-knows-what-shes-doing/ Mon, 23 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/6/12/the-naked-director/ Netflix made a whole series about Tatsumi Kumashiro building the Japanese adult film industry in the 1980s, which is kind of absurd and great. The Naked Director treats it all seriously—not as shock value, just as the business and ambition of building something in an industry most people pretend doesn’t exist. The Japanese porn world had its own weird aesthetic completely separate from the West, and the show actually cares about that history. What gets me is that it exists on Netflix now, mainstream, where you might find it between your other shows. That’s almost defiant. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/6/12/the-naked-director/ Wed, 12 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/6/11/the-waiting/ For two years before it came out, Cyberpunk 2077 was better than any game could be, because it didn’t exist yet. You had trailers, screenshots, developer interviews promising a revolution in open-world design, and what you really had was a projection based on The Witcher 3, which was probably the best open-world RPG ever made—vast, written like actual fiction, worth exploring because the world felt inhabited instead of designed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/6/11/the-waiting/ Tue, 11 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/28/clairos-small-sound/ Claire Cottrill from Boston makes bedroom pop in the literal sense—just her in a room with voice and careful arrangement, everything minimal enough that there’s nowhere to hide. “Pretty Girl” was the breakthrough, this quiet song that didn’t try to impress you, which is harder to pull off than it sounds. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/28/clairos-small-sound/ Tue, 28 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/28/when-old-parties-panic/ I remember when Rezo’s video came out. He was a YouTuber in Germany and he’d made this long takedown of the CDU, the country’s center-right party, and it went everywhere just before an election. Suddenly younger people were actually paying attention to politics. The party’s leadership watched this happen and their response told you everything about where they’d ended up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/28/when-old-parties-panic/ Tue, 28 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/27/the-forever-warning/ There’s that thing that happens when you fall down an internet rabbit hole—one link leads to another, then another, and suddenly you’ve lost three hours and become a frothing expert on something completely obscure. For me, it’s been atomic semiotics: the science of how to warn people ten thousand years from now about nuclear waste dumps they won’t understand using symbols they won’t recognize. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/27/the-forever-warning/ Mon, 27 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/27/silence-mapped/ Berlin at night is a machine. The clubs don’t close, the streets stay packed with people who’ve decided sleep is negotiable, the U-Bahn screams through tunnels until 5 AM and starts again at 4. If you live there long enough, you either learn to sleep through it or you learn to leave. There’s not much middle ground. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/27/silence-mapped/ Mon, 27 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/22/finally/ It’s been a quarter-century and DiCaprio and Pitt finally end up in the same movie. Tarantino puts them together in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, set in 1969 Los Angeles—the exact moment when the old studio system starts its final collapse. Everything beautiful is dying. TV is eating cinema. The old guard is fading. DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, a television star watching his relevance evaporate. Pitt is his stunt double, Cliff Booth. There’s an enormous ensemble supporting them—Margot Robbie, Al Pacino, Kurt Russell, Timothy Olyphant, Margaret Qualley—all moving through this specific, doomed landscape with absolute precision. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/22/finally/ Wed, 22 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/22/gate-of-living/ I watched the “Gate of Living” video three times straight, which is what I do when something isn’t done affecting me yet. The visual style—dark, sparse, carefully composed—threads back through her earlier work, these themes she keeps circling in “God, Nor Buddha” and “The Narrow Way” and work that goes back further still. Watch them in sequence and you see it’s all one thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/22/gate-of-living/ Wed, 22 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/20/when-everythings-bright/ Ellesse’s doing that thing again where 90s sportswear doesn’t feel like nostalgia, just clarity. Bright yellows, clean colors, the kind of windbreaker you could actually wear without second-guessing yourself. There’s something about a brand that’s been around long enough to cycle back to what it was good at. The collection doesn’t try to be anything—it just exists in bright primary colors and simple shapes. That’s the appeal, I think. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/20/when-everythings-bright/ Mon, 20 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/18/when-grumpy-cat-died/ I found out she died in one of those mixed news feeds—Grumpy Cat dead at seven from a urinary tract infection, sandwiched between tech announcements and memes that had already moved on. Tardar Sauce. The cat with the permanent scowl. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/18/when-grumpy-cat-died/ Sat, 18 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/13/opt-out/ Die Partei just dropped an AfD blocker. It comes for Chrome and Firefox, plus there’s a physical version for magazines where you literally flip past the content. The whole thing is obviously a joke, but like all Die Partei’s work, it’s also sincere—an argument buried under absurdism. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/13/opt-out/ Mon, 13 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/9/hold-your-breath/ Die Partei, Germany’s satirical protest party, gave their European election campaign slot to Sea-Watch. Not as a guest appearance or cause du jour—the full thing, uncut. They called it “Hold Your Breath,” and it wasn’t a plea or appeal. It was just facts: one in ten people drown crossing the Mediterranean. The EU doesn’t rescue them. The EU criminalizes rescue workers. The EU pays Libyan militias to drag people back. This is what you’re voting on in a few weeks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/9/hold-your-breath/ Thu, 09 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/9/easy-targets/ Some scam outfit called Constantino Tour sent out invites for a luxury vacation in Antalya to about twenty influencers, and they actually went. One blogger named Anna IX took the bait with her friend Natalie Osada. They flew out of Düsseldorf one evening and landed in Antalya. At the airport exit, three women were waiting with a sign displaying the company’s name. One asked for their passports—supposedly to speed up the hotel check-in. Anna handed hers over without a second thought and they got in the van. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/9/easy-targets/ Thu, 09 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/8/vermissen/ Henning May’s voice has always been this heavy, honest thing—the kind that doesn’t ask permission to break. Paired with Juju on “Vermissen,” it works in a way I wasn’t prepared for. She comes from SXTN, years of making crude Berlin hip-hop with Nura, reflecting their actual lives back without any apology. When they split up, I wondered what she’d do alone. Then this. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/8/vermissen/ Wed, 08 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/8/what-sticks/ Mark Ronson and Lykke Li made “Late Night Feelings” and the video’s genuinely compelling. There’s a charge to it, a tension between two people who know what they’re doing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/8/what-sticks/ Wed, 08 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/8/watchmen-again/ I watched the Snyder film back in 2009 and understood almost nothing. Walked out confused, didn’t bother looking up what I’d missed, moved on. Alan Moore’s universe isn’t built for people coming in fresh. It’s built for people who already care, who want to see the source material translated, who have opinions going in. I had none of those things. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/8/watchmen-again/ Wed, 08 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/8/miss-white/ Every photo on Instagram is proof that I’m living wrong. Someone figured out how to make showering look like freedom, how to sit on a couch and look like they have something figured out, and I’m here trying not to crack my skull on the shampoo bottle when I slip. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/8/miss-white/ Wed, 08 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/8/detective-pikachu-on-youtube/ At some point, Ryan Reynolds just uploaded the entire Detective Pikachu film to his YouTube channel in full. No rental fee, no subscription—just a Hollywood film sitting in your feed like any other video. Free. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/8/detective-pikachu-on-youtube/ Wed, 08 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/8/the-drinking-stopped/ You see the studies every couple years now. Young people aren’t drinking. The numbers just keep dropping—eight percent of twelve-to-seventeen year olds drinking weekly, down from over twenty percent in the early 2000s. Which means this whole thing we grew up thinking was inevitable—sneaking alcohol, first beers, getting fucked up as a rite of passage—just isn’t the default story anymore for kids coming up now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/8/the-drinking-stopped/ Wed, 08 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/8/even-millionaires-cant-stay/ I heard a story about Berlin’s wealthiest neighborhood, Grunewald, where the villas sit massive and old and expensive, the kind of place you’d think was untouchable. Turns out billionaires are buying them up, pushing out the millionaires who’d been there for decades. The wealthy have finally discovered what everyone else already knew: if you have something someone richer wants, you’re not going to keep it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/8/even-millionaires-cant-stay/ Wed, 08 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/7/not-gone-yet/ I woke up in a cold sweat at three in the morning thinking about Miley Cyrus without a shirt. The dream had somehow convinced me I hadn’t seen a decent topless photo of her in years—and I was right. Ever since she started doing the whole responsible adult thing, which frankly hasn’t been working. So I grabbed my phone and spent half an hour scrolling through the Miley folder, the collection of better years, just trying to calm down enough to sleep again. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/7/not-gone-yet/ Tue, 07 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/7/tech-made-me-sick-but-it-wont-make-me-well/ The worst part about depression is how quietly it arrives. You don’t want to admit it’s there, not really, not until it’s too late to pretend. I spent months telling myself I was just going through something, riding out a low phase, nothing permanent. But somewhere along the way the low became the baseline and I stopped even recognizing it as low anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/5/7/tech-made-me-sick-but-it-wont-make-me-well/ Tue, 07 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/4/15/tokyo-vinyl/ I’ve hit a wall with music made after 1989. The nineties were brutal, the 2000s worse, and everything that came after is just noise piled on older noise. When I see young people on TV clapping along to Image Dragons or Ed Sheeran, I fantasize about walking into that studio and hitting someone. But the real problem isn’t the obviously bad stuff. It’s that I can’t even listen to the good stuff anymore. Dua Lipa, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar—they’re legitimately talented. Poppier than I’d normally want, darker than mainstream radio should allow, actually genuine. I should be into it. But I can’t stomach it. I’ve heard enough music in my life to see the pattern underneath. Everything is just remixing everything else, the same moves in different keys, different faces on old templates, forever. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/4/15/tokyo-vinyl/ Mon, 15 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/29/deutschland/ Rammstein have sold over sixteen million records in their twenty-some-year existence. They’ve won Echo Awards, gotten Grammy nominations, sold out Madison Square Garden in under twenty minutes—all while singing exclusively in German. Every album since 1997 has topped the German charts. David Lynch and Lars von Trier have used their songs. They’re arguably the biggest rock band in the world right now, and definitely the most successful German rockers ever. And yet: nobody’s tried to copy them. Not really. A few bands have tested whether they could roll their Rs as majestically as Till Lindemann, but that’s surface level. The real reason Rammstein are untouchable is that they can’t be copied—because their whole existence is rooted in a specific moment in history that won’t repeat. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/29/deutschland/ Fri, 29 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/28/just-rihanna/ New Rihanna photos for Fenty and I can’t stop looking at them. There’s something about how she just presents herself—wearing her clothes, facing straight into the lens like she’s not trying to convince you of anything. Not performing mystery or aspiration or accessibility. Just showing you what she looks like and what she made. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/28/just-rihanna/ Thu, 28 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/28/the-harajuku-cycle/ Harajuku cycles through trends so fast that staying current feels pointless, but you go anyway. What dominates one season is dead the next. Stores open and close on some invisible schedule. The rhythm never breaks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/28/the-harajuku-cycle/ Thu, 28 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/28/sky-ferreira-again/ I’ve been checking for new Sky Ferreira work so rarely that when something actually surfaces, it lands differently. Blonde was 2013—ancient in internet time, back when the whole thing still felt like it might accumulate into something meaningful. After so many years, you stop expecting someone to return and start treating their silence as permanent. But she’s making new things anyway, and there’s something honest about that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/28/sky-ferreira-again/ Thu, 28 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/28/who-do-you-love/ The Chainsmokers have a new one out with 5 Seconds of Summer. ’Who Do You Love’ and the video’s live. If you’ve been paying attention since ’Closer’ became inescapable, you know the shape of this—something polished and designed to connect, and it usually does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/28/who-do-you-love/ Thu, 28 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/28/scratching-the-itch/ I’ve lost count of the hours spent in Skyrim—hundreds, across different playthroughs. I finished it again recently on PS4 with all the DLCs because I needed to be back in that frozen world before Elder Scrolls 6 finally shows up. Whenever that is. Years from now, probably. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/28/scratching-the-itch/ Thu, 28 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/28/honest-futurism/ These three met in LA and spent four years casually making music together before deciding to actually commit. Nora was dishwashing and driving Uber, trying to hold a songwriting career together with what little energy was left. Then at some point it shifted from maybe to definitely. They wrote “Sugar” in ten minutes. It took a year to get the single out. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/28/honest-futurism/ Thu, 28 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/28/the-instinct/ Found Daya on a playlist and thought, wait—there’s something real happening here. Most pop music calculates, but underneath this production is actual craft. Someone who knows what they’re doing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/28/the-instinct/ Thu, 28 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/27/tokita-ohma/ Tokita Ohma doesn’t have a backstory worth mentioning. He fights because that’s what he does, someone pays him for it, and that’s the deal. No tragic origin, no hidden motivation. Yabako Sandrovich never bothers explaining how he got this way in Kengan Ashura—a manga running since 2012—he just is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/27/tokita-ohma/ Wed, 27 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/27/playing-the-monster/ First time I heard Alli Neumann I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Twenty-one, an actress trying music, and already sounding like someone who’d studied how Falco got away with it, how Nina Hagen could be crude and brilliant at the same time. The first songs—”Merlot, Macht & Muse,” “Wenn ich dich Seh,” “Hohes Fieber”—had this nervous energy, like she was testing which of her voices people would let her keep. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/27/playing-the-monster/ Wed, 27 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/27/four-princesses/ I’ve loved Disgaea since the fifth game, Alliance of Vengeance. The humor’s stupid and earnest at once. The anime art is charming in a way modern games have mostly forgotten. The characters feel like people, not design documents. And underneath all that is a turn-based strategy layer that actually demands something from you. I spent way too many hours with that game, and I’m not sorry. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/27/four-princesses/ Wed, 27 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/27/still-coming/ I spent time with May in Düsseldorf, and they’re the kind of band where you understand immediately why they work together and can’t quite explain why to someone else. Maewa’s voice moves between urgent and almost seductive, Christoph hears things in guitar textures that most people miss, Carsten thinks about rhythm like someone who’s spent decades learning it. They’ve been together since 2013, long enough to trust each other’s instincts. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/27/still-coming/ Wed, 27 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/27/uboot/ Found Yung Kafa and Kücük Efendi through one of those algorithmic moments and came back to it. They’re German, their mixtape is called Uboot, and there’s something about what they’ve made that keeps pulling you back. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/27/uboot/ Wed, 27 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/27/the-knuckle-heads/ Found this Moose Knuckles campaign in Montreal and couldn’t stop thinking about it—a fictional gang called the Knuckle Heads shot by photographer Luis Morales, basically a crew of outsiders on a mission to make the brand known. It’s the kind of ridiculous concept that only works because the clothes are actually good. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/27/the-knuckle-heads/ Wed, 27 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/27/hælos/ Hælos makes music for four in the morning. Not the dancing kind, not the kind that builds toward a peak and leaves you breathless. The kind that plays when you’re alone at someone’s kitchen table, or walking through the empty city, still wired but already crashing. Still tasting the night but already grieving it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/27/hælos/ Wed, 27 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/26/white-earbuds/ Two years ago you’d spot someone with AirPods and it felt like a thing. Now they’re just everywhere. Apple made them respectable—made them normal, which made them universal. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/26/white-earbuds/ Tue, 26 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/26/ashe/ I was just killing time on YouTube, clicking through recommendations that had all started to blur together—same faces, same algorithm trying to figure me out—when Ashe came up. Ashlyn Willson, 24, indie artist from San Diego. She studied music at Berklee, and you can actually hear it. There’s real structure underneath everything, the kind of thing that happens when someone learns the craft instead of just stumbling into it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/26/ashe/ Tue, 26 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/26/the-upload-filter/ The EU Parliament just voted to break the internet. Article 13. Upload filters. From now on every platform has to scan everything you upload—check it against some database for copyright hits. If there’s a match, it disappears. The filters can’t tell the difference between fair use and theft, between a parody and the real thing. They just delete. But that’s kind of the point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/26/the-upload-filter/ Tue, 26 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/26/panty-party/ The game opens with anime girls in what looks like a destroyed schoolyard, and you realize pretty quick that they’re not the characters—the underwear is. The actual combatants are panties. Cute girls’ panties fighting it out in a 3D arena styled after Tekken. I’m not making this up. The game is real, it’s on Steam, it’s on the Switch in Japan, and it exists because someone genuinely made it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/26/panty-party/ Tue, 26 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/26/no-map/ Walking into TeamLab Borderless in Odaiba feels like stepping into light itself. The walls are screens. The floor is a screen. Everything glows and shifts and responds to your body moving through it, which means the art is watching you as much as you’re watching it. There’s no map, which sounds like chaos at first—how do you navigate an exhibition without knowing where you are?—but that’s the whole point. You drift from room to room and the rooms change as you move through them. Spaces bleed into other spaces. A wall of flowers responds to your body. Water flows upward. Everything communicates with everything else, and somehow you’re part of that conversation without trying. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/26/no-map/ Tue, 26 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/26/did-you-come/ Right after, when you’re both still sweaty and you ask anyway: did you come? And you already know from how she moves, how she avoids your eyes, whether this is going to be a lie or something that lands wrong. Both feel bad. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/26/did-you-come/ Tue, 26 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/26/real-games/ Most games on my phone are designed to evaporate from memory the moment you close them. Swipe left, match three, watch the progress bar climb. The notifications never stop. They’re apps built on the assumption that you’re not actually looking for anything substantial—just something to keep your hands busy while you’re waiting for the train or standing in line. Games that depend on reminding you constantly that they exist, that you haven’t played them in six hours, that you could be unlocking something right now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/26/real-games/ Tue, 26 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/25/kerli-from-elva/ Kerli is from Elva, Estonia—five thousand people surrounded by forest, in a place that had recently escaped the Soviet Union but hadn’t quite shaken it. She was the weird kid who sang, and she had to get out. Not romantically. Just gone, anywhere, it didn’t matter where. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/25/kerli-from-elva/ Mon, 25 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/25/scattered-shorts/ Love, Death & Robots is on Netflix, an anthology of animated shorts produced by David Fincher and Tim Miller. Each one is self-contained—sci-fi, horror, comedy, fantasy, whatever—and animated in a different style. No thread, no recurring characters, no arc. Just individual episodes you can watch in any order or skip entirely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/25/scattered-shorts/ Mon, 25 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/25/not-a-compromise/ Most rock-hip-hop hybrids are a compromise—guitars trying to sound hard, rappers over grooves that want to break into something else. Tiavo, Lucy and Deon from Saarbrücken, sidestepped all that and just made what they wanted. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/25/not-a-compromise/ Mon, 25 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/25/apples-streaming-bet/ Apple’s got their streaming service now. Apple TV+, launching soon, with the obligatory celebrities—Spielberg, Oprah, names that make entertainment feel legitimate. A new app, channels you can subscribe to individually, all the standard moves. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/25/apples-streaming-bet/ Mon, 25 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/25/she-knows-what-she-wants/ I probably shouldn’t be into Billie Eilish the way I am, given the age difference, but there’s no fighting it. There’s something unshakeable about her. The way she exists in the world with such obvious ease, like she already knows exactly what she’s about and isn’t interested in changing it based on what anyone else thinks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/25/she-knows-what-she-wants/ Mon, 25 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/25/cynda-mcelvana/ I fall in love with new people constantly. Mostly women. Can’t help it—they’re just better people, by a distance. This is Cynda McElvana, a model from Los Angeles. Darren Ankerman photographed her for Purple Magazine and she’s got that rare thing where elegance doesn’t require any effort. Her Instagram is the expected mix: bikinis, clever captions, behind-the-scenes stuff. For now she’s the girl I can’t focus past. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/25/cynda-mcelvana/ Mon, 25 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/25/thawed-into-apocalypse/ A meteor’s coming. That’s the entire premise - massive enough to end everything. So governments worldwide make this one bet: they’re going to freeze people. Young, healthy people. Insurance for the species. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/25/thawed-into-apocalypse/ Mon, 25 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/25/yo-returns/ Yo! MTV Raps is back, and it’s on German television. I never thought I’d write that sentence, but here we are. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/25/yo-returns/ Mon, 25 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/24/confessions-of-a-dangerous-mind/ The thing about Logic is his influences never matched. Wu-Tang Clan and Frank Sinatra. Nas and Miles Davis. RZA and Childish Gambino. You don’t end up with taste like that by accident, which means you end up with it by necessity—you listen to everything because nothing in your actual life is safe enough to settle into just one thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/24/confessions-of-a-dangerous-mind/ Sun, 24 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/24/unthroning-nobody/ Lennon Stella was on the TV show Nashville, one of those supporting characters who turned out to be more interesting than the leads. Her younger sister Maisy was there too. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/24/unthroning-nobody/ Sun, 24 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/24/tomasz-mro/ Tomasz Mro draws women. That’s the essence of it. British artist, mostly working in illustration—his subjects sit alone, often in thought, rendered with a precision that makes every line count. No excess, no showing off. Just clean drawing and a presence you can’t look away from. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/24/tomasz-mro/ Sun, 24 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/24/looking-out/ I reach for my phone the second boredom sets in. It’s automatic—pocket, Instagram, scroll, scroll, repeat. The justification is airtight: why sit with nothing when you could be liking photos, retweeting, swiping? You only live once. Might as well pack every moment with something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/24/looking-out/ Sun, 24 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/24/nothing-to-hide/ This short film by Daniel Šuljić called “Transparency” shows a world where everybody’s completely visible. Your location, your purchases, what you desire, who you talk to. No shadows. No privacy. The system knows exactly what you are. And if there are gaps, if something isn’t visible, you must be hiding something. You must be guilty. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/24/nothing-to-hide/ Sun, 24 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/24/youtube-won/ YouTube used to be the place where you uploaded stuff you didn’t really care whether anyone saw. Then it became the place where you could build an actual life out of being watched. The shift happened gradually, but by the time anyone really noticed, traditional media had become the side business. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/24/youtube-won/ Sun, 24 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/24/sally-walker/ Iggy Azalea is Australian, which shouldn’t have worked for hip-hop. She moved to the US at sixteen anyway and built something real. ’Fancy’ went to number one in 2014. Then came ’Problem’ with Ariana Grande—the two of them hit #1 and #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 simultaneously, something that hadn’t happened since the Beatles. That’s not viral noise; that’s genuine, sustained success in a genre that doesn’t typically hand it to outsiders. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/24/sally-walker/ Sun, 24 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/24/joy-crookes/ I still think about Amy Winehouse. It’s been years now, but I remember that particular kind of grief—when someone who’s been making exactly the right songs for you just disappears. That voice, soft but rough somehow, made sadness feel understood. “Love Is a Losing Game,” “You Know I’m No Good”—those songs burrowed into me when I was younger. They were necessary in a way only certain music is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/24/joy-crookes/ Sun, 24 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/23/already-porn/ Wood Rocket, the American porn factory, has built their business on one simple principle: if it has an audience, make porn of it. Pokémon, Game of Thrones, Zelda. Boobs, shaved pussies, penetration—the formula still works for views. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/23/already-porn/ Sat, 23 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/23/sigrid-cuts-through/ I found Sigrid through a playlist algorithm that actually got it right - a Norwegian artist with this voice that just cuts through everything. You know that feeling when pop music suddenly matters again? When someone’s made something that has actual energy and doesn’t sound like it was designed by committee? That’s what she does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/23/sigrid-cuts-through/ Sat, 23 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/23/detective-pikachu/ My Gen 1 team was set in stone years ago—Mewtwo, Charizard (raised from the start), Articuno, Gyarados, Dragonite. I wanted Pikachu or Eevee somewhere in there, but I couldn’t rely on cute in a real fight, so Dragonite got the slot. The puzzle was solved, and I didn’t think much about it after. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/23/detective-pikachu/ Sat, 23 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/23/modern-talking-again/ Capital Bra was having an absurd year. Eight #1 hits in Germany in twelve months—most-streamed artist in the country, ranking third all-time for chart dominance with only ABBA and the Beatles ahead. Berlin rapper, Russian and Ukrainian heritage, suddenly the nation’s hottest thing. Kids were streaming him relentlessly. He had that casual sound, those clever lyrics, the kind of appeal that doesn’t need explanation. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/23/modern-talking-again/ Sat, 23 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/23/orange-trees/ Marina was one of those pop singers I paid real attention to in the early 2010s. “I Am Not a Robot,” “How to Be a Heartbreaker,” “Hollywood”—songs that had both the melodic generosity and the production intelligence, music that looked as sharp as it sounded. Three albums in five years, each one assured, each one working. Then she was gone, completely, for so long that people’s first google suggestion about her was whether she was alive. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/23/orange-trees/ Sat, 23 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/23/no-para/ You’re scrolling through something and you hit play on a video that looks like standard German rap fare—all the signifiers are there, tinny beats, mumbled delivery, the whole playbook. Then it hits you: this isn’t serious. It’s a parody. And not some lazy SNL-style sketch. This is “Kein Para,” Yung Larry’s surgical dismantling of Bausa’s “#1 song ’Was du Liebe nennst,’” executed with such technical precision that you can’t quite take the original seriously anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/23/no-para/ Sat, 23 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/23/hiro-mashima-doesnt-change-much/ Hiro Mashima has a type. Kids who are fundamentally alone in some way, usually angry about it, usually desperate for connection. Crews of people who shouldn’t belong together but do. Wars that weren’t supposed to be their problem. And somehow, every single time, you believe these people would die for each other. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/23/hiro-mashima-doesnt-change-much/ Sat, 23 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/23/evangelion-sticks/ Shinji Ikari just wanted to see his father. That’s the whole hook, and it’s perfect because it’s so ordinary. He gets the summons, he shows up, and instead of a reunion, the world’s ending and he’s being handed the controls to a giant robot. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/23/evangelion-sticks/ Sat, 23 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/22/vertical-thinking/ Vertical video format was considered bad taste—everyone knew you were supposed to turn your phone sideways to film anything. But TikTok and Instagram changed the math. The interface demands vertical now. It’s all vertical, and nobody questions it anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/22/vertical-thinking/ Fri, 22 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/22/cold-fanta/ There’s something that happens when pixels hit the screen. Some people got over it. I didn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/22/cold-fanta/ Fri, 22 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/22/lsd/ Sia, Diplo, and Labrinth formed a supergroup called LSD and released a new song. Three artists with no obvious reason to work together, but each one knows what they’re doing, and it shows. Sia’s voice is unmistakable. Diplo’s production is tight. Labrinth keeps things from getting too polished. It’s the kind of collaboration that feels inevitable in retrospect, even though nobody saw it coming. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/22/lsd/ Fri, 22 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/22/settled/ Lena Meyer-Landrut used to be the Eurovision girl. Hyperactive, over-the-top, the kind of thing German pop spits up every few years and forgets about. Except she didn’t disappear. She got better. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/22/settled/ Fri, 22 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/22/no-calculation/ Post Malone doesn’t try to be relatable, which is exactly why he is. There’s no calculation to his rockstar thing—no studied persona, no “I’m a rapper too” winking at the camera. He just exists in that space between rap and rock without being self-conscious about the contradiction. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/22/no-calculation/ Fri, 22 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/22/fero47/ Fero47 posted videos of himself rapping on his phone and now he’s on Epic Records. German kid, half a million Instagram followers, debut single at number 8 on the charts—the whole trajectory from bedroom recordings to a major label deal compressed into a few years. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/22/fero47/ Fri, 22 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/22/hardcore-high/ Juju from SXTN never seemed to care if the hip-hop world was ready for her. When she and Nura made music together, they sounded like they were talking to friends at a party—crude, honest, no filter. “Von Party zu Party,” “Bongzimmer,” “Fotzen im Club”: the titles were the point. These weren’t songs trying to be clever. They were about what was actually happening in their lives in Berlin, and they sounded like it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/22/hardcore-high/ Fri, 22 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/22/millennial-tatort/ Every Sunday at 8:15, my friends disappeared into different versions of themselves. Usually spontaneous, funny, loud—then Tatort came on and everything stopped. Phones away, silence, grim faces. Because that’s when Germany’s national crime show airs, and an entire country stops for it: two detectives show up confused, wander around, arrest the wrong person, then chase the actual killer through a warehouse or dock while dramatic music swells. Same formula every week. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/22/millennial-tatort/ Fri, 22 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/22/i-cant-get-enough/ Selena Gomez is wearing pajamas in the new music video. Not styled or ironic—just soft, regular pajamas. She looks comfortable, which is not a word you’d use for most of her career. After fifteen years in public, dealing with lupus and depression and the raw weight of being that famous that young, she comes back sounding different. Quieter. Like she finally learned what honest sounds like when you sing it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/22/i-cant-get-enough/ Fri, 22 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/21/podkinski/ Palina Rojinski has a podcast now on Spotify called Podkinski. New episode every two weeks. She used Plato as cover for it—you learn more in an hour of play than a year of conversation, or something like that. Fair enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/21/podkinski/ Thu, 21 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/21/clothes-that-actually-last/ At some point I started paying attention to what I wear, not just what I eat. Used to grab whatever was cheap—fast fashion, throw it away after a couple of wears. Now I want things that last, things that come from somewhere real, where the people making them aren’t being exploited. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/21/clothes-that-actually-last/ Thu, 21 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/21/link-keeps-time/ Moving Link one tile per beat, reading enemy patterns against the music, every misstep a chance to die. That’s Cadence of Hyrule, a mashup between the Legend of Zelda and Crypt of the NecroDancer that shouldn’t work but does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/21/link-keeps-time/ Thu, 21 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/21/bonnie-strange-topless/ Bonnie Strange posted a topless photo on Instagram. Just a casual picture, nothing graphic—something about daydreaming through Ibiza without a bra. The comments came fast: “What kind of mother are you?” People were disgusted, certain this was wrong. This is what happens when a woman with children has the nerve to have visible skin. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/21/bonnie-strange-topless/ Thu, 21 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/21/mileys-honesty/ Miley Cyrus reinvents herself every couple of years with military precision. New sound, new look, new narrative—this time she’s all grown up, or reformed, or whatever the story is. Everyone buys it for a while, and then she posts a topless photo on Instagram and the whole thing falls apart. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/21/mileys-honesty/ Thu, 21 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/21/not-coming-out-in-japan/ Kabi Nagata drew a manga about wanting women in a country where desire like that stays silent. She posted pages online, anonymously, describing her own body and what she felt, the weight of it, the things nobody around you can possibly know. Somehow it turned into a book—something you could actually hold and buy. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/21/not-coming-out-in-japan/ Thu, 21 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/21/the-afterimage/ Tarantino’s ninth film is all about watching old actors watch themselves disappear, and he hired every recognizable face left in Hollywood to say it. Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Margot Robbie—they’re all there, along with half the industry, looking at a version of their own anxiety reflected back at them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/21/the-afterimage/ Thu, 21 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/21/when-wikipedia-went-dark/ I opened Wikipedia one morning and the whole site was just black. Complete blackout. A message from the editors explaining why—something about an EU copyright vote happening that day, Article 13, upload filters. They were taking the site down to get people’s attention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/21/when-wikipedia-went-dark/ Thu, 21 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/20/all-those-places/ When “Not A Love Song” went viral in 2017, Megan Bülow was still in high school. I don’t remember the moment particularly, but it makes sense looking back—a teenager writing an actual song about actual feelings instead of chasing the algorithm. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/20/all-those-places/ Wed, 20 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/20/hawkins-again/ Feels like it’s been years since Stranger Things aired a new season. I’d bailed on Game of Thrones after the obvious point—you know the season, the one where everything fell apart—and somehow the Duffer brothers’ thing became my stand-in. It’s got none of the scope, none of the dragons and blood and political machinery collapsing, but there’s something about a show set in a dying small town with kids being hunted by something from the dark that lands heavier than it probably should. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/20/hawkins-again/ Wed, 20 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/20/sue-tsais-wildflowers/ Sue Tsai made a Puma collection called Wildflowers and I keep thinking about how uncompromising it is. Wildflowers printed everywhere—cherry blossoms, lotus spaceships tangled in camouflage. A dress cut like a basketball jersey. Running shoes in soft leather. Tights with color-blocking. Everything speaking the same language, all at the same volume, which sounds like it shouldn’t work but it does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/20/sue-tsais-wildflowers/ Wed, 20 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/20/still-waiting/ That part of the year where it’s supposed to be better outside but isn’t. Gray, cool, all wrong. I’m inside with the lights down and something playing, waiting for spring to actually commit. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/20/still-waiting/ Wed, 20 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/20/stadia/ Google announced Stadia, which sounds like a painkiller but was actually their answer to cloud gaming. Stream games over the internet like Netflix—no console, no expensive graphics card, no waiting for hardware to age out. Just a controller and whatever power Google’s data centers could deliver. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/20/stadia/ Wed, 20 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/20/following-her-voice/ I keep tabs on Nora Tschirner’s voice work—German dubs, animated films, games sometimes. Her voice has a particular quality that survives medium shifts. So when I found out she was playing Greta Lemke in Trüberbrook, I picked it up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/20/following-her-voice/ Wed, 20 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/20/narrated/ Urban Outfitters dropped a new collection called “Narrated” and I kept coming back to it because it’s a clear read on where things are going. Less neon chaos, more earth tones—dusty pinks, ochres, coppers. Simple pieces with actual detail work: wrap tops, dresses with ruffles, a lavender jumpsuit that looks like it has real draping. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/20/narrated/ Wed, 20 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/19/toy-story-4/ Woody falls out the window. That’s the scene that changes everything in the first Toy Story—one moment of jealousy, a push that goes too far, and the toy that runs Andy’s room is suddenly separated from everyone, stranded in the yard and headed for what might as well be oblivion at the neighbor kid Sid’s house. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/19/toy-story-4/ Tue, 19 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/19/making-work/ Ama Lou’s a singer and filmmaker in North London. Paria Farzaneh and Feng Chen Wang both design menswear. Lava La Rue skateboards and makes art. Raye sings. They’re all working across different parts of London, doing their own thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/19/making-work/ Tue, 19 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/19/murakami-painted-her-world/ The colors in that “You Should See Me In A Crown” video hit you immediately. Everything Takashi Murakami touches becomes impossibly bright—flowers screaming, smiling skulls, a world trying too hard but somehow pulling it off. It’s the opposite of Billie Eilish’s actual music, which lives in whispers and minimal piano, all that space between the sounds. You’d think they’d cancel each other out. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/19/murakami-painted-her-world/ Tue, 19 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/19/cartwheel/ That’s how they met. Hailey Bieber climbed onto a diving board at a lake in New York, did a cartwheel, and belly-flopped into the water. Kelia Moniz watched and they became best friends. You can’t script that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/19/cartwheel/ Tue, 19 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/10/still-weezer/ You fall for someone, you end up falling for their music. A girl in Munich loved Weezer and I spent nights listening to Pinkerton, Raditude, Hurley, all of it. Songs like “Beverly Hills” and “Perfect Situation” got under my skin because they got under hers first. That’s how it works when you’re young. You’re trying to live inside someone else’s head. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/10/still-weezer/ Sun, 10 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/10/just-bonnie/ I tell people I’m obsessed with Instagram Stories, like I actually know what I’m talking about. Truth is I’m on my phone most evenings, skipping through them as fast as possible. Another selfie from the gym. Skip. Someone’s ex in the background where they shouldn’t be. Skip. A girl posting something she knows her boyfriend will see. Dumb. Skip. The app’s barely worth having. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/10/just-bonnie/ Sun, 10 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/10/ella-mai/ I found Ella Mai on Instagram, in one of those 15-second covers that somehow stuck with me longer than songs that should have mattered more. She’s from London, and you hear the whole tradition there—Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, Alicia Keys—but it’s not imitation, just inheritance. She comes from that same line. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/10/ella-mai/ Sun, 10 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/10/ryos-still-looking/ Your father comes home. A man named Lan Di is looking for a mirror. He kills your father. That’s how Shenmue starts, on a Dreamcast in 1999, and nothing hits the same way after. I spent weeks in that game just walking through Yokosuka, asking the same people the same questions, waiting for one of them to finally point me toward Hong Kong. Most games don’t have the patience for that. They’re afraid you’ll get bored, so they keep talking, keep moving, keep doing anything but letting you sit with what matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/10/ryos-still-looking/ Sun, 10 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/10/all-at-once/ Every few months North Korea detonates a nuclear weapon and the earth shakes and everyone refreshes the news for a few minutes before moving on. The thought sits there anyway. What would happen if every warhead on the planet went off at the same moment instead of one at a time over decades of hypothetical conflict. The mathematics don’t mean anything at that scale. Dust in the atmosphere. Years without sun. The slow suffocation of everything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/10/all-at-once/ Sun, 10 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/10/dutch-type/ The Dutch just hit different. Everyone knows this. I was twenty, stoned behind a student bar in Amsterdam, when three tall blonde women appeared out of nowhere like they’d been waiting onstage. Emma, Sophie, Madelief. Their long hair moved in the wind while they smoked the joint like it was nothing, and I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. I was too much in my head, too aware of how far out of my depth I was. I never talked to them, but I stayed half in love with them anyway—with something about the ease, the straightforwardness, the way they existed without narrating themselves. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/10/dutch-type/ Sun, 10 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/10/mercedes-bazan/ Colorful worlds full of thoughtful-looking figures. That’s the first thing you notice about Mercedes Bazan’s work, but it’s not the only thing. The second time through a piece, you start catching details—a building half-dissolved into pattern in the background, the exact angle of a face, the weight of a specific piece of fabric. The third time, you’re looking at something almost totally different from what you saw on the first pass. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/10/mercedes-bazan/ Sun, 10 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/10/one-arm-no-mercy/ I’d spent hundreds of hours in Dark Souls and Bloodborne, learning the grammar of FromSoftware games—the patience, the reads, the carefully timed counterattacks. Sekiro uses that language but speaks a completely different dialect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/10/one-arm-no-mercy/ Sun, 10 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/9/beautiful-trash/ There’s a city being consumed by a blood-drinking demon tree called Qlipoth. That’s the job. How you do it—with impossible weapons, rapid combos, a rotating cast of playable characters—is the only thing the game cares about. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/9/beautiful-trash/ Sat, 09 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/9/lightness-and-edge/ I grew up listening to the music Sigrid’s parents raised her on—Neil Young, Joni Mitchell. You can hear that foundation everywhere in her work: the conviction that a song needs to be built on something real. She started piano at seven in Bergen, just naturally good at it. By her teens she was covering Coldplay and Adele, but then something clicked—she realized she’d rather take songs apart, steal the pieces she liked, rearrange them into something hers. That’s always the right move. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/9/lightness-and-edge/ Sat, 09 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/9/dc-in-the-collapse/ Washington DC in the summer, everything broken. The Division 2 puts you there as a sleeper agent activated when the government completely fails. You move through the ruins, shoot people, try to keep the country from collapsing entirely. The first game did this in Manhattan, which was fine until you finished it—and then there was nothing. Just an empty endgame, loot that didn’t matter, playing until you got bored enough to quit. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/9/dc-in-the-collapse/ Sat, 09 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/9/chameleon/ You learn early that you need to adjust yourself for everyone around you. The real stuff—the bright, unfiltered you—gets dimmed down so you don’t stick out, so you survive. That’s what Jenniffer Kae’s new song ’Chamäleonmädchen’ is about. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/9/chameleon/ Sat, 09 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/9/the-gateway/ I scroll through playlists more than I actually play them, which sounds stupid but there’s something about a good cover that makes you want to listen. Most of them are generic—Apple’s been cycling through the same patterns and emoji combinations for years—but when someone actually designed something specific, you feel it. The cover tells you something about what’s coming before the first song even starts. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/9/the-gateway/ Sat, 09 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/9/cheeseburger/ You still see people on planes and trains with Game Boy Advances, playing like time doesn’t apply to them. And the GBA was good enough for that - the graphics hit this weird zone between SNES and early PS1, which basically made it the perfect machine for the games that actually held up. Zelda, Metroid, Advance Wars, the Pokemon games that mattered. You couldn’t get that combination anywhere else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/9/cheeseburger/ Sat, 09 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/9/overhearing-tokyo/ There’s a version of Tokyo that exists in your head before you go there—the neon, the packed trains, the vending machines. It’s the Tokyo everyone already knows. Finding someone who can actually talk about the real city, the one beneath that, takes work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/9/overhearing-tokyo/ Sat, 09 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/9/ricky-dietz/ 2009 was Peter Fox’s year. “Alles neu” came out, then “Haus am See” and “Schwarz zu blau” from “Stadtaffe,” and he basically proved you could make something genuinely interesting happen in Berlin around R&B and Dancehall and Afrobeat. Never softened it, never played it safe. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/9/ricky-dietz/ Sat, 09 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/8/the-exhaustion-of-okayness/ Be Charlotte is 21 and Scottish and has figured something out that most people spend decades chasing. Her song “Do Not Disturb” lives in this weird pocket where it’s utterly danceable but also deeply about something else—the need to disappear into yourself for a minute, to stop performing okayness and just exist. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/8/the-exhaustion-of-okayness/ Fri, 08 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/8/when-south-park-got-tired/ I spent way too much time watching South Park when it was actually good. Just sitting there, letting it do its thing, episode after episode. It felt like the only show that wasn’t lying to you. Everything else was so careful, so worried about offending someone, and South Park just didn’t care. Trey Parker and Matt Stone had figured out how to be nasty and brilliant at the same time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/8/when-south-park-got-tired/ Fri, 08 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/8/1a/ I’m always here for music videos shot in Tokyo. Something about that city—the density, the saturation, the way neon cuts through crowds—it becomes a visual argument on its own. The Killers and Shawn Mendes figured that out. So has Alexa Feser, moving through Shibuya and Harajuku with purpose. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/8/1a/ Fri, 08 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/8/when-they-drifted/ Late night, glass of wine, scrolling through Facebook. Checking in on old friends. What are they up to? Married? Kids? But it’s never just normal updates anymore. Your feed fills with right-wing slogans, immigrant-bashing memes, conspiracy theories about refugees. People you actually liked, now drowning in hate and desperation and whatever lies they’ve bought into. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/8/when-they-drifted/ Fri, 08 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/8/still-one/ In the UK, one female artist made the top 10 albums last year. Dua Lipa. You see it everywhere: Ariana Grande as the sole woman in the most-streamed artists, Helene Fischer as the only female voice in Germany’s charts. The pattern’s so consistent it’s almost funny. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/8/still-one/ Fri, 08 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/8/so-am-i/ Listening to “So Am I” the first time, what got me was the production, but what stuck was the idea underneath it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/8/so-am-i/ Fri, 08 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/8/unbothered/ Rachel Green’s nipples were always visible on Friends. I watched that show constantly as a teenager and spent a lot of those hours just looking at them, wondering if anyone else was seeing what I was seeing, if this was even allowed on network television. Jennifer Aniston never performed surprise or modesty about it. They were just there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/8/unbothered/ Fri, 08 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/8/seoul-at-ground-level/ I went to Seoul because everyone else was going. K-pop, the dramas, the whole cultural machinery had made South Korea impossible to ignore. But the version of the city I found on the ground was quieter than the export suggested. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/8/seoul-at-ground-level/ Fri, 08 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/7/cute-without-apology/ I have a genuine soft spot for Hello Kitty and her entire cast. Marumofubiyori, this pudgy white bear who won’t go anywhere without his blanket. Kirimichan, somehow charming despite having a fish for a head. Aggretsuko, the shy panda who screams death metal in karaoke bars when life gets to her. The whole roster is weirdly endearing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/7/cute-without-apology/ Thu, 07 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/7/gold-peanut-butter/ Cashmere toilet paper. Golden peanut butter. A seven-meter inflatable slide. Snoop Dogg decided these needed to exist and decided he’d be the one to make them. I respect that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/7/gold-peanut-butter/ Thu, 07 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/7/always-another-one/ Every couple of years another app appears promising to fix everything. Wunderlist, Evernote, Bear, Fantastical, Slack—they bloom in everyone’s dock, promise to end the chaos, then quietly disappear. I kept seeing Notion everywhere last year, always at the front of people’s folders, and there’s something touching about how much hope we keep investing in the next one. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/7/always-another-one/ Thu, 07 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/7/the-most-honest-relationship/ Love and Producer is a dating sim that took off in China. The setup: you’re hired to rescue a failing TV show, and suddenly you’ve got four superhero boyfriends competing for your attention. They have superpowers—one can fly, one can rewind time—and they love you if you pay them enough money. Purple diamonds. Real dollars. More cash, more affection. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/7/the-most-honest-relationship/ Thu, 07 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/7/back-to-tristram/ Diablo’s back on GOG now, which means I can actually play it again. The original 1997 version, the one that essentially created the action RPG template that everything else followed. You don’t need me to explain what Diablo is if you were there, and if you weren’t, the bones are simple: the world is being consumed by evil, and you walk into the darkness to stop it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/7/back-to-tristram/ Thu, 07 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/7/rothbarts-girls/ I’ve always appreciated artists who draw girls with actual agency and strength—not the decorative fantasy version, but characters with their own thing going on. Kirsten Rothbart does that. There’s no apology in her work, no softening of the edges to make feminism easier to swallow. These aren’t drawn for the male gaze or for empowerment™ marketing. Just drawn straight, with the kind of confidence that comes from knowing exactly what you’re making. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/7/rothbarts-girls/ Thu, 07 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/7/the-eighties-never-left/ I don’t know why Fulale’s album covers work, but they do. This Melbourne artist took Drake, Rihanna, Kendrick Lamar, Taylor Swift, all the contemporary names, and dressed them in 80s packaging—the specific kind of neon and chrome and leather that only that decade managed. The covers don’t look ridiculous. They look like they should have existed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/7/the-eighties-never-left/ Thu, 07 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/7/when-weirdness-works/ Late 2018, a German-Japanese trio wound up performing across Tokyo—high-rises, theaters, TV studios the size of a shoebox. Yuka Otsuki on vocals from the Japanese side, Matthias Erhard and Dominik Scherer from Germany, and someone decided to bring inflatable pandas, enormous plush toys, latex figures, whatever would fit through a venue door. I don’t understand the appeal of literal inflation as aesthetic, but the absurdity matched the music perfectly. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/7/when-weirdness-works/ Thu, 07 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/7/the-labo-gamble/ I don’t remember much about the Virtual Boy. Red plastic, black screen, you held it up to your face like binoculars. 1995. It gave people headaches and lasted about as long as you’d expect something that stupid to last. Nintendo’s trying VR again now, decades later, but this time with cardboard. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/7/the-labo-gamble/ Thu, 07 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/6/the-kill-switch/ The EU voted yes on Article 13 while Germany’s own coalition government had literally written into their contract that upload filters were unacceptable. Axel Voss, CDU, submitted them anyway. Which revealed everything about who actually controls the internet when money’s on the line. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/6/the-kill-switch/ Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/6/the-model-that-never-leaves/ So I saw this campaign from Ellesse that uses a completely fake model. Not like, heavily edited fake—completely digital. Her name is Shudu. She was created by this photographer named Cameron-James Wilson who apparently decided at some point that working with actual human beings wasn’t worth the trouble anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/6/the-model-that-never-leaves/ Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/6/rape-day/ Some developer released a visual novel called Rape Day. The game is exactly what the title suggests: you click through images as a psychopath in a zombie apocalypse, making decisions about which women to assault and kill. It lasted about five minutes on Steam before getting removed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/6/rape-day/ Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/6/peanuts-in-denim/ I’ve watched the Peanuts Christmas special probably fifty times, and I’ll watch it fifty more. The newer 3D movie is fine, but nothing beats the original. I’ll grab a Peanuts comic wherever I find one—train stations, random kiosks, wherever—because you never know when you want to spend an hour in Charlie Brown’s world. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/6/peanuts-in-denim/ Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/6/still-keeping-time/ I’ve seen those Casio digital watches on so many wrists over the years. Silver, minimal, the kind that turns up on bartenders and night-shift people and anyone who doesn’t think much about accessories. My friend Clara’s had the same one for probably a decade. The Japanese company made their first digital watches in 1974, and by the 90s they were everywhere—the kind of thing that becomes invisible and then, inevitably, cool again. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/6/still-keeping-time/ Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/6/older-women/ When I was thirteen or fourteen I was completely hung up on my friend Betty’s mom. Her name was Karin, though I had to call her Mrs. Ziegler because that’s what you did. She had long black hair, this sharp face, full lips, big breasts, pale blue eyes—and I couldn’t look at her without this weird collision of desire and envy just running through me. At night I’d lie in bed and daydream about the three of us together—me, Betty, her—going on vacation, lying under palm trees on some beach, all tangled up. Completely ridiculous. Nothing was ever going to happen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/6/older-women/ Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/6/alone-doesnt-work/ SXTN was a Berlin duo that made songs about their actual lives. Parties, late nights, the city, whatever was happening. Juju and Nura had this thing where every song felt real—crude when it needed to be, funny, sometimes thoughtful, but always honest. They were the voice of this generation living for right now, not thinking about what comes next. Watching them perform, that energy was something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/6/alone-doesnt-work/ Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/6/finding-edo/ You step out of Shibuya into the chaos—neon, glass towers, advertisements blinking through colors that shouldn’t exist, the future arriving in real time. Two blocks in the right direction and you’re somewhere else. Forest. Temple. Something quiet that’s been there for centuries. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/6/finding-edo/ Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/5/the-last-season/ Game of Thrones spent eight years breaking things you thought were fixed. Kings you thought were safe. Children. Entire plotlines that seemed central to the story. The Red Wedding was the moment I understood the show wasn’t going to bargain with me about what I wanted to feel. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/5/the-last-season/ Tue, 05 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/5/licht/ “My dad wasn’t there, so the judge showed up instead”—Bausa opens his new track “Licht” with that line, no setup, just the weight of it. He’s talking about Saarbrücken, his childhood without a father, how the system filled that gap. You hear it in his voice because he isn’t performing; he’s just saying it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/5/licht/ Tue, 05 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/1/bling-bling/ “Von Party zu Party” wasn’t a metaphor. SXTN lived that life. Juju and Nura rapped about their actual days in Berlin—parties that turned into mornings, döner stands, the kind of chaos you don’t think about in the moment. The songs were crude and honest and sometimes funny. They sounded like actual people talking about their lives, not a performance of it. For a few years they were the sound of something real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/1/bling-bling/ Fri, 01 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/1/the-machinery/ YouTube’s automated filters were already pulling videos of documented war crimes because IS flags appeared in the footage. Not the propaganda itself—just footage showing what was happening. The machine saw the symbol and said no. This was already happening in 2019 with filters companies installed voluntarily. Article 13 would make it mandatory for basically every platform that hosted user content. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/3/1/the-machinery/ Fri, 01 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/28/battle-angel-alita/ There’s this moment in the manga where Alita figures out her body was engineered for violence. That’s when the real story begins—not when she’s given a name or a purpose, but when she discovers what she actually is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/28/battle-angel-alita/ Thu, 28 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/28/still-about-the-bounce/ I remember being at a friend’s place when someone put Dead or Alive into the PlayStation, and nobody pretended we were there for the fighting system. Tekken did that better anyway. We were there for the physics—specifically how the female fighters’ bodies moved. It was crude and obvious, and Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball pushed that even further, making the entire game about buying gifts for half-naked women at the pool. That was the franchise’s whole identity for a long time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/28/still-about-the-bounce/ Thu, 28 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/28/dick-pics-framed/ A German creative agency called Herr Fuchs decided to make a photo book out of unsolicited dick pics. Collect them, print them, bind them. There’s your object. The premise only works if enough men are actually doing this, which they obviously are. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/28/dick-pics-framed/ Thu, 28 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/28/girl-gang/ You see it everywhere—friends in basically the same outfit. Same cut, same vibe, never actually coordinated, just two or three people who spend enough time together that they’ve somehow started looking like the same person in different bodies. It’s genuinely cool. No fashion magazine choreography, just taste converging because you actually like each other. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/28/girl-gang/ Thu, 28 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/28/what-stays/ Masha Sedgwick talks about finding out she was pregnant at twenty. It’s 2010, she’s a student, working whatever job pays, and her relationship is already falling apart. She describes looking at the test, watching the second line appear, and feeling something like dread move through her. All of it screaming no. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/28/what-stays/ Thu, 28 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/27/a-little-spark/ I was a serious Pokémon kid. Blue Version—I memorized everything. Every monster, every move, every secret and glitch. I must have beaten it a hundred times trying to build the perfect team, and by the end I had this absurd roster: Charizard, Mewtwo, Articuno, Dragonite, Zapdos, and another Mewtwo. Untouchable. Then I saw a Pokémon that looked like a keychain and thought, okay, I’m done. I was done after Crystal Edition anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/27/a-little-spark/ Wed, 27 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/27/supreme-and-the-art-of-the-overhyped-brand/ A friend of mine is basically a Supreme completist. Not just the obvious stuff—hoodies, decks, tees—but everything: bags, pens, belts, the random collaborations that don’t make much sense. Basketballs with a box logo. Coffee cups. Key chains. At a certain point it stops being fandom and becomes documentation. I get it in the abstract. The brand has this weird gravity in streetwear that makes people buy things they don’t need just to own the thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/27/supreme-and-the-art-of-the-overhyped-brand/ Wed, 27 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/27/the-aztrek-again/ Cardi B hit number one with “Bodak Yellow” in 2017, the first solo female rapper to top the chart since Lauryn Hill in 1998. So naturally Reebok dressed her in a ’90s sneaker. The Aztrek ’93 came back, and there’s something perfectly cynical about it: she’s the sound of right now, and they’re pulling her backwards into a dead decade. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/27/the-aztrek-again/ Wed, 27 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/27/good-photographs/ There’s this black-and-white photo of a raccoon by Blake Marvin that’s stuck with me. It’s from Apple’s global iPhone photography competition, and the thing is—it’s genuinely good. Not “good for a phone camera” good. Just good. The raccoon’s caught in the middle of what looks like a heist, eye contact with the photographer, and there’s this perfect composition of the hollow log interior that frames the whole moment. It was shot on an iPhone XS Max, which matters less than the fact that someone saw this and knew how to capture it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/27/good-photographs/ Wed, 27 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/27/when-patterns-mature/ I pulled up the Converse Archive Pack and hit a wall of recognition. Late eighties prints—camo, leopard, zebra stripes, white stars on navy—the kind of thing you’d see on a shelf as a kid and think was either genius or completely unhinged depending on what mood you were in. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/27/when-patterns-mature/ Wed, 27 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/27/what-you-actually-like/ Most people dress like they’re trying not to be noticed. Too much of anything—color, sparkle, personality—and someone might comment. So the clothes become safe. Neutral. Survivable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/27/what-you-actually-like/ Wed, 27 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/27/a-machine-that-worked/ There’s something funny about Dr. George Taylor’s “Manipulator” from 1869—a steam-powered device so enormous the motor had to stay in another room while just the vibrating part poked through the wall like a plumbing accident. Imagine walking into a special medical chamber just to get vibrated by a machine in the next room. But he’d actually figured something out. Switch to electricity, shrink it down, make it portable, and doctors started prescribing the thing for constipation and arthritis. The marketing was brilliant: magazine ads showing women using it on their faces and necks, all technically honest, all completely hiding what the device was actually good for. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/27/a-machine-that-worked/ Wed, 27 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/27/the-krabby-patty/ How many times have you watched SpongeBob and found yourself staring at the Krabby Patty, thinking about how hungry you are? The burger itself isn’t complicated on screen—bun, lettuce, tomato, pickles, some undefined meat paste. But they animate it so it looks good, with that slight shine, that way it sits on the plate. You want it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/27/the-krabby-patty/ Wed, 27 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/26/article-thirteen/ The EU’s been working for years on updating copyright law for the digital age, and they’ve landed on something called Article 13. It’s part of a larger directive updating copyright for the digital marketplace, and at its center is a requirement for online platforms with user-generated content to prevent the spread of unlicensed material through “appropriate and proportionate measures.” In practice, that translates to upload filters—automated systems that scan everything before you post it and kill anything the algorithm suspects might be copyrighted. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/26/article-thirteen/ Tue, 26 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/26/have-fun-in-pyongyang/ The only images of North Korea I’ve ever seen are the ones the government filmed itself: parades where tanks roll endlessly, nuclear tests, synchronized gymnastics where thousands of people form the leader’s face. It’s so relentless and so surreal that the country stops feeling like a place where people actually live. It becomes a permanent broadcast, a loop of propaganda with no frame around it, no life outside the cameras. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/26/have-fun-in-pyongyang/ Tue, 26 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/26/detective-pikachu-looks-good/ I had a really solid Pokémon team back in the day. Mewtwo and Mew, obviously—those were the dream picks. Charizard because I raised it from the start. Articuno for the ice storms. Gyarados because there was still a Magikarp inside it somewhere, and that meant something to me. And Dragonite, because let’s be honest, in a real fight you can’t rely on an Eevee no matter how cute it is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/26/detective-pikachu-looks-good/ Tue, 26 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/26/give-it/ Watched Shirin David’s new video and couldn’t stop watching. “Gib ihm”—give it. She’s giving it, grinding on expensive studio floors in clothes that barely exist, rapping about money and sex and not caring what anyone thinks, which is a funny thing to broadcast if you don’t care, but that’s the whole trick, isn’t it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/26/give-it/ Tue, 26 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/26/unguarded/ There’s something refreshing about finding an Instagram account where someone’s actually just living instead of performing. Lily Mo Sheen—Kate Beckinsale’s daughter—gets it. She posts from beaches, stupid selfies, whatever moment seems worth documenting. No strategy. No carefully managed image. Just someone with enough privilege that she doesn’t have to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/26/unguarded/ Tue, 26 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/26/wir-können-alles-sein/ Started hearing about Namika a few years back—Frankfurt rapper who didn’t sound like she was performing toughness. There’s something in German hip-hop where you’re supposed to prove yourself through street narrative, authenticity, the whole mythology, and she just declined to play it. Instead she had this warmth to her voice, like she actually wanted you in the room with her rather than wanted to warn you to stay out. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/26/wir-können-alles-sein/ Tue, 26 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/26/most-followed/ For a while there, Ariana Grande had the most followers on Instagram. Selena held it before her, but that’s done now. 146 million people watching her stories, her selfies, whatever she posts—the number’s incomprehensibly large, but then again, everything about Instagram is incomprehensible when you actually stop and think about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/26/most-followed/ Tue, 26 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/26/gorillaz-in-print/ Gorillaz have always been a visual project first. Jamie Hewlett’s art defines them as much as Damon Albarn’s music does—the four characters (Noodle, Murdoc, Russel, 2D) are so fully realized, so specific in their weirdness, that you can’t imagine the band without them. It makes sense that Levi’s wanted to do something with that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/26/gorillaz-in-print/ Tue, 26 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/25/empty-sea/ Laura Carbone makes music that shouldn’t work but does. Dark and poppy. Black with light in it. Sad but hopeful. She started as a blogger, then became the frontwoman of Deine Jugend, a punk band she runs with Tim Bonassis, her producer and collaborator. Standard indie trajectory, except she actually followed through. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/25/empty-sea/ Mon, 25 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/25/sole-fury/ The hard part of a good sneaker isn’t the hype—it’s designing something that doesn’t fight with how you dress. Reebok’s Sole Fury gets there without pretending. The silhouette sits quiet, the colors are steady, and it works whether you’re in jeans or something with real structure. No lifestyle story, no creative-pioneer framing. The shoe doesn’t need it. That’s rare enough to notice. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/25/sole-fury/ Mon, 25 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/25/rebecca-reusch/ I remember when her case started circulating through the usual channels—social media, Tumblr reblogs, people sharing her photo with mounting desperation. This was February 2019. Rebecca was fifteen, missing since the morning of the eighteenth, last seen on her way to school in Berlin. She’d been wearing a pink plush jacket, a BTS hoodie, ripped jeans, Vans. The kind of detail that makes her real in a way statistics don’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/25/rebecca-reusch/ Mon, 25 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/25/small-dick-problems/ I stumbled onto the Small Dick Problems subreddit late one night and couldn’t look away. It’s exactly what it sounds like—guys with small penises talking openly about the entire weight of it. How to sleep with someone without the conversation becoming a logistics problem. Whether to warn them first or just let them figure it out. What you can actually do when there isn’t much to work with. One guy asked if expensive pumps really worked. Another said his girlfriend texted jokes about his size to her friends. A third got ghosted after sending a photo and wanted to know what he’d done wrong. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/25/small-dick-problems/ Mon, 25 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/25/romas-year/ The Oscars without a host that year, which somehow felt right. The ceremony had more room to breathe. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/25/romas-year/ Mon, 25 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/25/sailor-moon-on-lsd/ I didn’t want to like “Fast Heroes Sixty” at first. A German anime series? That’s not how these things work. But the show—this chaotic, barely coherent thing about a pizza baker named Pit Block and his friends Croissant and Rino Welka—it’s different. It’s clearly a love letter to 90s anime, maybe a parody, maybe just a tribute to the good old days when anime didn’t care about making sense. When magical schoolgirls in skimpy outfits fighting cosmic evil was enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/25/sailor-moon-on-lsd/ Mon, 25 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/25/faster-than-youth/ I don’t follow sneaker releases that closely anymore, but something about the Ader Error x Puma collaboration pulled me in. They call their design philosophy “Futro”—the space between retro and future—and it could be marketing nonsense, but in their hands it becomes something real. A collection called “Faster Than Youth.” I still have no idea what that means, which I respect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/25/faster-than-youth/ Mon, 25 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/23/zendaya/ I’m a little smitten with Zendaya, if I’m being honest. It probably started with that Taylor Swift “Bad Blood” video—just her presence in that crowd, the way she moved. Something about her felt different from the standard Disney-to-fame kid. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/23/zendaya/ Sat, 23 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/23/shanghai-underground/ Shanghai’s club scene operates below the official narrative. Neon-lined streets, bass pressure from beneath street level, the kind of night-time infrastructure that doesn’t match the daytime. In the clubs you find down there, there’s a different circuit running—attention distributed away from the usual oversight, rules that apply selectively, the machinery of control loosening just enough to let something breathe. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/23/shanghai-underground/ Sat, 23 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/23/everyone-wants-to-be-him/ Lil Pump has decided that everyone wants to be him, and the new video for “Be Like Me” proves it. Retirees, animals, that kid who does celebrity impressions—they all want the dreadlocks, the face tattoos, whatever he’s got. It’s a funny concept, and it works because Pump himself is funny without trying to be. He’s just completely, unselfconsciously himself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/23/everyone-wants-to-be-him/ Sat, 23 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/23/where-it-works/ Met Christine in Munich—she was heavily pregnant, and after Thai food we ended up at Hugendubel. The Japanese literature table was on the top floor. There was Convenience Store Woman, red cover with pufferfish on it. I’d been meaning to read it for a year. On the train home I finished the whole thing between cups of coffee. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/23/where-it-works/ Sat, 23 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/22/just-looking/ Calvin Klein’s campaign is Kendall Jenner, A$AP Rocky, and Shawn Mendes in their underwear, photographed by Glen Luchford. It’s transparent what they’re doing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/22/just-looking/ Fri, 22 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/22/plateau/ Converse and JW Anderson have been putting out some smart sneakers, and this Run Star Hike collaboration is worth paying attention to. The white version comes with a wildly colorful platform sole—like a wedge from some ridiculous 80s shoe, except it actually works. There’s also a glitter version. The whole thing is basically Anderson playing with proportion, taking an icon and breaking it down, stretching some parts and compressing others until it’s something new. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/22/plateau/ Fri, 22 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/22/listen-to-yourself/ You’re drowning in input. Phone, other people, the street—constant noise with no off switch. Tove Lo gets this. She’s the Stockholm artist who makes darker pop about failed love and desire, the kind of songwriting that doesn’t pretend everything’s fine. She thinks about the moments when you actually hear yourself think, when you put headphones on and listen to something that moves you, and everything else finally stops scattering your attention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/22/listen-to-yourself/ Fri, 22 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/22/twenty-six/ Miley showed up in the desert somewhere between Los Angeles and Las Vegas with photographer Ryan McGinley and came out of it mostly naked, which is what she does these days. The Marc Jacobs pieces were there but minimal—stylist Samira Nasrin understood the assignment. There’s a photograph of her next to a bonfire so clean and bright it looks designed, which it probably was, and it’s the kind of image that would have ended her Disney contract the moment it surfaced ten years ago. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/22/twenty-six/ Fri, 22 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/22/bowser-gets-the-keys/ Nintendo’s new president is named Doug Bowser. Not a codename, not a nickname—that’s his actual name. Doug. Bowser. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/22/bowser-gets-the-keys/ Fri, 22 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/22/after-andromeda/ I lived in Mass Effect. All three games, every side quest, every corner of the Citadel and the planets beyond it. The ending was something everyone wanted to rewrite and sure, there were moments that felt like compromise, but I never cared about the arguments. Those games felt real to me in a way most don’t. Then Andromeda happened and it became clear that lightning doesn’t strike the same bottle twice, that whatever alchemy BioWare had found wasn’t going to happen again with that particular formula. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/22/after-andromeda/ Fri, 22 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/22/the-access/ I watched a WDR documentary about clan crime in the Ruhrgebiet, Germany’s industrial heartland. The reporters somehow got access to both sides—embedded with police during raids, also filming inside the family networks. I’m not sure how they made that happen, but there it is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/22/the-access/ Fri, 22 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/21/no-filter/ Everything online is filtered—carefully lit, carefully framed, softened around the edges. Then you see the person in real life and they’re sharper than expected, stranger, more present. That gap between the version you show and the body you actually live in has become so normalized that talking about it feels obvious, except it’s not obvious to experience. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/21/no-filter/ Thu, 21 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/21/designer-athlete/ Gigi Hadid’s got a new fitness collection with Reebok, based on the idea that volleyball, modeling, and design all feed into each other. She’s not wrong—different work teaches you different things. You move through the world as an athlete, you understand proportion as a model, you learn constraints and collaboration as a designer. Each feeds the others. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/21/designer-athlete/ Thu, 21 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/21/youtubes-problem/ Matt Watson posted a 20-minute video in 2019 showing how YouTube’s algorithm and comment sections had become a staging ground for child predators. Five clicks could take you from the homepage to a rabbit hole of videos featuring young girls in gymnastics or dance videos, and from there into comment threads where men posted timestamps of moments children were exposed or in positions they found arousing. These moments got compiled into videos, downloaded, and traded on private sites. No one told the kids this was happening. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/21/youtubes-problem/ Thu, 21 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/21/kitbull/ I could watch Pixar movies all day. Up, Wall-E, Finding Nemo, Toy Story, Brave, Inside Out, Ratatouille, Coco, Cars—doesn’t matter. I’d cry and laugh through every single one. Wall-E falls apart after the first thirty minutes, Up gets worse as it goes, and Cars is basically for kids whose drunk dads force them to watch Formula 1. But Pixar is Pixar. They’ve earned it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/21/kitbull/ Thu, 21 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/21/k-pop-won/ There was a time when Asian pop meant Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z, Ayumi Hamasaki, Hikaru Utada—that was the future sound. Then Korea arrived. Not as a revelation, just as a fact. Somewhere between the 90s and now, the charts rewrote themselves. It’s always Korea. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/21/k-pop-won/ Thu, 21 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/21/ferropolis-again/ Ferropolis announces its lineup every spring, and it’s one of those things I always check because it tells you something about what’s happening in electronic music and performance art. 2019’s list landed recently—Bon Iver, A$AP Rocky, Bilderbuch as the names everyone recognizes, but the rest of it is what actually tells the story. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/21/ferropolis-again/ Thu, 21 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/21/the-fold/ In 2019, Samsung announced a solution to a problem nobody was having. The Galaxy Fold was a foldable phone that cost two thousand euros and was supposed to replace both your phone and your tablet, or solve some internal conflict about which one to carry. The logic was that if you were the kind of person who couldn’t decide between the two, here was the answer: just get both at once, but make it fold. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/21/the-fold/ Thu, 21 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/20/the-internet-keeps-dying/ Every few years some tired coalition of lobbyists and career politicians figures out a new way to break the internet. This time it’s Article 13—a copyright filter that the EU is about to ram through because tech regulation is too hard and industry lawyers speak louder than anyone else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/20/the-internet-keeps-dying/ Wed, 20 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/20/how-they-fall-apart/ Red Chucks, canvas already soft and separating from the rubber sole. That’s the first time I remember actually noticing what shoes someone was wearing. They belonged to a girl I knew—not anyone important, just someone whose taste in things made sense to me even then. I wanted a pair after that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/20/how-they-fall-apart/ Wed, 20 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/20/freckles/ Yeah, I’m into her. Kamila Joanna—29, from Berlin. She originally came from Poland when she was 11, moved with her family and just never left. Loves Berlin for what it is, the openness, the fact that nobody here makes you apologize for existing. She’s got freckles everywhere, the kind that make you stupid. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/20/freckles/ Wed, 20 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/20/i-love-you/ Berlin has a new magazine called I Love You. I like the title—it doesn’t explain itself, just declares what it is. I haven’t read it yet, but that kind of confidence is usually worth paying attention to. Most of the magazines that come out of Berlin disappear within a year or so. I’m curious whether this one will stick. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/20/i-love-you/ Wed, 20 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/20/no-apologies/ The video is moody, intimate—Ariana moving through a space, telling someone they should just break up with their girlfriend already because she’s bored and wants them. That’s the whole song. No metaphor, no apology, no dressing it up in feelings. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/20/no-apologies/ Wed, 20 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/20/renting-friends/ Japan has a rental friend service called Family Romance. Pay them, they send someone to your event who’ll smile at your jokes and act interested, and the founder Yuichi Ishii guarantees at least 100 Instagram likes. It’s the most honest thing I’ve heard from a service that’s technically not about dating at all. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/20/renting-friends/ Wed, 20 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/20/a-record-store-in-oakland/ I still collect files like some people collect vinyl—MP3s, AACs, FLACs stacked across external drives. Japanese city pop from the 80s, video game soundtracks nobody else remembers, anime music from shows maybe twelve people ever watched. Stuff that lives nowhere else because the rights are tangled or the market was always too small. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/20/a-record-store-in-oakland/ Wed, 20 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/19/the-thotiana-truce/ I remember this South Park episode where Jimmy and Timmy discover the Crips and want to join, but the Bloods show up and start executing half the gang, and then someone tries to broker peace in a gymnasium. Watching Blueface’s “Thotiana Remix” video, I thought about that episode because he somehow pulled off what the cartoon kids couldn’t—got actual Bloods and Crips in the same shot. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/19/the-thotiana-truce/ Tue, 19 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/19/karl-lagerfeld-is-dead/ Karl Lagerfeld is dead. That shouldn’t require explanation. But it does. Everyone knows what it means—a man people called arrogant and brilliant and ruthless and visionary, hated and loved simultaneously. He didn’t apologize or explain himself. I think he was exactly what he claimed to be: an icon, a thinker, someone who reshaped how the world looked through pure force of will. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/19/karl-lagerfeld-is-dead/ Tue, 19 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/19/the-sleek-in-five/ The Sleek is the kind of shoe that works because it doesn’t ask permission. Clean leather. Perforated three stripes. A window for the logo. Colored sole. Adidas kept the silhouette and changed the color—five times. Pink and red, white and yellow, white and pink, pale blue, black leather. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/19/the-sleek-in-five/ Tue, 19 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/19/following-nobody/ I remember scrolling through this Tokyo street-style account and getting caught. The girl had pink hair, Harajuku fashion sense, perfect proportions, shots from all the right places. The kind of Instagram that made you feel behind on your taste level. Then something nagged at me—the skin too smooth, the light always falling the same way, the proportions just slightly too ideal. This wasn’t a very good Photoshopped account. This was CGI. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/19/following-nobody/ Tue, 19 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/19/one-foot-out/ Maisie Peters was eighteen when she decided to make music her actual life and moved to London. Summer 2018: she was in studios every day while her friends were home doing normal eighteen-year-old things. “Stay Young” is what she made from that distance—a song about the moment you realize you’re already changing, becoming someone new, even as you’re promising your old friends nothing will. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/19/one-foot-out/ Tue, 19 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/19/making-mario/ I spent weekends as a kid sitting in front of my Super Nintendo, daydreaming about designing my own Super Mario World levels. A ghost house full of red Yoshis. An underwater level with Koopas everywhere. A forest of doors, each hiding some impossible puzzle. I’d grin to myself, knowing that someday I’d actually build all this. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/19/making-mario/ Tue, 19 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/19/the-nineties-were-bright/ The thing about the nineties is how much was allowed to exist at the same time. The eighties had their dark glamour and bad hair, the two thousands became this beige nightmare of minimalism and taupe everything, but the nineties? Anything went. Fluorescent, clashing, maximalist, sincere, ironic, earnest—it was all acceptable. You could be terrible and it didn’t matter because everyone was terrible in a different way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/19/the-nineties-were-bright/ Tue, 19 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/19/legion/ What grabbed me about Astral Chain wasn’t the premise—it was the creative lineup. Masakazu Katsura handled the character design. He did Zetman and Video Girl Ai, both with this gorgeous kinetic energy that just moves on the page. Takahisa Taura is directing, and he came up as a game designer on NieR: Automata. Hideki Kamiya, who created Bayonetta, is involved. That’s a specific enough combination that the game stops feeling like a generic cyberpunk announcement and starts feeling like a genuine creative vision. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/19/legion/ Tue, 19 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/18/links-awakening/ I tell people A Link to the Past is my favorite Zelda game because the Super Nintendo is objectively the best console ever made and there’s no argument. But in those late-night honest moments, alone with myself, I’ll admit that Majora’s Mask and Link’s Awakening sit deeper in my actual heart. The first for how dark and strange it gets. The second because it’s such a perfect, tight little game—every stone placed right, every flower, every enemy exactly where it needs to be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/18/links-awakening/ Mon, 18 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/18/still-thinking/ Robyn spent eight years away and I didn’t realize how much I’d been waiting for her until she came back. “Honey” last October didn’t feel like a comeback—it felt like someone picking up mid-conversation. “Missing U,” “Because It’s in the Music,” the new video for “Send to Robin Immediately”—all of it confident in a way that reboots usually aren’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/18/still-thinking/ Mon, 18 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/18/radio-energy-naked/ I knew they were doing Playboy before I saw it. Radio Energy—those voices everywhere across Germany, same women in different markets. Julia, Natali, Daniela, Elisa, Janine. Suddenly nude in the magazine, March 2019. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/18/radio-energy-naked/ Mon, 18 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/18/mtv-isnt-dead/ MTV still exists. Barely. No music videos—the internet took care of that. I won’t watch what they broadcast now. Everything was better. The logo’s gone forever. I’d resurrect the whole channel if it meant eternal Daria reruns. The M doesn’t stand for my name. Dumping it to pay-TV was inexcusable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/18/mtv-isnt-dead/ Mon, 18 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/18/cardi-and-bruno/ Watching two people with genuine star power actually look like they’re having fun together in a video hits different. No pretense, no manufactured tension, just Cardi being Cardi and Bruno doing that thing where he seems to be in on a joke only he knows. The flirting works because neither of them is trying too hard—it’s easy, the way it should be. You can feel the chemistry, but more than that, you get the sense they’re actually enjoying the moment, not performing enjoyment for a paycheck. That’s rarer than it should be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/18/cardi-and-bruno/ Mon, 18 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/18/selena-posted-that/ She posted photos from the beach with her friends, and she was just there—in a white bikini, nothing retouched, no sucking in. Her stomach showed. No big deal, except it kind of was. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/18/selena-posted-that/ Mon, 18 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/18/nothing-in-common/ Nothing connects Avril Lavigne and Nicki Minaj except they’re both massive in pop music, which barely counts as a connection. Avril came through rejecting the idea that female pop stars had to be perfect. Nicki came through and said perfect was boring—she’d be weird and in total control. Different eras, different everything. I think about them together anyway because they both refused the script. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/18/nothing-in-common/ Mon, 18 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/3/marshmello-in-pleasant-park/ Marshmello performed a concert in Fortnite, ten minutes in Pleasant Park with cartoon characters bouncing around him. It was what you’d expect—bright, chaotic, a thing to witness once and forget. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/3/marshmello-in-pleasant-park/ Sun, 03 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/3/hard-white/ In Hard White, Nicki trades her usual color explosion for monochrome and darkness, styles herself as some underworld queen. It’s the kind of move that could feel like obvious parody in anyone else’s hands. But she commits completely, and that commitment is what makes it work. You watch and believe she’s running whatever dark space the video builds because she’s always been good at making you believe she’s in control. Aesthetic shift, sure, but the fundamentals stay the same. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/3/hard-white/ Sun, 03 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/2/have-you-seen-her/ I wasn’t expecting much from “When I Die” until it started. No intro, no hook—just Alma’s voice saying the title plainly. That’s her whole approach. No managed entry point, no consideration of whether you’re ready. Just the thing itself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/2/have-you-seen-her/ Sat, 02 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/2/kill-the-wall/ Shangguan Zhe runs Sankuanz under a concept he calls “Kill the Wall”—which shows up in everything: fragments of contemporary art mixed into vintage sportswear, uniform aesthetics made strange, visual language that doesn’t respect clean boundaries. He treats streetwear like actual art rather than product, pulling from subcultures and following a real grammar: oversized midsoles that look almost deliberately clumsy, earth tones interrupted by neon, 90s shoe shapes rebuilt at new scale. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/2/kill-the-wall/ Sat, 02 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/1/drew-house/ Drew House is Justin Bieber’s streetwear brand, and it’s beige and maroon and navy—colors that exist but barely register when you look at them. T-shirts for sixty bucks, hoodies for more, a smiley face logo that looks like he spent maybe an afternoon on it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/1/drew-house/ Fri, 01 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/1/sushi-god/ Raw salmon, sashimi, the whole thing—I could eat nothing but sushi for the rest of my life. The texture of it on my tongue, perfectly steamed rice, a soy sauce thick enough to actually taste. I’d do it for breakfast, lunch, dinner, every meal, until food poisoning or some ocean parasite took me out. And I wouldn’t even care. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/1/sushi-god/ Fri, 01 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/1/rings/ She sings about buying herself expensive things. No tragedy narrative, no redemption arc, just a woman who’s been through hell saying I’m going to buy myself rings and not explain why. That’s the whole song—Ariana on “7 Rings,” the 2 Chainz remix. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/1/rings/ Fri, 01 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/1/the-l-words-coming-back/ I watched “The L Word” in a very particular state of mind for a long time. These women on screen—Shane with her perfect hair, Dana caught between everything, Alice sharp and impossible—didn’t need to do anything special for it to register. The show let you look at them without shame, without irony, without the usual defenses. It was disarming. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/2/1/the-l-words-coming-back/ Fri, 01 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/31/at-ease/ Simon Bolz, the photographer, said something pretty straightforward in his caption about Marie: she’s “such a positive and open young woman” and “extremely photogenic.” Looking at the photos, you can see it immediately. She looks comfortable. Not like someone performing comfort or playing a part – just actually there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/31/at-ease/ Thu, 31 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/31/already-decided/ The video for “Bury a Friend” unsettled me in a way I hadn’t expected. Michael Chaves directed it, and it doesn’t try to be disturbing so much as sit with genuine unease. Billie Eilish was seventeen, working with her brother Finneas on production, and they moved together in the mix like they’d already done this a hundred times. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/31/already-decided/ Thu, 31 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/31/the-hundred/ Game Two hit 100 episodes. The show’s been going since MTV killed Game One a couple years back, which means Budi, Simon, Etienne, Nils, and whoever else shows up has somehow managed to keep talking about video games on German public television without anyone pulling the plug. They’re good at it—they know how to actually engage with games instead of just reporting on them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/31/the-hundred/ Thu, 31 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/31/get-schwifty/ I’ve been missing Rick & Morty in a way that’s starting to feel pathological. Three full seasons of a drunk inventor and his anxious teenage grandson careening through infinite universes—each episode crammed with casual brutality and jokes that land harder because they never announce themselves. It’s the best thing animated television has managed, at least if you care about that sort of thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/31/get-schwifty/ Thu, 31 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/30/kingdom-hearts-3/ There’s something almost defiant about Kingdom Hearts as a series—the idea that you can smash Disney and Final Fantasy together, throw in a teenager with a giant key for a sword, add mythology about light and darkness and hearts, and somehow make it all land. It shouldn’t work. It keeps working. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/30/kingdom-hearts-3/ Wed, 30 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/30/cell-memory/ Puma’s got a shoe called the Cell Viper, and it’s based on Cell technology from 1998. Hexagonal cells in the midsole that were genuinely innovative at the time—not marketing, actual engineering. The shoe responded better, cushioned better. If you were paying attention, you could feel the difference. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/30/cell-memory/ Wed, 30 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/30/dead-mans-canvas/ I’ve never been sure what kind of horror fan I am. Splatter stuff, all gore and screaming? Or those so-badly-made films where the cheap effects become weirdly comforting? Or real thrillers that actually burrow into your skull? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/30/dead-mans-canvas/ Wed, 30 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/30/another-eden/ I’ve loaded Chrono Trigger maybe five times since the ’90s, never finished it the same way twice. The branching endings meant you could always convince yourself there was more to see, another route through Zeal or another conversation at the End of Time. Masato Kato and Yasunori Mitsuda made something that felt inexhaustible. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/30/another-eden/ Wed, 30 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/30/rihanna-gets-it/ I spent years watching YouTube beauty vloggers with zero taste. They’d grab whatever was cheapest at the drugstore, film themselves in their bedrooms, and paint their faces like they’d never seen a mirror. Bibi, Daaruum, Dagi Bee—I watched them. I even bought their shit. Not my finest moment, but yeah. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/30/rihanna-gets-it/ Wed, 30 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/30/in-it-for-the-hearts/ Converse is selling sneakers with hearts on them for Valentine’s Day. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/30/in-it-for-the-hearts/ Wed, 30 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/30/toxins-and-toys/ Five out of eighteen sex toys tested by Stiftung Warentest failed because they’re loaded with actual poison. DEHP, which damages fertility. Phenol, which might cause genetic defects. Nickel, which triggers allergies. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are possibly carcinogenic. The other thirteen mostly passed, which is something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/30/toxins-and-toys/ Wed, 30 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/29/that-grip/ Jonas Dassler plays Fritz Honka hunched and desperate, watching women in bars with the intensity of someone who will never be wanted. Fatih Akin’s film doesn’t romanticize him or apologize for depicting him—it just watches, patient and exact. Honka was a real killer in Hamburg, the 1970s, murdering prostitutes and keeping what was left in his apartment while neighbors complained about the smell. The film doesn’t turn that into spectacle. It makes it banal, which is worse. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/29/that-grip/ Tue, 29 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/29/the-continental-80/ Adidas brought back the Continental 80 in new colorways recently, and I found myself paying attention in a way I don’t usually about shoes. There’s something honest about a trainer that doesn’t try to be anything other than what it is—a court shoe from the 80s with good leather, a stripe, and a two-part cup sole. Nothing trying too hard, nothing overcomplicated. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/29/the-continental-80/ Tue, 29 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/29/ken-park-still/ Ken Park showed up in 2002 with this brutal clarity that stuck with people. Larry Clark, Edward Lachman, and Harmony Korine made a follow-up to Kids that felt like a much more vicious film—quieter in some ways, more aware of itself. It’s about four teenagers in the dead space between LA and Fresno, all of them just existing in this vacuum. The opening is a suicide. There’s incest, religious dysfunction, murder, all treated with this flat documentary eye. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/29/ken-park-still/ Tue, 29 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/29/pocket-monsters-again/ I was genuinely obsessed with Pokémon Blue when I was younger. Knew every monster, every move, every hidden corner. Beat it something like a hundred times just trying to build the perfect team—Charizard, Mew, Articuno, Dragonite, Zapdos, Mewtwo—all so ridiculously overpowered that the whole game became almost trivial after the first playthrough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/29/pocket-monsters-again/ Tue, 29 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/29/dancing-on-ice/ Sat.1 had this show where celebrities learn to skate with professionals. I don’t know why I started watching—it’s a stupid premise—but something about watching someone fall and get back up over weeks of practice is weirdly compelling. On ice, you can’t fake progress. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/29/dancing-on-ice/ Tue, 29 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/29/add-yourself/ Someone found a bug in FaceTime group calls. You’d start a call and swipe up to add another person, but instead of entering their number you’d add your own. Now you’re listening in on the other person’s call without them knowing. Video works too. Just like that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/29/add-yourself/ Tue, 29 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/29/skeleton-music/ I found them through Spotify, one of those recommendation rabbit holes where you’re clicking around in playlists from people you actually trust for taste. Dahlia Sleeps—Luke Hester producing, Lucy Hill singing, a London band that’s been building quietly for a while now. The sound is skeletal: minimal electronics, reverb-heavy, but never woozy. Lucy’s voice is surprisingly warm against it, soulful in a way that catches you off guard. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/29/skeleton-music/ Tue, 29 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/29/cool-for-rent/ That new Puma Cali in purple is sitting in my head. The shoe itself is fine—tennis court design from the 80s, perforations and a chunky sole, nothing that’s going to change your life. But it works. There’s no apology in it, no self-consciousness about being retro. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/29/cool-for-rent/ Tue, 29 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/28/skeleton-key/ There’s a skeleton on Instagram living a better life than me. @OMGLiterallyDead. Just bones in streetwear, going to clubs, taking selfies. No apology, no self-consciousness, just a complete absence of flesh participating fully in the Instagram ecosystem. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/28/skeleton-key/ Mon, 28 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/28/experience-overrated/ Dana messages me occasionally with a show she swears will change my life. Her taste is genuinely scary—ignore one of her recommendations and you fall out of touch with what’s actually happening in culture. So when she texted about Sex Education, I didn’t protest. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/28/experience-overrated/ Mon, 28 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/28/where-she-belongs/ I discovered Asian Doll through one of those algorithmic turns that actually landed something worthwhile. Misharron Allen—that’s her real name—was born in Dallas in 1996, which means she grew up watching southern hip-hop crystallize into its most potent form. When she started rapping, trap music wasn’t experimental anymore; it was the language everyone was speaking. The fact that she got signed to Gucci Mane’s 1017 Records label is significant because Gucci doesn’t collect people. He recognizes them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/28/where-she-belongs/ Mon, 28 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/28/swastikas-and-flowers/ BNK48, the Thai sister group of the Japanese idol factory AKB48, showed up to rehearsal in swastika T-shirts. Arms raised. Someone filmed it. It went everywhere. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/28/swastikas-and-flowers/ Mon, 28 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/28/manga-at-three-am/ I used to hunt for manga in actual shops. There was something ritualistic about it—the cramped aisles, the smell, picking up volumes at random and reading the first few pages to decide if they were worth buying. Most of those shops are gone now. The ones that survive are expensive and thin, their stock picked over years ago. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/28/manga-at-three-am/ Mon, 28 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/28/proof-of-love/ Someone in Berlin is handing out keys to U-Bahn stations. Not the transit authority. The homeless. That’s the move. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/28/proof-of-love/ Mon, 28 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/28/fewer-students-more-promises/ Around the same time the German government promised to fix BAföG—that post-war commitment to fund education for anyone who needed it—fewer students could actually access it. That paradox is the whole thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/28/fewer-students-more-promises/ Mon, 28 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/28/price-tag/ So this Berlin clothing brand made t-shirts where the price tag is the entire design. Plain white shirt, price printed on the chest in yellow—20 euros, 600 euros, whatever you paid. They call the collection Statussymbol and they’re selling it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/28/price-tag/ Mon, 28 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/26/underpowered/ The Resident Evil 2 remake opens with Leon and Claire arriving in Raccoon City just as the Umbrella Corporation’s experiments escape containment. Mutated creatures, zombies, the full catastrophe. I watched someone play through it, which turned out to be the best way to experience it—you’re helpless, you see what they’re about to run into, you can’t do anything but react, which is exactly what the game is designed for. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/26/underpowered/ Sat, 26 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/26/harajuku-in-december/ Walking through Harajuku in December, I noticed something: the cold that would send people back home into black sweaters and earth tones just seemed to unlock more color here. There’s this moment in most places where winter arrives and everyone agrees, wordlessly, that it’s time to dress like grief. Japan wasn’t playing that game. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/26/harajuku-in-december/ Sat, 26 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/26/wargroove/ Wargroove is what Chucklefish made when they decided to do a tactics game. If you’ve played anything else from them—Starbound, Stardew Valley, Risk of Rain—you know they have solid instincts about what makes a game work. This one’s no different. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/26/wargroove/ Sat, 26 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/26/lauren-solo/ Fifth Harmony happened, and it was massive—“Worth It,” “Work From Home,” the usual manufactured-pop machine but executed well enough that people didn’t mind. Lauren Jauregui left the group, which is what happens in groups eventually. In October 2018, she put out “Expectations,” a solo single that sounded nothing like Fifth Harmony: quieter, weird, actually produced instead of just arranged. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/26/lauren-solo/ Sat, 26 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/25/certainty/ I watched this VICE documentary called “The Young Black Conservatives of Trump’s America,” and I kept running into the same wall: these people were real, they were serious, and I didn’t understand them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/25/certainty/ Fri, 25 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/25/the-broken-academy/ A billionaire industrialist ends up with seven children born mysteriously on the same day to unconnected mothers around the world. He builds them into a superhero team called The Umbrella Academy. By their teens, it all falls apart. Decades later, the surviving six have to reunite as adults in their thirties—Luther, Diego, Allison, Klaus, Vanya, Number Five—when their adoptive father dies. But the investigation gets immediately derailed because they can’t stand each other and also the world is ending. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/25/the-broken-academy/ Fri, 25 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/25/face-swap/ There’s a Futurama episode where civilization nearly collapses because everyone’s too busy fucking robot versions of celebrities to have children. Fry gets so wrapped up in the Lucy Liu model that it nearly ends humanity. It worked as a joke because the idea seemed impossible—who’d actually choose a machine? But you watch it now and know exactly who would, and know there’s nothing stopping them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/25/face-swap/ Fri, 25 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/25/back-to-denim/ Denim sits in this strange cultural middle ground. It’s the most basic thing—workwear, no pretense, something you wear because it works. But it’s also been handled so much by fashion that just wearing it straight feels deliberate now, almost like a statement. Either you’re someone who doesn’t think about clothes, or you’re someone who’s decided to commit to what denim means. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/25/back-to-denim/ Fri, 25 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/25/brightness-all-the-way-down/ There’s something about Kero Kero Bonito that makes you remember why you ever liked pop music in the first place. They’re three people from London—Sarah Bonito, Gus Lobban, Jamie Bulled—and they sound like they imported their entire musical education from Japanese pop and synthpop instead of the usual places. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/25/brightness-all-the-way-down/ Fri, 25 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/24/swan-song/ You don’t expect James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez to make a manga adaptation and have it actually work. Alita: Battle Angel exists in this space where everything about it should fail - live-action anime, CGI cyborg protagonist, dystopian cyberpunk, self-discovery plot - but it’s actually good. Rosa Salazar plays Alita, a cyborg who wakes up in Iron City with no memory, trying to figure out who she is while people try to use her combat skills. It’s the kind of film that could’ve been soulless and instead is just genuinely solid. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/24/swan-song/ Thu, 24 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/24/vaping-makes-you-unfuckable/ There’s this fake government PSA floating around about vaping that just kills me. It’s got this serious deadpan warning that e-cigarettes reduce your attractiveness by sixty percent. Not your lung function. Not your wallet. Your sex appeal. The consequences are loneliness, isolation, and sexual frustration. It’s obviously a comedy bit from some German sketch group, but the execution is perfect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/24/vaping-makes-you-unfuckable/ Thu, 24 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/24/rosalía-arrives/ Spanish music, when you think about it, is mostly garbage. Tourist dreck made by people who stopped caring years ago, just loud enough and exotic enough to get drunk Mallorca vacationers swinging their excess around on the dance floor. Then Rosalía showed up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/24/rosalía-arrives/ Thu, 24 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/23/the-long-game/ Yuni Ahn took the creative director job at Maison Kitsuné and showed up to Paris Fashion Week with a collection in beige, saffron, and dark blue. Not exactly a provocation. The clothes sat somewhere between conservative streetwear and sixties office wear—sharp, minimal, built to last. She wasn’t interested in excitement, which made her interesting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/23/the-long-game/ Wed, 23 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/23/the-berghain-morning/ There’s a moment around five in the morning when people start leaving the clubs. You can see it on them—they’ve been somewhere else. Their clothes are damp, they blink hard when the sun hits them, and their eyes haven’t caught up yet. They’re crossing back into the city like it’s a different world. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/23/the-berghain-morning/ Wed, 23 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/23/the-whole-world/ The show was in a karaoke bar. Not a gallery, not a ballroom—an actual karaoke bar near Alexanderplatz with the TV tower in view. You can’t signal venue choice more clearly than that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/23/the-whole-world/ Wed, 23 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/21/buy-the-rings/ “7 Rings” is one of those songs that’s everywhere and I can’t resent it. The production is candy-bright, Ariana running through what’s basically a shopping list with her friends, the whole philosophy built on: money solves problems. Or at least buys enough stuff that you stop noticing the problems for a while. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/21/buy-the-rings/ Mon, 21 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/17/password-panic/ Got another email about 22 million passwords leaked. The panic instructions, the ritual password changes, the temporary feeling of being on top of things—it’s theater that stopped meaning anything a few years ago. These breaches happen constantly now, and I’ve made peace with the fact that my data is probably compromised somewhere on some server I’ll never know about. You can’t live in constant digital panic, so you don’t. You change the passwords that matter, ignore the rest, and get on with your day. The whole system is designed to make you feel simultaneously helpless and guilty, and at a certain point you just stop letting it work on you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/17/password-panic/ Thu, 17 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/17/four-octaves/ I heard Ilira as background noise—Instagram, TikTok, one of those feeds where songs just materialize between other content. The voice stopped me, did something that obviously triggered whoever designed the algorithm. Four octaves, the captions said. I don’t know what that technically means beyond “unusual,” beyond notes going where voices don’t typically go. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/17/four-octaves/ Thu, 17 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/17/ghostbusters-again/ Ghostbusters works. It’s one of those 80s films that shouldn’t work as well as it does - three guys who don’t know what they’re doing, running a ghost-catching business from a firehouse, saving New York because who else is going to do it. The comedy hits without trying. The effects look weird and charming. Even the subplots about the city itself being some kind of dimensional portal feel completely natural. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/17/ghostbusters-again/ Thu, 17 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/16/tokyo-skate/ Whenever I’m in Tokyo, I end up at Miyashita Skate Park in Shibuya during lunch. I get a bento box from the Family Mart around the corner, sit at the edge of the park, and watch people skate for an hour. It’s weirdly meditative—just the sound of wheels on concrete, people learning tricks or cruising through. Kids, old guys, all of them moving like they own the place. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/16/tokyo-skate/ Wed, 16 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/16/late-night-cherry-glazerr/ There’s this guitarist I sleep with on and off. Her apartment is a constant war of sound—she’s always got some rock music going that I can’t even parse, and I prefer darker stuff anyway, music that actually says something. She mocks my taste, I mock hers, we both know neither is changing. But she’s talented and her body makes it impossible to leave, so we make it work with wine and sex and just not talking about music. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/16/late-night-cherry-glazerr/ Wed, 16 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/16/explicit-tradition/ I found Senju Horimatsu through some rabbit hole online—I forget where—and his work stayed with me. Swedish, born in Stockholm in 1968, real name Matti Sandberg. He started as a tattoo artist, then moved into prints that sit between contemporary practice and shunga, those old Japanese erotic woodblocks. The comparison isn’t perfect, but the intention is clear: he’s making sexually explicit art in the visual language and with the technical skill of something centuries old and formally revered. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/16/explicit-tradition/ Wed, 16 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/16/lindsay-lohans-good-years/ I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t completely into Lindsay Lohan back in the early 2000s. Red hair, freckles, a voice that had actual character to it—I was hooked. I know what the narrative became. The tabloids, the drugs, the collapse into every bad thing you could imagine. But before that, for a couple of years, she was genuinely talented. Not as a performer especially, but as a songwriter with something to say. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/16/lindsay-lohans-good-years/ Wed, 16 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/16/loud-and-free/ When Kilian Kerner showed up at Berlin Fashion Week three years after his label collapsed, the whole thing read less like a comeback and more like someone finally allowed to breathe. His collection, “City Life,” came out aggressive and uncompromising—oversized hoodies and structured coats with metal lettering spelling out provocative statements. “I’m not a racist and I don’t have to be smart to prove it.” Direct, uncomfortable, nothing like the safe choice. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/16/loud-and-free/ Wed, 16 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/15/fyre/ I watched Netflix’s Fyre documentary. It’s about a music festival on the Bahamas—thousand-dollar tickets, celebrity promotion, and when attendees showed up: broken tents, sick dogs, homeless people, and cheese sandwiches someone had apparently assembled in a garage. Nobody could leave. Evacuation capacity was so limited that everyone spent hours stuck on the island, filming it all on Snapchat. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/15/fyre/ Tue, 15 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/15/the-weeknd-gets-away-with-it/ I should hate The Weeknd—he got to sleep with Selena Gomez, and I didn’t, which I’ve never figured out. But you can’t hate someone who makes music this good, the kind that actually cuts through all the forgettable recycled noise. Since Abel Tesfaye showed up at the start of the decade with House of Balloons, he’s been operating on a different frequency. Right now, he’s the pop star. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/15/the-weeknd-gets-away-with-it/ Tue, 15 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/15/the-restless-kind/ “I love being the best at everything I do, always.” Anne-Marie said this without irony, her Essex accent hard and flat. Not a boast—just saying what’s true about herself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/15/the-restless-kind/ Tue, 15 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/14/the-nineties-wont-quit/ I keep running into the nineties everywhere—not in some arch, retro-collection way, but like something that just won’t die. The Spice Girls, Friends, the absolute chaos of color and style, the feeling that you could wake up and something genuinely unexpected would be normal by evening. It was dumb and real at the same time, and now when I catch a glimpse of it, my gut reaction is just yes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/14/the-nineties-wont-quit/ Mon, 14 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/14/still-not-ready/ The Red Wedding destroyed whatever safety I thought the show had left. After that scene, no one was sacred. That was the point - “Game of Thrones” showed you that loyalty and honor mean nothing when you’re up against ruthlessness and power. The smart move was always the cruelest one. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/14/still-not-ready/ Mon, 14 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/14/restless-rimworld/ I don’t like anything about RimWorld. The graphics are ugly, the music is dull, the story’s recycled. Yet I’ve spent more time in this game than any other I’ve ever played. I find myself back there constantly, watching these broken people who crashed on some random planet try to build a life, only to have someone—usually a depressed pyromaniac with relationship problems—burn the whole thing down while they’re sleeping. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/14/restless-rimworld/ Mon, 14 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/4/the-leak/ A Twitter account spent the summer of 2017 doing something simple and horrible: publishing the personal information of celebrities, politicians, and internet personalities. Phone numbers. Home addresses. Scanned ID cards. Family messages. Credit card details from people’s relatives. All of it dumped online, sorted into what looked like an Advent calendar leading up to Christmas. The targets ranged from YouTubers like Gronkh and LeFloid to rappers like Sido and Marteria, to comedians and other public figures, alongside politicians from nearly every party in the German Bundestag—everyone except the AfD. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2019/1/4/the-leak/ Fri, 04 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/21/the-descent/ Below drops me into darkness without explanation—just a dungeon, complete solitude, the constant downward pull. There’s something hypnotic about it. The game rewards patience and observation, turning the endless slog through shadow and stone into something meditative. Each level strips away more light, adds more weight. It’s deliberately lonely, and that’s the whole point. The loneliness is what keeps me going. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/21/the-descent/ Fri, 21 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/21/the-warehouse-option/ Brandenburger Tor on New Year’s is a specific kind of torture. Thousands of people, overpriced beer, a DJ playing whatever gets the safest response, someone doing a Helene Fischer tribute while the crowd screams along. It’s not a party, it’s a tourist attraction pretending to be a party. Everyone there filming it, nobody actually experiencing it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/21/the-warehouse-option/ Fri, 21 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/20/broken-at-eleven/ I was eleven when a friend sent me a link. A woman getting used by fifty men, one after another. Slapped, thrown, broken. She was crying. They were laughing. The whole thing is burned into my head in a way that sunshine and first crushes never were. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/20/broken-at-eleven/ Thu, 20 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/20/o-human-being/ I’ve been wondering since I was a kid why Christmas means killing thousands of trees just to throw them out in January. Every year, the same routine. They’re farmed for it, sure, but there’s something off about a tradition where nobody thinks to keep one alive, to let it survive and come back. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/20/o-human-being/ Thu, 20 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/20/no-net-no-bra/ I remember when Miley was the baseline transgressive pop star—the one who’d twerk on Robin Thicke at the VMAs like she was trying to start a religion, who posed with her cunt out and a strap-on in some legendary photoshoot, who announced she was pansexual like she’d solved something the rest of us were still confused about. For a minute there, she was the thing that made parents lose their minds and gave the internet an actual reason to care about celebrity news. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/20/no-net-no-bra/ Thu, 20 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/19/new-era-did-it-again/ New Era keeps taking designs that already work and tweaking them just slightly, which shouldn’t work but somehow always does. Three new snapback configurations landed, and I spent more time than I should thinking about what actually changed between them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/19/new-era-did-it-again/ Wed, 19 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/19/facebook-gave-your-messages-to-netflix/ Your private messages on Facebook weren’t private. The New York Times got hold of documents showing that Facebook had handed other companies the keys—Netflix, Spotify, banks, Microsoft, Sony, Amazon, Apple, Pandora. Official partnerships, open APIs, workarounds. The door was open. Whether or not these companies actually read what you wrote probably depends who you ask. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/19/facebook-gave-your-messages-to-netflix/ Wed, 19 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/19/found-her-way-in/ I found a Playboy in my dad’s closet once, which is how I know that cliché actually happens. Chelsie Aryn had the same moment as a kid—came across her father’s magazines, thought the women in them were unbearably beautiful, and decided right then that she was going to be one of them. She pulled it off. She’s Miss January in one of the recent issues, and there’s something to sit with in that symmetry. She spent her whole childhood in front of cameras. Her mother photographed everything, and after Chelsie was born, she became the obvious subject. By high school she was voted most photogenic. Then MySpace happened, and she was posting pictures there. Playboy was just where the arc was always heading. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/19/found-her-way-in/ Wed, 19 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/19/she-came-back/ Selena Gomez came back to Instagram. Just posted some photos. Nothing huge. But I found myself genuinely relieved, which surprised me. I didn’t realize I was that invested in whether she was holding up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/19/she-came-back/ Wed, 19 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/19/wireless-in-frankfurt/ Frankfurt got Wireless in the summer of 2019, the London festival importing itself wholesale to the Alten Rebstockpark for a couple of July days. I remember the strangeness of it—Travis Scott and The Weeknd and Casper all on a Frankfurt lineup, a city that had no particular reputation for this scene suddenly hosting forty thousand people in streetwear moving between open-air shisha bars and foodtrucks. It felt less like Frankfurt had built toward something and more like hip-hop had gotten big enough that it didn’t ask permission anymore. It just showed up and expected the city to make room. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/19/wireless-in-frankfurt/ Wed, 19 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/19/west-coast-authenticity/ LA’s skate culture in the seventies wasn’t trying to be anything. Kids in Dogtown had concrete and a way of moving through the world that didn’t require permission, and that was the whole thing. The way that eventually became a marketable aesthetic is its own story, but what makes the Puma x Chinatown Market collection interesting is that Mike Cherman actually understands what he’s working with. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/19/west-coast-authenticity/ Wed, 19 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/19/the-miley-version/ Miley and Mark Ronson did this version of “No Tears Left to Cry” for BBC Radio 1. It’s just them and the song, no production, and something about that stripped-down thing catches you off guard. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/19/the-miley-version/ Wed, 19 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/18/naked-on-a-meadow/ I want to sit naked on a meadow with nothing but junk food and die trying. Pizza so thick you need both hands. Burgers stacked five high. Everything deep-fried. Just eat until something stops working—your heart, your lungs, doesn’t matter—and expire with cheese on your face and a stupid grin. That’s the whole fantasy. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/18/naked-on-a-meadow/ Tue, 18 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/18/what-the-documentary-shows/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/18/what-the-documentary-shows/ Tue, 18 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/18/dead-cells/ Every few months I cycle back through Dead Cells the way I used to with Super Metroid—convinced the next run will unlock something, find the weapon combo that feels perfect, open a door I’ve been circling. It’s a metroidvania wearing a roguelike’s skin, which sounds like a design document but actually lands. Each run is short enough to feel disposable; the progression—abilities that unlock new paths through the same interconnected world—makes me want another one immediately. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/18/dead-cells/ Tue, 18 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/18/2018s-videos/ 2018 was the year music videos suddenly mattered again, though not for reasons the industry would’ve claimed. The massive hits were everywhere—Drake sliding through tracks, Cardi B’s unapologetic everything, Khalid’s voice floating underneath like sedation. But what stuck wasn’t the budget or the name. It was the weight. Ariana Grande looked damaged in ways she wasn’t hiding. Selena Gomez let you see it. These were artists who’d been through something and came out the other side still making things. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/18/2018s-videos/ Tue, 18 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/18/unpolished/ Cardi B hit number one with “Bodak Yellow” and something shifted. Not because the song was perfect, but because it happened instantly, completely, out of nowhere. She was on reality TV a month before. Then this one song and she owned everything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/18/unpolished/ Tue, 18 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/18/searching-for-kanye/ Kanye West is impossible to hold still in your mind. You find one stable thing about him—the production, the ear for samples, the way he rebuilt hip-hop from soul records and classical music—and then you remember the rest of it, the endless performing, the ego that swallows everything, and the verdict collapses. Everyone just picks a side. Either he’s a genius or he’s a charlatan. Nothing in between. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/18/searching-for-kanye/ Tue, 18 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/18/war-is-over/ Mark Ronson, Miley Cyrus, and Sean Ono Lennon did “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” on SNL, and the thing that struck me was how unafraid they were of the material. It would have been easy to make it contemporary, sand it down, update it into something safer. They didn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/18/war-is-over/ Tue, 18 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/18/drachenlord/ Rainer Winkler was a German YouTuber known as Drachenlord, famous for years of filmed confrontations outside his apartment building. The setup was always the same: someone would show up to provoke him, he’d explode, everything got recorded. It had that quality of watching someone slowly consumed by his own spectacle, pushed further into a corner each time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/18/drachenlord/ Tue, 18 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/17/when-k-pop-clicked/ A friend put on a SHINee song in the car and I wasn’t expecting it to stick, but there was something in the way everything locked in—vocals and production and this intensity that felt more precise than anything in Western pop. The thing was engineered, and somehow that mattered less than the fact that it was good. By the time BTS came up in conversation a month later, it was clear I’d been missing something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/17/when-k-pop-clicked/ Mon, 17 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/17/hidden-cameras/ South Korea has a hidden-camera problem that’s become almost mundane. Men buy spy cameras for about $20 at electronics shops, install them in bathroom stalls, film women naked, sell the footage online or to strangers for kicks. It’s happened enough that women check toilets before sitting down, looking for infrared signatures of hidden lenses. Some just stop going out. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/17/hidden-cameras/ Mon, 17 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/17/that-ariana-grande-moment/ Victorious was the usual Nickelodeon pablum, but her voice was obvious immediately. The kind of control that only comes from actually studying someone—Mariah Carey probably, maybe Imogen Heap. She understood what a run was for, which is different from just being able to do one. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/17/that-ariana-grande-moment/ Mon, 17 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/17/the-manga-dorm/ Most Netflix stuff stresses me out right now. I just needed something where I could laugh without thinking about what I was watching, and Comic Girls showed up at the right time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/17/the-manga-dorm/ Mon, 17 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/17/after-spex/ Spex closed in 2018. It was a German music magazine—the kind of publication that shaped what people in this country thought mattered in music and film, even if nobody actually subscribed. Prestigious in that niche, influential way. By the end of the year it was done anyway: circulation tanked, advertisers moved to digital, the whole print infrastructure collapsed the way everyone said it would. But music magazines had a weirder problem than just being printed on paper. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/17/after-spex/ Mon, 17 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/17/a-game-that-doesnt-demand/ Gris is a game that doesn’t ask anything of you. You could sit with that for a second—in a medium built on asking, demanding, punishing. There’s a girl, Gris, caught in something painful, and her world has bleached white. Moving through it restores color. Her dress shifts with each ability—blue, red, yellow—each one unlocking a new way through space. Puzzles appear when you need them. Platforms materialize under your feet. No one dies. Nothing is urgent. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/17/a-game-that-doesnt-demand/ Mon, 17 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/17/brain-police/ I found Zuno Keisatsu through the usual rabbit hole—’60s Japanese rock, looking for what Western garage never quite captured. What I found was a band that made noise because silence felt complicit. Brain Police. The name alone was a threat. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/17/brain-police/ Mon, 17 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/16/slim-and-old/ Japan’s the weird case where everyone’s thin and lives forever despite the smoking and drinking and KFC. Walk through Tokyo and what strikes you is the absence: nobody’s overweight. And people are routinely living past 100, still sharp, still involved. It’s the one place where the correlation between longevity and staying lean actually holds. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/16/slim-and-old/ Sun, 16 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/16/the-thing-about-dying/ Christmas meant video games. My parents knew that if they gave me a new game, I’d shut up for six weeks. Mario 64, Zelda, real games that lasted. Nothing you could beat in a weekend. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/16/the-thing-about-dying/ Sun, 16 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/16/the-blogs-are-dead/ Blogsport’s closing down and I keep thinking about what that means—thirteen years they ran it, started by two students back in 2005 who just built it for their friends, and then they had to open it up because there was so much interest. By 2009 it was growing crazy-fast, exponentially, so they actually made it professional. Georg Klauda ended up basically running the whole thing unpaid, which makes sense why after thirteen years of dealing with servers and support emails and legal complaints and taxes, while not actually blogging yourself, you’d just be done. “We’re exhausted,” he said, and I believe him. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/16/the-blogs-are-dead/ Sun, 16 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/16/good-fat/ I know exactly what’s going to kill me eventually: bacon. Good, fatty bacon. I could put it on everything or in everything or with everything—sandwich, pizza, pasta, doesn’t matter as long as it smells and tastes like bacon. Crispy strips, fried or grilled with eggs, yeah that’s an American or English breakfast thing, but I’d eat it any time of day. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, between meals. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/16/good-fat/ Sun, 16 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/16/keke/ YouTube rabbit-holed me into KeKe’s “Validé” at maybe three in the morning. Wasn’t looking for anything, just following whatever the algorithm served next. She’s Austrian, early twenties, voice that stops you like she’s not even trying. Trained jazz singer doing rap, or maybe just doing whatever she feels like and rap is what came out. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/16/keke/ Sun, 16 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/16/the-next-walk/ Hello Games spent years taking shit for No Man’s Sky—promises broken, interviews that were either lies or delusions, the whole machine that turns hype into resentment. And then they just kept working. Updates, features, actual listening to what people wanted. The game became real. Now when someone mentions it, you don’t hear the laugh-track anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/16/the-next-walk/ Sun, 16 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/16/call-me-beep-me/ I watched Kim Possible because I was in love with her. Completely dumb about it. Rewatched the whole series dozens of times, all hundred-plus episodes, which tells you something about the grip she had. The show itself was competent—Kim and her best friend Ron stopping supervillains every week, Wade feeding them intel through the Kimmunicator, Rufus the naked mole rat doing weird comedic bits. But I was there for Kim: the red hair, the competence, the way she handled chaos. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/16/call-me-beep-me/ Sun, 16 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/16/loud-shoes-italian-light/ Italy occupies more space in my head the further I get from it. The light does something there that doesn’t happen anywhere else. The food tastes like it was designed on purpose. People move through their days without the constant feeling that they’re already late. I’ve thought more than once about the retirement fantasy—small place on the coast, mornings like that, nothing else. It’s good to think about when you’re somewhere that doesn’t quite have that energy. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/16/loud-shoes-italian-light/ Sun, 16 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/16/three-voices-one-love-song/ Marteria, Casper, and Kat Frankie recorded a love song together. It’s the kind of collaboration that doesn’t announce itself—three rappers trading verses like they were sorting something out in the studio and we just happened to be listening. There’s an intimacy in three people thinking about the same person at the same time, especially when they usually deal in armor and distance. No performance, no conviction, just three voices saying it plainly. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/16/three-voices-one-love-song/ Sun, 16 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/15/k-pops-normal-now/ K-Pop’s not some separate world anymore. You hear it everywhere, mixed into everything else. Dua Lipa and Blackpink on the same song sounds absurd until you actually listen to it, and then it’s just… there. It works. That’s become the pattern—western artists showing up on K-Pop tracks like it’s the natural thing to do now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/15/k-pops-normal-now/ Sat, 15 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/15/melbourne/ I scrolled through Nicole Ganker’s Instagram long enough to form opinions about a stranger’s life, and the verdict is simple: hers is genuinely better. She’s always somewhere beautiful—festival, beach, mountains—with people who look interesting, with a boyfriend, existing in that casual-but-perfect way that only works when you know you’ll photograph well. I’m at my desk most nights finding reasons to stay in, which is honest but not encouraging. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/15/melbourne/ Sat, 15 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/15/miles-morales/ “Sunflower” had been out there for a while when Post Malone and the rest of the Into the Spider-Verse soundtrack finally hit streaming—the full thing with Nicki Minaj, Juice WRLD, Lil Wayne, all of it. It doesn’t feel like a typical superhero tie-in album, more like hip-hop that happened to come from a movie. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/15/miles-morales/ Sat, 15 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/15/king-of-tokyo/ Jaden Smith is in Harajuku doing Kamehameha poses for a music video. The tourists don’t know what he’s doing. He doesn’t care. Digital effects get added in post—blue waves of energy, very anime—and that becomes the actual art. This is what happens when your dad is Will Smith and you’re too spoiled to just accept it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/15/king-of-tokyo/ Sat, 15 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/15/playing-alone/ I’m bad at competitive games. Not occasionally—genuinely, objectively bad. StarCraft, League of Legends, Overwatch, Minecraft, Final Fantasy XIV. I’d jump into any of them and get destroyed immediately. In dungeons I’d be running in circles, completely lost, and the group would be right to lose their minds. There’s no excuse for it. So I quit. Now I stick to single-player games where I’m the only one I’m letting down. Skyrim. Far Cry 5. Yakuza Zero. Games where failure is private. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/15/playing-alone/ Sat, 15 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/15/the-things-they-delete/ Instagram will delete your breast but let a screed about purifying the race sit there for six weeks. Facebook has entire teams moderating nakedness while hate speech multiplies faster than they can delete it. There’s no incompetence here, no accident—they’ve decided which kinds of human expression are profitable and which ones make the advertisers nervous. Violence doesn’t scare sponsors. Skin does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/15/the-things-they-delete/ Sat, 15 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/15/what-i-actually-want/ Smartwatches have always felt like a con to me. You’re strapping a phone to your wrist, basically—one more screen to check, one more device demanding your attention. But analog watches, the kind that just sit there and tell the time? There’s something satisfying about those. These new adidas Originals designs are worth noticing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/15/what-i-actually-want/ Sat, 15 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/14/still-drawing/ I wanted to be a manga artist. Spent years drawing in my room—Dragon Ball, Akira, whatever manga I could get. I had this real belief it was going to be my thing. Then school got harder, other stuff took over, and at some point I just stopped. The sketchbooks went into storage. The dream kind of evaporated. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/14/still-drawing/ Fri, 14 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/14/shanghai-tofu/ This Berlin brand started by two sisters caught my attention because of one embroidered detail. Shanghai Tofu makes clothes pulled from actual Chinese street style—not exoticized, not made safe for export—and they have this beret stitched with 打酱油. If you follow Chinese internet culture, you know this phrase. Some guy on TV got asked about celebrity scandal and said he didn’t care, he was just buying soy sauce. The comment stuck, became permanent slang for “that’s not my problem, not interested.” https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/14/shanghai-tofu/ Fri, 14 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/14/vanessa-hudgens-on-hot-ones/ I like Vanessa Hudgens. Always have—High School Musical, Spring Breakers, The Princess Switch, all of it. I like her enough that when I’m jerking off to those leaked nudes of hers I feel bad about it, like it’s wrong because she’s actually such a genuinely nice person. So I feel guilty and switch to Sasha Grey instead, figure at least she’d be cool with someone looking at her asshole. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/14/vanessa-hudgens-on-hot-ones/ Fri, 14 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/14/obsidians-turn/ New Vegas was the Fallout game I actually loved. Fallout 3 was decent enough, better than 4 anyway, but New Vegas had something real. Interesting characters, actual ideas, places designed to make you want to wander through them. Then Fallout 4 came out with its locked-down dialogue, and I was genuinely disappointed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/14/obsidians-turn/ Fri, 14 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/14/city-pop-on-wax/ I’ve always been envious of people who collect vinyl. Not the aesthetic of it—though there’s that—but the actual commitment involved. You go to a record store or hunt online, you pay real money for a specific pressing you’ve been tracking for months, and then you play it. Just that one record, all the way through. Streaming promises infinite choice and then delivers infinite mediocrity. Every song matters equally, which means nothing matters at all. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/14/city-pop-on-wax/ Fri, 14 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/14/australian-summer/ I hate winter. Some people settle into it fine—hot chocolate, blankets, that whole thing—but I’ve never managed it. I’m at the window thinking where did the sun go, because I actually need it. Heat on my skin. Real light. The ability to exist outside without planning seventeen layers. Every year it’s the same: the temperature drops and I vanish into my apartment for three months. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/14/australian-summer/ Fri, 14 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/14/hairy-fluffy-wet/ My third real friend was Jörg, sophomore year. He wore lip gloss and shaved his armpits completely smooth, which didn’t seem that weird at the time because a few guys at school had gotten metrosexual after David Beckham made it a thing. We dated for two months. Then he told me he was gay. We never slept together, but a few times he fingered me, and he was really bad at it. I thought it was because he was inexperienced. But no—he just couldn’t do anything with a pussy. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/14/hairy-fluffy-wet/ Fri, 14 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/14/the-thinking-police/ I wanted to send my girlfriend something filthy on Facebook and apparently that’s not allowed anymore. Facebook’s decided they’re going full puritanical with new community standards that ban any form of sexual solicitation or contact on the platform. Doesn’t matter if it’s public or hidden in groups or messages. Get caught and you’re warned. Do it again and you’re deleted. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/14/the-thinking-police/ Fri, 14 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/13/lil-miquela-doesnt-exist/ Lil Miquela doesn’t exist, but she’s more successful than anyone actually trying to be an influencer. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/13/lil-miquela-doesnt-exist/ Thu, 13 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/13/warm-shot/ There’s a photographer named Alwin Maigler who shoots in two distinct phases. The first is deliberate and composed—he’s building a studio series, moving through subjects methodically, everything controlled. Then once the main work is done, he cranks the music, straps a flash onto the camera, and just fires. It’s barely contained chaos. The second part only works if you’ve already spent hours with someone, if you’re both loose enough that the camera stops feeling like an obstacle between you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/13/warm-shot/ Thu, 13 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/13/crystal-suede/ There’s something about a sneaker studded with crystals that shouldn’t appeal to me as much as it does. Puma and Swarovski made one for the Suede’s fiftieth anniversary—the classic stripe lined with precision-cut glass that catches light the way formal things usually do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/13/crystal-suede/ Thu, 13 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/13/the-girl-who-wont-play-along/ Maggie Lindemann left San Antonio for Los Angeles when she was sixteen, in 2015, to make music. She had all the ingredients for the story everyone knows: talent, ambition, the right person noticing. But then she wouldn’t stop saying fuck, and it became clear this wasn’t going to go the way these things usually go. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/13/the-girl-who-wont-play-along/ Thu, 13 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/13/the-darkness-held/ The Red Wedding broke something. Not because you didn’t see it coming, but because the show actually went through with it. Stannis burned his daughter alive. Cersei descended those King’s Landing steps naked and shamed. Game of Thrones spent seven years proving that the worst thing you could imagine wasn’t hypothetical—it was likely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/13/the-darkness-held/ Thu, 13 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/13/winter-blur/ Winter shrinks everything. The light disappears, the weather turns miserable, and the world outside your window becomes something you stop looking at. The couch becomes serious furniture. The heat stays on. You find yourself scrolling through new releases, looking for something that might fill the hours until spring. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/13/winter-blur/ Thu, 13 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/13/matcha/ I spent years as a coffee addict. Serious about it. Started at a design agency during my media training, and it never really stopped. Regular lattes at first, then whatever fancy drinks Starbucks had, then black americanos with nothing—just the necessary bitter hit. Eventually it was only about the effect. The jolt. Two pots a day until my stomach was screaming, my hands wouldn’t stop shaking, and sleep was impossible. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/13/matcha/ Thu, 13 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/13/what-pink-can-do/ Arvida Byström makes work in screaming pink and it stops you. Bodies, hair, blood, technology—all of it unapologetic, all of it broadcast. You notice the shock value first, but that’s not really the point. What she’s actually done is build a visual language out of things women are supposed to hide, and rendered it all undeniable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/13/what-pink-can-do/ Thu, 13 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/12/the-cleanest-high/ Saturation levels beyond what seems possible on a handheld screen. The music is precise and demanding. You’re moving your hands in patterns that feel instinctive until the moment you think about them, then you miss the next beat. The game doesn’t pause. It doesn’t wait for you. It just keeps going, color into color into color, each transition timed to the drums. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/12/the-cleanest-high/ Wed, 12 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/12/the-kiezmarke/ You walk past someone on the street asking for money and there’s always that moment. Cash disappears. You don’t know where it goes, and that’s the thing that lets you keep walking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/12/the-kiezmarke/ Wed, 12 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/12/what-everyone-was-into/ Pornhub dropped their 2018 stats and the numbers are genuinely strange to think about. Thirty billion views, a hundred million a day, a thousand searches per second, five million videos uploaded. There’s a lot of people getting off on the internet. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/12/what-everyone-was-into/ Wed, 12 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/12/the-foursquare-mayor/ Every time one of these travel videos drops, the same thing happens. You click it because the thumbnail looks nice, the music starts, and suddenly you’re on Google Flights pricing tickets to Tokyo without thinking about rent or whether you’d have to sell your grandmother to make it happen. Which I haven’t done yet, but give it time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/12/the-foursquare-mayor/ Wed, 12 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/12/milena-huhtas-surreal-worlds/ There’s something about an illustration where every time you look at it again, you find something new. A detail you didn’t see before, a figure half-hidden in the corner, a joke that suddenly lands. You get lost in the image, and your mind fills in the rest. You don’t need permission to project your own meaning into it—the blank spaces invite you to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/12/milena-huhtas-surreal-worlds/ Wed, 12 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/12/barcelonas-dolls/ Hannah, a girl in my year, wasn’t interested in waiting tables or cleaning for university money. So she did what made sense—charged rich men for blowjobs through a WhatsApp group. Whenever some CEO or politician needed to get sucked off, he’d message the group with date and place, and Hannah and the other girls would bid for it. She was making serious money, and extra if she was willing to be flexible about arrangements. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/12/barcelonas-dolls/ Wed, 12 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/12/she-comes-back/ “Let Go” and “Under My Skin” were two of the best albums ever made. “Sk8er Boi,” “My Happy Ending,” “Complicated”—I danced to those songs, cried to them, fucked to them. She had something the radio was missing: a voice that made sense of being seventeen and furious and horny and lost all at once. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/12/she-comes-back/ Wed, 12 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/11/shell-games/ Everyone closed ranks the instant the Scarlett Johansson Ghost in the Shell film happened. Not because it was bad. Because you don’t remake Ghost in the Shell. You don’t even try. It sits somewhere between Akira and Cowboy Bebop in terms of what it’s allowed to mean—foundational, sealed off, not a property you think you can improve on. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/11/shell-games/ Tue, 11 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/11/the-dragon-twenty-years-later/ Once a year at the disco in my hometown, they opened the small hall for kids—Mardi Gras, mostly. We’d show up in pirate costumes and ninja gear, loose on orange juice and poppers, and the best part was the dark corner with the arcade machines. I’d feed coins into one: Wonder Boy in Monster Land. I kept dying at the same dragon, some pixel bastard that wouldn’t quit, but I didn’t care. The point was the coins going in, the screen lighting up, the feeling that something was happening. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/11/the-dragon-twenty-years-later/ Tue, 11 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/11/mercy/ I woke up in a cold sweat at three in the morning convinced I’d forgotten what Miley Cyrus looked like topless. Not asleep-panic, full awake-panic—I had to reach for my phone immediately and scroll through the folder just to remember, to calm down, to prove it hadn’t slipped away. Twenty minutes of scrolling before I could sleep again. I know how this reads. I know. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/11/mercy/ Tue, 11 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/11/sick-cute/ Pink bandages on fresh cuts. Hello Kitty in the margins of a suicide note. That’s the core of Yami Kawaii, which translates roughly to “sick cute”—a Japanese subculture that takes depression, self-harm, and suicidal ideation and dresses them up in the visual language of anime girls and pastel aesthetics. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/11/sick-cute/ Tue, 11 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/11/back-for-more/ I made it a hundred hours into Far Cry 5 before it locked me in a bunker and the world wouldn’t stop burning. The whole reason I’d been there was supposed to stop that. Nothing worse than investing that much time and something like actual feeling into a game only to have it close on you sideways, nowhere near where you wanted to land. So I swore the series off. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/11/back-for-more/ Tue, 11 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/11/hamburg-late/ Hamburg at night is full of people you’d never expect to find anywhere else—the ones who wouldn’t bend to the template everyone was using. Walk into a bar late enough and you meet someone whose life is so specifically theirs that you can’t look away. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/11/hamburg-late/ Tue, 11 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/10/starcourt/ That Stranger Things trailer was basically just a mall. Not some abstract monster dimension or a cursed house, but Starcourt—a shopping center in the 1980s with arcades and food courts and the specific gravity that malls have when you’re the right age to care about them. It was a weird choice for scale-up, but it worked immediately. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/10/starcourt/ Mon, 10 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/10/inji-seos-worlds/ The first time I really noticed Inji Seo’s work I wasn’t looking for it - just scrolled past something too bright and kept going. But you start seeing it everywhere. Women painted round and soft, stretched across colors that shouldn’t work together but do. Legs up. Mouths open. Unashamed about all of it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/10/inji-seos-worlds/ Mon, 10 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/10/losing-it/ I’ve lost my phone seven times. Taxi, ex’s apartment, a party, a café in New York, my aunt’s house, the bus—and once it fell off a church tower while a few friends and I were being idiots trying to film something. I probably got it back three times, if I’m being generous. The rest meant a trip to the phone store and the depressing knowledge that I’d just spent money that could’ve gone toward ice cream on replacing the same device I apparently can’t hold onto. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/10/losing-it/ Mon, 10 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/10/face-my-fears/ Utada and Skrillex open Kingdom Hearts 3, a collaboration that shouldn’t work but does. Utada’s voice carries weight—controlled, assured—and Skrillex keeps the production tight enough that she’s always the center. By the first chorus the game has your full attention, before you’ve even played a minute of it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/10/face-my-fears/ Mon, 10 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/10/the-fake-fur-standard/ Fake fur used to be a confession. If you were making something that looked expensive, you used the real thing. Fake meant cheap. Shrimps, Hannah Weiland’s label, decided that was a stupid rule. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/10/the-fake-fur-standard/ Mon, 10 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/4/tumblr-deleted-itself/ Tumblr killed itself this week. Not on purpose, but they might as well have. December 17th and no more nude photos, no more porn, no adult content at all. The thing about Tumblr—the actual thing that made it work—was that it let all of that exist. That was the whole platform. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/4/tumblr-deleted-itself/ Tue, 04 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/4/the-fake-poster/ Some smart person made a fake Coca-Cola billboard in Berlin—perfectly rendered, Christmas aesthetic, one added line: Say no to the AfD. It was December and it was part of the AfD Advent Calendar, which was a campaign of daily actions against racism and the far-right, twenty-four of them, one for each day. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/4/the-fake-poster/ Tue, 04 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/4/hooded-skirt/ I’m not the type to dismiss fashion. I show up outside boutiques at seven in the morning for a drop, spend half a month’s salary on whatever seems essential that week. The cycle moves on in a couple weeks but in those weeks you believe. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/4/hooded-skirt/ Tue, 04 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/4/sushi-illustrated/ Raw salmon on hot white rice, soy sauce thick enough to coat your tongue. If I had the money I’d eat nothing but this until something from the ocean depths took me out. I really wouldn’t care. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/4/sushi-illustrated/ Tue, 04 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/4/the-bounty/ The Center for Political Beauty, a German art collective, set up a bounty system for Nazi-spotting. Three million photos from far-right marches, seven thousand identified participants, thirty to a hundred euros if you reported someone to their employer and got them fired. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/4/the-bounty/ Tue, 04 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/4/rihannas-naughty/ Rihanna just announced another lingerie drop called Naughty, and at this point there’s not much pretense left about what Fenty is actually for. She’s not selling confidence or transformation or any of the coded language fashion brands hide behind. She’s selling lingerie designed to be looked at and wanted, and she’s built her brand on being direct about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/4/rihannas-naughty/ Tue, 04 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/3/night-of-life/ Cro customized a Levi’s trucker jacket for World AIDS Day, and that’s what caught my attention. When someone actually goes in and designs something specific instead of just lending their name, it feels different. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/3/night-of-life/ Mon, 03 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/3/melovemealot/ If you’ve figured out I’m following you on my fake Instagram account, fine. You don’t matter to me. None of you do. Not one. I don’t care which friend you’re eating ice cream with in Verona, how cute your dog looks at sunset, or why you thought your bare feet next to your lunch would make a good photo. You’re invisible to me. The filters don’t change that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/3/melovemealot/ Mon, 03 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/3/nudes-for-access/ In China, young people are apparently sending nude photos to companies in order to use their apps. The first time I read about it I thought it was an exaggeration, one of those viral misreads that gets worse each time someone shares it. But it’s real. And what gets to me isn’t that it happens, but that it doesn’t shock anyone. You know where this was going. Photos instead of personal data. Flesh instead of a password. Maybe the companies don’t even look at them. Maybe that’s not the point. The point is you’ll do it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/3/nudes-for-access/ Mon, 03 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/3/skin-and-stone/ Bare skin against water and stone does something to an image that clothed figures can’t. There’s less visual noise, more direct geometry—the shape of a body against landscape rather than body as visual decoration. Stefan Imielski’s “Nude in Nature” is built on this premise: women, various locations, no props, just body and environment. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/3/skin-and-stone/ Mon, 03 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/3/what-kitsunés-does/ Eastpak’s been making bags since the seventies—functional, military-rooted stuff you throw in a van. Maison Kitsunés whole thing is Paris and Tokyo not quite deciding between themselves, and not trying too hard. When you put those two sensibilities on the same duffel, the same backpack, you might expect some friction. There isn’t any. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/3/what-kitsunés-does/ Mon, 03 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/2/reset/ Gesaffelstein disappeared for five years, and when he finally surfaced, it was to make fun of everything that had happened to music while he was gone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/2/reset/ Sun, 02 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/1/tavi-killed-rookie/ Tavi Gevinson shut down Rookie Magazine last year. After seven years, the site just stopped. No warning, no slow fade—she killed it because she couldn’t keep it alive and keep herself alive at the same time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/1/tavi-killed-rookie/ Sat, 01 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/1/thank-you-mean-girls/ I’ve watched Mean Girls more than any other film—more than anything else, really. The 2004 one with Lohan and McAdams and Caplan, Lizzy Caplan especially. I was into her. That’s probably when you first understand that girls aren’t just other people but something you actually notice, something your body has an opinion about. The movie works because it nails high school exactly. The casual cruelty, the hierarchies that feel cosmically important when you’re sixteen, the way one comment can destroy someone, and then those small moments of kindness that don’t undo anything but somehow matter anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/12/1/thank-you-mean-girls/ Sat, 01 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/30/actually-watching/ Conan O’Brien went to Japan with a camera crew and made some travel videos for his late-night show. They’re among the few travel things I’ll actually watch. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/30/actually-watching/ Fri, 30 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/30/velvet-stars/ Miley’s doing Converse again—third collaboration—and I was ready to ignore it. Most celebrity shoes are just a name on standard inventory. But there’s this vinyl Chuck Taylor with star tape on the sole, that kind of small ridiculous detail that either lands or it doesn’t. These land. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/30/velvet-stars/ Fri, 30 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/30/nothing-breaks-like-a-heart/ This is Mark Ronson learning how to make pop music again. The song has flamenco guitar in it, almost country, something that shouldn’t work but does. Miley Cyrus sings it like she’s finally stopped performing surprise at her own existence—her voice has weight now, something hard underneath the melody. They put it together in late 2018, which is a specific moment for both of them, though I didn’t understand why until I’d heard it a few times. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/30/nothing-breaks-like-a-heart/ Fri, 30 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/30/boulevard/ Gina-Lisa Lohfink released a song called “Boulevard.” I’m not sure why this surprised me, but somehow it did. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/30/boulevard/ Fri, 30 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/29/after-monet/ Monet wasn’t sure if he was painting Japan or the idea of Japan. He built a garden from prints since he couldn’t visit—worked from images, tried to live inside them instead. That obsession with Japanese composition, with space and color as pure structure, seeped into everything he touched. The Western art world called it Japonisme and treated it like a revelation, but it was just one man’s very long infatuation. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/29/after-monet/ Thu, 29 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/29/friends-like-these/ Selena Gomez and Puma put out a sports collection, and what caught me was that she didn’t just slap her name on some existing designs. She brought in her friends—Dana Veraldi, Katie McCurdy, Connar Franklin, Raquelle Stevens, Courtney Barry, Caroline Franklin, Theresa Marie Mingus. People she actually knows. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/29/friends-like-these/ Thu, 29 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/29/90s-kid/ The 90s catch heat they don’t deserve. Everyone talks about the bad parts now—the fashion disasters, the haircuts, daytime TV hell, that dread around Y2K, SMS charges eating your entire paycheck at 19 cents a message. On the surface it looks like a genuinely bad decade, a cultural low point we should all be embarrassed about. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/29/90s-kid/ Thu, 29 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/28/new-years-eve/ The trick with New Year’s Eve is looking like you didn’t try, which means trying harder than any other night. Everyone’s in the same spot, standing in front of their closet. Too much and it looks like you spent all afternoon on it. Too little says you don’t care. The actual answer is probably just to wear something you already like that makes you feel good—the party’s going to be the same either way. At least you won’t hate what you’re wearing in the photos. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/28/new-years-eve/ Wed, 28 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/28/see-you-space-cowboy/ Netflix is doing a live-action Cowboy Bebop with Shinichiro Watanabe directing, which is either the smartest move or a complete waste. At least they got the person who made it involved, even if that doesn’t guarantee anything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/28/see-you-space-cowboy/ Wed, 28 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/28/just-soft/ Kylie Jenner and Adidas made COEZE, which is just fleece—oversized, soft, in red or purple. The pitch is simple: warm and casual enough to wear anywhere. At home, getting coffee, pretending you didn’t think about your outfit. Winter needs things like this. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/28/just-soft/ Wed, 28 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/27/the-character/ Lady Gaga’s essentially out of the pop business now. After A Star is Born with Bradley Cooper, she made it clear she wanted to be a real person—complicated, sad, working through actual things—rather than a character, and that’s a fair choice. But pop music needs people willing to be characters, willing to be loud and strange and excessive without caring if they look ridiculous. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/27/the-character/ Tue, 27 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/27/the-intertidal-zone/ Stephen Hillenburg made SpongeBob SquarePants and died at 57 from ALS. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/27/the-intertidal-zone/ Tue, 27 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/27/why-anime-feels-true/ You’re sitting in front of a show about a kid with powers they don’t understand, and a moment comes where the character just stares at something—and the feeling in that frame is the exact feeling you’ve been carrying around for three days without being able to explain it to anyone. That happens a lot in anime. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/27/why-anime-feels-true/ Tue, 27 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/27/summer-in-december/ I hate winter. There’s snowboarding—you get a whole day on white slopes, then collapse in a warm cabin and drink yourself stupid. That part’s fine. But the rest of it, the mud and dark and cold that just sits there, it hollows you out. I spend months wanting time to move faster. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/27/summer-in-december/ Tue, 27 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/27/evangelion/ I’ve never experienced anything quite like Neon Genesis Evangelion. Most anime fits neatly into categories—good, great, whatever—but Evangelion doesn’t want neat categories. It wants to disturb you. Along with Cowboy Bebop and Sailor Moon and Wolf’s Rain, it’s one of the best things anime has produced, but unlike those shows, it doesn’t feel like entertainment. It feels like something dangerous that got released by accident. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/27/evangelion/ Tue, 27 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/26/im-on-tinder/ I used to look down on Tinder—thought it was degrading, that real people met through better channels, that I was somehow above the whole apparatus. Then some mix of boredom and genuine horniness got the better of me, and I downloaded it one night while drunk, which I’m not going to pretend was a deliberate choice. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/26/im-on-tinder/ Mon, 26 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/23/new-rules/ Saw Dua Lipa at a small venue in London—maybe 200 people, tight space. She opened with “New Rules,” that song that’s basically a masterclass in not being a pushover. “Don’t answer the phone when he’s drunk and lonely.” It’s become one of the biggest songs in the world, which tells you something about what people actually need to hear. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/23/new-rules/ Fri, 23 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/23/032cs-winter-museum/ Kiko Mizuhara on the winter cover of 032c, half-naked in a dark motorcycle jacket, looking past the camera. Born in Dallas but she became a Japanese supermodel, which is the kind of boundary-crossing that fashion lets you do—like you’re just trying on different cultures, seeing what fits. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/23/032cs-winter-museum/ Fri, 23 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/23/the-originals-untouchable/ Disney’s been on a spree lately—dig up an old cartoon, render it in 3D, cast some stars, release it. Aladdin, The Jungle Book, Dumbo. Just working through the vault. But The Lion King shouldn’t be on that assembly line. That one’s sacred. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/23/the-originals-untouchable/ Fri, 23 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/22/tooth-paint/ There’s this constant arms race on Instagram where everyone’s trying to out-weird each other. One day it’s traveling to some cliff somewhere, the next it’s stalking a celebrity so you can get a photo with their face squeezed next to yours. It’s all about attention. Attention’s getting harder to grab. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/22/tooth-paint/ Thu, 22 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/21/share-your-gifts/ A girl in an Apple ad is too scared to show anyone her drawings. She’s got canvases hidden away, sketchbooks locked in a box, the whole thing—artistic talent but paralyzed by the fear that it’s not good enough for anyone to see. A dog opens the window, wind scatters everything, and suddenly the neighborhood catches sight of her work. Nothing bad happens. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/21/share-your-gifts/ Wed, 21 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/21/selena-knows-what-shes-doing/ Selena Gomez has the system figured out. The contradictions are too perfect to be accidental—interviews where she talks about Jesus, then Instagram stories in lingerie, a clean image constantly undercut by sexualized content, carefully aimed moments where the boundary almost gives. It’s not hypocrisy. It’s a strategy, and it’s working. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/21/selena-knows-what-shes-doing/ Wed, 21 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/20/behind-the-fence/ Oxford Street, somewhere behind barbed wire and a heavy metal door, there’s a warehouse where Adidas threw a party for another celebrity collaboration. Kendall Jenner and Olivia Oblonc on the streetwear collection—months of work, apparently, resulting in a puffed jacket and assorted other pieces that land somewhere between premium and accessible, or maybe just expensive enough to feel like it matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/20/behind-the-fence/ Tue, 20 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/18/a-mute-in-the-machine/ Lea wakes up with no memory and no voice, logged into CrossWorlds—an MMO in some future where the line between player and world has gone liquid. The only way out is to play through it. I moved her through puzzles and dungeons, pieced together scraps of who she was, and slowly the game revealed why she’s trapped inside a game world in the first place. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/18/a-mute-in-the-machine/ Sun, 18 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/17/bambi-season/ Bambi’s been getting criticism for decades, and it’s deserved—it’s basically an industry reminding itself it exists. You can sit home and trash the whole thing if you didn’t get invited, which is easy and makes sense. But then someone asks if you’re coming, and suddenly all that judgment dissolves and you’re digging through your closet past the t-shirts and old jeans, looking for something that might pass for formal. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/17/bambi-season/ Sat, 17 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/17/everything-else-stops/ Standing in front of Super Potato at eleven PM with maybe fifty yen left in my pockets, staring at cartridges I’ll never actually play because my Japanese isn’t good enough to finish the story, everything else just stops mattering. The neon’s too bright, the arcades are too loud, there’s some idol group performing somewhere and you can hear the screams even though you can’t see them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/17/everything-else-stops/ Sat, 17 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/17/no-redemption/ Bill Burr made a show on Netflix about his childhood in the seventies called “F is for Family.” It’s stuck with me in a way most shows don’t—partly because it feels like a confession instead of a performance. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/17/no-redemption/ Sat, 17 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/16/like-an-alien/ Olivia Devine walks through abandoned Hollywood streets in an astronaut suit, fantasizing about killing her peers, feeling like she’s from another planet. It sounds conceptual when you describe it, but it’s the literal emotional shape of her experience—present and completely alienated at once, watching your age group move forward while you’re watching from outside. She made it into a short film to go with her Peer Pressure mixtape. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/16/like-an-alien/ Fri, 16 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/16/glucose-haltig-as-fuck/ Every year a German publishing house asks teenagers what slang they’re actually using, then announces the winners like they’ve cracked some great code. I keep watching because the results are consistently, perfectly wrong in exactly the same way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/16/glucose-haltig-as-fuck/ Fri, 16 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/16/dumbos-back/ I watched the original Dumbo once as a kid and it terrified me in a way that made me never want to watch it again. The mother, the abuse, those characters in the hallucinatory beer-drunk sequence. A helpless little elephant with these oversized ears getting put through everything. I was maybe seven or eight. One viewing was enough to make me lock that film away. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/16/dumbos-back/ Fri, 16 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/16/the-end-of-lindenstraße/ The ARD announced they’re cancelling Lindenstraße. Thirty-four years on air, and they’re done. Final episode in 2020. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/16/the-end-of-lindenstraße/ Fri, 16 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/16/behind-the-screen/ There’s a particular kind of person who feeds on tearing others down. Not someone with a legitimate criticism—just someone who’s decided that another person’s existence is a problem that needs solving. They attack, then wait to see if it landed. Pure compulsion disguised as an opinion. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/16/behind-the-screen/ Fri, 16 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/16/die-ärzte-show-up/ Die Ärzte wasn’t on Spotify. Not for years. Not for principled reasons, not for practical ones—just wasn’t there. Farin Urlaub, Bela B, Rodrigo González seemed to have decided that whatever you got from streaming services wasn’t worth the effort of signing up. So if you wanted to hear them, you owned the records or you didn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/16/die-ärzte-show-up/ Fri, 16 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/16/pokémon-tamagotchi/ I was carrying around a Tamagotchi in the 90s, and my whole sense of competence hinged on keeping the pixels inside alive. Mine died in its own shit. Not metaphorically. Literally. You’d forget to feed it for a day and come back to a dead screen, that immediate gut-punch of knowing you’d failed at something genuinely simple. The worst part was that it felt true to life. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/16/pokémon-tamagotchi/ Fri, 16 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/15/that-august-thing/ On a brutal August afternoon in Tel Aviv, photographer Michael Ivnitsky and model Shay Ri had figured out the formula: borrow a friend’s apartment, camp next to the air conditioner, get drunk, play Mac DeMarco, discuss which people the world would genuinely be better off without. If you’re working together, that’s when you make something worth seeing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/15/that-august-thing/ Thu, 15 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/15/vices-long-fade/ I used to actually read VICE. Not because it was cool—I mean, yes, but that wasn’t the point. I read it because every issue had something you wouldn’t find anywhere else. Real reporting from places that didn’t matter to bigger outlets. The photography was sick. The writing had swagger that felt earned, not performed. The whole thing carried this implicit message that the world was weirder and more interesting than anyone wanted to admit. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/15/vices-long-fade/ Thu, 15 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/14/almost-over/ There’s a point where a show stops being entertainment and becomes something you’re stuck with, obligated to see through. Game of Thrones hit that point for me sometime around season five, maybe earlier. But I kept watching anyway—through the Red Wedding, through Stannis burning his daughter, through Cersei’s naked walk of shame down those heavy stone steps. All designed to make me feel something darker than shock. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/14/almost-over/ Wed, 14 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/14/the-hand-off/ The appeal of Kynseed is letting you build something—a farm, a business, a family, whatever—and then watch it outlast you. Your character gets old, eventually dies, and you just slide into the next generation and keep going. The whole thing’s designed around that timer. Made by some people from Lionhead, which makes sense; that whole company was obsessed with generational consequences and the idea that your choices ripple forward through time. Kynseed does that same thing but as a chill pixel-art sandbox. Stardew Valley mixed with Albion. You’re not optimizing anything or grinding toward an endgame; you’re just settling somewhere and seeing what a whole life looks like across thirty or forty years and three or four characters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/14/the-hand-off/ Wed, 14 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/14/jobcenterfotzen/ You know the scene. Tuesday morning job center appointment. You show up on time with everything organized, and your caseworker arrives late with an unbuttoned shirt reeking of beer. Die toten Crackhuren im Kofferraum made a song about this specific hell. “Jobcenterfotzen”—I won’t translate it—comes with a music video that looks like a documentary from some parallel bureaucratic nightmare: decrepit computers, dead-eyed workers, hallways that trap you forever. The only way out is a lottery win or a jump from the window. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/14/jobcenterfotzen/ Wed, 14 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/14/tsurukis-tokyo/ I had this version of Japan in my head—the one everyone has. Neon, order, precision, a country where everything works and nothing is messy. You know the fantasy. You’ve absorbed it through a thousand images that all blur into the same impossible place. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/14/tsurukis-tokyo/ Wed, 14 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/14/wilfred-warrior/ Wilfred Warrior is a Persian cat from London who looks like someone stuffed Steve Buscemi into a white fur coat and ran him over a few times. I know that sounds mean, but it’s the first read you get when you see him—something went catastrophically wrong in a lab somewhere, or the universe played a prank that landed in exactly the right way. The face you’d normally avoid looking at, except it works. He’s got this grin, these huge eyes, this stare that somehow has personality underneath it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/14/wilfred-warrior/ Wed, 14 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/14/holding-the-words/ She photographed herself holding cards with the worst insults she’d received. Lena Meyer-Landrut, a German pop star who won Eurovision, had been getting brutalized online for years—fuck you, you bitch, ugly, worthless, arrogant brat, disgusting woman, whore—strangers in DMs every single day, working through some need to humiliate her. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/14/holding-the-words/ Wed, 14 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/13/london-gets-further/ I haven’t made it back to London in longer than planned. There was a time I’d go at least once a year, just for that specific international atmosphere—nothing you get in Berlin or Hamburg or anywhere else in Germany. London had something different. Still does, probably. But cities don’t wait, and somewhere along the way the annual trip became something I kept postponing. Now it’s been years. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/13/london-gets-further/ Tue, 13 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/13/hard-girls/ There are days I’m fine with Ed Sheeran or whoever making me feel something deep, but most days what I actually want is hip-hop that doesn’t care about your feelings—something crude and mechanical, especially from women who’ve got more edge and style than I ever will. City Girls are exactly that. They don’t bother with the fake gangster routine. At least one of them has done actual time, which is the only credibility that matters when so many other rappers are just dressed up in a story. Their songs are straight autobiography. “Where The Bag At,” “Sweet Tooth,” “Tighten Up”—these aren’t invented narratives, they’re just how their life sounds. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/13/hard-girls/ Tue, 13 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/13/color-in-november/ I saw someone in Harajuku wearing neon pink, some experimental top, sneakers that didn’t match. Just walking, unbothered, like it was normal. And I guess in Tokyo it is. That baseline of visual confidence—wearing bright color in wet November like it’s fine—that’s what separates Tokyo from everywhere else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/13/color-in-november/ Tue, 13 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/13/copy-paste/ Facebook turned into the digital equivalent of a retirement home. Parents and grandparents colonized it, arguing about refugees and politics in the comments. Younger people were bailing to Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok—anywhere their parents weren’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/13/copy-paste/ Tue, 13 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/13/detective-pikachu-looks-fine/ I had the best Pokémon team you could build from the first generation. Mew and Mewtwo—obviously ridiculous. Charizard that I raised from the start and loved. Articuno for the ice storms. Gyarados even though it was born a useless Magikarp. Dragonite because in an actual fight, Pikachu and Eevee are cute but unreliable, no matter how much you care about them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/13/detective-pikachu-looks-fine/ Tue, 13 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/13/video-not-available/ You know the message. You’re searching for something—a music video, a clip, anything—and there it is: “This video is not available in your country.” After you see it enough times you stop noticing. But YouTube just announced they might be putting up a lot more of those, and on purpose. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/13/video-not-available/ Tue, 13 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/13/stan-lee/ I was never really a Marvel person—always preferred manga—but you couldn’t ignore Stan Lee. He created or co-created nearly every major superhero of the last seventy years. Spider-Man, the X-Men, Hulk, Thor, Daredevil, Iron Man, Black Panther. The catalog is almost absurd. He died at 95, and American pop culture doesn’t make sense without his fingerprints on it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/13/stan-lee/ Tue, 13 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/12/a-party-moment/ Jeremy Scott pitched the Moschino x H&M collection as a party. Fun, pop, energy, friends showing up—that’s the pitch. No pretense of importance. Just meant to be fun and then it’s over. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/12/a-party-moment/ Mon, 12 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/12/the-whole-thing/ Diana Kingston lives in Milan and makes her living with two related but supposedly separate things: her appearance and her genuine love of comics. Model, former Playmate, comic fan. That combination - the attractive woman who’s into the same stuff you’re into - is its own specific fantasy. Everyone knows it. The hot girl who gets your references. The woman who’s both object and companion. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/12/the-whole-thing/ Mon, 12 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/12/hazelnut-bastille/ My world has always been pixelated. I don’t mean that literally, but when I think of what a real video game feels like, it’s sprites and tiles and that sound the SNES made when it was pushing close to its limits. I loved the big 3D games when they arrived. The Witcher 3 is genuinely great. Super Mario 64 is a masterpiece. But something about the pixel world closing off felt like a death. The industry decided realism was the future, and for years I believed them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/12/hazelnut-bastille/ Mon, 12 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/12/if-these-were-gadgets/ Instagram as a camera. WhatsApp as a walkie talkie. Netflix as a slide projector. That’s what Thomas Olivier designed—what modern apps would actually look like if someone had invented them in the 1980s, not as software but as physical objects you could hold. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/12/if-these-were-gadgets/ Mon, 12 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/12/the-spiral/ Some nights I lie awake and the same thought loops endlessly in my head: what if. What if. What if. While other people are jerking off in the dark or getting fucked stupid by their partner and falling asleep with that satisfied look, tomorrow ready to coast on momentum and build their life resume, I’m lying there getting nowhere, thinking myself into circles. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/12/the-spiral/ Mon, 12 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/9/the-thing-that-works/ The BVG made a song. Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” reinterpreted by transit employees in a glossy video that commits fully to the concept—cool and confident and aware of its own absurdity. The premise is simple: a public utility loves you. They’ve decided to sing about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/9/the-thing-that-works/ Fri, 09 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/7/still-bonnie/ Bonnie Strange had a kid, and then she took her clothes off for Playboy. No break in between. No period where she disappears, gets the body back, returns to public life. Just: newborn, then naked in a magazine. It’s a straightforward move and also kind of a fuck-you to everything we pretend to believe about motherhood. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/11/7/still-bonnie/ Wed, 07 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/10/29/back-to-the-board/ I haven’t played Monopoly in years. Maybe not since my cousin—the scratchy type who’d get bored after thirty minutes and start throwing houses and hotels at me in frustration. Or with my dad, who refused to lose. He had this uncanny way of maneuvering me into financial ruin so smoothly that I stopped believing in capitalism altogether. I’ve been quietly rooting for the collapse of international banking ever since. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/10/29/back-to-the-board/ Mon, 29 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/10/29/dark-sabrina/ Netflix picked up “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.” If you know the original with Melissa Joan Hart, this isn’t it. It was effortlessly charming because of her—a teenager with actual magic powers, and it never felt desperate or over-explained, just funny and perfect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/10/29/dark-sabrina/ Mon, 29 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/10/10/taki-taki/ Caught the “Taki Taki” video during a work break. It’s got that generic reggaeton-trap groove that gets everywhere for a summer and then disappears completely. Ozuna’s in it, Cardi B’s in it, DJ Snake produced it—none of it means anything to me, and I suspect it won’t mean anything in six weeks. The video’s exactly what you’d expect: beach bars, dancing, bodies, the whole designed-for-summer-playlists thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/10/10/taki-taki/ Wed, 10 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/10/8/missing-softcore/ I watched a clip the other day—some seventies film with soft focus and diffuse light, the camera moving slowly across skin like it was stealing glances. Three minutes and it was hotter than scrolling through porn sites for an hour. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/10/8/missing-softcore/ Mon, 08 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/10/4/getting-it-right/ There’s a twenty-year-old from Berlin named Nessie who posts outfit pictures, and the thing about them is they don’t look like she’s performing anything. Just careful decisions, letting them be what they are. You see a lot of young creative people where the effort is all visible—they’re desperate to prove they’re interesting. She was just working. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/10/4/getting-it-right/ Thu, 04 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/10/4/mitsuboshi-colors/ Put this on one night out of boredom, just a cute anime about three elementary school girls and their clubhouse in Ueno. Yui, Sat-chan, Kotoha, a thieving cat, neighborhood stuff. That’s the cover. What I didn’t expect was how unsettling it actually gets. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/10/4/mitsuboshi-colors/ Thu, 04 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/10/4/playboy-and-german-tv/ I’ve never heard of Isabel Vollmer. I don’t watch German television—if you forced me to choose between three hours of Til Schweiger and smashing my head into concrete, I’d probably go with the concrete. So her nude Playboy shoot means nothing to me personally. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/10/4/playboy-and-german-tv/ Thu, 04 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/10/2/weedcraft/ Weedcraft is Devolver Digital’s business simulation about running an illegal cannabis operation. You grow, sell to customers, compete with dealers who have better product and lower prices, stay ahead of the cops. The dream is to be the best dealer on your block. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/10/2/weedcraft/ Tue, 02 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/9/21/test/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/9/21/test/ Fri, 21 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/8/9/still-works/ I got my first G-SHOCK when I was fourteen. Confirmation day. Fire-engine red with a skull and spider web on the face—the Fox Fire model. I loved that watch. Wore it everywhere with stupid pride through my small hometown. More than anything else I owned, that watch was me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/8/9/still-works/ Thu, 09 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/8/4/manga/ I’ve been reading a lot of manga lately. There’s something about how they’re paced that gets me—a page does what it needs and then you move. No overcooking it. Maybe it’s just different enough from everything else I read. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/8/4/manga/ Sat, 04 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/27/the-essential-shape/ There’s something satisfying about seeing Chun-Li rendered as a low-poly model. The geometry is clean, the colors pop, and somehow she’s more recognizably herself than in most official art. Michael Firman’s been doing this for a while—taking characters I’ve known forever and reducing them to clean geometric shapes. Link, Mega Man, the whole Nintendo roster. The style reads instantly, which shouldn’t be possible. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/27/the-essential-shape/ Fri, 27 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/26/the-whitest-k-pop-group/ Ran across EXP Edition through some pop culture rabbit hole - four guys from New York named Šime, Koki, Frankie, and Hunter who moved to South Korea to be K-pop idols. No background in the industry, no cultural connection to any of it, just American ambition and a management company willing to bet on something completely absurd. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/26/the-whitest-k-pop-group/ Thu, 26 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/26/gungeon-nights/ It’s hot. I’m on the couch in underwear, cold drink sweating on the side table, playing Enter the Gungeon. It’s exactly the game I need on a night like this. The pixel art looks cute—little creatures, bright colors—but the game itself is relentless. It destroys you over and over, yet here I am, coming back anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/26/gungeon-nights/ Thu, 26 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/26/mid90s/ Summer in 90s Los Angeles if you were skateboarding: the park, the streets, the crew you fell in with at the shop, the family problems you couldn’t do anything about. Jonah Hill spent his teenage years in that world, and for his directorial debut he made a film about it—or a version of it, anyway. The protagonist is a thirteen-year-old named Stevie; the film is called Mid90s. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/26/mid90s/ Thu, 26 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/25/no-flinching/ Found a game called “Fuck ISIS - Super Patriotic Dating Simulator.” You’re a CIA agent named Elodie seducing ISIS members in Syria. It’s got crude jokes, dating-sim mechanics, and it’s half-finished on Kickstarter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/25/no-flinching/ Wed, 25 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/25/oksana-schatschko/ Oksana Schatschko, 31, co-founder of Femen, was found dead in her Paris apartment. No cause of death was ever established. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/25/oksana-schatschko/ Wed, 25 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/23/fear-and-loading/ I almost made it to Hong Kong a few years back. We were traveling through China, and one of the people with us was from there—kept talking about how different it was, how we had to see it. But visa issues and time ate up the plan, and we ended up not going. One of those near-miss regrets you file away. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/23/fear-and-loading/ Mon, 23 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/23/i-am-shin-chan/ There’s a kid in Shin Chan who doesn’t understand shame. He grabs asses. He lifts skirts. He says whatever crude thing is in his mouth without filtering it through any social decency. He’s five years old and he’s the most honest thing on screen. And somehow he’s the character I’ve most wanted to be, which says something I’m not sure I want to examine too closely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/23/i-am-shin-chan/ Mon, 23 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/23/still-cant-quit/ I quit the agency thinking I’d figured out the secret. Write from anywhere, set your own hours, no boss. I was making money writing about celebrity bodies, fucking models in bathroom stalls, traveling on someone else’s dime. I thought I’d beaten the system. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/23/still-cant-quit/ Mon, 23 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/18/private-monsters/ There’s this gap. The version of me people see and the version I actually am. I’m decent enough when it matters—patient with friends, not gratuitously cruel, conscious of how I move through the world. But alone in my apartment with my phone I’m something else. Different thoughts. Different searches. Different resentments. The kinds of things that would change how people see me if they surfaced. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/18/private-monsters/ Wed, 18 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/18/sneaker-into-smoke/ I watched someone turn a Balenciaga Triple S into a bong, and it was more satisfying than any sneaker content I’ve seen in years. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/18/sneaker-into-smoke/ Wed, 18 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/17/mandy-moore/ Britney and Christina dominated the late nineties, and the Spice Girls too. They earned every bit of attention they got. But around the turn of the millennium, Mandy Moore released “So Real” and something just clicked. I didn’t understand half of what she was singing. Didn’t even matter. There was “Candy,” “Walk Me Home,” “Lock Me in Your Heart”—this collection of songs that somehow never landed the way they should have, at least not with anyone I knew. I’d put the album on for friends and watch it go nowhere with them. They didn’t hear what I heard. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/17/mandy-moore/ Tue, 17 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/17/the-forever-list/ There’s a YouTuber named Gregor Kartsius who’s spent the better part of twenty years playing every RPG he could find, and he finally did what everyone does eventually—he made a list. Not just any list: 101 best RPGs, plus some extras squeezed in, stretched across videos that’ll take longer to watch than some of these games take to beat. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/17/the-forever-list/ Tue, 17 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/17/kill-the-head/ Bill Murray does this thing where he just exists in the world and it works. Selena Gomez was making a zombie film with him then, which made sense. I’d thought of her as basically the new Scarlett Johansson anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/17/kill-the-head/ Tue, 17 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/17/the-waitress-threw-him/ This video’s circulating. Some guy at a restaurant grabs a waitress’s ass in passing—like he doesn’t have to think about it. She grabs him back, throws him into tables, into another customer, pure animal reflex. People online can’t stop talking about whether she was justified. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/17/the-waitress-threw-him/ Tue, 17 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/17/starcourt-mall/ Someone on Reddit spotted a renovated mall being dressed up for Stranger Things and Netflix confirmed it. Starcourt Mall, opening summer 1985 in Hawkins—the show’s using the mall as the backdrop for season 3. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/17/starcourt-mall/ Tue, 17 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/17/mechanical-dread/ The thing about Akira is that it doesn’t try to make the future look good. Katsuhiro Otomo’s film is probably the closest we’ve gotten to showing apocalypse without irony or nostalgia—just Tokyo coming apart, the architecture failing, the people smaller and smaller until they disappear. It commits to the ugliness completely. That’s what makes it a masterpiece. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/17/mechanical-dread/ Tue, 17 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/17/hipster-sincerity/ I watched this segment on Karambolage—that French-German cultural comparison show—and it got me thinking about how the same aesthetic manifests so differently depending on where you plant it. You put a Berlin hipster and a Paris hipster side by side, and yeah, they’re wearing the same uniform: Club Mate, fixed-gear bike, full beard, dark glasses, those geometrically patterned shirts in colors that shouldn’t go together. Same uniform, totally different energy underneath. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/17/hipster-sincerity/ Tue, 17 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/17/we-2-always-1/ The thing about German Schlager is that everyone acts like it’s beneath them until they’re drunk enough to admit they don’t mind it. Helene Fischer burns into your brain whether you want her to. The Amigos are somehow still alive despite being medically dead for two decades. Everyone pretends not to care, but you catch them knowing the words anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/17/we-2-always-1/ Tue, 17 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/10/lil-dicky/ I have a lot of time for Lil Dicky because he’s managed something most rappers don’t: he’s funny without being a joke, skilled without being a flex. Most comedians who rap are just bad at rapping. Most rappers who try to be funny end up diminishing the technical stuff. He does both, fully, at the same time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/10/lil-dicky/ Tue, 10 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/4/dream-job/ I could argue with my family all night about whether blogging counts as a real profession and get absolutely nowhere. For them, a real job means going somewhere—an office, a store, a workshop. Having a boss. Definitely not working for yourself, which they see as basically admitting defeat and pretending you have income. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/4/dream-job/ Wed, 04 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/4/six-in-the-morning/ Six in the morning. Heidi Kubieziel opens the door to find six armed police in tactical vests and two city observers in her stairwell. They’re looking for her husband Jens, who isn’t home. They want documents from Zwiebelfreunde, the digital rights organization where Jens sits on the board. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/4/six-in-the-morning/ Wed, 04 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/4/copyright-goes-nuclear/ Some CDU politician named Axel Voss—guy apparently had no idea how the internet actually works—pushed a copyright reform through the EU that included automatic upload filters. Every platform would have to scan everything before it went live and block anything flagged as infringing copyright. The pitch was always about protecting creators and the music industry. Nobody was going to say out loud that this would also catch your remixes, your mashups, your fair-use clips, your memes using a thirty-second song. All the things that actually make the internet worth using. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/4/copyright-goes-nuclear/ Wed, 04 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/3/how-to-tell-good-coffee/ I need coffee in the morning or I’m genuinely unbearable—not just tired, but actually broken, moving through the day half-dead until that first cup hits. It’s pathetic, I know. I’ve bought the expensive brands, the ones with reputations, roasters that sell on origin and care. I tell myself I can taste a difference between what I’m buying and supermarket coffee. Probably I can’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/3/how-to-tell-good-coffee/ Tue, 03 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/3/the-compulsion/ I got Harvest Moon for the SNES at Christmas 1998, and I barely remember anything specific about that year except that I was glued to that game for months. It was the first time I understood why people got lost in farming sims—the little rituals, the calendar always pushing you forward, the feeling that leaving a crop unharvested was somehow a personal failure. Eventually I moved on, but I kept looking for that same thing in every Harvest Moon sequel that came after, and they were all terrible. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/3/the-compulsion/ Tue, 03 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/3/funko-made-cereal/ Funko made cereal. Of course they did. When a company realizes collectors will buy a $15 toy even if they hate it, branching into breakfast is inevitable. The boxes come with Cuphead in red, Mega Man in blue, Gollum in green—the same characters you’d already have on a shelf, now printed on cardboard. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/3/funko-made-cereal/ Tue, 03 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/3/born-in-84/ Luo Yang and I were born in the same year—1984—and that detail felt important when we talked. Politics doesn’t preoccupy her much, she said. She doesn’t think it shapes her work or her life in any direct way. She’d rather watch the people around her, pay attention to how they actually live, even though obviously their lives are bent by forces much larger than themselves. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/3/born-in-84/ Tue, 03 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/3/another-rapper-another-beer/ Every rapper eventually launches a beverage. It’s as inevitable as the first NFT project or the signature sneaker that nobody asked for. Bausa got his turn—slapped his face on a can of Gude and called it an “Artist Edition.” https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/3/another-rapper-another-beer/ Tue, 03 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/2/indifferent/ Post Malone showed up in 2015 with face tattoos and a beat he’d made himself, singing melody over trap in a way that confused everyone trying to categorize him. “White Iverson” had enough personality that it stuck. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/2/indifferent/ Mon, 02 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/2/rosis/ The Revaler Straße in Berlin had this place called Rosi’s where I’d show up on summer nights with friends, no particular plan, just the thing people did. A beer garden with fairy lights draped over wooden benches—the kind of setup that felt like it would always be there, at least while you were drunk. I was usually pretty fucked up there, high or drunk or both, but the place had a specific weight to it, not just another club but somewhere with actual character. Drum and bass mostly, sometimes techno, whatever packed people into the two-story room and kept them dancing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/2/rosis/ Mon, 02 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/2/i-wanna-dance-with-somebody/ I’m not as hung up on breasts as people seem to think. Sure, I appreciate them—the same way I appreciate a pizza loaded with double cheese or cheap corner-store wine that tastes like someone mixed in antifreeze. They’re pleasant. I notice. But I’m not obsessed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/2/i-wanna-dance-with-somebody/ Mon, 02 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/2/rick-and-morty-got-insufferable/ There’s that moment with every show where it stops being fun to like because the people who like it have decided it proves something about them. For Rick and Morty, I think it was when the Pickle Rick episode dropped and the fandom realized they could use it as proof they were smarter, weirder, more enlightened than everyone else. By the time actual news stories were running about McDonald’s sauce shortages, the show had lost me entirely, even though technically it hadn’t really done anything wrong. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/2/rick-and-morty-got-insufferable/ Mon, 02 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/2/concrete-cuckoos/ A wooden chalet, hand-painted, someone’s grandmother’s mantelpiece for fifty years. Every hour on the hour, a tiny door pops open and a stylized bird emerges, calls out, disappears. That’s the cuckoo clock formula, refined to kitsch—quaint, unthreatening, the kind of thing you’d encounter in a Black Forest gift shop or your parents’ cabin. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/2/concrete-cuckoos/ Mon, 02 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/2/before-she-showed-up/ Hi Score Girl nails something I’ve been thinking about since the nineties. Back then it was just the arcade—quarters, sweat, someone’s little brother crying because he lost Street Fighter again. Or home on the console, same crew on rotation, playing until some parent showed up with threats. The whole social geometry of gaming before it became something you did alone on a screen in your room. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/2/before-she-showed-up/ Mon, 02 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/2/the-better-ghost/ Since “Lost in Translation” I’ve been a devoted Scarlett Johansson viewer—the kind of person who watches everything she makes, even when it doesn’t work. And there’s been plenty that doesn’t work. Lucy, Under the Skin, Rough Night, Ghost in the Shell are all the same film, essentially: a beautiful actress in a hollow thing, cashing in goodwill on material that doesn’t merit it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/2/the-better-ghost/ Mon, 02 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/1/phantom-meat/ That moment when you walk past somewhere and smell grilling—burgers, steaks, fat hitting hot metal—and suddenly nothing else exists. Someone’s cooking and you’re not invited. Your body reacts before your mind. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/1/phantom-meat/ Sun, 01 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/1/into-the-hollow/ You’re descending into Dirtmouth. The ruined city fades above as you push deeper into caverns filled with insects and corrupted creatures that move in ways that feel off. It’s Metroidvania structure—all that backtracking, finding new abilities, discovering passages you were too weak to access before. The world feels genuinely wrong in the way that makes your chest tighten. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/1/into-the-hollow/ Sun, 01 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/1/what-dark-souls-is-actually-about/ Any Dark Souls player will tell you the story is this profound, sprawling thing—layered, cryptic, each detail something you have to dig for. The implication is they’re smarter than you because they played through an unrelenting game where everything kills you and they also thought about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/1/what-dark-souls-is-actually-about/ Sun, 01 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/1/gleaming-continuity/ You see Rina Sawayama’s list of interests—anime, Nintendo, strange music—and you immediately know her. That was my childhood too, basically. Spent it glued to screens watching whatever weird stuff I could find, learning about culture through games and cartoons and whatever was on TV. She grew up the same way, moved from Japan to London by her parents and surrounded by that same sensory chaos. When you meet someone with that background, you trust them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/1/gleaming-continuity/ Sun, 01 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/1/callgirl-2000/ I’d never read a pulp novel. Those cheap paperbacks at the train station, the newsstand, some decrepit magazine shop—people who bought them seemed suspicious. Hairy doctors seducing nurses during hospital crises. Who wants to read that? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/1/callgirl-2000/ Sun, 01 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/1/the-underground-still-moves/ I was in my twenties when we started driving to illegal raves in the kind of buildings that shouldn’t have been standing anymore. Warehouses outside the city, abandoned industrial spaces, places that existed off the map. My friends and I didn’t really think about whether we were allowed to be there—you don’t when you’re that age. You go for the music, for the way six hours of dancing in a dark basement changes how you experience being alive. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/1/the-underground-still-moves/ Sun, 01 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/1/same-outfit/ Peter Baumann traveled across Japan with Maria Kn for three weeks shooting fashion photos, wearing the same outfit the entire time. Not a statement, just practical—one dress packed, everything light, easy to move. That’s the whole idea. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/7/1/same-outfit/ Sun, 01 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/30/no-sorting/ Most photographers learn the rules early—what goes in a portfolio, what gets buried in a private folder, what never appears in the same image as what. Kristofferson San Pablo, a photographer from Manila now based in LA, seems to have never learned them, or learned and ignored them. He shoots roadtrips and Simpson riffs and nudes and whatever else interests him, all filed together with no hierarchy. A picture diary without apology. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/30/no-sorting/ Sat, 30 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/30/how-youll-go/ I lie awake sometimes and think about how I’m probably going to die. Not in some morbid, actively-planning-it way—just the casual obsession. Under a bus. Choking on pizza. That one ex with the knife. Train tracks. Cancer, obviously. AIDS, though less likely now. A dog with rabies. Sepsis from a cut I didn’t notice. Lungs giving out. Heart just deciding it’s had enough. Or standing on the edge of some high building when everything finally breaks wrong. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/30/how-youll-go/ Sat, 30 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/30/born-in-82/ Marteria and Casper made an album together called “1982.” Both born the same year in Germany, different towns, different careers. Now they’re making something as a pair. First track is “Champion Sound.” https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/30/born-in-82/ Sat, 30 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/30/va-11-hall-a/ VA-11 HALL-A is set in a dystopian cyberpunk metropolis, but you’re not the one saving it. You’re not even trying. You’re Jill, a bartender who shows up for her shift and wants to get through it without someone dragging her into a corpo conspiracy or a gang war. That’s genuinely the whole premise. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/30/va-11-hall-a/ Sat, 30 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/30/superstar-flowers/ If I had a million dollars, I’d buy coke and video games and some impossible Kate Upton-Selena Gomez hybrid to sleep with. But honestly, most of it would go to Superstars. Every single adidas Originals Superstar that exists or will ever exist. Every version, every color, every material. Before they were trendy, after they stopped being trendy, forever. The Superstar is the only shoe. There is no other discussion. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/30/superstar-flowers/ Sat, 30 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/30/the-tattoo-question/ Every few years the idea comes back: I should get a tattoo. Something small. I wanted black stars on my arm at twelve, my parents said no, probably the right move. Now I think maybe something on my hand, an empty triangle on my forearm—something small enough that I could pretend it was just an impulse if I hated it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/30/the-tattoo-question/ Sat, 30 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/30/speaking-terms/ Lindsey Jordan’s debut “Lush” gets to the point—no setup, no waiting. “Speaking Terms,” “Golden Dream,” “Let’s Find an Out” don’t circle what they’re about. They’re direct about the texture of young romantic pain, the kind that feels permanent even though you know it won’t be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/30/speaking-terms/ Sat, 30 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/29/back-in-orsterra/ I spent the objectively best years of my life sitting in front of an old tube TV, deep in some SNES RPG. The games blur together when I try to list them—Lufia, Terranigma, Secret of Mana, A Link to the Past, Illusion of Time, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Evermore, Star Ocean, EarthBound, Final Fantasy III, Harvest Moon, Breath of Fire, Mystic Quest, Soul Blazer—but the feeling stays sharp. Each one mattered in a way nothing really matters to me anymore. I’d do just about anything to get back there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/29/back-in-orsterra/ Fri, 29 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/29/juno-birchs-worlds/ Juno Birch paints breasts and women and sex and power like nobody else. Her work splits people—some try to decode it, understand what she’s saying. Others want it off the wall, burned, gone. But that split, that recoil, that’s where the art lives. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/29/juno-birchs-worlds/ Fri, 29 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/29/space-looks-good/ My friends were in Tokyo and started noticing everyone wearing the same thing: new white NASA shirts. Streetwear drops from Heron Preston, Monkey Time, Vans, Carhartt WIP. Same design across all of them—that seventies NASA worm logo, big and centered, nothing else. Pure minimalism. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/29/space-looks-good/ Fri, 29 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/29/scorpion/ Drake grew up in Toronto playing Jimmy Brooks on Degrassi—138 episodes of high school drama before he was old enough to legally drink. Then he walked away from acting to rap, which is one of the strangest career pivots in entertainment, and it worked completely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/29/scorpion/ Fri, 29 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/29/the-now-now/ Gorillaz have this thing where none of the albums feel like they’re just going through the motions. Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett built the virtual band with 2D, Murdoc, Noodle, and Russel in 2001, and from that first album through Demon Days, Plastic Beach, The Fall, and Humanz, each one sounds like exactly what they wanted to make at that time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/29/the-now-now/ Fri, 29 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/29/that-version-of-summer/ Non Non Biyori works because nothing happens. Four girls in rural Japan, no escalating plot, no stakes—just moments filmed with enough care that you feel something watching them. A conversation that loops back. Light on water. The particular exhaustion of walking somewhere on foot when trains are what you’re used to. It accumulates. You watch and without realizing it, you’ve let yourself believe that life could actually be this manageable, this good. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/29/that-version-of-summer/ Fri, 29 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/28/disenchantment/ There’s a show called Disenchantment. Matt Groening made it. Medieval fantasy world, dragons, monsters, everyone’s drinking. So Futurama but with castles instead of spaceships. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/28/disenchantment/ Thu, 28 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/28/what-hamburg-actually-looks-like/ The Hauptbahnhof in Hamburg has a smell. You hear about it before you get there—legendary, they say. That’s your introduction to the gap: what gets marketed versus what’s actually there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/28/what-hamburg-actually-looks-like/ Thu, 28 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/28/bright-quick-done/ I can’t do the long-term game thing anymore. Three weeks with Fortnite or World of Warcraft and I’m ready for literally anything else. I need something I can finish in an evening, feel like I got something out of it, and then move on. No battle passes, no seasons, no twelve-year-olds in voice chat. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/28/bright-quick-done/ Thu, 28 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/28/cats-on-pizza/ There’s this Instagram account where someone photoshops cats into pictures of food. Cats on pizza, cats on ice cream, cats sitting on an orange like they own it. The artist is Ksenia, a Russian illustrator, and the account is called Cats in Food. That’s it. That’s the whole concept. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/28/cats-on-pizza/ Thu, 28 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/28/impossible-mix/ I fall in love with strangers constantly. Someone passes on the street and I catch their scent or the way they move, and I’m briefly, pointlessly transfixed—certain we’d be perfect together if we ever spoke. We’d find some roof, drink cheap wine, smoke, laugh about nothing specific. It’s stupid. I know nothing about them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/28/impossible-mix/ Thu, 28 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/28/dressing-loud/ Tokyo summers are brutal. Rainy season first—everything damp and heavy—then heat that’s relentless. You sweat through everything by noon. One summer I was buying replacement t-shirts at the H&M in Shibuya almost every day. The register guy started saying my name before I got to the counter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/28/dressing-loud/ Thu, 28 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/28/the-manga-merch-threshold/ Most anime and manga merchandise is garbage. The kind of thing you find in tourist shops or gas stations—screenprinted onto cheap cotton, colors already fading before you wear it twice. But there’s been this slow shift where actual designers have started taking manga aesthetics seriously, and when they do it right, it’s harder to dismiss as novelty. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/28/the-manga-merch-threshold/ Thu, 28 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/28/when-love-becomes-lethal/ Back in 2002, the internet was slow and billed by the minute. Battle Royale was worth stealing—I queued it up overnight and waited two days for the download to finish. Some bootleg trailer had convinced me it mattered, all blood and darkness. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/28/when-love-becomes-lethal/ Thu, 28 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/27/the-number/ There’s this weird moment in every relationship where one person finally asks or admits it, and suddenly all the calculus you did in your head matters less than the actual number. You didn’t really want to know, but you needed to, and now you can’t unknow it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/27/the-number/ Wed, 27 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/27/still-reading/ Ten years ago German blogging was everywhere—loud, colorful, hundreds of voices. Now most of it’s gone. The good ones either sold out to magazines, switched to YouTube, or just quit. You notice it when you actually use a feed reader, which almost nobody does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/27/still-reading/ Wed, 27 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/27/nobody-knows-the-anthem/ So there’s this Bad Lip Reading video of the German national team singing their anthem, right, and it’s just pure nonsense when you watch their actual mouths moving. The real words are all solemn and dignified, but Bad Lip Reading just transcribes what it looks like they’re actually saying, and it’s complete gibberish. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/27/nobody-knows-the-anthem/ Wed, 27 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/27/normal-perverts/ I stumbled into FetLife one night and found a whole world I didn’t know was that organized. Not hidden—just there. People in leather and horse masks, uniforms, expensive gear, all discussing it seriously. College kids, office workers, people who wanted something different. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/27/normal-perverts/ Wed, 27 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/27/5-in-the-morning/ I heard “5 In The Morning” and realized how completely she’d settled into herself. Not the version still trying to figure it out—the version who already knows. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/27/5-in-the-morning/ Wed, 27 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/27/lachicams-fantasies/ Andy Warhol’s been the biggest influence on how I think about sex and art. His work taught me that color and repetition can make anything beautiful, that you can flatten something onto a canvas and suddenly it’s worthy of serious attention. Which is probably why I’m so drawn to LaChicaM, a Polish artist who took that idea seriously and ran straight into explicit pornography. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/27/lachicams-fantasies/ Wed, 27 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/27/volt-because-someone-had-to-try/ Everyone you know spends time complaining about Europe falling apart. Brexit. The refugee crisis being handled like a game of hot potato. Lobbying openly corrupting everything. And the Upload Filter coming down the pipe, which would basically kill the internet as anyone under thirty knew it. You could go out with your friends and spend the night taking it apart, or you could do something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/27/volt-because-someone-had-to-try/ Wed, 27 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/26/jadens-tokyo/ Jaden Smith’s been obsessed with Tokyo ever since he made Neo Yokio, and it hasn’t gotten any less strange. The anime was pretty bad, but he doesn’t seem bothered. He was too busy loving Tokyo to notice it didn’t work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/26/jadens-tokyo/ Tue, 26 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/26/straight-girls-playing/ Nothing gets me harder than straight girls with other girls. That first time especially, when I know for certain she’s actually straight—that’s when I feel like the turning point in her life, like I’m giving her something nobody else ever will, pulling her into a world she never knew existed. That moment when the confusion on her face shifts into something else. When she realizes she actually wants this. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/26/straight-girls-playing/ Tue, 26 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/26/mattresses-of-berlin/ You walk around Berlin and there are always three things. Dog shit on every corner. Empty beer bottles in gutters. And mattresses just abandoned on sidewalks, sitting there like someone might come back for them, which they won’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/26/mattresses-of-berlin/ Tue, 26 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/26/summer-loop/ I keep coming back to Chillhop’s seasonal stuff. They put out four a year and Summer Essentials 2018 just dropped—the usual crew of producers, the usual formula, nothing surprising. Matt Quentin, Stan Forebee, Sofasound. Names I’ve heard plenty but couldn’t place in a crowd. Doesn’t matter. The work lands. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/26/summer-loop/ Tue, 26 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/26/when-k-pop-won/ I watched the “Ddu-Du Ddu-Du” video and felt that familiar twinge—the recognition of something perfectly crafted, something expensive, something that knows exactly what it’s doing to your brain. It’s not just the production. It’s how every element clicks into place, no wasted motion, no sloppy edges. This is music as manufactured product, and I mean that without judgment. It’s just what it is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/26/when-k-pop-won/ Tue, 26 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/26/the-exception/ Selena Gomez managed something most Disney stars can’t—she got older without imploding into the kind of spectacular disaster everyone half-expected. While the rest of them were having public meltdowns and scandals, she just kept working: made decent music, did weird art films like Spring Breakers, stayed professional enough that nobody took her entirely seriously but not boring enough that anyone stopped watching. It’s a balance almost nobody hits. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/26/the-exception/ Tue, 26 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/26/growing-old-in-the-cape/ There’s something I keep thinking about regarding superheroes in old age. Not mythology or legacy—just the practical question. What does Superman do at seventy? What happens to Flash when his knees give out? Russian artist Lesya Guseva answered it with these soft, colorful illustrations where she mixes the hyperviolent comic worlds with something gentler. Batman just wants to sleep. Supergirl and Wonder Woman feed pigeons. Captain America stands in the rain protecting Snow White. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/26/growing-old-in-the-cape/ Tue, 26 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/25/speedrunning-that-matters/ Someone finishes a three-hour game in fifteen minutes because they’ve played it three hundred times and know every glitch, every spot where the engine breaks. A week of this—different runners, different games, all of them pushing what they love as fast as physics allows. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/25/speedrunning-that-matters/ Mon, 25 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/25/soho-without-her/ Dua Lipa completely had my head that year. When V Magazine put her on the cover and she threw a party in Soho to celebrate, I needed to know everything about it - which meant tracking the whole night through Instagram stories from people too busy filming to actually have fun. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/25/soho-without-her/ Mon, 25 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/25/poolside/ Three German athletes got photographed naked in a pool during the 2018 World Cup. The national soccer team had declined, so Playboy booked Kristina Levina, Patrizia Dinkel, and Tanja Brockmann instead. Mallorca, topless in a pool, and Dinkel was named Playmate of the Year. She’d wanted the title since childhood, crediting beer and a philosophy of living well to her figure rather than gym work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/25/poolside/ Mon, 25 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/25/wahre-welle/ Germany’s state education ministry launched an online channel called Wahre Welle TV—True Wave TV—that broadcasts like a straight-up conspiracy outlet. Lizard people controlling global finance. Flat earth proofs. Moon Nazis. Cell phone radiation killing children. Angela Merkel puppeted by America and banks and whoever else. The whole thing is satire, obvious enough that you’d recognize how stupid these channels actually sound. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/25/wahre-welle/ Mon, 25 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/25/alone-with-everyone/ Pizza and wine in the apartment, door locked, scrolling through people’s lives on screens. The internet was supposed to end loneliness and instead it just made it louder. Everyone’s performing now—their best selves, their curated moments—and the more you watch the more alone you feel. Not because you’re excluded. Because the connection’s fake. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/25/alone-with-everyone/ Mon, 25 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/25/once-bernd-always-bernd/ Krautchan was Germany’s answer to 4chan—the place where guys called themselves Bernds and spent way too much time convincing themselves they were smarter, edgier, and just generally better than everyone else. The mix was always the same: some right-wing stuff, a lot of anime girls, a few actual nerds teaching each other how to install Linux. It was theirs, and it felt alive in that specific way imageboards do when they’re small enough to have a real culture but big enough that you’re not watching the same five people every day. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/25/once-bernd-always-bernd/ Mon, 25 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/25/the-now-now/ Gorillaz premiered ’The Now Now’ with a live session at Boiler Room Tokyo, and it felt like one of those moments where the marketing was actually connected to what the album was about. The new record had City Pop all over it—that glossy, introspective 80s Tokyo sound that had come back as something cool again—and going to Tokyo to play it made sense. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/25/the-now-now/ Mon, 25 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/25/internet-killed-the-video-star/ VIVA’s gone now, technically speaking. Another dead channel. You might catch old clips sometime, the late versions, and think “okay, MTV variant, got it.” By that point it was. But there was a real VIVA, the one that started on December 1st, 1993, as a deliberate answer to MTV Europe. And it was genuinely strange. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/25/internet-killed-the-video-star/ Mon, 25 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/22/night-vision/ You show up when it’s dark out. Reading in bed with the phone hidden so nobody catches you awake past bedtime, or in a club because everyone’s dancing except you, or on the last train home drunk and having missed your stop twice because you weren’t paying attention. This place is what you’re looking at when the night gets too quiet or too slow or you need something besides what’s in front of you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/22/night-vision/ Fri, 22 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/13/obsession/ Night City is broken in the familiar way—megacorps in towers, dealers on the street selling neural implants and the promise of transcendence, the poor and rich separated by invisible distance. It’s cyberpunk 101, which means it’s been rendered a thousand times already. The aesthetic has become so tired that neon feels comfortable now, expected. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/6/13/obsession/ Wed, 13 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/29/viva-la-vulva/ There was a time when sex was something that happened away from daylight, away from real examination. The body was functional, not something you looked at. Shame and machinery. Then nine months later you had kids and that was the end of looking anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/29/viva-la-vulva/ Tue, 29 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/29/the-shark-hunt/ Fishermen off Okinawa were losing their catch to sharks. Day after day the sharks would come, tear through the nets, and disappear with the fish. At some point you stop calling it nature and start calling it a problem. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/29/the-shark-hunt/ Tue, 29 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/29/herbertstraße/ Nisse’s new album is called “Ciao.” The first single is “Unmöglich”—Impossible. Once you know his story, that word makes sense. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/29/herbertstraße/ Tue, 29 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/29/no-gender-just-clothes/ Miley and Converse made a collection with no gender split. Everything was designed for anyone to wear—no impossible curves pretending women’s bodies are one shape, no boxy nonsense pretending men need infinite room. Just colorful pieces that fit. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/29/no-gender-just-clothes/ Tue, 29 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/29/just-skin/ My back looks like it’s been through a full nuclear weapons program. I could spend money on Clearasil or wait for acne to become beautiful. Everything’s beautiful these days, anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/29/just-skin/ Tue, 29 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/28/when-manga-gets-dark/ There’s a particular staleness to mainstream manga—the endless high school romance fantasies, the fetishization, the predictable beats. Which is why discovering horror manga felt like finding an actual exit. Kazuo Umezu and Hideshi Hino weren’t just making comics. They were building something else entirely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/28/when-manga-gets-dark/ Mon, 28 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/28/golden-at-fifty/ Kylie Minogue’s been everywhere long enough that she doesn’t have to be anything anymore. The new video for “Golden,” shot in Cuba and out on her 50th birthday, has her without makeup for the first time on camera. It doesn’t read like a statement—more like someone who’s finally decided she’s done performing for an audience. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/28/golden-at-fifty/ Mon, 28 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/28/hard-rain/ I’ve stopped pretending I don’t obsess over Lykke Li. Every video she makes, I end up posting it. It’s not deliberate anymore—it’s just what happens. Where most artists ration their visuals, drop promotional videos every few months and make the rounds, Lykke just keeps releasing. Video after video, no apparent strategy, just constant output. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/28/hard-rain/ Mon, 28 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/28/brusch/ There’s this German musician, Tristan Brusch, who makes music that shouldn’t work but does. His father was a violinist—serious classical training. Brusch learned composition as a kid, absorbed all that structure, and then went sideways with it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/28/brusch/ Mon, 28 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/28/still-cant-quit/ I used to tell myself I’d quit World of Warcraft after a couple months. That was in 2005. Every night I disappeared into Azeroth. Every morning I knew I should stop and knew I wouldn’t. The thing about games that grab you that deep is they never really let go. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/28/still-cant-quit/ Mon, 28 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/28/the-nippon-connection/ Every year the Nippon Connection festival takes over Frankfurt. The world’s largest festival dedicated to Japanese cinema—six days, over a hundred films, everything from documentaries to anime to features nobody’s heard of. Filmmakers from Japan come to talk about their work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/28/the-nippon-connection/ Mon, 28 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/28/yubers-room/ Yuber wanted to become a Twitch streamer and it ruined him completely. He quit his job, his girlfriend left, his friends stopped showing up—everything that held his life together came apart. The bet was that streaming would eventually pay off, that viewers would materialize, that donations would cover rent. They didn’t. Years passed and he kept going, broadcasting to almost nobody from a room that accumulated trash like evidence. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/28/yubers-room/ Mon, 28 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/24/disenchantment/ There’s a drunk princess, an elf sidekick, and a cat demon in a fantasy kingdom called Dreamland. This is Matt Groening’s Disenchantment, which Netflix dropped all twenty episodes of at once. It’s what he made after The Simpsons spent thirty years becoming increasingly pointless, and after Futurama had its brief moment of genuine brilliance. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/24/disenchantment/ Thu, 24 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/24/deep-end/ I watched Lykke Li’s “Deep End” video like watching those vertical iPhone recordings from parties—the frame, the movement, the way the camera just catches what’s there. Except this was shot with actual intention, lit beautifully, and it matters more. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/24/deep-end/ Thu, 24 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/24/wizard-of-legend/ Fast. That’s the whole thing. Wizard of Legend is about throwing spells at enemies so quickly that you stop thinking and start reacting. Contingent99, a Los Angeles studio, made it as their first game. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/24/wizard-of-legend/ Thu, 24 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/16/new-york-imported/ The dream of New York is durable. Even as the city changes, what it represents stays in people’s heads. You see it in fashion, music, the way people from other places move. There’s gravity to it that doesn’t seem to break. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/16/new-york-imported/ Wed, 16 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/16/precrime-in-bavaria/ Bavaria just passed a police law that basically turned Minority Report into policy. Cops can move on you based on suspicion alone—before you’ve actually broken any laws. Movement bans, electronic tracking, frozen bank accounts. Preemptive everything. The official reason is terrorism prevention, but what you’re actually looking at is a state that decides suspicion is enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/16/precrime-in-bavaria/ Wed, 16 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/16/hyrule-in-four-colors/ Months with Link’s Awakening on Game Boy Color. Those greens and blues in the palette—they just work for a game where you’re walking through someone’s dream. The pixel art is genuinely beautiful in a way that sticks with you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/16/hyrule-in-four-colors/ Wed, 16 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/16/the-richardson-pivot/ Richardson released a new collection shot in Tokyo during bloom season, which is the part of the playbook where you’ve officially made it as a fashion brand. The pieces look good—hoodies, shirts, towels. But I kept thinking about what Richardson used to be, which was actually provocative, actually scandalous in a way that meant something. Now they’re another lifestyle label selling carefully composed taste, which is fine, it’s just the arc of everything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/16/the-richardson-pivot/ Wed, 16 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/15/five-times-a-day/ My best friend told me over coffee recently that he’s been jerking off five times a day and it’s wrecking him. Morning, classes, before he sees friends, before bed, middle of the night. It’s just eating the day. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/15/five-times-a-day/ Tue, 15 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/15/german-food-stays-home/ German food stays home. Schnitzel, wurst, käsespätzle—all excellent, all basically unknown outside Germany. Pizza’s everywhere. Sushi’s everywhere. Thai food, Indian food, Mexican food. But German food? It’s regional in a way that feels almost deliberate. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/15/german-food-stays-home/ Tue, 15 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/15/failed-parody/ The choreography in Childish Gambino’s “This is America” is tight and controlled, precise movements against images of violence and consumption and distraction. It’s a carefully constructed argument: spectacle versus brutality, performance versus what’s actually happening. Every element supports that tension. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/15/failed-parody/ Tue, 15 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/15/i-fall-in-love-with-you-through-a-robot/ After “Your Name” worked in 2016, a particular kind of silence fell over the industry. Everyone started waiting to see if someone could do it again—if that film was lightning in a bottle or if there was a repeatable formula. That Shinkai film reached people who’d never sit through anime, got them invested. That’s rare enough that everything released since gets measured against it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/15/i-fall-in-love-with-you-through-a-robot/ Tue, 15 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/15/folding-music/ Ariana Grande performed “No Tears Left To Cry” on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon using a Nintendo Labo piano—which is cardboard. The Roots kept time. It sounded good. No one treated it as a novelty. It just was. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/15/folding-music/ Tue, 15 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/15/in-the-code/ I used to hack into Super Nintendo and Game Boy cartridges with these weird devices, poking around inside to find what the developers left buried. Unreachable chests, broken enemies, passages through solid walls. The thrill wasn’t breaking the game—it was seeing what existed in the code that nobody was supposed to find. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/15/in-the-code/ Tue, 15 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/15/refugee-porn/ I came across something last week that won’t let go. Mohamed Amjahid reported on the porn search data—“refugee” queries exploding on Pornhub, xHamster, RedTube since 2015, spiking in lockstep with immigration politics. Eight hundred thousand searches a month. The pattern is so transparent it’s nauseating: election cycle, talk-show debate, AfD rally, search spike follows. Repeat. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/15/refugee-porn/ Tue, 15 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/14/akiras-standard/ Opening with Kaneda’s bike skidding across that neon highway—that moment when you understand everything in anime is about to change. That’s 1988’s Akira. A film that didn’t just transform Japanese animation. It transformed what animation could be at all. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/14/akiras-standard/ Mon, 14 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/14/still-there/ There’s something about the SNES that doesn’t need defending anymore. Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Super Mario Kart—you know what those are. The pixel art didn’t age into a style, it just stopped needing apologies. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/14/still-there/ Mon, 14 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/14/competent/ Missandei was the only sane person in Game of Thrones. Everyone else was poisoning each other and scheming for power, and she was just competent and calm and smart. Nathalie Emmanuel played her that way - not theatrical, just present. There’s a scene where she’s naked on a beach and it doesn’t feel exploitative like so much of GoT’s nudity did; it feels like her character exists outside all that pageantry. You realize watching it that you’re seeing real acting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/14/competent/ Mon, 14 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/14/when-rihanna-made-underwear/ Rihanna made an underwear line and actually made it good, which shouldn’t have surprised me but did. Savage × Fenty isn’t celebrity merch with her face printed on cheap fabric—it’s solid basics at prices that don’t immediately make you hate yourself. Tangas around 25 euros, bras between 20 and 30, corsets closer to 100. You could wear these and feel fine in them, which is the whole point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/14/when-rihanna-made-underwear/ Mon, 14 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/14/this-is-america/ Childish Gambino dances through the frame with meticulous choreography, and all around him are bodies and guns and blood, shot and lit with obsessive care. You’re supposed to be watching him. You’re supposed to not see what’s in the margins. That’s how it works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/14/this-is-america/ Mon, 14 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/14/one-big-move/ A 39-year-old Dutch guy named Didi Taihuttu sold his house, sold his cars, and moved his family to Thailand to chase Bitcoin in 2017. An Arte documentary followed him through it, watching what happens when someone decides the only way out is through something totally untested. Within six months his money had quintupled. He became a millionaire. He became the guy who made the call that worked. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/14/one-big-move/ Mon, 14 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/14/what-she-wanted/ The last time I really paid attention to Lykke Li was 2014, when “I Never Learn” came out with songs like “Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone”—the kind of album that stays with you because every track feels necessary. Then she went quiet, or at least I stopped listening. It happens. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/14/what-she-wanted/ Mon, 14 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/14/four-out-of-five/ Arctic Monkeys, Sheffield, early 2000s—the band that made “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor” feel like it was written about the exact moment you were in. They had that specificity. Alex Turner wrote like he’d been watching, no generality to project yourself into. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/14/four-out-of-five/ Mon, 14 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/4/submission/ When dogs feel outmatched, they collapse on their backs, expose everything, and just surrender. That’s submission. When I feel like that, I do the same thing, except I also get this overwhelming urge to rub myself against whatever just beat me. It’s not always sexual, but ritual—pure acknowledgment. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/4/submission/ Fri, 04 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/3/photographers-are-finally-getting-paid/ Photographers are finally getting paid. Somewhere right now, lawyers from the Trunk Archive are sending standardized letters to German bloggers: five thousand euros per image, per post, whatever the cost formula dictates. The Archive represents Ellen von Unwerth, Valerie Phillips, Olivier Zahm, and a roster of photographers whose work ended up on fashion and lifestyle blogs without permission. They use PicScout—basically Google Images but set up for legal leverage—to find what belongs to them. The software pulls up your 2015 post with a borrowed photograph. You’d forgotten about it years ago. They hadn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/3/photographers-are-finally-getting-paid/ Thu, 03 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/2/our-homemade-video/ I’d been awake for three days straight. Every time I’d jolt up at 2 AM, 4 AM, 6 AM, the first thing I’d do was reload the page. The video would still be there, thumbnail and all, sitting among thousands of others like it, completely unmoved by my desperation. I’d click the little flag in the corner again, fill out another form, send another email to an address that almost certainly didn’t have a real person behind it. Then I’d lie back down and stare at the ceiling, drinking cold coffee. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/2/our-homemade-video/ Wed, 02 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/2/she-didnt-flinch/ The Vanity Fair cover in 2008 was a turning point—Hannah Montana nearly naked, the kind of thing that made every concerned parent in America lose it. After that came the decade of provocative performances and music videos, all treated like she was falling apart, everyone waiting for her to hit rock bottom and apologize. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/5/2/she-didnt-flinch/ Wed, 02 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/27/billies-lovely/ Billie Eilish was fifteen when “Lovely” came out with Khalid, and I kept getting stuck on that fact. Not in a weird way—just the contrast between how young her voice sounds and what she’s singing about. There’s something about hearing actual fear and exhaustion in a teenage voice that feels more honest than when older artists do it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/27/billies-lovely/ Fri, 27 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/27/following-the-pull-back-to-tokyo/ There’s this gravitational thing that happens with design movements—they start in one place and ripple out until everyone’s orbiting around the source. For streetwear, that center has always been Tokyo. Not exclusively, but the gravity keeps pulling you back there. Fujiwara, Takahashi, Nakamura, Yamamoto—these aren’t names that come up in conversation, they’re coordinates you’re always trying to reach. The magazines too. POPEYE, GRIND, Men’s Non-No. They documented something that the rest of the world spent years trying to understand. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/27/following-the-pull-back-to-tokyo/ Fri, 27 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/27/back-at-hogwarts/ Hogwarts Mystery hit number one on the app store and suddenly everyone I knew was a Ravenclaw again. I got it because I was bored one night and thought it would be funny for ten minutes. That was two weeks ago. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/27/back-at-hogwarts/ Fri, 27 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/27/between-two-timelines/ Puma had this launch for the RS-0 in Berlin—a running shoe trying to matter as streetwear. They filled a space with arcade cabinets, the games everyone remembers, and served drinks while people looked at shoes. The design works. Old Puma genes, some future language in the lines, that archive green. Everyone was dressed like they’d solved this problem last year and didn’t care anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/27/between-two-timelines/ Fri, 27 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/27/ateens-actually/ ABBA’s back. The machinery kicks in—housewives reclaim their disco, Sweden markets its cultural legacy, certain gay men get their nostalgia returned. But the conversation skips the actual better version: A*Teens. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/27/ateens-actually/ Fri, 27 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/27/lösch-dich/ When you watch “Lösch Dich,” a documentary about online hate networks, you expect to learn about anger. What you get is the production schedule. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/27/lösch-dich/ Fri, 27 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/27/weekend-stupidity/ Saturday always hits the same—brain checked out by afternoon, nothing on the calendar, friends doing their own thing. Used to just kill time scrolling until dinner. Then I dredged up this stupid list from somewhere in my memory, one of those old joke posts about ridiculous missions you’d assign yourself for the weekend. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/27/weekend-stupidity/ Fri, 27 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/27/verde/ Verde is green in Spanish, and Marsimoto’s given us an entire album that proves he’s still operating on the strangest frequency in German rap. Most alien energy, most removed from whatever’s happening on actual earth while the planet falls apart in the background. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/27/verde/ Fri, 27 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/26/visibility/ Someone did something clever with the festival posters this year. Splash, Hurricane, Rock am Ring—stripped out all the women’s names. What remained looked thin. You could see what wasn’t there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/26/visibility/ Thu, 26 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/26/one-border-over/ There are three ways to get weed in Germany and none of them are good. You hang around Görli, hoping to find someone who isn’t selling you dyed weeds. You rely on the paranoid guy on the seventh floor—the one terrified of aluminum foil, airplanes, sunlight. Or you order from the darknet and leave the door unlocked because you know what’s coming. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/26/one-border-over/ Thu, 26 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/26/hard-expectations/ Kendall Jenner’s Instagram is full of photos where she’s wearing something almost see-through and tight, and there they are—visible, at full attention, making a statement. Not the natural version that exists on most bodies, but the permanently alert kind that makes you wonder if she’s either always cold or always in a state of optimal arousal. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/26/hard-expectations/ Thu, 26 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/26/still-here/ I used to download these monthly compilations of indie rock—just absolute chaos, fifty songs thrown together with no logic. Interpol, Blonde Redhead, Modest Mouse buried in there between all the garbage. You’d dig through them looking for the real ones. This was what mattered. This was what you cared about. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/26/still-here/ Thu, 26 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/26/gumshoe/ Gumdrop scraped chewed gum off Amsterdam streets, ground it into granules, and pressed it into shoe soles. Gumshoe—a pink sneaker where the sole is 20 percent of the stuff, about a kilogram per pair. The sole even has a map of Amsterdam on it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/26/gumshoe/ Thu, 26 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/26/too-many-avengers/ I went to see Infinity War because my friends were going. I hadn’t watched Marvel in years, didn’t know who half the characters were, spent two hours watching people have emotional conversations with strangers. Left feeling nothing, which seemed wrong. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/26/too-many-avengers/ Thu, 26 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/26/when-platforms-get-scared/ YouTube deleted Simon’s channel after five years. Every weekly upload, gone, because he posted about hemp products. Not a major violation, probably not even one by their actual rules—just an overcorrection in a panic. Poof. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/26/when-platforms-get-scared/ Thu, 26 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/26/they-want-your-real-name/ Julian King, the EU’s commissioner for security, wants to know who you really are. Not your username—your actual name, verified and on file somewhere. It would solve everything, he thinks. Misinformation would vanish. Trolls would behave. The whole internet would finally grow up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/26/they-want-your-real-name/ Thu, 26 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/25/söders-rainbow/ Bavaria’s premier Markus Söder pushed through a law requiring every state building to hang a cross starting June 1st. His argument is that the cross represents Christian Western cultural identity, not religion specifically. It’s the kind of line you deliver when you’re not thinking very hard about what you’re saying. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/25/söders-rainbow/ Wed, 25 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/25/supposedly-sixteen/ WhatsApp’s age requirement just jumped from 13 to 16 because of GDPR. Starting in May, you’ll see a prompt asking if you’re old enough. Answer no, and you’re supposedly out. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/25/supposedly-sixteen/ Wed, 25 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/25/looking-for-angels/ “Ask me no questions, I will tell you no lies, careful what you wish for. We’re looking for angels in the darkest of skies.” That’s Lauren Mayberry from the new CHVRCHES song, and I’ve been paying attention since 2013 when they showed up with “The Mother We Share,” and her voice really hasn’t changed—still that precise, clinical precision that somehow makes synth-pop feel less empty. The BBC once said their early stuff shimmered once you wiped the tears off the speakers, which was honest because it sounded like they actually meant it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/25/looking-for-angels/ Wed, 25 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/25/american-apparel-redux/ American Apparel’s whole thing was being aggressively boring in the best way. Plain t-shirts. Hoodies. The kind of basics that somehow become iconic because someone got the fit and the color right. Dov Charney built the brand on that—minimal design, manufactured in LA, priced so you could actually buy it. During the hipster peak, if you wanted to look good without overthinking, American Apparel was basically the answer. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/25/american-apparel-redux/ Wed, 25 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/25/the-last-video-store/ Videodrom is in crisis. The video rental store in Berlin’s Kreuzberg has 35,000 films in its catalog—the biggest in Germany—and €20,000 in debt that grows every month. Rental numbers have collapsed. The owner, Karsten Rodemann (who calls himself Graf Haufen), watches the math turn impossible. Summer’s coming, traditionally dead season for places like this, and he’s out of reserves. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/25/the-last-video-store/ Wed, 25 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/25/into-the-ghibli-park/ You know that moment in Spirited Away when Chihiro steps through the tunnel and everything opens up—the food stalls, the bathhouse, the flooded landscape—and you realize she’s crossed into somewhere she can’t come back from? That’s what they’ve built in Nagakute, about 350 kilometers west of Tokyo. A place where the animation actually becomes a place you can walk through. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/25/into-the-ghibli-park/ Wed, 25 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/25/the-echo-is-dead/ Kollegah and Farid Bang showed up at the Echo Awards with Holocaust jokes. Just said them, onstage, like it was part of the bit. The industry watched, then watched the board of the Bundesverband Musikindustrie realize they had a problem that couldn’t be fixed with a statement. So they did the only thing left: they killed the award and promised something better. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/25/the-echo-is-dead/ Wed, 25 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/24/musically-was-a-hunting-ground/ I found out about Musical.ly the way you find out about most things online—someone sent me a screenshot, someone mentioned it in passing, and then I went down a rabbit hole trying to understand how a lip-sync app had turned into what amounted to an open marketplace for child exploitation. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/24/musically-was-a-hunting-ground/ Tue, 24 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/24/black-screen-records/ Chrono Trigger still lives in my head. The way Yasunori Mitsuda’s music shaped that whole world—there’s something about game soundtracks that no film score does quite the same way. They’re built to loop, to anchor you in a space you’re moving through, to make you feel the weight of a moment without ever trying. The Witcher 3, Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium—I come back to these albums the way other people come back to records they loved in high school. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/24/black-screen-records/ Tue, 24 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/24/purple-reign/ First time I saw these, I couldn’t stop looking at them. Purple doesn’t usually work on sneakers—most designers hedge their bets, throw in black or white like an apology. These just commit to it completely. Full purple. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/24/purple-reign/ Tue, 24 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/24/mario-in-hyrule/ I’ve always wondered what it’d be like to play one of these games as someone else. What if Mega Man was here instead, or Samus. You imagine it for a second and move on. A YouTuber named Kaze Emanuar actually did it. He merged Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time—both N64 games from the late 90s, both locked in my head as separate monuments—so Mario wanders through Hyrule trying to find Peach. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/24/mario-in-hyrule/ Tue, 24 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/24/tom-hardys-venom/ Venom’s a film now with Tom Hardy, and honestly that’s the only reason I’d care. The character itself doesn’t interest me much—symbiote, Spider-Man enemy, the usual comic stuff. But him doing his thing, going completely serious and committed into something as absurd as a talking creature living inside a guy’s skin, that’s worth the ticket. He doesn’t half-ass anything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/24/tom-hardys-venom/ Tue, 24 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/24/the-s5/ Sunday around noon on the S5, packed car between Jannowitzbrücke and Ostbahnhof. A 36-year-old woman is giving her 38-year-old friend a blowjob. Kids are somewhere on the train, tourists are around, and she’s just going for it—no hesitation, mouth working, dick out in public. Commitment to the act. I’ll give her that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/24/the-s5/ Tue, 24 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/24/studying-to-strangers/ I started using YouTube livestreams for studying after Spotify cut into my concentration one too many times with loud ads, and I wasn’t about to pay for another subscription. Turns out there’s this entire universe of 24/7 streams—people broadcasting the same lofi beat or ambient electronic track for hours, sometimes days straight. The weird part is that thousands of people are watching at any given time, half of them doing homework or working, all of them quiet, and the chat just scrolls with tiny celebrations (someone passing an exam, someone finishing a book) or just people existing in the same space, half-ignoring each other. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/24/studying-to-strangers/ Tue, 24 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/23/ethan-klein-gets-it/ I catch myself rewatching H3H3’s back catalog instead of starting something new on Netflix that could theoretically change my life. If YouTube disappeared tomorrow I honestly wouldn’t care—or I would care so little I wouldn’t have words for it. Only one channel would actually hurt to lose. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/23/ethan-klein-gets-it/ Mon, 23 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/23/eighties-twitch/ Sometimes I fall asleep to Twitch. Someone’s playing a game I don’t understand, talking in a voice that just works as sleep medicine—Ragequit, Tara Babcock, Kelly Jean. I’m a fan. I’ve actually given these people money. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/23/eighties-twitch/ Mon, 23 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/23/still-hearing-tico/ There’s still that feeling when you hear them. Any of the themes. Tico, Lady Oscar, Sailor Moon—one chord of the opening and I’m eight years old again, sitting on the floor in front of an old television set. That was the thing about German TV in the nineties. They just played anime straight through the afternoons. No apologies, no self-consciousness. They treated these shows like they were the most important thing on the schedule, and I believed them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/23/still-hearing-tico/ Mon, 23 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/23/nemes-galfy/ Harajuku, Shibuya, Shimokitazawa. Spend enough time in Tokyo’s shopping districts and you understand something about how young Japanese people see clothes. They don’t try harder or have more money; they just see something different on the street. A style emerges overseas, and within months Tokyo has already torn it apart and reassembled it into something that looks nothing like the original but feels inevitable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/23/nemes-galfy/ Mon, 23 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/23/in-the-cold/ Boot up God of War and the day disappears. The story is solid—Kratos and Atreus in the Norse world, the gods there afraid of what his rage could do—and it’s enough to keep playing. But what actually gets you is the visual design. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/23/in-the-cold/ Mon, 23 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/23/just-filler/ I got a free Netflix subscription a few years ago and genuinely thought my entertainment problems were solved. Unlimited everything, instant access. That lasted until I’d watched Stranger Things and Breaking Bad and the handful of other shows that didn’t feel like a waste of time. After that it was just scrolling through hundreds of options looking for anything that didn’t seem designed for someone else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/23/just-filler/ Mon, 23 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/23/the-opposite-of-effort/ These new German rappers are easy to dismiss. The mumbling, the studied refusal to put in work, the obvious copying of American cloud rap that somehow still works. It’s hard to call it music and harder still to call it rebellion. It’s just laziness with branding. And yet here it is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/23/the-opposite-of-effort/ Mon, 23 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/22/by-the-kamo/ I spent time in Kyoto and understood why it gets under your skin. Tokyo was relentless—too loud, too much, too fast. Kyoto is different. Everything moves slower there, the air feels older, and you stop trying to keep up with the city and just let it happen around you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/22/by-the-kamo/ Sun, 22 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/22/verne-troyer/ The thing about Verne Troyer and Mini-Me is that he didn’t mail it in. He could have—it was already a silly character, already funny just by existing—but instead he committed completely, understood the timing and the physicality, made it work without it tipping into cruelty. That’s harder than it sounds. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/22/verne-troyer/ Sun, 22 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/22/oddmar-works/ There’s this specific feeling—your thumb on the run button, the jump already queued, knowing exactly how far you’ll travel through the air because you’ve done it enough times to know. That’s what the Super Nintendo was for. Mario, Donkey Kong Country, Kirby—all of it built around that one sensation of having perfect control. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/22/oddmar-works/ Sun, 22 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/22/done-for-me/ Charlie Puth’s “Done For Me” is fine—it’s a clean production, the kind of song that exists because it’s easy to make and people like to listen to it. But the video is different because Kehlani’s in it, dancing through the whole thing. She moves with this kind of control that isn’t flashy or tryhard, just efficient and confident, the movement of someone who’s figured out how to fill a frame. You watch her instead of watching the song, which is probably not what Puth intended but it’s what happens. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/22/done-for-me/ Sun, 22 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/21/schoko-gras/ Ritter Sport made a hemp-seed chocolate and called it Schoko & Gras. Limited to a hundred thousand bars, hemp seeds in the filling, completely legal, because in Germany that’s the entire selling point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/21/schoko-gras/ Sat, 21 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/21/locked-in/ Bali Baby’s got this new song “Backseat” and it’s doing exactly one thing: Avril Lavigne, early-2000s Disney Channel, pop-rock. She’s 20, from Atlanta, and she owns it without apology. The music video was shot in brutal cold—12 hours, permanent frostbite on her fingers—and she’s genuinely proud of that commitment. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/21/locked-in/ Sat, 21 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/21/atm/ “I fell in love with big wheels and fast kicks, made no thoughts about it, it might kill me, I just count a lot of money.” That’s J. Cole on “ATM,” over a trap beat that’s almost austere—controlled, nothing wasted. He’s not lecturing about materialism; he’s confessing to it. Naming the specific trap of wanting things you already know won’t save you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/21/atm/ Sat, 21 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/21/every-minute-over-again/ Minit gives you sixty seconds to live. A small pixel character wakes up in his house wanting to explore the world, and the game ends every minute. Talk to a duck, it ends. Find something useful, it ends before you use it. Dead, reset, back where you started. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/21/every-minute-over-again/ Sat, 21 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/21/keep-up/ Kourtney Kardashian took her clothes off for V Magazine. This is apparently still news. The theory seems to be that you need to either die or get naked to stay in the conversation anymore, and she went with the second option. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/21/keep-up/ Sat, 21 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/21/chonis/ Bad Gyal’s from Vilassar de Mar outside Barcelona, born in ’97, and when she shows up on a track with La Zowi and Miss Nina it’s clear they’ve figured something out. “I’m where the money is,” she sings, “I just want to cash out, I want bills, I want - fuck me.” La Zowi goes further: “I’m a whore counting money, your whore knows how to suck it, I’ll cut you because you’re bad.” These girls call themselves Chonis - street girls, trashy girls, the thing you’re not supposed to become - and they made trap and reggaeton that got played in Madrid, Barcelona, Seville. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/21/chonis/ Sat, 21 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/21/gundam-narrative/ I grew up knowing about Gundam the way you know about something woven into a culture—enormous robots standing in Japanese plazas, merchandise everywhere, a universe someone created in 1979 and kept building on without stopping. Nearly fifty years of it, so embedded in the country’s identity that it sits alongside things that took centuries to form. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/21/gundam-narrative/ Sat, 21 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/20/domino/ I fell asleep during the first Deadpool. Combination of weed, pizza, and the kind of exhaustion that hits without warning. I remember the opening being solid, then I woke up at the credits. Not the kind of experience that makes you clamor for more. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/20/domino/ Fri, 20 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/20/no-tears-left-to-cry/ “No Tears Left To Cry” came out in summer 2018, about a year after the bombing at her Manchester concert. Twenty-three people dead. Over five hundred hurt. She’d dropped out of sight after that, which made sense—you don’t come back from something like that on a normal timeline. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/20/no-tears-left-to-cry/ Fri, 20 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/20/tim-bergling/ Avicii’s dead. Tim Bergling, the Swedish producer, found in Muscat at twenty-eight. No detail about how, no explanation, just gone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/20/tim-bergling/ Fri, 20 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/20/supreme-and-lacoste-made-a-polo/ I stopped paying attention to Supreme years ago. Nothing against them—I just got tired of tracking what was going to cost three hundred dollars on Grailed next week. But I saw something about a Lacoste collab, and it made me wonder what that even means anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/20/supreme-and-lacoste-made-a-polo/ Fri, 20 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/20/weekend-missions/ Weekends are supposed to feel like a gift, but there’s always that moment Saturday evening where you’re sitting around and realizing you’ve got nothing. No plans, no obligations, and that restless feeling kicks in—the one that makes you want to do something pointless just to prove you’re still here. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/20/weekend-missions/ Fri, 20 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/20/getting-to-coachella/ There’s this moment every year where the entire fashion world just stops and turns toward the desert. Coachella has become something beyond the festival—it’s a destination myth, the place where you’re supposed to matter. Being there only means something once you’re photographed being there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/20/getting-to-coachella/ Fri, 20 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/20/what-stays/ When I was eighteen I booked an appointment at the tattoo studio around the corner because I wanted black stars and a moon on my upper arm. Fifty euros deposit, come back in a week. I never went back. The doubt paralyzed me—what if I got bored with celestial bodies? What if this was a huge mistake before the needle even made contact? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/20/what-stays/ Fri, 20 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/19/a-hundred-thousand-times/ I found out this streamer named Mibu said “Fortnite” one hundred thousand times on a single stream. Just the word, over and over, for hours. No gameplay, no commentary, nothing. Just saying it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/19/a-hundred-thousand-times/ Thu, 19 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/19/what-she-figured-out/ For what Michael Jackson or the Beatles are to some people, Lykke Li is to me—not a comparison that lands on anyone else, just the truth about what I listen for. Everything she makes is exactly right on every level. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/19/what-she-figured-out/ Thu, 19 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/19/never-again-pizza/ I looked down at myself in some bathroom I won’t be naming and realized I couldn’t see my own dick anymore. Normally it’s a decent size, but when your stomach gets big enough to eclipse it, you have to stop and process that for a minute. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/19/never-again-pizza/ Thu, 19 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/19/a-cozy-awards-night/ There was something refreshingly intimate about the Jupiter Awards ceremony last night in Berlin—the kind of event where you could actually have a conversation instead of just working the room. Out of half a million votes, they picked Elyas M’Barek and Emilia Schüle as the year’s best actors. M’Barek won for Fack Ju Göhte 3, which also took best German film. Both deserved it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/19/a-cozy-awards-night/ Thu, 19 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/19/back-to-tape/ I watched this documentary called Back to Tape the other day—Niko Hüls driving around Germany talking to the people who made Hip Hop actually exist there. I was braced for the usual history-lesson thing, but what I got was something quieter. Just a road trip through the places where the music lives: Munich, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Rödelheim, the towns and backyards where it all got built. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/19/back-to-tape/ Thu, 19 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/18/always-somewhere-else/ Katie Kuiper from Sydney probably isn’t anything like me, which might be why I ended up looking at her photos. She’s the kind of person who actually travels. I’m the kind of person who prefers to stay still. But travel bloggers are useful when you don’t want to move—you get all the postcards, none of the jet lag, all piped into your room while you’re lying there thinking about what you might order. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/18/always-somewhere-else/ Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/18/when-neon-died/ I read NEON completely—front to back, then back to front, hunting for details I’d missed. The reporting on dreams, the talk about sex that didn’t flinch, the strange honesty about what it felt like to be alive online. Every month it found the exact nerve to touch. Then somewhere I stopped being the person it was written for. I’d outgrown it, and that was fine. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/18/when-neon-died/ Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/18/when-facebook-stopped-mattering/ Woke up one morning and half my audience was gone. Facebook had changed their algorithm again—pushed friends and family higher, buried anything with a link. So anyone who followed me there was suddenly not seeing my posts. I panicked. Everyone else publishing online was panicking too. We’d built our readership partly on that platform, and they’d just shut the door. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/18/when-facebook-stopped-mattering/ Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/18/all-of-them/ I’ve watched this show so many times that I can recite the dialogue, but there’s still this moment in season two where something happens between Mamoru and Bunny that I can’t get over. It makes me genuinely upset, and I think about it at three in the morning sometimes, sitting up in bed wondering why he couldn’t just explain himself. Thirty years later and it still bothers me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/18/all-of-them/ Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/18/getting-caught/ I found a video of Ronja von Rönne—a German blogger/journalist who makes her living catching people in their own contradictions—taking two YouTube “flirt experts” onto a late-night show. These guys teach pickup artistry. The progression is always the same: hold her hand, kiss her, take her home. They were there to talk about attraction and bodies and how to approach women, and she basically watched them hang themselves without them noticing it happening. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/18/getting-caught/ Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/18/verde/ I caught up with Marsimoto about Verde, his fifth album coming April 27. First thing clear: pressure wasn’t his thing. He’d been doing this on his own terms from the beginning—smoke when he wants, travel when he wants, make whatever sounds right. German music is shit and it pisses him off, so he makes albums to fix it. Verde was next. He’d already won before we even started talking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/18/verde/ Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/18/the-lights-come-on/ The AfD—Germany’s far-right nationalist party—decided they need to shut down the Berghain’s darkroom because people are having sex in it. Which is, you know, exactly what the darkroom is for. Not corrupt housing policy, not a broken healthcare system, not anything that actually matters. Just sex in a dark room that needs their immediate legislative attention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/18/the-lights-come-on/ Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/17/ina-wroldsens-sea/ “Sea” is built on the Nøkken, a figure from Norwegian folklore—a water spirit that drowns people. Dark thing to base a pop song on. Ina Wroldsen makes it work though. She talks about the song as an ode to Norway and her family, which sounds like something you’d read in a press release, but in the actual song it feels honest, like she’s singing to something private and just letting us listen in. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/17/ina-wroldsens-sea/ Tue, 17 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/17/girl-power-from-seoul/ I’ve always been a Japan guy. But I can’t ignore what South Korea’s doing right now. Japan’s been cycling through the same pop-rock formula for fifteen years. Seoul keeps cranking out perfectly calibrated pop stars with real international reach. It’s not luck. It’s a machine. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/17/girl-power-from-seoul/ Tue, 17 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/17/making-art-of-it/ Every time one of those old school friends you half-remember adds you on Facebook because they want to be visible to the world again, and then they have a baby, the maternity photos start rolling through. They’re always awkward. You’re always blocking them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/17/making-art-of-it/ Tue, 17 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/17/the-highlight-reel/ I stopped watching the Echo Awards years ago. The reasons should be obvious by now. Not the Holocaust jokes or the self-satisfied rappers or the musicians who suddenly develop a conscience and return their awards—that’s all surface noise. What actually killed it for me is that the whole thing is just an incestuous machine celebrating mediocrity, with zero interest in who these people are or what they’ve made. It’s not a music award. It’s an industry congratulating itself once a year. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/17/the-highlight-reel/ Tue, 17 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/17/just-there/ There’s a photoshoot by John Joseph Estevez I can’t stop looking at. He photographed Guadi Galano, an Argentine model, for something called “Dip.” Three simple settings: a pool, a lake, an apartment flooded with light. She’s topless in all of them. Cigarette burning, glass in hand, that’s the whole concept. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/17/just-there/ Tue, 17 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/17/still-thinking/ My friend shoots porn sometimes, and he keeps asking if I want in. Says I’d be good at it. Says it’s just a job. It probably is, for him. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/17/still-thinking/ Tue, 17 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/17/art-of-a-champion/ I went to an exhibition in Berlin—Nike, Jordan, and Converse had commissioned sixteen artists to interpret sixteen legendary basketball moments. The Kickz store hosted it. There was a party with decent drinks and people who knew what they were looking at. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/17/art-of-a-champion/ Tue, 17 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/16/made-in-kenya/ I came across work from Papa Petit and Velma Rossa, siblings designing in Nairobi, and realized how little I knew about what’s actually being made there beyond the occasional fair-trade fashion story. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/16/made-in-kenya/ Mon, 16 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/16/april-in-palm-springs/ April in Palm Springs always smells like sunscreen and desperation. The Levi’s pool party at the Colony Palms landed right on the Coachella weekend, which meant everyone had already filled the desert into their plans and was just waiting for an excuse to show up. Snoop Dogg and Heron Preston handled the music—the kind of celebrity DJ energy that doesn’t require your attention, everyone too busy with phones and drinks to really listen anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/16/april-in-palm-springs/ Mon, 16 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/16/coming-back/ 6IX9INE’s tracks have this weird quality where they shouldn’t work but they do. The boy-band melodies mixed with street noise, the chaotic production that somehow holds together. There’s actual depth in there if you listen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/16/coming-back/ Mon, 16 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/16/she-still-cant-help-it/ She’s been trying to seem respectable and serious lately. Gone are the days when she’d piss on streets naked, flash her body in magazines, move her genitals around MTV shows just to watch everyone lose their minds. That was the interesting Miley Cyrus. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/16/she-still-cant-help-it/ Mon, 16 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/16/gucci-gang/ “Gucci Gang” is a stupid song. It’s fourteen seconds of Lil Pump saying “Gucci Gang” over and over, and somehow in 2017 that was the entire joke and also the entire point. You either got it or you were the person at the party complaining about music while everyone else was laughing at how dumb it was. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/16/gucci-gang/ Mon, 16 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/16/still-wanting/ Casey Neistat walks into Stadium Goods like someone who doesn’t need anything—because he doesn’t—and immediately starts talking about Yeezys and Nike collabs like someone who spent actual time caring about these things before money let him own everything. That detail is what stays with me. Not the three grand in shoes, but that he seemed to actually want them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/16/still-wanting/ Mon, 16 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/16/never-gets-old/ P-Thugg hides Dave 1 under the bed when his girlfriend shows up. It’s a dumb move, the kind of thing you do at seventeen because you panic. They’re doing it in 2018 in the “Must’ve Been” video, both in their thirties, and it still works because some people never really grow out of that instinct. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/16/never-gets-old/ Mon, 16 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/15/every-controller-ever/ I’ve held so many different controllers in my hands over the years that I couldn’t tell you the exact count anymore. Atari 2600, Master System, NES, Mega Drive, Super Nintendo, PlayStation, Virtual Boy, Nintendo 64, GameCube, Xbox, Wii, Switch, and everything after that. It never stops. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/15/every-controller-ever/ Sun, 15 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/15/only-spring/ Spring’s the only season that makes sense in Tokyo. Winter flattens everything to gray, summer’s unbearable—either the heat wraps around you like a wet towel or it’s raining sideways for a week. Autumn’s fine if you like melancholy. But spring is the only window where you can exist outside without losing your mind to temperature or water. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/15/only-spring/ Sun, 15 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/15/eyes-bleeding/ Right now there’s an insane amount of genuinely good new music, and I’m barely keeping up, but I fell for Princess Nokia pretty much immediately. Destiny Nicole Frasqueri’s the full name—born in ’92, performing as Princess Nokia—and she makes this laid-back feminist hip-hop that works everywhere. Put on “Metallic Butterfly” or “Honeysuckle” or “1992” and suddenly you’re in a completely different headspace, whether you’re smoking or fucking or just doing dishes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/15/eyes-bleeding/ Sun, 15 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/15/cheese-meat-special-sauce/ McDonald’s cycles through limited-edition stuff all year—bavarian week, valentine week, easter week—with special burgers and sides and salads. But you already know what you’re ordering before you look at the menu. Big Mac. It’s the only order that makes sense. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/15/cheese-meat-special-sauce/ Sun, 15 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/15/billie-doesnt-care/ I’m probably too old to think a sixteen-year-old is this cool, but Billie Eilish has something most people never develop: she genuinely doesn’t care. Not the performative kind of not-caring where you care very much about seeming like you don’t care. The actual thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/15/billie-doesnt-care/ Sun, 15 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/15/shenmue-returns/ The Dreamcast was doomed, but in its final years Sega made Shenmue—this impossibly ambitious game about a martial artist searching for his father’s killer in a living harbor town. The world breathed differently than other games. NPCs had schedules. Ryo earned money and ate meals. Learning martial arts required practice and time. The game moved slowly and asked for patience. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/15/shenmue-returns/ Sun, 15 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/15/brief/ Mason Ramsey yodeling at Coachella reminds me of that Simpsons episode where Bart becomes famous for saying “I didn’t do it” at exactly the right moment. One perfect accident and the whole room goes nuts. Then you’re not famous anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/15/brief/ Sun, 15 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/15/flabjacks/ You see these sneakers and immediately know someone thought carefully about them. Every surface is covered, but it never feels chaotic. It’s dense with images and details but organized, full of characters and patterns that suggest a whole world living on the shoe. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/15/flabjacks/ Sun, 15 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/14/naked-again/ Playboy was going to stop publishing nudes, which would have been cowardly, so they pivoted back to #NakedIsNormal. This is how we get Nina Daniele, 29, from the Bronx, as the 2018 International Playmate of the Year. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/14/naked-again/ Sat, 14 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/14/i-can-spell-it-now/ I can spell Nicki Minaj’s name correctly now, which means she’s broken through. Not just for me but everywhere. She dropped two new tracks, ’Chun-Li’ and ’Barbie Tingz,’ and there’s a video for the first. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/14/i-can-spell-it-now/ Sat, 14 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/14/coachella/ Every year Coachella puts together a genuinely good lineup—Beyoncé, Tyler the Creator, St. Vincent, Jamiroquai—artists that matter. But the festival itself has become this strange thing—less about the music and more about celebrity fashion, Instagram documentation, everyone carefully performing what a festival person looks like. I’ve never gone and probably won’t pay that much to stand in the desert in expensive clothes to be photographed. But the artists are worth watching, even from home on a livestream. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/14/coachella/ Sat, 14 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/14/the-ones-who-wouldnt-wait/ Instagram used to be a place to post vacation photos. Then it became a tool for anyone with something to say and the nerve to be visible. The feminists got there early. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/14/the-ones-who-wouldnt-wait/ Sat, 14 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/14/the-sacred-building/ I play PlayStation more now, but Nintendo has a permanent place. The SNES games shaped my entire childhood—Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Super Mario World. I think about it seriously sometimes: I want to take a console to the grave so I can keep playing pixel adventures forever. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/14/the-sacred-building/ Sat, 14 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/14/mega-drive-small/ I was a Sega kid before I switched to Nintendo. The games were something—Sonic, Ecco, Golden Axe, and then the RPGs: Phantasy Star, Landstalker, Shining Force. Games that still make sense when I think about them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/14/mega-drive-small/ Sat, 14 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/14/after-years-anonymous/ He built an entire world of sound and then stayed invisible inside it. Just the voice, the music, no face attached—which in an age of celebrity visibility seems almost impossible now. But The Weeknd had the discipline for it. Mixtapes, production, atmosphere, everything except the person. You had to follow the sound to find him. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/14/after-years-anonymous/ Sat, 14 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/14/ceo-at-sixteen/ When I think back to sixteen, three things come to mind: video games, anime, jerking off. If someone asked what I wanted to do with my life, I’d say something vague about media and everyone would leave me alone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/14/ceo-at-sixteen/ Sat, 14 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/13/dancing-anyway/ In 2014, Kyiv’s nightlife just stopped. When the Revolution came and the shooting started, the clubs closed, the energy died. Not peace—just absence. The kind of dead a city goes when nothing normal is happening. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/13/dancing-anyway/ Fri, 13 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/13/ten-little-missions/ Friday night and the calendar’s empty. The apartment’s clean, your friends are unavailable, your phone’s been quiet all day. You start imagining the dumb missions that could pass the time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/13/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 13 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/13/a-profound-waste-of-time/ The glossy magazines with the game covers consumed more of my money than the games themselves. I remember the weight of them, waiting in line at the shop. The smell. The overwrought fonts that made half the text a chore to read. A profound waste of time and money, obviously. Probably why I remember it so clearly. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/13/a-profound-waste-of-time/ Fri, 13 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/13/the-timetable/ After work, a beer. On weekends, wine shared with friends. Saturday nights, vodka mixed with whatever’s cheap. It’s just life. Normal until you read that The Lancet published data saying it’s all killing you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/13/the-timetable/ Fri, 13 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/13/shaved-or-not/ There are basically two camps now—women who shave everything smooth, women who’ve decided that’s exactly what they won’t do. Both absolutely convinced they’ve found the right answer. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/13/shaved-or-not/ Fri, 13 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/13/pink-in-harajuku/ Blumio is the kind of musician who doesn’t require permission. Based in Düsseldorf, based in Tokyo depending on the season, he makes rap that’s openly joyful and politically steady—anti-fascist, inclusive, aggressively funny without being clever about it. The music sounds like he’s having a better time than you are. Probably he is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/13/pink-in-harajuku/ Fri, 13 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/12/haiyti-on-television/ I keep rewatching the Haiyti performance from television. “Webcamgirl” was the song, and I don’t even know why I’m this obsessed with it. She’s a Hamburg rapper, mid-twenties, and for the last few years she’s basically taken apart everything German rap thought it knew. The agreement about boundaries—street versus avant-garde, gangsta versus art, underground versus pop—she either broke through them or they were never as real as everyone wanted to believe. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/12/haiyti-on-television/ Thu, 12 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/12/young-ma-made-a-porn/ I watch a lot of porn, and there’s this constant frustration—you’re trying to actually get off, but the editing is terrible, the dialogue is unbearable, someone’s moaning wrong, the guy’s just going through the motions, the cumshot gets botched, or the whole thing cuts out before it ends. You’re lying there thinking, “I should have directed this.” https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/12/young-ma-made-a-porn/ Thu, 12 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/12/harajuku-doesnt-care/ When I was a kid, I envied girls their wardrobes. They could wear anything—skirts, pants, layered tops, whatever. We were locked into jeans and t-shirts, and that was it. Anything else would’ve made you a freak in the small town where I grew up. Not even a debate. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/12/harajuku-doesnt-care/ Thu, 12 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/12/the-carnival/ Joseph Seed doesn’t hide. When I showed up in Eden’s Gate as a freshly minted deputy, him and his cultists didn’t scatter or panic—they just watched. Joseph stayed still and quiet, knowing something I didn’t: I wasn’t leaving Hope County. Not today. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/12/the-carnival/ Thu, 12 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/12/the-freedom-part/ Pip Hicken in a photoseries by Rachel Mia Fogarty called “The Celestial Women”—blue wig, pink glasses, completely topless, no hesitation about any of it. She’s a musician in Melbourne, makes art, makes work with other people on projects that don’t need anyone’s approval to exist. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/12/the-freedom-part/ Thu, 12 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/12/cookie/ “In a club you say hi, maybe buy a drink, and move on. In a restaurant you sit down and actually talk to people.” That’s Cookie, Heinz Gindullis, explaining why he moved from running Cookies—the legendary Berlin nightclub—to running Cookies & Cream and Crackers. For decades he was the person you knew if you went out in Berlin, the kind of figure who shaped the city’s nightlife through the 90s and 2000s. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/12/cookie/ Thu, 12 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/11/neo-tokyo-radio/ The city looks too bright when you’re not inside it. Standing on the wall looking out at nothing but dark, you finally see what that brightness costs. Beyond the barrier there’s no light at all. No sound. Just ice and void and a cold that wants to kill you. Somewhere there was ocean. Beaches. Now there’s only this. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/11/neo-tokyo-radio/ Wed, 11 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/11/pynk/ Every time I see Janelle Monáe, the same three things hit me at once. How is one person allowed to be this perfect? What’s the trick with teeth that white? And why, why isn’t she the biggest star on the planet? She’s got everything—the talent, the discipline, the presence—and yet the world hasn’t quite made her untouchable in the way it should. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/11/pynk/ Wed, 11 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/11/what-he-wouldnt-say/ Zuckerberg sat there for five hours trying to convince Congress that Facebook wasn’t evil. Most of it was him repeating the same rehearsed answers. You could watch all of it or skip it entirely—I don’t think either way mattered much. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/11/what-he-wouldnt-say/ Wed, 11 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/11/moonlighter/ I grew up on Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana—played them until they wore out. Those Super Nintendo RPGs were enormous and detailed despite the pixels, and they kept me occupied for years. I still have the muscle memory, still hear the music when I think about them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/11/moonlighter/ Wed, 11 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/11/switter/ Backpage got killed last week. The FBI shut it down using new federal laws designed to fight sex trafficking—FOSTA, SESTA, the acronyms that scare the shit out of platforms that host user content. And now sex workers are panicking, which is what happens when you build your livelihood on someone else’s servers. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/11/switter/ Wed, 11 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/11/how-it-works/ Daniëlle Cathari is 23 and Adidas just put her work on the right person—Kendall Jenner. The collection’s actually strange: exaggerated proportions, unexpected materials, that 90s aesthetic everyone’s still mining. I’m genuinely not sure if it’s vision or just smart instinct for the moment, but either way, it works. Weird shapes on the right person, and suddenly it matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/11/how-it-works/ Wed, 11 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/11/dicke-lippen-twenty-four-hours/ Katja Krasavice is Germany’s biggest YouTuber, and like all of them at a certain level, she makes music now. “Dicke Lippen” is the expected product of all that—you probably know exactly what you’re getting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/11/dicke-lippen-twenty-four-hours/ Wed, 11 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/11/still-on-facebook/ Every few months I open my browser settings and look at the option to delete my Facebook account. I get as far as the confirmation page, read the warning about how I’ll lose access to apps and events and messages from people, and I close the tab. It’s not that I don’t want to leave. It’s just that everyone else is still there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/11/still-on-facebook/ Wed, 11 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/10/that-feeling/ You know that feeling when you watch the first three or four Harry Potter films in a row? It’s warm, adventurous, full of friendship. The perfect emotion, really. But good feelings fade, like everything does. And then I found a way to bring it back. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/10/that-feeling/ Tue, 10 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/10/why-not-gender-stars/ I’ve been getting emails, mostly angry, asking why I don’t use gender stars in my writing. Those asterisks in the middle of words—Busfahrer*in instead of the standard form. If you don’t know what these are, you’re lucky. If you do, you’re probably here wondering if I’ve finally cracked and started using them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/10/why-not-gender-stars/ Tue, 10 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/10/hotel-smokers-lounge/ HUF dropped a 420 collection called Hotel Smokers Lounge. Colorful, straightforward, leaf prints on hoodies and tees, the usual. I scrolled through the lookbook and didn’t feel much—which is kind of the point now. Five years ago this would’ve seemed transgressive. Now it’s just streetwear. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/10/hotel-smokers-lounge/ Tue, 10 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/10/eight-anarchists/ They sent an audio track across the Atlantic to record vocals. Eight people in different countries working from an East London house, building a song in pieces. That’s how Superorganism started—this DIY process that somehow landed as something actually fresh, the kind of thing that should feel scattered but instead feels like it’s got real blood in it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/10/eight-anarchists/ Tue, 10 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/10/pop-kultur/ Berlin’s got enough festivals. Most blur into the same calendar, the same names rotating through bigger venues each year. Pop-Kultur was different by 2018—still committed to booking people nobody else quite knew what to do with yet. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/10/pop-kultur/ Tue, 10 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/10/too-many-followers/ There’s a point where an Instagram account stops being a person and becomes a brand. I watched it happen in real time—used to be able to tell what Kendall Jenner actually liked from what she was getting paid to promote, but that line dissolved years ago. Now there’s a study to confirm what anyone scrolling long enough already knows: mega-influencers—half a million followers or more—have become nearly worthless to the people paying them. The scale defeats itself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/10/too-many-followers/ Tue, 10 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/10/the-kit-kat-club/ The Kit Kat Club is on Köpenicker Straße in Berlin. You know the reputation if you know it exists—the dress code that actually works, the Saturday nights, CarneBall Bizarre. People show up in latex or less and do exactly what they came for, and the place has been around long enough that it’s just itself now. Not performing, not trying to be something for an audience. Just a nightclub that’s also openly a sex venue. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/10/the-kit-kat-club/ Tue, 10 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/9/so-sad-so-sexy/ Lykke Li’s music got me through the last ten years. Not in some metaphorical, poetic sense—literally. Youth Novels, Wounded Rhymes, I Never Learn. The Twilight song everyone clowns on but which is genuinely good. There was something about the architecture of those albums that made sense when nothing else did. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/9/so-sad-so-sexy/ Mon, 09 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/7/converse-and-sneakersnstuff-do-camo-two-ways/ There’s something interesting happening when you take a military pattern that’s spent decades washing into fashion and paint it lavender. The new One Star collaboration between Converse and Sneakersnstuff comes in two colorways—a pretty standard tan and brown, and then this pale purple thing that should look ridiculous but somehow doesn’t. Camo stopped being about hiding a long time ago. Now it’s just a texture, a visual language, something that reads as intentional rather than evasive. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/7/converse-and-sneakersnstuff-do-camo-two-ways/ Sat, 07 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/7/not-one-thing/ I kept seeing Rina Sawayama’s name attached to different things—music, fashion, design—and assumed they were different people until I realized they were all the same person, 27 years old, who grew up split between Niigata and London with Final Fantasy IX on repeat. There’s something about that childhood that shapes everything she does later. You’re in neither place, speaking both languages, pulled between two sets of expectations about who you should be. The games were escape, sure, but also permission to exist outside the script. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/7/not-one-thing/ Sat, 07 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/5/what-whatsapp-wouldve-been/ The eighties come back around every few years—synth-pop, neon, pixel art, the whole thing. And you get this flood of nostalgia where suddenly everything from back then seems better. Cooler. More authentic. But it’s selective nostalgia. You remember the vibe and completely forget what was actually hard about living there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/5/what-whatsapp-wouldve-been/ Thu, 05 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/4/four-years-of-not-screaming/ Das Filter turned four the other day. It’s a publication about culture, media, technology, design—the standard beat of cultural writing—except it’s run by people who don’t seem interested in any of the usual noise. No “stunning,” no “breaking,” no desperation. They just want to understand what’s happening. Ji-Hun Kim and whoever’s working there approach it quietly, seriously, focused on actual substance. That’s almost disqualifyingly old-fashioned now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/4/four-years-of-not-screaming/ Wed, 04 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/4/what-it-would-taste-like/ The thought of a chocolate Whopper is ridiculous, which is why Burger King’s April Fools’ stunt landed. A sandwich made entirely from dark and milk chocolate, shaped like the thing itself. They never actually made it, just posted the image and let everyone’s mind do the work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/4/what-it-would-taste-like/ Wed, 04 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/4/bartier-cardi/ Cardi B’s ’Bartier Cardi’ is everything the song title promises. The video has her wrapped in red fur and diamonds, surrounded by rapturous attention that’s orchestrated to the frame. She owns every second of it—the confidence isn’t performed, it’s just there. That’s the kind of ease most people have to work into; she started with it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/4/bartier-cardi/ Wed, 04 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/4/bish-gets-it/ BiSH shouldn’t work the way they do, but they’re smarter about it than anyone else doing this. They’re an idol group from Japan that owns being an idol group—owns the construction, the artifice, the whole manufactured thing—and that honesty makes them feel more genuine than the groups pretending to be natural. Aina The End, Cent Chihiro Chittiii, Momoko Gumi Company, Lingling, Hashiyasume Atsuko, Ayuni D—seven members, sharp energy, songs like “PAiNT it BLACK” and “SMACK baby SMACK” that stick with you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/4/bish-gets-it/ Wed, 04 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/4/counterfeit/ Spring break videos: drunk college girls flashing their tits for plastic beads, all of it ending up in some VHS box called “Girls Gone Wild Vol. 247” so some middle-aged guy in his basement can jerk off to it. You know the vibe. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/4/counterfeit/ Wed, 04 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/4/amanda-delara/ Amanda Delara makes dark pop. Electronic, built around these melodic hooks that carry Middle Eastern tones—not deployed as exotica, just part of her. She’s Norwegian, daughter of Iranian immigrants. The songs are political. “Keep Your Dollars,” “Dirhamz,” “New Generation”—they’re about capitalism and war and systems, the things that matter if you’re paying attention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/4/amanda-delara/ Wed, 04 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/4/aliens-in-sneakers/ Some artists spend their whole practice pinning reality down—make it look exactly as it is, every detail locked. Jay Bisual went the opposite direction. His work out of Barcelona is pure color and invention. Aliens in fresh sneakers. Space girls floating through planets thick with stardust and magic, robots skating through impossible clouds. The kind of work that makes you want to frame every single piece on your wall. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/4/4/aliens-in-sneakers/ Wed, 04 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/30/sailor-moons-beautiful-disaster/ I’ve been a massive Sailor Moon fan for years, but there are still two things I’ve never had the nerve to actually watch. One is that cheap-looking live-action adaptation—the kind that looks like high school kids made it for film class and somehow turned it in for a decent grade. The other is the musical. When I first heard about it, I pictured those over-the-top North Korean theater productions you see in documentaries, all spectacle and no human warmth. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/30/sailor-moons-beautiful-disaster/ Fri, 30 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/29/phenom-lux/ Selena Gomez has lupus. Most celebrities who catch a disease turn it into a vague TED talk about resilience, but she decided to do something less stupid: design a shoe with Puma and donate the proceeds to the Lupus Research Alliance. The collaboration is called the Phenom Lux—a training shoe that’s also fine for everyday wear. It’s not some limited-edition vanity project either; it’s a real sneaker designed to be useful. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/29/phenom-lux/ Thu, 29 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/29/moose-knuckles/ Moose Knuckles started in 2007, but the family’s been making cold-weather gear for nearly a hundred years—which is to say it’s fundamentally a practical brand. It exists because Canada is brutal in winter. Then they launch a campaign called ’Three Wheel Motion’ inspired by 80s skateboarding, specifically Tony Alva, who was the first real skate star, the guy who made it about freedom and motion rather than technical tricks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/29/moose-knuckles/ Thu, 29 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/28/the-arkyn/ Adidas dropped a new sneaker called the Arkyn. Mesh upper, three stripes, sock-like construction with perforated tongue, Boost sole in four colorways—nude, dark blue, black, white. One-thirty euros. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/28/the-arkyn/ Wed, 28 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/28/pretty-in-pastels/ Winter lasts forever, or it feels like it does. You buy things you don’t really need just to feel like something’s shifting, some small momentum toward better weather. I picked up a pair of Levi’s in this soft pastel blue—the kind of color that screams California, 1990s, some version of the world where you’re driving with the windows down and nobody’s complaining about the weather. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/28/pretty-in-pastels/ Wed, 28 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/27/things-that-work/ There’s this Vietnamese student making videos about how she can’t believe how good Germany is. Traffic actually flows. Cosmetics aren’t complete garbage. There are parks. The infrastructure doesn’t actively fight you. She’s right, obviously, but hearing someone articulate what you’ve completely stopped noticing is disarming. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/27/things-that-work/ Tue, 27 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/27/seoul-eventually/ Tokyo is my favorite city, the one I keep returning to because there’s always something else hiding in the side streets. But Seoul’s been edging closer, becoming one of those places that won’t leave my head alone. I’ve been to enough cities now—New York, London, Paris, LA—that I can tell the difference between a place you visit and a place you actually want to understand. Seoul is the second kind. It’s the K-pop, the fashion, the way they’ve managed to keep modernity and tradition side by side without collapsing them into each other. And then there’s the food, the intensity around kimchi that reminds me of the way other places treat wine as a serious thing. The neighborhoods, too—Gangnam, Hongdae, Daehakno—these aren’t the tourist version of the city, they’re just how people actually live there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/27/seoul-eventually/ Tue, 27 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/27/small-club-big-names/ Migos came to Berlin with Culture II fresh out and played Huxley’s, which is strange because they’re a stadium act. Quavo, Offset, and Takeoff sold out a club the size of a shoebox in hours, the kind of show they probably hadn’t done in years. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/27/small-club-big-names/ Tue, 27 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/27/butt-detective/ There’s a talking butt in Japan that solves crimes. Oshiri Tantei—Butt Detective—started as a manga and got successful enough to warrant an anime series. The character, created by Yoko Tanaka and Masahide Fukasawa, drinks tea, eats sweet potato cake, and apparently solves cases by farting on people. It’s a children’s show. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/27/butt-detective/ Tue, 27 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/27/the-air-max-thing/ The Air Max doesn’t need defending. You see them everywhere, especially in Asia, where sneaker culture carries a different weight—different mythology, different relationship to what Western design means. The visible air bubble, that silhouette. It’s become one of those things that’s just there, part of the visual language. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/27/the-air-max-thing/ Tue, 27 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/27/the-pencil-moment/ Apple released an iPad at 350 euros with stylus support. That’s the announcement. The specs don’t matter—Retina display, A10 chip, whatever—they’re fine, they’re all fine. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/27/the-pencil-moment/ Tue, 27 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/27/fashions-first-family/ I watched “Fashion’s First Family,” i-D’s documentary about London fashion newcomers, and what struck me was how little romance there was to any of it. You go in thinking about Vivienne Westwood and Karl Lagerfeld and the mythology of how you actually break in, and instead you get people grinding through season after season—getting a tiny bit famous maybe, then disappearing when the cycle turns over. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/27/fashions-first-family/ Tue, 27 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/27/everything-evaporates/ I don’t remember anyone in my school filming themselves having sex. Four underage girls in Regensburg did it a few years back. Full pornography. Shared it on WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook with their entire class. Spread across at least five different schools. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/27/everything-evaporates/ Tue, 27 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/27/actual-quiet/ I’m in a cafe trying to work. There’s a couple arguing at the next table, someone streaming a podcast through their phone speaker, the endless hiss of the espresso machine. I put in earbuds. The noise is still underneath everything, competing for my attention. I can’t focus. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/27/actual-quiet/ Tue, 27 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/26/she-answered-back/ Kelly Svirakova answered back to all her perverted Instagram DMs. Just replied, genuinely, to see what happened. And it’s everything you’d expect and somehow worse. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/26/she-answered-back/ Mon, 26 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/26/the-genies-back/ I saw Christina Aguilera on the cover of Paper Magazine the other day. Thirty-seven, two kids, blonde hair, freckles. She looked like herself—not curated, not performing, just present. It’s rarer than it should be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/26/the-genies-back/ Mon, 26 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/26/pokémon-gets-fila/ The thing about Pokémon gear as a kid is that you’d get destroyed for it. Showing up to school in a Pikachu shirt in the 90s wasn’t just uncool—it could actually get you in trouble, or at least mocked relentlessly. Then nostalgia became a real cultural force in the 2010s, and suddenly the same people who would’ve shamed you were buying the same merch without a trace of irony. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/26/pokémon-gets-fila/ Mon, 26 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/26/druck/ The Norwegian series “Skam” came out of nowhere and somehow became this global thing. Creator Julie Andem followed four teenagers through real teenage life—crushes, coming out, family pressure, all the stuff that actually matters when you’re sixteen—without the usual television gloss. Part of what made it work was how raw it felt, how much it trusted the audience to recognize actual human conversation when they heard it. It was a show that looked and sounded like you were eavesdropping on someone’s real life. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/26/druck/ Mon, 26 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/26/no-performance/ There’s an image that stuck—photographer named Daniel Dittus shot a girl called Julia Eh at a vintage shop in Hamburg, Vintage Gallery. Julia with a pineapple in spring light. The kind of thing that just works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/26/no-performance/ Mon, 26 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/26/being-watched/ Huan Huan has her phone out and a selfie stick pointed at her face. She’s walking to the gym, into a restaurant, through a mall. Her viewers watch in real time. They send virtual gifts—basically icons that convert to money. She makes about $20,000 a month just by living on camera. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/26/being-watched/ Mon, 26 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/25/pink-season/ Parks get packed in spring, everyone out with beer in the middle of the day, these achingly earnest pop songs about the blossoms playing from somewhere. Cherry season hits Tokyo and the whole city organizes around it. Hanami. People wait all year for those pink trees, and when they come the streets fill up with exactly the kind of euphoria you’d expect from that much collective focus. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/25/pink-season/ Sun, 25 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/25/berlin-hip-hop-92/ Watched this Claudia Rhein documentary about Berlin’s hip-hop scene in the early 90s. By that time, techno was already winning. Everyone knows that part of the story—Berlin became a techno city, and it stayed that way. But there’s this window where hip-hop was still happening in the neighborhoods. Kreuzberg, Wedding, Neukölln. Still brewing, still real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/25/berlin-hip-hop-92/ Sun, 25 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/24/kickz-again/ You notice when a good shop disappears. Das Kickz was gone from Kreuslerstraße for six months, and Hamburg felt smaller without it. The reopening was the standard event—cold drinks, people from the scene—but what mattered was having the place back. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/24/kickz-again/ Sat, 24 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/23/seventy-grand/ I’ve always wondered how much people actually spend on mobile games. A few bucks here and there, probably adds up to more than I’d want to calculate. But there’s always someone who goes further. Someone like Daigo. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/23/seventy-grand/ Fri, 23 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/23/taught-himself-everything/ Reezy is twenty-two and everything he knows, he learned from YouTube. The production, the mixing, the video editing, the visual sense—all of it came from tutorials. He’s from Frankfurt and he released two mixtapes in a row, “Feueremoji” and “Tropfenemoji,” with song titles that feel like they’re indexing someone’s private mythology: “Testament 1995,” “Lovestory 2002,” “Wolken 0000.” https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/23/taught-himself-everything/ Fri, 23 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/22/lost-in-april/ The trap of opening Netflix in April is the same trap every month, except April feels worse somehow. Winter won’t let go. You’re tired of the cold, tired of rewatching the same shows you finished months ago, and then Netflix drops everything at once—new seasons of dramas you’d forgotten about, anime with fresh subtitles, limited series promising dark complexity, sci-fi that cost actual money to make, classics that somehow still work. It’s both generous and completely paralyzing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/22/lost-in-april/ Thu, 22 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/22/stop-thinking/ I found Snail’s House’s Snö at exactly the moment I needed something that would let me stop thinking. Not sleep, just stop—pause the day, let the noise settle, disappear into something gentle for a few hours. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/22/stop-thinking/ Thu, 22 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/22/the-girls-bijou-draws/ Bijou Karman draws girls from Los Angeles—young, strong, undeniably pretty—and apparently everyone worth knowing has already noticed. Rihanna’s looked. So have Converse and Harper’s Bazaar and Elle. The work is sharp: clean line, color, this kind of confident clarity that doesn’t apologize. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/22/the-girls-bijou-draws/ Thu, 22 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/22/deadpool-returns/ The Deadpool 2 trailer just dropped and I already know I’m seeing it in a theater. This is one of those rare superhero movies that understands what it is: funny, violent, nothing to apologize for. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/22/deadpool-returns/ Thu, 22 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/22/britney-again/ Saw the Kenzo photos of Britney Spears and something just clicked back. You know that moment when someone drifts out of your awareness and suddenly comes back, and you remember exactly why you cared? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/22/britney-again/ Thu, 22 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/22/getting-high/ Being at an Alison Wonderland show when you’re already high does something to you. Her beats are relentless, the synths pull you somewhere darker, and everyone around you has basically shut off their brain—just there for the feeling, everything else irrelevant. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/22/getting-high/ Thu, 22 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/22/the-lions-blaze/ As a kid I’d spend hours imagining what it’d be like to get pulled into a game—not as some reincarnated hero, just trapped in there, actually living through Secret of Mana or Chrono Trigger from the inside instead of controlling it from a couch. The difference between pressing buttons and actually having to deal with what happens. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/22/the-lions-blaze/ Thu, 22 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/21/over-my-head/ Echosmith were everywhere with ’Cool Kids’ in 2013—one of those songs that plants itself in your brain whether you want it there or not. Then they basically disappeared, and I figured that was it. Peak and decline, like half the acts from that era. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/21/over-my-head/ Wed, 21 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/21/still-logged-in/ I’ve disliked Facebook and Zuckerberg for years. Unsympathetic is closer—there’s something about the whole operation that’s never sat right with me. The thought of deleting my account comes up regularly, for all sorts of reasons. But I never actually do it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/21/still-logged-in/ Wed, 21 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/21/the-ramen-shops/ Afuri in Sendagaya is my favorite ramen shop in Tokyo, and now it’s on a t-shirt. So are Ebisoba Ichigen, Menya Musashi, and Ippudo—all part of a Uniqlo collaboration that just dropped. Around fifteen euros each, which feels almost too cheap for what you’re actually wearing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/21/the-ramen-shops/ Wed, 21 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/21/big-dick-problems/ I’ve been carrying around a specific shame since I was maybe seven or eight. We were at a nudist beach in Italy—my parents dragging me along—and I saw a grown man’s dick for the first time. Not in some formal way, just there, as these things are in those places. I remember looking at myself and thinking, without the language for it yet, that I’d somehow gotten shortchanged. That particular piece of sadness never really left me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/21/big-dick-problems/ Wed, 21 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/21/earthgang-and-jid/ I kept running into EarthGang and J.I.D. in different contexts and never realized they were connected until I found out they’d gone to Hampton University together. That kind of detail changes how you listen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/21/earthgang-and-jid/ Wed, 21 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/20/klaas-cant-rap/ Alexa raps: “I connect my fist to your face via Bluetooth.” Siri jumps in: “Send your dick pic to your mom’s picnic.” This is Klaas Heufer-Umlauf’s late-night show on ProSieben. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/20/klaas-cant-rap/ Tue, 20 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/19/following-nastya/ Nastya Kovaleva is a Russian model who actually travels instead of just posing in locations for Instagram. France, China, Thailand—she moves between them and documents it all without the usual performance. No manufactured narrative, no lifestyle branding. Just someone going places and paying attention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/19/following-nastya/ Mon, 19 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/19/what-landed-this-week/ Some music videos are trying to make a statement. Empire’s “Buttocks Beat! Beat!” is not interested in statements. It’s just a running ass chasing girls through the frame while they get beaten up. The song underneath is pure adrenaline—loud idol pop with heavy guitar, the kind of thing you could genuinely lose your mind to in your apartment at midnight, dancing alone with the lights off. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/19/what-landed-this-week/ Mon, 19 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/19/the-girls-i-couldnt-draw/ I spent a lot of time as a kid copying Sailor Moon from the manga. Page after page, trying to get her face right, the way she moved, her whole look. It never worked. Eyes too big, hands weird, legs that wouldn’t sit right. After a couple years of getting nowhere I just stopped. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/19/the-girls-i-couldnt-draw/ Mon, 19 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/18/the-corpse-walks-on/ The Simpsons used to mean something. Everyone had the same episodes memorized, the same jokes that worked in any conversation, the same memories of when television could actually shape culture. There was a moment when knowing a Simpsons reference meant you belonged to a specific group of people who got it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/18/the-corpse-walks-on/ Sun, 18 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/18/timeless/ I’ve been deep in the vaporwave thing for a while now. City-pop, future funk, whatever you want to call that aesthetic—Japanese music from the eighties remixed and rearranged by producers in bedrooms all over the world. Chilled beats, emotional synths, all of it arranged to make you feel like you’re inside some imaginary Tokyo from an imaginary future. A gray spring day disappears when you’re listening. You’re somewhere else entirely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/18/timeless/ Sun, 18 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/18/remind-me-tomorrow/ The TimeMachine popup’s been camping in the corner of my screen for three years. Every morning—sometimes twice—it shows up asking if I want to finally back something up. Every time, I hit “remind me tomorrow.” I’m 972 days into lying to myself about when I’m actually going to do this. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/18/remind-me-tomorrow/ Sun, 18 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/18/revamp/ A tribute album called “Revamp” with Elton John songs—that’s a legitimacy test. If you can get Mary J. Blige, Coldplay, The Killers, Ed Sheeran, Florence + The Machine, and Lady Gaga in the room, your songs probably mean something. The first single is Demi Lovato and Q-Tip doing “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart,” which is weird enough to actually work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/18/revamp/ Sun, 18 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/17/more-clarissa/ Clarissa taught me more than anyone else who actually set out to teach me anything. My parents, my teachers, friends—none of them got through the way that show did. It was scripture for me on all the stuff that mattered. Still is. I find myself rewatching those old episodes late at night and I’m still pulling something from them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/17/more-clarissa/ Sat, 17 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/17/reezys-feueremoji/ Reezy’s Feueremoji with Bausa has been running in the background for a while. The whole thing sits in this chillhop-and-trap zone—production that’s deliberate about not trying too hard. The songs are about expensive clothes and food, success and future anxiety, all delivered with the same flat confidence. “Zombies,” “John Schnee,” “High Class Street Fashion”—they follow the same blueprint, and it works because nothing is reaching. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/17/reezys-feueremoji/ Sat, 17 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/17/nobuhiko-obayashi-is-not-tim-burton/ The “Tim Burton of Asia” comparison follows Nobuhiko Obayashi around, but it doesn’t fit. Burton trades in gothic spectacle; Obayashi makes something weirder and more genuinely unsettling. His films—”House,” “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time,” “The Last Snow”—exist in their own register, something between horror and pop, the personal and the fantastical, without needing an American reference point to make sense. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/17/nobuhiko-obayashi-is-not-tim-burton/ Sat, 17 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/17/something-worth-doing/ Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman is one of those castings that just works. There’s something in the way she carries herself—part warrior, part completely unbothered—that makes you believe the things she does on screen are actually possible. So when Reebok signed her for a fitness campaign alongside Ariana Grande, Gigi Hadid, and Victoria Beckham, I didn’t immediately dismiss it. The promotional language is all there—becoming your strongest self, mental and physical transformation, all of that—but at least the person saying it seems like she actually believes it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/17/something-worth-doing/ Sat, 17 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/17/that-lil-dicky-video/ I like Kendall Jenner. She seems genuinely unbothered by the fame, the cameras, all of it—cool in a way that doesn’t try. Just someone who ended up in the Kardashian machinery and doesn’t seem to care if anyone thinks that’s impossible. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/17/that-lil-dicky-video/ Sat, 17 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/17/the-supreme-uniform/ Used to be you just got dressed and left the house. Wore what was clean, what felt okay, moved on with your day. Brands mattered—Adidas beat whatever the discount store had—but people still looked different from each other. Had room to exist in whatever. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/17/the-supreme-uniform/ Sat, 17 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/17/oh-mama/ Some music video where Rick and Morty do a Pulp Fiction bit while Run The Jewels’ “Oh Mama” plays underneath. Rick belching through the chaos, Morty terrified, both of them moving through what amounts to a job gone sideways. You’re always waiting for new episodes that may or may not come, rewatching old ones because there’s nothing else to do. At least when something like this surfaces, you remember why you’re stuck with the show. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/17/oh-mama/ Sat, 17 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/16/the-mickey-effect/ Walking into Toon Town for a fashion show felt like the kind of thing that shouldn’t work. The streets are too bright, too oversized, too committed to being cartoon. But Opening Ceremony and Disney pulled it off. Humberto Leon and Carol Lim designed a collection that lived in the same space as the Mickey Mouse buildings around it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/16/the-mickey-effect/ Fri, 16 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/16/weekend-missions/ There was a period when the best weekend ideas came from strangers proposing increasingly absurd missions. Some were harmless enough—stare at stars, eat more walnuts, make one last run through the Toys’R’Us. Others veered into genuinely unhinged territory, crude and sexual in that specific way that only made sense in a particular internet moment, when shock value and stupidity were basically the same as humor. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/16/weekend-missions/ Fri, 16 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/16/ramen-heads/ I found my way to Afuri in Sendagaya a while back and basically never left. The menu is small and I know it backwards. There’s a particular yuzu ramen they make that I still think about when I’m not sitting at the counter—the broth is bright and clean, and the noodles have this texture that most places fuck up. Which is why people spend their lives making it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/16/ramen-heads/ Fri, 16 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/12/supreme-believers/ I’ve got a friend who’s obsessed with Supreme. Like, genuinely obsessed—not just the obvious pieces, but the pens, the keychains, the skateboards, the sneakers, everything. For years I thought he was completely insane. Lately I’m starting to understand it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/12/supreme-believers/ Mon, 12 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/12/paulchens-sermon/ Paulchen’s been on my case about Bitcoin for years. Get in now or regret it later. Litecoin’s the future. Ethereum’s going to change everything. The blockchain will solve… something. The pitch blurs together after a while, but I keep thinking the same thing: can code actually stop people from wanting to get rich? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/12/paulchens-sermon/ Mon, 12 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/12/five-articles/ A couple’s been together five years and they barely have sex anymore. Both of them want to—neither’s holding back intentionally—but the gap between comfort and desire is wider than you’d think, and they can’t seem to cross it. It’s the kind of problem that exists in a lot of relationships but doesn’t get talked about much. A therapist named Angelika Eck wrote about it for Zeit Magazine, about how eroticism survives in long-term relationships, and reading it felt like someone finally naming something you already knew was wrong. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/12/five-articles/ Mon, 12 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/10/face-collection/ I have a folder on my computer that contains 271 photographs of Dua Lipa’s face. Just her face. Not in context, not at events, not with other people—just the closeups where you can see every angle. I sorted them by date, then I re-sorted them by lighting conditions. I’m not proud of this. I’m also not ashamed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/10/face-collection/ Sat, 10 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/9/heal-cancer/ Flipped through an old list the other day—ten missions that were supposed to be accomplished over a weekend, the kind of crowdsourced absurdism that made the internet feel participatory for a moment. Go back and superlike an ex on Tinder. Dress as Batman and help solve crimes. Get drunk and play beer pong with old people at a nursing home. Give out free condoms to strangers. Watch Harry Potter backwards. The final one, with no setup: heal cancer. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/9/heal-cancer/ Fri, 09 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/7/anime-went-mainstream/ Wearing anime shirts to school was social suicide back in the day. Or at least it felt that way—you’d get mocked by kids with even less social standing than you, which somehow made it worse. Now it’s everywhere. Sailor Moon stickers on MacBooks. Adults with Pikachu tattoos. The whole forbidden thing became a style choice. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/7/anime-went-mainstream/ Wed, 07 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/7/lost-in-space/ You know the thing where you’ve finished a show you actually cared about and nothing else looks watchable. That was me after Game of Thrones fell apart. Stranger Things was somewhere in the void. House of Cards was done. Netflix had plenty of shows—it always does—but nothing that felt worth the commitment. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/7/lost-in-space/ Wed, 07 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/6/okay-kaya/ I don’t know how long Okay Kaya has been making music, but I just found her. A Norwegian artist living in New York, and the first time I heard her songs I understood I’d been waiting for this without knowing it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/6/okay-kaya/ Tue, 06 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/6/an-argument/ Big breasts are genuinely fascinating. That’s not a profound observation—just true. Anyone saying they’re indifferent is either lying or has trained themselves not to notice. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/6/an-argument/ Tue, 06 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/6/the-warmth-bus/ Hans Staudenmayer’s flashlight beam sweeps across the steps of the Alte Nazarethkirche in Wedding. Minus twelve degrees. Two feet sticking out from under a blanket. “Can you hear me?” he asks. The blanket moves. “We’re from the Wärmebus. Do you need help?” https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/6/the-warmth-bus/ Tue, 06 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/6/when-rappers-get-anime/ Tobi Lou is a rapper from Chicago (born in Lagos, Nigeria) who made a song about Sailor Moon because he loved the show. That sentence wouldn’t have meant anything interesting ten years ago. Anime was the thing you hid, the thing that made you strange. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/6/when-rappers-get-anime/ Tue, 06 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/5/no-apologies/ Three years old, Joanie Del Santo stole her parents’ friends’ shoes at a dinner party and organized a runway show in the living room. Everything else followed naturally—modeling at seventeen, styling when people asked for help, then Saint Liberate, the vintage shop she opened because she needed something entirely her own. Her grandfather even models on the site, which says something about how she thinks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/5/no-apologies/ Mon, 05 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/5/after-hours/ I arrived in Berlin in the summer of 2007 and had no idea what I was doing. The city felt like it was on fire in a way that made sense at night and nowhere else. Bar 25, Scala, Knaack—clubs you’d hear about from other people, never from any official source. You’d show up because someone told you to, and the night would become something you couldn’t have predicted. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/5/after-hours/ Mon, 05 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/5/things-that-dont-fit/ There’s a supermarket in Berlin that only sells what every other supermarket throws away. SirPlus, in Charlottenburg, built its entire operation on food that’s technically surplus or cosmetically wrong—too small, too misshapen, past its best-by date but still fine to eat. The fact that this is novel enough to be worth noting, that there’s something almost radical about selling discarded produce, says everything about how we’ve normalized waste. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/5/things-that-dont-fit/ Mon, 05 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/4/five-things/ The internet is basically an endless stream of garbage and occasionally something genuinely interesting. This week I read five pieces that made me think. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/4/five-things/ Sun, 04 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/3/yami-kawaii/ I saw a girl in Harajuku with a rope printed on her dress. Not as a subtle design element—an actual noose, rendered in cute pink. Her nails were pastel. She was carrying a bag with cartoon faces that had slashed wrists and were somehow still smiling. This is Yami Kawaii, which means “sick cute,” and it’s what you get when Japan’s obsession with cuteness collides with its culture’s more complicated relationship to death. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/3/yami-kawaii/ Sat, 03 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/2/ten-stupid-missions/ Saturday afternoons drop you into this weightless space where nothing pulls at you, so you just dissolve into the couch and pretend to exist. To actually move, I came up with ten ridiculous missions, nothing sensible, just friction between you and complete stasis. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/2/ten-stupid-missions/ Fri, 02 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/2/bolognese-fries/ Japanese McDonald’s has always been comfortable with culinary chaos—pizza with marshmallows, chips flavored like sushi, ketchup mixed with soy sauce. It’s the kind of thing that would read as an insult to food tradition anywhere else, but Japan never gave a shit about that, and that’s honestly the best part of their food culture. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/2/bolognese-fries/ Fri, 02 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/2/german-wired-rip/ I watched German Wired die this year. Condé Nast shut it down quietly—no announcement, just gone. The magazine launched in 2011 betting that print wasn’t dead, that people would pay for serious tech journalism on paper. Turns out the audience wasn’t there, at least not in enough volume. Official explanations are always vague—bad sales, editorial problems, general apathy from the corporate side. The closure itself says more than any statement could. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/2/german-wired-rip/ Fri, 02 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/2/everything-you-say/ The piano was old, and nobody ever taught her to play it. She just touched the keys until they made sounds she liked, then started singing. That’s how Beatrich—Lithuanian, 19, self-taught—started making music. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/2/everything-you-say/ Fri, 02 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/2/she-finally-gave-in/ I can already hear it. Six months from now, same commute, same radio station, the same song between news breaks. Iggy Azalea and Quavo, “Savior,” looping until it’s just part of the static. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/2/she-finally-gave-in/ Fri, 02 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/2/heavy-rules/ Alma put out this mixtape called Heavy Rules with Mø, Kiiara, and Tove Styrke. I played it once and came back to it, which is the only metric that matters for whether something sticks around. The kind of thing you’d play on a drive with the windows down, not because it’s going to change your life but because the songs don’t get in the way of what you’re thinking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/2/heavy-rules/ Fri, 02 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/1/already-there/ Unearthed demos from dead artists hit different. It’s listening to a version of someone who doesn’t exist anymore—which is technically always true, but demos make it sharp. This is Amy Winehouse at seventeen, before Back to Black, before Rehab, before everything solidified into myth and tragedy. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/1/already-there/ Thu, 01 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/1/pocket-sprite/ I spent my childhood with a Game Boy that felt like a brick—heavy, gray, never fit right in a pocket no matter how you crammed it. Now there’s the PocketSprite: 55 by 32 millimeters, 14 millimeters thick. Small enough that you could actually carry it anywhere. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/1/pocket-sprite/ Thu, 01 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/1/television-gave-up/ ProSieben and Sat.1 are just running the same three shows in heavy rotation now. “The Big Bang Theory,” “2 Broke Girls,” “Two and a Half Men”—the same episodes endlessly recycled like they’re the only programs on earth. I remember when this wasn’t true. “Stromberg” was on, “Bullyparade,” “TV Total”—German shows with something behind them, made for an actual audience. Now it’s just American syndication and reruns, the lowest-effort content possible filling every slot. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/1/television-gave-up/ Thu, 01 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/1/netflix-forever/ I stopped watching regular TV years ago. RTL, ProSieben, the public channels—I can’t remember the last time I actually turned them on. Most people I know are the same. We stream now. Netflix, Amazon Prime, whatever. Ten euros a month and appointment television is dead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/1/netflix-forever/ Thu, 01 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/1/the-paid-interrupt/ Asian Andy became an Uber driver and livestreamed the rides. People watching online could pay to send messages that a text-to-speech voice would read inside the car, right there in front of his passengers who had no idea any of this was happening. I don’t know how long he thought about this before doing it—it feels like one of those ideas that arrives fully formed, obvious in retrospect, impossible before the fact. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/3/1/the-paid-interrupt/ Thu, 01 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/28/80s-dua-lipa/ I’ve been scrolling through YouTube looking for 80s production treasures, and there’s this whole subculture of people remixing modern songs as if they actually belonged in that decade. Find a current hit, give it the right synths and drum machines, and suddenly you’re listening to what might have been a lost single from 1985. The novelty never gets old. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/28/80s-dua-lipa/ Wed, 28 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/28/less-to-prove/ Ellen von Unwerth shot Miley for Wonderland and the first thing I noticed was that she looks like herself. Not the shocked version everyone had been trained to expect, not the scandal-Miley that was everywhere. Just someone in front of a camera without needing to prove anything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/28/less-to-prove/ Wed, 28 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/27/after-club-mate/ Club Mate has been the drink of German nightlife so long that it barely registers as a choice anymore. You drink it because it’s there, because everyone else is drinking it, because the first sip is somehow both horrible and necessary. The taste gets worse before it gets better, but it always gets better. That’s the ritual. That’s the deal. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/27/after-club-mate/ Tue, 27 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/27/play-chrono-trigger/ The game opens with a carnival and a girl with a time pendant, and from there Chrono Trigger barely puts a foot wrong. Thirty years later and no one’s made a better JRPG. Sakaguchi directing, Horii writing, Toriyama designing—they hit something that just works. Multiple endings, a time plot that holds together, characters that stick with you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/27/play-chrono-trigger/ Tue, 27 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/26/another-one/ Another app just landed to kill Instagram and Facebook and everything in between. Vero. The pitch: you share what matters to you—music, films, restaurants, photos, whatever—and you choose exactly who sees it. No algorithm, no ads, no surveillance. Just people you actually know seeing things you actually want them to see. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/26/another-one/ Mon, 26 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/26/easy-for-her/ Yuka Kinoshita’s channel is genuinely one of my favorites on YouTube. There’s something weirdly compelling about watching a tiny Japanese woman demolish impossible quantities of food without blinking—three kilos of rice, a dozen raw eggs, soup poured over it all—while she’s cracking jokes to the camera like she’s having tea. It’s insane and I can’t look away. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/26/easy-for-her/ Mon, 26 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/26/brockhampton-in-berlin/ I discovered Brockhampton the same way everyone else did—through their videos—and I couldn’t believe how much they’d managed to pull off with no label, no gatekeepers, just people deciding to work together. Fourteen of them in one house, rappers and producers and video directors and graphic designers, all contributing equally, all influencing the direction. Three albums in seven months. It shouldn’t have been possible. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/26/brockhampton-in-berlin/ Mon, 26 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/26/game-over/ This morning Nerdcore was gone. Just a line on the homepage—”Game over. Nerdcore 2005 - 2018”—and then nothing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/26/game-over/ Mon, 26 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/26/antifuchs/ German female rappers kept getting scattered. You’d get a moment—SXTN with “Fotzen im Club” and “Bongzimmer,” those uncompromising tracks that proved what women could do—but the moment wouldn’t hold. The space would close back up. After them it was just fragments, no presence. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/26/antifuchs/ Mon, 26 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/25/bushidos-backyard/ The internet’s relentless. Most of it vanishes, but sometimes something catches and stays with you. Five things rattled around in my head recently, and they share nothing except that they all caught me mid-scroll. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/25/bushidos-backyard/ Sun, 25 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/24/bill-murray-gets-it/ Bill Murray is my god. Not in the way most people worship—no temples, no prayers, no promises about the afterlife. Just the straightforward certainty that this man understands how to live better than almost anyone else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/24/bill-murray-gets-it/ Sat, 24 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/23/how-to-waste-a-weekend/ Friday night and you’re already bored. The weekend hasn’t even started and you can feel it dragging—that flatness, that emptiness. So you start thinking about stupid things. Things that sound interesting in theory but would be miserable in practice. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/23/how-to-waste-a-weekend/ Fri, 23 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/23/waiting-it-out/ March on Netflix was its usual deluge. New seasons of Jessica Jones, Love, Santa Clarita Diet, Designated Survivor, Suits, Gotham, The Blacklist—the reliable stuff you were already watching. Some of it held up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/23/waiting-it-out/ Fri, 23 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/22/pizza-by-reflex/ Hold on. Someone made a vibrator that automatically orders pizza the moment you come. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/22/pizza-by-reflex/ Thu, 22 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/22/breasts-save-the-world/ Comet’s coming in the movies, so you blow it up or hide in a bunker or hold hands and wait. Nobody ever figured out the solution until Erina Kamiya made it obvious. Get in a hot tub with friends, let your chest turn into a Saiyajin, boom, world saved. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/22/breasts-save-the-world/ Thu, 22 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/22/when-your-cat-wont-save-you/ This guy on YouTube faked his death to see what his cat would do. The premise is funny because you already know roughly how it’ll turn out—with your faith in your cat’s loyalty shattered once more—but you watch anyway because you want to know the specific mechanism of disappointment. His cat was named Sparta, which added this absurd heroic veneer to the whole thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/22/when-your-cat-wont-save-you/ Thu, 22 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/22/computiful/ I’m alone so often and I just wish you were here. That’s how CRO opens “Computiful,” stating it plainly without desperation. In a world of unlimited options, he wants to turn it all off and just want one person. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/22/computiful/ Thu, 22 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/22/alcohol-wins/ I’ve heard the argument too many times to count: alcohol’s worse for your brain than weed. It’s not like anyone’s disputing it. But there’s always this gap between what we know and what actually gets legalized, and that’s where Germany’s been stuck—where most places have been stuck, really. The cops know it. The researchers know it. The law still doesn’t care. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/22/alcohol-wins/ Thu, 22 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/22/five-dollars/ I watched Bill Gates try to guess grocery prices on Ellen. He said five dollars for a bag of rice. The fact that he was catastrophically wrong tells you most of what you need to know about billionaires and how removed from ordinary life they become. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/22/five-dollars/ Thu, 22 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/21/web-20-died/ Vox—not the TV network, the media company that owns The Verge, Polygon, Eater—just fired fifty social media workers. The official reason: the industry changed. What they meant was that the whole Web 2.0 thing nobody was supposed to question turned out to be a cult, and the cult was collapsing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/21/web-20-died/ Wed, 21 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/21/lollapaloozas-coming-home/ Last year’s Lollapalooza was ruined by logistics. They’d booked Trabrennbahn Hoppegarten—an old racetrack basically off the map—and public transport there was theoretical at best. People spent hours trying to arrive, got stranded trying to leave. It was a masterclass in how not to run an event. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/21/lollapaloozas-coming-home/ Wed, 21 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/21/titanic-punks-bild/ Watching a satirical magazine destroy a major tabloid’s credibility with nothing but forged emails is the kind of perfectly executed prank that almost makes you believe in justice. Almost. Titanic, the German satire publication, sent BILD a series of invented emails supposedly between a left-wing politician and a Russian internet troll. BILD published them on the front page under a screaming headline about a dirty campaign. No verification. No pause. Just the story that sounded too good to sit on. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/21/titanic-punks-bild/ Wed, 21 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/21/the-burger-we-wont-make/ You probably know In-N-Out and Shake Shack the way you know about all the good things you’ll never actually get around to. The Double-Double Animal Style, the Double Shackburger—these aren’t just burgers, they’re the reason people hate coming home from California or New York. I read once that if you’ve eaten either one and you still go to McDonald’s, you deserve whatever cold, sad thing you’re about to order. Hard to argue. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/21/the-burger-we-wont-make/ Wed, 21 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/21/i-dont-give-a-fuck/ Five of them together on BBC Radio 1 in LA, tearing through ’I Don’t Give A Fuck’—Dua Lipa, Charli XCX, Zara Larsson, MØ, Alma—and it was one of those moments where the lineup just works. Everyone brings something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/21/i-dont-give-a-fuck/ Wed, 21 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/20/the-bad-cover/ I came across this Billie Eilish cover of Michael Jackson’s ’Bad’ on some Australian show—Like A Version. She was sixteen, and she’d slowed the whole thing down into something almost unrecognizable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/20/the-bad-cover/ Tue, 20 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/20/dinosaur-costumes/ My uncle stopped buying American peanuts. My aunt swore off McDonald’s. A friend gave up a certain genre of entertainment—the specifics don’t matter. These were small acts of spite, which felt like the only honest response to 2016. Trump happened, and America became optional, something you could simply boycott like a bad coffee brand. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/20/dinosaur-costumes/ Tue, 20 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/20/still-pixels/ I’ve always said pixel art is the best way to make a video game. Maybe that’s just nostalgia talking—I grew up on Super Nintendo, after all—but I’ve played through Witcher 3, Skyrim, Final Fantasy XV, games that probably cost more to make than my car is worth, and I still get that specific thrill from a well-crafted pixel platformer that the big 3D stuff doesn’t quite touch. There’s something about constraints that makes you sharper. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/20/still-pixels/ Tue, 20 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/20/harajuku-in-winter/ Harajuku in winter is jarring if you’re used to how cold weather kills color everywhere else. I’m accustomed to that mode—bundle up, survive, everything shifts toward black and gray. But kids here are walking out of school in oversized printed hoodies that somehow look both childish and expensive, paired with pants in colors that have no business existing when it’s cold. There’s no irony in it. No performance. Just color. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/20/harajuku-in-winter/ Tue, 20 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/19/digital-cocaine/ There’s this modder named Filip who makes about six grand a month selling cocaine in The Sims 4. Not real cocaine, obviously—digital cocaine in a mod called Basemental Drugs. But the money is real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/19/digital-cocaine/ Mon, 19 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/19/you-cant-tell/ I started noticing these videos in my feeds a while back—Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift, Emma Watson in explicit films they never actually made. First instinct: another celebrity hack. The expected crime. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/19/you-cant-tell/ Mon, 19 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/19/paid/ You want to chill in your underwear, have weed and pizza in the air, something chill playing in the background. Something that doesn’t get on your nerves, keeps the vibe right, doesn’t get in the way while you do whatever. That’s where I was at when someone sent me the Saya and Kris video. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/19/paid/ Mon, 19 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/19/the-gion-matsuri/ The Gion Matsuri started with plague. In 869, priests at Yasaka Shrine in Kyoto carried portable shrines through the city to stop a sickness spreading through it. Whether it actually worked doesn’t matter—the point is it stuck. The festival became annual, and now it’s one of those things everyone knows about Kyoto, one of the reasons you end up there in July sweating in crowds. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/19/the-gion-matsuri/ Mon, 19 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/19/the-paint-comes-out/ Someone spray-painted a building in the Wedding the other night. It was this coordinated action—“Still not lovin’ Gentrification”—targeting the new developments, the ones with furnished apartments for students at prices nobody who actually lives here can pay. I understand it completely. The anger is justified. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/19/the-paint-comes-out/ Mon, 19 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/19/borrowed-chairs/ The benches disappeared from Kottbusser Tor one afternoon—the deep U-Bahn station where you’re standing alone on the platform at off-hours and the sound carries wrong. Berlin’s transit authority had unscrewed them, supposedly to discourage homeless people and dealers from lingering. What actually happened was it became brutal for anyone who couldn’t stand for hours: old people, anyone with chronic pain, anyone whose body was already losing the day. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/19/borrowed-chairs/ Mon, 19 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/19/im-definitely-squidward/ SpongeBob’s one of those childhood characters you’d actually want to murder as an adult. I used to admire the guy—his genuine joy in everything, the way he found meaning in jellyfish and burgers, his absolute inability to be cynical. I wanted to be him. Now I’m pretty sure I’d be Squidward, the only one in that show with any sense. I’d want to bury him and Patrick both somewhere quiet and forget they existed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/19/im-definitely-squidward/ Mon, 19 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/18/getting-out/ In Shanghai, I watched young designers and artists move through the internet like it was a puzzle they’d solved. They used VPNs without thinking about it, switched between encrypted apps, shared links to things the government didn’t want them to see. It was all very competent and very tired. There wasn’t anything revolutionary about it—just people who wanted access to information and had learned to build the infrastructure themselves. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/18/getting-out/ Sun, 18 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/18/still-the-best-theme-song/ The transformation sequence music from Sailor Moon is the best theme song ever written for a TV show. Twenty-five years later, I’m still convinced this is true. Those opening notes catch you the same way they caught you at nine years old, like they’re rewiring something in your brain that got set years ago. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/18/still-the-best-theme-song/ Sun, 18 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/16/stripes-again/ Stripes don’t really leave fashion, they just fade for a season or two while everyone chases something else—florals, pastels, whatever’s on the mood board. Then somebody remembers that a simple repeating line is almost impossible to get wrong, and suddenly they’re everywhere again. There’s a reason for that. Stripes work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/16/stripes-again/ Fri, 16 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/16/loving-love/ Naaz made a song called “Loving Love” and didn’t complicate it. The whole premise is right there: love doesn’t follow rules, doesn’t check gender, doesn’t ask permission. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/16/loving-love/ Fri, 16 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/16/just-friends/ Anne-Marie and Marshmello made a song called “Friends” about being stuck outside someone’s desire. The friendzone isn’t real, except it completely is—just not as a place. It’s a feeling, and the feeling is real enough to build a song around. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/16/just-friends/ Fri, 16 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/16/antiporno/ Japan sells itself as modern and progressive. Meanwhile, young girls get pushed into idol groups or pose for bikini magazines, and everyone calls it opportunity. The reality is there’s nothing else—no other jobs, no other path forward. The math works out simple enough: sell your image or go home to your parents. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/16/antiporno/ Fri, 16 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/15/babymaker-2/ Babymaker 2 is Night Tempo building an entire world inside your headphones using nothing but synthesizers and sampled memory. You’re in a Tokyo disco from an 80s anime that doesn’t exist—or maybe all 80s anime—where the neon is too bright and everything sounds like it’s remembering something beautiful that never actually happened. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/15/babymaker-2/ Thu, 15 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/15/what-they-did-to-secret-of-mana/ If someone had asked me what I wanted from a Secret of Mana remake, I would’ve had a straightforward answer: keep the pixel art but upres it, get an orchestra to play the music, polish it up without losing the charm, maybe add some dungeons if you want to get creative. That’s what I would’ve said. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/15/what-they-did-to-secret-of-mana/ Thu, 15 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/14/what-unretouched-looks-like/ Kate Upton took shit for a while there. Designers getting handsy to “verify her authenticity,” Family Guy doing their thing, Instagram filling with hatred and sexual fantasies. All because she doesn’t fit the proportions we’ve normalized in Photoshop. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/14/what-unretouched-looks-like/ Wed, 14 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/14/neo-tokyo-radio/ The snow falls past Momo’s window. Orange lamp flickering. Neo Tokyo Radio plays—same as every day—and the Master sets down a bowl of ramen still steaming from the pot. A glass of vodka comes with it. “Heater’s dead,” he says. “This works better.” https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/14/neo-tokyo-radio/ Wed, 14 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/14/just-bonnie/ I’ve started telling people I’m addicted to Instagram Stories, which is both true and a convenient lie. The reality is I spend my evenings on the couch watching trash TV with my thumb ready to skip through everyone else’s content. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/14/just-bonnie/ Wed, 14 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/14/direct-quotes-direct-threat/ There’s something about documentation that makes people nervous. Nathan Mattes understood this when he built his website—We Are the AfD—and filled it with nothing but direct quotes from actual party members. No commentary, no spin—just what they said. Lines like “A refugee doesn’t care which border kills him.” Or “We’re basically just the NPD with better optics.” Or “We need to seal the borders and accept the horrific images.” That’s the whole archive. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/14/direct-quotes-direct-threat/ Wed, 14 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/14/still-offline/ I lived online—phone, laptop, gaming, everything that mattered. That’s where my actual life happened. But Germany, the country I physically inhabited, was stuck somewhere else entirely. Slow internet everywhere. Laws written for people who didn’t know what the internet was. Schools that didn’t teach digital literacy. Politicians who clearly didn’t understand, or didn’t care. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/14/still-offline/ Wed, 14 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/13/crossing-souls/ The pixel art in Crossing Souls is the first thing that hits you. It looks deceptively simple at first, almost cheap, but the detail is meticulous. Someone in a small studio in Spain spent real time on this. The animations are sharp, the environments have weight, light falls through windows with purpose. It’s the kind of art that doesn’t announce itself, which is harder to pull off than it sounds. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/13/crossing-souls/ Tue, 13 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/13/not-a-love-song/ You dig through a lot of garbage to find anything worth keeping. Rappers everyone’s already moved on from, producers working out of bedrooms with the same preset plugins, safe indie that knows exactly which buttons to press. And then something like “Not A Love Song” comes through and you remember why you keep digging at all. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/13/not-a-love-song/ Tue, 13 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/12/cuddling/ I spent a decade watching the same thing over and over in endless variation. Three guys destroying a blonde girl. Bukkake compilations. Asian rough-sex videos. Crying, gagging, the whole escalation game. At some point the industry locked itself in an arms race with numbness and everyone was losing. I stopped being aroused and just started looking for the next thing louder than the last, the next thing cruel enough to cut through whatever I’d become numb to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/12/cuddling/ Mon, 12 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/12/ferropolis-in-july/ I used to think the point of a festival was discovering new things. You’d go for three headliners you knew and leave with five new favorite bands. Now you go for the people you already listen to, and any surprises are just bonus. The Melt Festival lineup is heavy on the names I already have on playlists - The Xx, Nina Kraviz, Tyler the Creator, Odesza, Jon Hopkins. It’s not a complaint. It’s just honest. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/12/ferropolis-in-july/ Mon, 12 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/12/frame-perfect/ I borrowed my best friend’s older brother’s Super Nintendo for two weeks when I was ten. The goal was basic: finish Super Mario World before he asked for it back. When the credits rolled on the second-to-last day—Mario grinning at me, Peach safe, that little victory ditty playing—I felt like I’d done something worth doing. Genuinely proud. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/12/frame-perfect/ Mon, 12 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/12/the-samantha-principle/ Early in Sex and the City, Samantha spends an entire day masturbating, hunting for an orgasm she lost somewhere. It sounds ridiculous, but the shamelessness of it—the commitment to a feeling without any narrative, any apology, any wellness-speak around it—that’s her whole thing. I watch that scene now and think about all the years I spent around people who would never, not because they couldn’t, but because they’d have to explain it, justify it, frame it as something respectable. Samantha doesn’t do that. She doesn’t soften or perform or make it smaller than it is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/12/the-samantha-principle/ Mon, 12 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/12/the-last-blockbuster/ I remember the smell of a video rental store—plastic cases, dust, that same recirculated air from the 90s. You could scan the whole store in five minutes, but you’d stand there for twenty anyway, waiting for something to grab you. Or you’d wander into the wrong section by accident and see things you weren’t supposed to. There was an element of discovery in that, of randomness. You didn’t get what you wanted; you got what the store happened to have, and you convinced yourself it was what you wanted. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/12/the-last-blockbuster/ Mon, 12 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/12/what-youtubers-actually-made/ Every kid wants to be a YouTuber now. Not a doctor, not an astronaut—those were for a different era. Now the dream is just: sit in front of a camera, mess around, upload the footage, and let the money arrive. It’s supposed to be that simple. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/2/12/what-youtubers-actually-made/ Mon, 12 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/24/still-friends-with-tom/ I barely remember it now, but there was this time when MySpace mattered. When the internet piped and wheezed and you’d customize your page, change your song, agonize over your top eight. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/24/still-friends-with-tom/ Wed, 24 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/24/azuki/ I follow Instagram mostly for women. Attractive women, their bodies, the half-revealed thing that keeps you scrolling. It’s the same impulse I had raiding my dad’s Playboy from his office as a teenager—that promise of almost, the fantasy your brain fills in. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/24/azuki/ Wed, 24 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/24/owning-ghosts/ There was this cryptocurrency called CryptoCelebrities where you could buy digital contracts tied to famous people. You didn’t own their likeness or their time or anything concrete—you just owned a token that said you owned a token of Selena Gomez or Justin Bieber or Eminem. The celebrities themselves had no idea this was happening and weren’t getting paid. They just existed, and people were turning them into tradeable assets. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/24/owning-ghosts/ Wed, 24 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/18/the-copyright-panic/ Back when Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive came up for a vote in January 2018, I kept thinking about all the dumb videos and screenshots and remixes I’d thrown up online over the years. Nothing I made would have survived those upload filters. Most of what made the internet fun wouldn’t have. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/18/the-copyright-panic/ Thu, 18 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/17/the-hook/ I’d been avoiding anime for a while, burned out on the usual stuff, and then I watched the first episode of Darling in the Franxx just to see what Trigger was up to. Ended up needing to know what the hell was happening. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/17/the-hook/ Wed, 17 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/15/positions/ Nadine Kroll wrote a book called “Stellungswechsel”—roughly, a change of position—about moving to Berlin as a young woman and figuring out what you want sexually, what feels good, what you’re allowed to admit wanting. She wrote it plainly, without the usual performance. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/15/positions/ Mon, 15 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/13/gatekeeping-never-stopped/ Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Prime—you log in and it’s all there. Every movie, every song, every book, completely legal, absurdly cheap. Who buys DVDs anymore? Who bothers with piracy? It’s so much easier to just pay eight bucks a month. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/13/gatekeeping-never-stopped/ Sat, 13 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/13/early-dragon-ball/ Found the first Dragon Ball volumes at a flea market when I was maybe ten, and I read them until the pages started falling apart. Kept coming back to the same panels, the absurdity of it, the way Toriyama drew everything—the monsters, the gadgets, Bulma’s everything. I wanted to live inside those pages. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/13/early-dragon-ball/ Sat, 13 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/12/festival-sluts/ I was at a Die Ärzte show years back, deep in the crowd and sufficiently drunk, when a girl up on someone’s shoulders just decided to pull her shirt off. No hesitation. She had that look—permission she didn’t know she was looking for, handed to her by three chords and the roar of a thousand people. I don’t think Farin saw. I doubt anyone who mattered saw. But everyone around her saw, and that seemed to be the whole point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/12/festival-sluts/ Fri, 12 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/12/what-blows-up-on-twitch/ Somewhere in the last few years Twitch became the actual cultural center for gaming, which is kind of wild considering it’s just people streaming themselves playing video games. YouTube had every advantage—money, infrastructure, cultural momentum—but they made it about thumbnails and ten-minute videos and the algorithm. Twitch just let people stream for eight hours straight and somehow that was more interesting. There’s probably a lesson in there about authenticity or immediacy or whatever, but mostly it’s just that people want to watch people. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/12/what-blows-up-on-twitch/ Fri, 12 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/12/in-love-with-a-ghost/ I got exhausted with mainstream music fast. You know the rotation—Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Kendrick Lamar, whoever else controls the algorithm that week. It all blurs together after a while, and you realize you’re not actually listening to anything. So one day I just stopped and went looking for something else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/12/in-love-with-a-ghost/ Fri, 12 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/12/the-drawer/ Bruce Lee and Freddie Mercury as roommates in a Tokyo apartment. Michael Jackson visits. Doraemon shows up. There’s a magical drawer full of impossible things. A Transformer joins in. This is what Suekichiiii, a Twitter user, has been building one toy photograph at a time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/12/the-drawer/ Fri, 12 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/12/nihon-noir/ Walk Tokyo at night and something shifts. The day version is fine enough—schoolgirl uniforms, businessmen in their surge, couples scattered through parks. But it’s not the truth. When the sun drops the city folds in on itself and the neon takes over, wrapping everything in these sickly bright colors that feel more honest than daylight ever could. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/12/nihon-noir/ Fri, 12 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/12/three-steps-ahead/ The song’s called “I Don’t Give A Fuck,” and it’s either the most honest thing Dua Lipa could say right now or the most calculated provocation you can imagine. Probably both. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/12/three-steps-ahead/ Fri, 12 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/12/the-same-three/ Every few years without fail, I go back to three shows: Friends, Scrubs, The O.C., maybe Skins. These grabbed me somehow and never let go. Probably shaped me more than any person I’ve known or band I’ve obsessed over. They were there from early childhood through every bad love affair, every stupid phase. They’ll be here at the end. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/12/the-same-three/ Fri, 12 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/12/virtual-currency-girls/ Kasotsuka Shojo hit Tokyo at exactly the right moment—five girls dressed as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, whatever else was pumping that quarter. Two Japanese trends colliding: idol groups and crypto hype. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/12/virtual-currency-girls/ Fri, 12 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/11/the-pixel-translation/ Pixel art does something 3D never will. Those small, colored blocks stacked into an image have a warmth that 3D can’t touch—reminds me of endless afternoons disappearing into one epic after another on the Super Nintendo. 3D is cold. Sterile. Pixels are honest. They know they’re a construction and they don’t apologize for it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/11/the-pixel-translation/ Thu, 11 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/11/sneaker-with-a-ticket/ Fashion keeps trying to be art. Art keeps trying to hide inside normal things. Usually it doesn’t matter—it looks cool, accomplishes nothing, whatever. But Adidas Berlin figured out how to skip the middle part and just make something that works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/11/sneaker-with-a-ticket/ Thu, 11 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/11/cassies-almost-too-much/ I could talk about Cassie’s musical accomplishments, her creative vision, the genius of how she navigates the music industry. That would be the smart thing, the right thing, the non-sexist thing. And it would also be completely honest in some abstract sense. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/11/cassies-almost-too-much/ Thu, 11 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/11/grey-market-nostalgia-in-são-paulo/ Brazil’s game market is completely backwards. Import tariffs push console prices so high that most people will never own current hardware, which means you get these entire generation of kids still grinding through ancient Sega cartridges while the rest of the world moved on decades ago. There’s something almost beautiful about it—not intentionally, but by accident of economics. Necessity creating its own weird culture. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/11/grey-market-nostalgia-in-são-paulo/ Thu, 11 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/11/tokyo-in-the-small-hours/ I’ve watched enough Tokyo documentaries to recognize when one actually gets it. Stephan Düfel’s documentary doesn’t try to explain the city; it just moves through it and watches how people live there. That’s the only approach that works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/11/tokyo-in-the-small-hours/ Thu, 11 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/11/giuliana-farfalla/ When Giuliana Farfalla showed up on Germany’s Next Topmodel, she had something—the kind of presence that stays with you. The sort of certainty that reads through a TV screen. I thought she was going somewhere. Then she was on the jungle show, the big German one everyone watches. Then Playboy. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/11/giuliana-farfalla/ Thu, 11 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/11/germany-gets-off/ There’s an unfiltered honesty to Pornhub’s annual statistics. What a country gets off to is basically the truth about what that country wants, stripped of all the usual lies and pretense. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/11/germany-gets-off/ Thu, 11 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/11/your-name/ I’d already downloaded “Your Name” months before it hit German theaters—you know, from one of those sites that shouldn’t exist but do—so I knew exactly what the ending would do to me. Didn’t matter. I watched it again in the cinema and spent the last twenty minutes leaking from every hole in my face. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/11/your-name/ Thu, 11 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/10/denim-works/ There was a long period when denim was genuinely uncool. The sleazy guys in Mantas wore it. Worn-out guys with herpes halfway down their thighs. Your supposedly cool physics teacher with the mustache. Those were denim’s associations. Then something shifted and now it’s fashionable again. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/10/denim-works/ Wed, 10 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/10/macross-is-back/ I basically live on Bandcamp these days. Spotify never really worked for me, so I dig through the strange stuff myself—finding things that would’ve otherwise been lost in all that noise. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/10/macross-is-back/ Wed, 10 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/10/peach-coke/ Japan gets the good versions of everything. I figured that out years ago—watching how their convenience stores actually seem designed for human beings, how their video games have personality, how limited edition products appear for a moment and vanish. Peach Coke showed up there in January for a few weeks, then it was gone. Everyone else got vanilla and cherry, like we’re stuck in permanent safe mode. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/10/peach-coke/ Wed, 10 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/2/those-80s-rooms/ Every 80s bedroom photograph shows you something whole. Star Wars posters on the wall, an Atari or Commodore gathering dust on the desk, rotary phones, Duran Duran and Madonna and The Who taped up on the walls—whatever mattered that week. The specificity of it—which bands, which console, which exact model—tells you something complete about a moment in someone’s life. There was a kind of faith in those rooms, a belief in the permanence of these things. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/2/those-80s-rooms/ Tue, 02 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/2/streaming-hate/ Spotify destroyed something in my life that wasn’t broken. For years I’d built a practice around owning my media—torrenting indie playlists, downloading anime series through RSS feeds, collecting MP3s on external drives. This was inefficient, and probably illegal, and I didn’t care. I had access to everything. More than that: I had the freedom to keep it, to revisit it, to build something that was actually mine. That’s the kind of person I was. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2018/1/2/streaming-hate/ Tue, 02 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/12/27/the-game-boy-that-wouldnt-start/ You know that feeling. Someone gives you something electronic and it arrives without batteries. Of course it does. And of course it’s Christmas, or Christmas Eve, or some other day when every store is closed and you can’t go buy them yourself. The gift sits there. Waiting. Useless. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/12/27/the-game-boy-that-wouldnt-start/ Wed, 27 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/12/7/just-despacito/ YouTube’s 2017 Rewind came out and it’s exactly three things: Despacito, Poppy, fidget spinners, and a bunch of people laughing while they throw paint. That’s the entire year, according to YouTube. No depth, no German creators, just an endless row of interchangeable smiling faces. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/12/7/just-despacito/ Thu, 07 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/12/6/what-heintje-was-into/ Modern German rap is relentless—every track is fighting to be the crudest. The lyrics are about fucking women, humiliating them, degrading anyone who isn’t hard enough. After an hour you feel marinated in it. Compared to what was on the radio thirty years ago, it’s a total collapse. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/12/6/what-heintje-was-into/ Wed, 06 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/12/6/city-pop-other-peoples-childhoods/ I found that comment buried in a City Pop video thread—someone wrote “This is like living someone else’s childhood”—and it’s the only way I can describe what this music actually does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/12/6/city-pop-other-peoples-childhoods/ Wed, 06 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/12/6/identity-requires-memory/ I found out what Rocco und seine Brüder pulled off in Berlin and I haven’t stopped thinking about it. They laid ten fake Wehrmacht stumbling stones—Stolpersteine—into the pavement right in front of the AfD headquarters. Called the whole thing “Identität braucht Erinnerung.” Identity requires memory. The phrase hits different when it’s planted in concrete instead of printed somewhere you can look past. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/12/6/identity-requires-memory/ Wed, 06 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/12/6/looking-decent/ You open your closet and everything in there either doesn’t fit or smells like you gave up on grooming last summer. Christmas is a week away and somehow you need to look presentable—not like you spent an hour getting ready, but definitely like you remember what a comb is. It’s the annual challenge: finding something that reads as intentional without looking desperate. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/12/6/looking-decent/ Wed, 06 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/12/6/something-real/ Clairo uploaded videos of herself singing from her bedroom in Boston. Lo-fi, intimate recordings that sound like she’s singing just for you. The songs are small and pop-shaped, the kind of thing that could vanish under everything else online. But they didn’t. Her audience found them because something about the approach read as honest. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/12/6/something-real/ Wed, 06 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/11/27/the-long-haul/ Since childhood I’ve fantasized about the Guinness Book of Records—some pointless achievement I’d actually want my name attached to. Never settled on what it would be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/11/27/the-long-haul/ Mon, 27 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/11/14/polarstern/ There’s something particular about design competitions for consumer products. A corporation picks a theme—”Mystic Ice World”—and two hundred designers throw ideas at it, knowing maybe one will stick and they’ll get acknowledged in some limited way. Gorbachev vodka ran one of these a few years back. The winner was Gabriela Berdecio from Barcelona, and her design was called “Polarstern”: a starry night sky on midnight blue, cold and clear and not trying too hard. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/11/14/polarstern/ Tue, 14 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/11/8/japanese-horror-doesnt-blink/ I watched Kwaidan years ago and it stuck in a way nothing else did. There was no softness to it, no apology. Just strangeness and cruelty held in perfect focus. That’s the thing about Japanese horror—it doesn’t feel embarrassed to be horror. It treats the genre seriously, which sounds obvious until you realize how much American cinema spends time watering things down, tucking everything into love stories. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/11/8/japanese-horror-doesnt-blink/ Wed, 08 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/11/7/what-petra-eriksson-sees/ You can make gray feel honest enough, call it the real world unadorned and serious. But spend too long there and honest starts feeling like defeat. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/11/7/what-petra-eriksson-sees/ Tue, 07 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/11/7/the-tip-jar/ There’s this video that went viral last August of a girl walking up to an Uber driver and stealing his tip money. Just takes it from the jar while he’s sitting right there. Which would be strange enough on its own, but everything about it raises questions I can’t stop thinking about. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/11/7/the-tip-jar/ Tue, 07 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/11/6/eating-through-three-cities/ The tonkatsu chef at a counter in Shinjuku had been dropping pork cutlets into hot oil so long that he did it without looking. His hands moved like they were playing an instrument—the timing exact, the rhythm unbroken. Oil snapped, the batter crackled, and he slid each piece across to you while it was still hot enough to burn your mouth. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/11/6/eating-through-three-cities/ Mon, 06 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/11/6/katsura-hashino/ You’re a teenager in a small Japanese town, investigating murders that pull you into alternate realities where you fight shadow versions of people’s psyches. You’re also attending school, buying groceries, spending afternoons with friends. Persona 4 shouldn’t work—tone-wise, aesthetically, practically it should fall apart under its own contradictions. Instead it feels true, like that’s actually how life works: the routine and the profound hitting you at the same time without resolution. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/11/6/katsura-hashino/ Mon, 06 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/11/6/maggie-coles-hawkins/ Maggie Cole, an artist from Omaha, drew all of Stranger Things—every character you know, every new face. The full cast in her style, committed to paper, and it’s the kind of work that makes you linger when you see it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/11/6/maggie-coles-hawkins/ Mon, 06 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/11/6/pascale/ I keep meeting women in clubs, cafés, at parties—always the same type, always the same result. We click immediately and spend the next few days together, sleeping in her apartment, ordering pizza, talking until the sun comes up. Then I disappear. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/11/6/pascale/ Mon, 06 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/11/6/sci-fi-supermarket/ Google decided Berlin’s cool kids needed a Pixel 2, so they built a Sci-Fi Super Mall as bait—a playground where pseudo-nerds could discover what a smartphone with good cameras could do. To make sure people actually showed up, they flew in Boiler Room, a few hundred influencers, YouTubers, party builders, the whole apparatus. Everyone filtered their Instagram posts. Everyone got paid or fed or both. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/11/6/sci-fi-supermarket/ Mon, 06 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/11/6/december-clothes/ Christmas merchandise starts showing up before summer ends, which is wild until you remember most people have no idea what to wear for the holidays. You see them at parties in whatever they wore last week, or they tried something and it feels wrong, or they just wore black and didn’t think about it. There’s a middle ground where it works—something that reads as intentional without looking like you’re dressing up—but not everyone lands there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/11/6/december-clothes/ Mon, 06 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/27/lime-and-mint/ ASICS dropped a pair of Halloween sneakers and I’m thinking about why limited colorways still matter to designers. The GEL-KAYANO TRAINER in mint and black, the GEL-MAI KNIT in lime and grey. You know ASICS as a running brand—they’ve been doing their thing since the seventies—but these aren’t about performance. They’re about what happens when a heritage technical shoe gets a color palette that makes you look twice. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/27/lime-and-mint/ Fri, 27 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/27/couch-season/ Nothing sounds better than November on the couch. Weather’s gone gray, there’s that specific bite in the air that makes staying inside feel earned, and somewhere out there Netflix has one of those fat dumps of new stuff. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/27/couch-season/ Fri, 27 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/26/the-shallowness-trap/ There’s this thing happening with young journalists right now where everyone’s desperately trying to seem cool and irreverent and in touch with what matters. They finish school, they get a byline somewhere online, and suddenly they’re convinced they’re revolutionizing media. They drink artisanal coffee, share ironic memes in group chats, and write listicles about whether you’re smart enough to know basic facts. The whole thing is exhausting to watch. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/26/the-shallowness-trap/ Thu, 26 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/26/the-newest-thing/ The event in Munich was secondary to the actual draw—spending time with colleagues like Gilly, Ümit, Thang, Christine, Frank, Fuchs, Micha, Rita, Marco, and Rainer, people who think seriously about design and technology. We looked at the Huawei Mate 10 Pro in some sterile event space, but the real substance was after: dinner at Hoiz Neobrasserie, drinks at Ruby Lilly, sleeping in a comfortable hotel. This is what tech journalism actually is—an excuse to be in a room with people you like, looking at the latest expensive thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/26/the-newest-thing/ Thu, 26 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/26/chillhop-season/ When the new Chillhop Essentials drops, I add it without thinking. It’s become this automatic thing—I see it come through and I’m already scrolling to find it. There’s a trust there that’s hard to explain to people who don’t spend time with instrumental music. You know what you’re getting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/26/chillhop-season/ Thu, 26 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/25/that-night/ Nike van Dinther brought it up on her podcast years later, talking about #MeToo and what happened to her during a press trip to Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 2011. She and Sarah Gottschalk were discussing the silence women carry after assault, the shame that makes you feel complicit, and she told the story about the magazine editor on that trip—about getting drunk with the whole group, about him offering to walk her back to her room, about waking up with his fingers inside her while she slept. She remembered thinking about all the other women who must have faced the same thing, and she was so embarrassed that she pretended to still be asleep. She just turned away until he stopped. She dressed quickly while he was in the shower and went back to her own room. The next morning everything was strange. She told Sarah and they talked about it, but she convinced herself it might not have happened, might have been the alcohol playing tricks. Then she tried to get him to admit it over Skype months later and his response—the defensiveness, the way he immediately shut it down—convinced her it was real. So she told this story on a podcast, naming him, because she’d finally gotten to a place where she could. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/25/that-night/ Wed, 25 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/25/matadors-back/ Matador came back. It was a men’s magazine from Germany, ran in the mid-2000s. The idea’s simple: find people who’ve actually lived something and let them write. No self-improvement narratives, no enlightenment guides, no essays about reinvention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/25/matadors-back/ Wed, 25 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/25/hairy-legs/ An Adidas campaign featured Arvida Byström, a photographer, modeling with hairy legs. The image generated rape threats, hate mail, the full hostility package—because her legs weren’t smooth. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/25/hairy-legs/ Wed, 25 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/25/pattas-gel-mai/ Patta took the ASICS Tiger Gel-Mai, a silhouette that’s been around since 1990, and made it look like someone designed it in the last month. Dark brown nubuck, a soft pink knit showing through the sock-like upper, small Patta logos woven at a few points, reflected stripes that catch light at night. It’s not a lot of information, which is why it works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/25/pattas-gel-mai/ Wed, 25 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/25/finally-terry-richardson/ His photographs were everywhere for years—celebrities positioned against white walls in that stark, unflinching way. The style became instantly recognizable, something magazines wanted, something that mattered in a way you couldn’t quite explain. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/25/finally-terry-richardson/ Wed, 25 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/24/what-a-jacket-absorbs/ The denim jacket is the most democratic garment in Western culture. It looks the same on a billionaire and a broke musician, on someone who works outside and someone who just wants people to think they do. You can’t dress it up enough to make it formal, and you can’t fuck it up enough to make it wrong. It just absorbs whoever wears it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/24/what-a-jacket-absorbs/ Tue, 24 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/24/gucci-gang/ Lil Pump insists he’s the coolest, most perpetually high rapper around. It doesn’t convince me. But something about the pink dreadlocks and the sheer lack of self-consciousness makes me look twice. Almost. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/24/gucci-gang/ Tue, 24 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/24/just-cereal-and-buttons/ What I actually want is to sit in my pajamas with a bowl of cereal and play Super Mario World until my eyes go soft. Not the idea of retro gaming, not some carefully curated collection of rare cartridges. Just that exact feeling. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/24/just-cereal-and-buttons/ Tue, 24 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/21/the-threshold/ The Topshop window had maybe six different Stranger Things designs up when season two was about to drop. I stopped to look at them and felt something I couldn’t quite name—not embarrassment, but in that direction. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/21/the-threshold/ Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/21/the-faé/ “The Faé are children living at the end of the world,” Grimes said when she launched her new music genre. “They know humanity won’t last much longer on this earth and make art that reflects this knowledge.” It’s a strange framework, but it works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/21/the-faé/ Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/2/before-sunrise/ Every autumn, half the music world suddenly reaches for the introspective record. Strip away the production, confess something, prove you have depth. Most of it is thin—sounds intimate because it’s quiet, sounds profound because the reverb is heavy. Anna Leone, though, she actually pulls it off. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/2/before-sunrise/ Mon, 02 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/2/tokyo-doesnt-dim/ Tokyo in October hits different. I went to Harajuku expecting the usual seasonal contraction—that annual dimming, everyone buttoning themselves into dark coats and gray like armor against cold. Instead, the streets were chaos. Color everywhere. Neons, pastels, patterns that shouldn’t work together. Kids in Harajuku, Shibuya, Yoyogi dressed like they were refusing autumn’s invitation to disappear. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/10/2/tokyo-doesnt-dim/ Mon, 02 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/28/lord-of-the-breasts/ Hugh Hefner founded Playboy in 1953, which means he spent most of his adult life making people angry for putting naked women and good writing in the same magazine. You’d think that wouldn’t be controversial, but for most of the twentieth century, sex and intelligence were supposed to be enemies. Shame was the deal you made with yourself. Hefner just refused it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/28/lord-of-the-breasts/ Thu, 28 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/27/puff-puff/ Found a couple early Dragon Ball volumes at a flea market when I was young and read them until the spines cracked. This tiny monkey kid named Goku hunting for magic balls with his girl and an old man—something about it worked. Everything felt possible because you genuinely didn’t know what came next. The discovery was happening on the page at the same time I was discovering it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/27/puff-puff/ Wed, 27 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/27/october-streaming/ October meant admitting defeat to the couch. Netflix was dropping new seasons and shows and everything in between, and I already knew I’d spend the next month with some combination of pizza, wine, and whatever was bright and moving on the screen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/27/october-streaming/ Wed, 27 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/27/public-access/ Miley’s hosting this poolside interview thing for Converse, guests scattered around talking about fashion or music or whatever, and there’s a yellow cow in the background. The whole setup is so transparently a brand operation that it almost becomes endearing. She’s not pretending it’s organic or sincere—she’s just committed to having a good time with it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/27/public-access/ Wed, 27 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/27/what-tinder-knows/ British journalist Judith Duportail asked Tinder for her data once. Because the UK was still in the EU at the time, Tinder actually had to send it. She got eight hundred pages. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/27/what-tinder-knows/ Wed, 27 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/27/what-ariel-actually-looks-like/ I cycled through Disney princesses as a kid—one week Mulan because she was strong and sharp, the next Pocahontas because she seemed genuinely wild, Belle because she read. But Ariel was the baseline, the one that always pulled me back. Red curls, lived underwater, had weird cool friends, refused to stay trapped in one world when another existed. The other princesses were performances. Ariel felt like an actual person. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/27/what-ariel-actually-looks-like/ Wed, 27 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/25/one-broken-key/ Watch them long enough and the pattern becomes obvious. AfD politician says something designed to make everyone lose their mind. Everyone does. Then a clarification, a “that was taken out of context,” a shrug, and they move on to the next provocation. Same sequence. It’s not complicated. It’s scandal, apology, scandal, apology. It’s the only move they know, and it works because people keep treating it like news instead of recognizing the same broken tactic repeating itself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/25/one-broken-key/ Mon, 25 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/18/nowhere-else-to-go/ I saw pictures of girls in Harajuku with their whole bodies painted in these bright blocks—yellow, turquoise, pink, colors that don’t match anything because they’re not supposed to. The trend is called Ishoku Hada, which is just Japanese for unique skin, and it’s centered around this girl Sonoramas and her friends Miyako and Lilly and Cherry and Lmskii and Miku, all of them covered in color, walking through Harajuku and Shibuya like they’re trying to prove something about what happens when you refuse to stop pushing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/18/nowhere-else-to-go/ Mon, 18 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/18/free/ 6LACK spent years trapped in the wrong contract. Ricardo Valdez Valentine—Baltimore born, Atlanta raised—got signed to a label that had no idea what to do with him, and he was stuck there for years while he had actual songs waiting to exist. When he finally got out and released “Free 6LACK,” it wasn’t really a debut. It was a release. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/18/free/ Mon, 18 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/18/suki/ I’m watching BoJack Horseman again, eating cold pizza, looking at a stack of PS4 games from 2019. Suki, meanwhile, is living. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/18/suki/ Mon, 18 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/18/the-dadbag/ I’ve always been into guys with bellies. That’s just how it is. A six-pack is nothing, forgettable, but a belly—a belly means something. Means you’ve lived, eaten, made choices instead of dedicating everything to the gym. Sure, I’ll enjoy hard muscle sometimes, but who wants to actually date someone like that? They’ll drag you to early morning runs, make you count calories, turn the whole thing into a training program. Exhausting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/18/the-dadbag/ Mon, 18 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/18/the-air-force-again/ The Air Force 1 just won’t quit. Adidas keeps throwing Superstars and Stan Smiths at anyone who’ll listen, pumping out new colorways and collaborations like hype is a finite resource they’re trying to corner. But the AF1 stays. It’s been the same essential shape since the ’80s—high or low, leather or canvas, clean or wrecked—and it still moves the way everything else is trying to move. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/18/the-air-force-again/ Mon, 18 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/16/ultraviolet-dystopia/ I’m drawn to dystopias in a way I can’t fully explain. There’s something about the image of total collapse, systems of control refined to their logical extreme, that just holds my attention in a way utopias never will. Peace and freedom and perfect structures bore me. What I want is the opposite—concentrated power, governments and corporations intertwined until they’re indistinguishable, extraction and surveillance so complete they become the baseline of existence. Somewhere in that darkness, small rebellious movements emerge, moving like ghosts through spaces too vast to fully understand, let alone fight. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/16/ultraviolet-dystopia/ Sat, 16 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/16/the-familymart/ I lived next to a FamilyMart for the first three months I was in Japan, right there in Ikejiri Ohashi. Close enough that I could walk over in the middle of the night in whatever I was wearing and no one would care. The employees knew me pretty quickly—they’d greet you every time, that cheerful automatic greeting, and I’d just nod and disappear into the aisles. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/16/the-familymart/ Sat, 16 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/15/ten-terrible-ideas/ Someone online once listed ten things you absolutely must do this weekend, each one progressively more hostile than the last. It starts almost kind—go to a sake festival, drink cheap—and then immediately betrays you by getting absurdist. Sing the Pokémon theme at the start of every conversation, deadpan, no laughing. Marry the first M-named person you meet. Get yourself on the evening news by any means necessary. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/15/ten-terrible-ideas/ Fri, 15 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/15/antisocial-media/ Twitter in 2008 felt enormous. I was on Facebook when most people were still in StudiVZ groups. I posted breakfast photos to Instagram when sepia filters were brand new. It all genuinely felt great—social networks, actual connection, witnessing what moved someone else in the moment. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/15/antisocial-media/ Fri, 15 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/14/juju-in-india/ I had this dream where I ran into Juju in India and we walked through the forest to an abandoned temple. Built a fire, watched the stars, kissed with tongue. You know that kind of dream that feels completely real. Woke up and spent the whole day lovesick because it had felt so deep and genuine. Scared me a little. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/14/juju-in-india/ Thu, 14 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/14/dr-sommer/ The first thing you’d flip to in BRAVO was Dr. Sommer’s advice column. She answered everything—sex questions, heartbreak, family trouble, the regrettable people you’d spent time with. What made her different was that she actually took it seriously. No performance, no brand voice. Just genuine engagement with what was going wrong. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/14/dr-sommer/ Thu, 14 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/14/the-tie-in-math-class/ Christian Lindner, the FDP leader, sells himself as Germany’s future—young, digital, modern, his political brand all aspiration and forward-thinking. Then a 1997 video surfaces from an old German youth show, and it destroys the narrative entirely. It shows him in school. In a tie. To math class. Not a required school tie. A chosen tie. To math class. And he’d get dropped off in a borrowed limousine, which is so absurdly perfect it feels like someone invented it as a joke. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/14/the-tie-in-math-class/ Thu, 14 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/14/sophias-monobrow/ Sophia Hadjipanteli, a Greek model, had a monobrow. One continuous strip of hair across her forehead. Agents wanted it gone. Men online wanted it gone. Everyone in the machinery of making people look a certain way wanted it plucked, waxed, lasered away. She refused. She said she looked better with it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/14/sophias-monobrow/ Thu, 14 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/14/cut-through/ There’s a moment in one of London Grammar’s songs where Hannah Reid’s voice just cuts through this dense wash of synths, and it hits you that the whole architecture of the song—trip-hop shadows, careful arrangement, every synth in exactly the right place—was built to create that moment. The voice is the point, but it doesn’t announce itself that way. It just arrives, and suddenly everything else makes sense. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/14/cut-through/ Thu, 14 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/13/bathtub-civics/ Palina Rojinski got naked for a German Vogue voting campaign. Not to sell magazines—to sell voting itself. The campaign was called #Germanwoman, one of those celebrity-driven initiatives where famous people explain why politics matters. Except they didn’t do interviews or PSAs. They put her in a bathtub with champagne, walking through how the electoral system actually works. The timing, the mechanics, the whole structure of it. The unspoken hook was the hope that she’d shift and reveal something accidental, which is both the campaign’s entire premise and its entire confession. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/13/bathtub-civics/ Wed, 13 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/13/bodega/ Airbnb made hotels feel optional. eBay turned flea markets into afterthoughts. Uber convinced us we’d never touch a steering wheel again. American startups keep finding things we thought were permanent—brick and mortar, the idea of ownership, the friction of a simple transaction—and rendering them quaint. And now there’s Bodega, which wants your local convenience store to feel the same way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/13/bodega/ Wed, 13 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/12/heatwave/ It’s getting cold and grey again, which is exactly when Amber Mark’s ’Heatwave’ lands right. Not because the song is literally about summer—it doesn’t try that. It’s just warm, genuinely warm, in a way that feels good right now. Her voice in it, the production, the space around everything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/12/heatwave/ Tue, 12 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/12/pink-carousel/ The runway was circular. There was an actual pink landscape painted on the floor, or maybe it was projected, I can’t remember now—but the point is Rihanna wasn’t interested in the standard fashion week formula. No long cold stages, no clinical precision. This was the Fenty x Puma show in New York, and it looked like something between a carnival and a nightclub. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/12/pink-carousel/ Tue, 12 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/9/foreignrap/ I stumbled on this site called Foreignrap and it’s basically a repository for hip-hop from everywhere—you sort by country, get surprised, whatever. No algorithm trying to convince you that one region owns the genre. Just videos from Korea, Japan, Iceland, Congo, everywhere. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/9/foreignrap/ Sat, 09 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/8/vienna-no-plans/ Barbara came back to Vienna for a weekend a few months after we first met and we decided to shoot. No plan, no concept—just walk around at night with an analog camera and eat pizza. That’s what we did. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/8/vienna-no-plans/ Fri, 08 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/8/half-the-country/ You might as well publish your own social security number online—at least then you’d know where it was. But 143 million Americans just had theirs stolen by Equifax, which is the joke. Equifax is a security company. A security company got hacked in the most basic, humiliating way possible. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/8/half-the-country/ Fri, 08 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/8/the-magazine-closed/ I used to pick up NYLON at the newsstand, and it actually looked at what was happening. Marvin Scott Jarrett started it in 1999, when a magazine could still pay attention to what young people were doing without turning it into content. Selena Gomez, Lindsay Lohan, Mischa Barton on the covers. Real paper, real color, and someone actually cared about the texture of that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/8/the-magazine-closed/ Fri, 08 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/8/voting-unboxed/ Sophie Passmann unboxed her absentee ballot like it was some limited-edition skincare collaboration. Every Instagram personality with three hundred followers was desperately waiting for L’Oréal or ALDI or whoever to send them something to film. Sophie got the one thing nobody would ever sponsor: her voting materials. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/8/voting-unboxed/ Fri, 08 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/8/notes-of-berlin/ Notes of Berlin documents something I’ve always found absurd and funny—the notes, signs, and messages people plaster onto walls, doors, and bus stops throughout a city. Every person who sees them does something different: some laugh, some get angry, some just keep walking. The blog captures that moment when a stranger’s dumb joke or desperate plea or weird observation stops you in your tracks. It’s a document of how cities talk to themselves, one sticky note at a time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/8/notes-of-berlin/ Fri, 08 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/7/bill-mudrons-ghibli/ I saw Princess Mononoke for the first time in 1999 at AnimagiC, a small convention in Koblenz. Japanese audio, subtitles, theater screen. I walked out completely undone. Studio Ghibli got under my skin that day and never left. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/7/bill-mudrons-ghibli/ Thu, 07 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/7/pattaya/ You go to Pattaya looking for a beach and you get one - warm water, decent sand, the kind of seafood restaurants that actually know what they’re doing. On the surface it’s a functional tropical destination, the stuff you see in travel photos. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/7/pattaya/ Thu, 07 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/7/calling-it-in/ The German election software had a problem. When the Chaos Computer Club started investigating, they found the user manual sitting publicly online, complete with credentials for the manufacturer’s internal systems. The update server passwords were exposed. The connection for election night results was pre-configured in the software, with a password—at least in Hesse—that said “test.” And the software generated sample result files that revealed exactly what real files needed to look like. Together, these weren’t theoretical vulnerabilities. Someone with basic technical skill could forge election results across the entire country. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/7/calling-it-in/ Thu, 07 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/7/arigatou-ikura-sumimasen/ I got lost in Shibuya trying to find a restaurant that wasn’t on Google Maps. The small street I turned down had no English signs—not that I expected them, but standing there the reality hits different. I said sumimasen to someone outside a shop, and they understood. They pointed, I went, and something shifted in how I felt about being there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/7/arigatou-ikura-sumimasen/ Thu, 07 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/7/how-they-work/ Stumbled on this site called Interface Lovers that just interviews people who make the stuff you use every day. Designers at Spotify, coders at Dropbox, illustrators at Nike—the people building the interfaces and apps that eat up your time. The interviews aren’t polished PR. They talk about their actual setups, what software they use, what keeps them going creatively. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/7/how-they-work/ Thu, 07 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/7/vfiles-runway-nine/ VFILES had set up runway 9 at Barclays and you could feel the difference the moment you walked in. Not the usual fashion week thing where designers present to other designers in polite silence. This was different. Electric. The kind of crowd that actually cares—rappers, producers, style people, the ones who actually dress instead of just showing up to be seen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/7/vfiles-runway-nine/ Thu, 07 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/7/when-they-finally-come-south/ Looking at electronic music lineups, the geography is always the same: Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne. The circuit has a gravity that pulls north. Not intentionally—it’s just how cities calcify once they establish themselves as the place. Big cities attract big promoters attract the artists who shape culture, and everywhere else inherits scraps. The south has audiences and decent venues but might as well be a province. Not Munich, which has enough weight to pull things its way. I mean Stuttgart, places like that—actual culture, actual crowds, but the serious artists skip right through. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/7/when-they-finally-come-south/ Thu, 07 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/6/shes-already-in-that-one/ Sarah Knappik stopped being a person somewhere around her fifth reality TV appearance and became a principle of German television instead. She’s on everything—GNTM, I’m a Celebrity, Model WG, Promi Big Brother, Total Blackout, Berlin Tag & Nacht, even Sharknado 4—to the point where she’s less a celebrity than a permanent fixture, like a news anchor or a jingle you can’t shake. The Playboy interview in this issue gives you the standard philosophical material: volcanoes, Tenerife, something about living in the moment. It’s what you say when you’ve been on enough television that you’ve become indistinguishable from it. She’s not pretending to be anything anymore. She’s just there, reliable and interchangeable, a guarantee that whatever they’re filming, there will be someone familiar on the screen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/6/shes-already-in-that-one/ Wed, 06 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/6/king-of-the-dogs/ I put on Romano’s “Copyshop” and he’s talking about Berlin after the wall came down, not the grand narrative but the actual days of it. Couch deliveries, retraining programs, all these people just there in a city reorganizing itself. Punks and skinheads and everyone else trying to figure out what they were now. He doesn’t make heroes of any of it, just describes what he saw. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/6/king-of-the-dogs/ Wed, 06 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/6/netflix-origins/ You’re deep in some show when you start thinking about Netflix itself. Where’d it come from? Why’d they try to sell themselves in 2000? There’s a video with 101 facts about it. You’ll watch them, keep maybe three, and have one thing to mention at dinner. It doesn’t matter, but you’ll do it anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/6/netflix-origins/ Wed, 06 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/6/burning-in/ My first summer in Tokyo, ’Spending all my Time’ by Perfume was everywhere—the kind of everywhere that isn’t annoying yet because it seems inevitable. You’d hear it in Harajuku shops, in cafes, in clubs at night. The drums were plastic and bright, the vocals thin and processed, and after maybe the hundredth time you stopped resisting it. The song had just installed itself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/6/burning-in/ Wed, 06 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/6/athleisure-money/ You drag yourself back to the gym after years of not going, and of course you need new clothes because showing up in whatever is somehow worse than not showing up at all. Puma and Zalando have this capsule collection out now with Pamela Reif—the Instagram fitness influencer who basically built her brand on eating almost nothing and looking immaculate while exercising. Catsuits, leggings, crop tops, all in black and white with touches of this color called Violet Tull that doesn’t really exist until someone decides it does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/6/athleisure-money/ Wed, 06 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/6/she-walked/ Alice Weidel took off her microphone during a ZDF talk show and left. Someone asked her about two party colleagues, she got uncomfortable, and she walked out of the studio. The moment you watch that happen on live television, you know you’re looking at someone who isn’t ready for any real power. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/6/she-walked/ Wed, 06 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/6/mana-in-3d/ I spent enough time with Secret of Mana on the SNES that the soundtrack never really left my head. The sprite work, the colors, the magic animations—it’s all weirdly concrete in a way that three-dimensional games often aren’t. That’s probably why I’m skeptical that a 3D remake can capture what made the original feel the way it did, no matter how much visual polish you throw at it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/6/mana-in-3d/ Wed, 06 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/5/someone-was-listening/ I open my inbox expecting garbage—junk, spam, someone’s ambitious dick pics. Instead there’s this letter from Anna. She’s been reading for years and decided to actually make something. Took one of my stickers, did a photoshoot with it, sent me the pictures. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/5/someone-was-listening/ Tue, 05 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/5/ko-hyojoo-gets-it/ I thought longboards were cool until the dreadlock YouTubers started doing spiritual journey content with them and suddenly every twelve-year-old wanted one. Kids ruin everything, especially things that were actually good to begin with. For a while longboarding just felt like another dead trend. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/5/ko-hyojoo-gets-it/ Tue, 05 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/5/fuji-at-2-am/ Mount Fuji is one of those Japan bucket-list things. It’s been sacred for over a thousand years, apparently first climbed by some monk nobody remembers back in 663. These days hundreds of people go up every year, and they all do basically the same thing: they time it so they can watch the sunrise from near the top. That means catching a hut halfway up around midnight and then starting again in the dark, probably 2 AM. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/5/fuji-at-2-am/ Tue, 05 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/5/fried-fried-chicken-chicken/ Veil Brewery in Richmond, Virginia made a beer that tastes like fried chicken. They didn’t use an extract or hint of spice—they fried the chicken and threw it in the kettle. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/5/fried-fried-chicken-chicken/ Tue, 05 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/5/the-right-to-disappear/ Berlin, September 2017. There was a protest they called “Save the Fundamentals”—thousands of people in the streets, angry about surveillance. The government was sneaking laws through to hack phones and computers. Citizens were nothing but data sources now, mined for profit. That was the angle. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/5/the-right-to-disappear/ Tue, 05 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/5/milk-gets-summer/ I’ve been on this tropical music kick—lofi hip-hop mostly, nothing too dance-oriented, just these soft beats and minimal melodies hanging in the background. The kind of stuff that makes you feel like you’re somewhere warmer, which is the whole point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/5/milk-gets-summer/ Tue, 05 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/4/the-museum-that-shouldnt-exist/ Urban Nation opened in Berlin on Bülowstraße, a museum for street art and urban contemporary work. About 130 artists showed up for the opening—Shepard Fairey, Herakut, Ron English, people who’ve spent their careers putting images on walls that didn’t belong to them. There was an opening festival with installations and a community wall you could actually paint on. The whole institutional machinery rolled out for something that was never supposed to be inside a building. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/4/the-museum-that-shouldnt-exist/ Mon, 04 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/4/before-they-copied-it/ Tresor. Matrix. Kellerdiscos. East Berlin, 1997—and everyone who was there will tell you the parties were harder, the drugs better, the clubs more real. The standard mythology. What mattered was the specific moment: when the city’s nightlife was shifting east and the scene was still inventing instead of copying. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/4/before-they-copied-it/ Mon, 04 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/4/dragon-ball-won/ You want to know the biggest anime ever, you’ll get an argument. One Piece has been going forever. Sailor Moon changed what anime could be. Pokémon turned it into a global commodity. Naruto, Doraemon, Ghibli films—all of them huge, all of them shaped what people thought anime was. But if you’re measuring by what lasted longest and hit hardest, if you’re measuring by sheer staying power, Dragon Ball wins. Since 1986, it hasn’t let up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/4/dragon-ball-won/ Mon, 04 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/4/what-it-needed/ I found This is Jane Wayne a few years back hunting for writing about fashion that didn’t feel like performance. Most style blogs are that—look what I’m wearing, look how I think about color. Nike van Dinther and Sarah Gottschalk built something different. The writing was smart and conversational, willing to care about stupid things and then veer into something real. Better than it had any right to be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/4/what-it-needed/ Mon, 04 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/4/grounded/ Rowan Hamilton found Effy and Iona on Instagram and reached out about a shoot in Portland. They said yes, no complicated back-and-forth. That’s what it looks like when people recognize something real in each other’s work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/4/grounded/ Mon, 04 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/4/die-parteis-master-plan/ Nilo Destino and Zwieboe showed up at a press conference in Kreuzberg and basically wrecked it to make a simple announcement: Serdar Somuncu should be Germany’s next chancellor. They weren’t joking. They were completely serious about not being serious, which is the only sane position anyone can take about politics at this point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/4/die-parteis-master-plan/ Mon, 04 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/4/slipped-through/ I’ve been playing London Grammar’s “Truth Is a Beautiful Thing” constantly late into the night—the kind of album that sinks in while you’re working, wine in hand, thinking about whatever’s left of the day. It doesn’t announce itself. It’s just there, the way you want music to be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/4/slipped-through/ Mon, 04 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/3/the-propaganda-ministry/ Die Partei took over thirty Facebook groups run by AfD supporters. About 180,000 people across them. They changed the pages and didn’t hide it—their Propaganda Minister, Shahak Shapira, had a statement ready. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/3/the-propaganda-ministry/ Sun, 03 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/3/replika/ I downloaded Replika when I was lonely, or curious, or just tired of maintaining actual friendships. The app promises to be your best friend - the one you can close whenever you’ve said enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/3/replika/ Sun, 03 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/3/a-magazine-called-suzy/ I found a magazine called Suzy not long ago and ended up spending more time with it than magazines usually get from me. Most photography that reaches for intimacy just feels voyeuristic—there’s this thin layer of shame built into the image, a sense that you’re seeing something you shouldn’t be. Schoenberg’s photographs don’t have that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/3/a-magazine-called-suzy/ Sun, 03 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/2/still-rolling/ I grew up sneaking through my hometown’s video rental store. My mother brought me in when I was young, but I wasn’t allowed past the Disney section—the place was 18+. I went back every other day anyway. Each visit I’d slip a few cassettes further: past the action films, past the erotic thrillers, until I was standing innocently in the adult section, fundamentally changed by something I didn’t fully understand yet. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/2/still-rolling/ Sat, 02 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/2/ten-dollars/ Instagram got hacked in 2015 and six million people’s contact information got stolen and immediately packaged for sale on the dark web. Someone looked at it and thought, here’s a business. Not even to sell the whole thing - just to let people query it. Ten dollars and you could find anyone by their email or phone number. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/2/ten-dollars/ Sat, 02 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/2/the-gospel-according-to-iguchi/ Noboru Iguchi is the director he looks like he is. Born in Tokyo in 1969, he makes films about cyborg schoolgirls, killer sushi, and parasites that cause catastrophic dysentery. Machine Girl. Dead Sushi. Zombie Ass. The titles don’t lie—you get blood, violence, perversion, miniskirts, and this kind of anarchic glee in pushing it all further. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/2/the-gospel-according-to-iguchi/ Sat, 02 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/2/hair-that-changes-its-mind/ A few YouTubers started coloring their hair, and suddenly everyone in the city wanted to try it. Blue, green, silver. Some pulled it off. Most of them, though—there’s something about a neon head that doesn’t translate unless the rest of you is already there to meet it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/2/hair-that-changes-its-mind/ Sat, 02 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/2/the-summer-hit-lottery/ Summer hits arrive without explanation. ’Genie in a Bottle’ owned 1999. ’Macarena’ in ’96 was unavoidable—played everywhere and somehow still echoing. Prince’s ’When Doves Cry’ in ’84 felt necessary, even though I came along after the fact and just understood later that it had mattered. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/2/the-summer-hit-lottery/ Sat, 02 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/2/cros-mask/ Cro wore a panda mask on stage, which should have been absurd but wasn’t. Instead it became the most honest thing about the work—a commitment to image over identity, to the constructed self as the real self. Every song happened in the frame of that mask. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/2/cros-mask/ Sat, 02 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/1/the-real-obscenity/ There was an election coming in Germany, and I’d already decided: Die Partei. Not for any serious reason—just because they were the only ones being honest about how completely obscene things had gotten. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/1/the-real-obscenity/ Fri, 01 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/1/deck-10/ Red Bull Radio launched Deck 10, a monthly program on the third Tuesday hosted by Naima Limdighr and Keno Mescher. The idea is simple: cover rap and electronic scenes away from the major cities, the sounds and people nobody else is really paying attention to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/1/deck-10/ Fri, 01 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/1/chocolate-and-converse/ Kenny Anderson wearing the new Chocolate and Converse collaboration. One Star, Chuck Taylor All Star Hi-Tops, t-shirt, longsleeve, nylon windbreaker—their first time working together. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/1/chocolate-and-converse/ Fri, 01 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/1/ready-to-go/ “Ready to Go” is faster than you’d expect from Hurts. Theo Hutchcraft and Adam Anderson built their sound on slowness—arrangements that breathe, vocals that sit quiet in the mix, production that rewards attention. This song just wants to move. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/1/ready-to-go/ Fri, 01 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/1/just-like-that/ Berlin’s been drowning in posters for weeks—movies, events, services, and now election season on top of it. The candidates have claimed every vertical surface, and public space becomes just another billboard. You walk past thousands of messages nobody asked for. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/1/just-like-that/ Fri, 01 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/1/hauptstadtliebe/ Bread & Butter’s on again in Berlin, and Levi’s just threw out a limited shirt that’s almost boring in how minimal it is—just “Berlin” across the chest, black or white, that’s it. No logo, no weird design flourish, just the word. The kind of thing that feels obvious after someone does it, which probably means they got it right. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/9/1/hauptstadtliebe/ Fri, 01 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/31/pop-rebellion/ Before I heard Halsey, I was completely convinced modern pop was dead. You’d have to retreat into indie music just to find anything with real pulse. But she showed up and proved that wrong. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/31/pop-rebellion/ Thu, 31 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/31/the-satirists-had-a-point/ So Die Partei - you can believe whatever you want about them. They blame the Russians for everything, think Germany shouldn’t take in more refugees than the Mediterranean can handle, and want to bring back emergency exams where students get five questions nailed to the chalkboard in early June and the answers are just posted online beforehand. Then you chill. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/31/the-satirists-had-a-point/ Thu, 31 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/31/too-many-parties/ A month before the election and everyone’s shouting over everyone else. Merkel this, Schulz that, a dozen smaller parties all convinced they have the answer to the same questions nobody’s really asking the same way. More Europe or less. More women in power or fewer. More money for workers or less. The contradictions pile up and you realize half of them are just performance—theater for the cable news crowd. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/31/too-many-parties/ Thu, 31 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/31/the-asexual-thing/ I walk through the city and there’s always someone. The cute stranger, the bartender, someone entirely unremarkable who just hits. It’s this constant pull underneath, part of how I move. I figure everyone’s like this - same default wiring. Then there’s Michelle, who isn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/31/the-asexual-thing/ Thu, 31 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/31/the-permanent-vacation/ Nigora—no last name, or none that matters—has been everywhere. Thailand, Mexico, Jamaica. Topless on beaches, photos stacking up on Instagram. No personality, no brand, no pretense that anything else is happening. She figured out that if you’re beautiful and willing to be constantly photographed, you can live your entire life in motion, funded by other people’s desire. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/31/the-permanent-vacation/ Thu, 31 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/31/they-have-your-file/ Stood at the wrong protest. Lived next to someone smoking. Your face in the wrong camera at the wrong time. The German police file you away—quietly, without asking, without telling you afterward. Most people have no idea. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/31/they-have-your-file/ Thu, 31 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/30/worst-of-chefkoch/ I’ve lost hours on Chefkoch, this German recipe site where people submit their food with zero self-awareness. Sliced tomatoes. Salt. Powdered flavor enhancer. Liquid flavor enhancer. Call it “Tomato Plate à la Andi” with a wrong accent mark, and somehow that’s cuisine. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/30/worst-of-chefkoch/ Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/30/dressed-in-tokyo/ Before Japan ends in an atomic war with North Korea and individual style stops mattering, I wanted to photograph some people who actually know how to dress. The kind of style you don’t see much in Berlin or Munich or anywhere else in Germany. So I wandered around Harajuku, Shibuya, and Shimokitazawa with a camera, using my broken Japanese on strangers and photographing whoever said yes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/30/dressed-in-tokyo/ Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/30/when-ads-stopped-working/ René’s email hit at exactly the right moment. If you’ve been watching the advertising model implode, those numbers looked familiar: blog revenue from two grand a month down to two hundred. Not a reorganization. Not a pivot. A person living off savings while trying to keep something alive. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/30/when-ads-stopped-working/ Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/30/the-oktoberfest-shoe/ The heel is embroidered with lederhosen patterns. There’s a pretzel worked in. Gold lettering spells “Prost” alongside the three stripes. Someone at 43einhalb and adidas designed a sneaker specifically for Oktoberfest, and they spent real time on the details. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/30/the-oktoberfest-shoe/ Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/29/living-with-it/ In 2013, visiting Japan for the second time, there was constant talk about Kim Jong-un potentially lobbing a nuclear missile at Tokyo. Nobody seemed actually frightened—it was just part of the landscape, like the humidity—but when anti-missile defense stations started appearing across the city, something real shifted. You’d walk past these structures and feel the weight of the threat materialize. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/29/living-with-it/ Tue, 29 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/29/real-names/ You see a username like Bernd161 in your mentions calling you names, and you process it in about two seconds before your brain just… adjusts. Sometimes it stings. Sometimes it’s funny. Usually you don’t think about it again. That’s the deal with anonymity online—strangers can be cruel, but they’re hidden, so it doesn’t quite land. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/29/real-names/ Tue, 29 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/29/hacked/ Someone hacked Selena’s Instagram and posted nudes of Justin Bieber, which is funny on multiple levels. Her team caught it in minutes, shut everything down, reset the password, replaced the photos with normal content. Crisis averted in under an hour. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/29/hacked/ Tue, 29 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/29/something-underneath/ Pop music that doesn’t feel cheap is a specific thing to solve. You need lightness without emptiness, simplicity that doesn’t sound simple. Tom Misch worked this out young—a guitarist and producer who released Beat Tape 1 on Bandcamp, a collection of songs that sound like he knows exactly what to leave out. Each track takes what it needs and stops. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/29/something-underneath/ Tue, 29 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/29/what-paris-lost/ She was eighteen when Rick Salomon filmed them together. He was thirty-three. She never consented to him making the tape, and she definitely never consented to him leaking it. But in 2004, “1 Night in Paris” hit the internet, and the whole thing became inextricable from her brand. The public story was simple: the tape made Paris Hilton famous. It was the thing that launched her into the stratosphere. Except that’s not what happened. She never made a cent from it. Never wanted it out there. When she finally talked about it publicly, she was still furious about this part—the myth that she’d somehow benefited. “I never made a dollar off that video,” she said. “That’s one of the things that really pisses me off when I hear it.” https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/29/what-paris-lost/ Tue, 29 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/29/what-jim-will-draw/ I’ve been thinking about what it would be like to have someone who’d actually draw anything you could think of. Any fantasy, any crude impulse, any bit of obscene nonsense rattling around in your head—rendered in Microsoft Paint and sent back to you. No judgment. No limit. Well, Jim exists. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/29/what-jim-will-draw/ Tue, 29 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/29/he-wants-sex/ “You want to fuck me but you can’t because I forbid it.” That line from Henning May—from AnnenMayKantereit—is the whole song right there. It’s the hook on this WDR Unplugged remix they did with SXTN’s Juju and Nura for the track “Er will Sex,” and the delivery is perfect. He sounds wounded by the injustice of it, genuinely offended that desire isn’t a complete argument in itself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/29/he-wants-sex/ Tue, 29 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/29/another-youtube-redesign/ YouTube redesigned itself again, which means I logged in one day and spent five minutes confused about where everything went. This is what happens every few years—they rearrange the furniture, people get annoyed, and then you get used to it. The old interface had a button in a bad place, and the new interface has the button in a different bad place. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/29/another-youtube-redesign/ Tue, 29 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/28/making-games-actually/ You’ve played video games your whole life. You watched Minecraft explode, played Super Meat Boy, beat Undertale. Now you think: I could make something. Get a computer, learn the engine, upload it somewhere, see what happens. That’s the feeling. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/28/making-games-actually/ Mon, 28 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/28/lang-lebe-die-gang/ So years ago I basically made this blog into a Lena Meyer-Landrut thing after her Eurovision win. Might as well admit that now since if you’re still curious why anyone cares about her, that’s my fault. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/28/lang-lebe-die-gang/ Mon, 28 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/28/look-what-you-made-me-do/ Taylor had fights with basically everyone—Katy, Kanye, Kim, every guy she dated, apparently even Selena. Those feuds used to fuel her music. Anger and betrayal made her records better. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/28/look-what-you-made-me-do/ Mon, 28 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/28/iheartberlin-at-ten/ I knew Frank and Claudio back when I was still figuring out my own blog. We ran into each other at parties, on press trips, in those hours after midnight when you’re already deep into whatever the night became. They had the idea for iHeartBerlin early on, and I watched them build it piece by piece—careful, thoughtful, never trying too hard. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/28/iheartberlin-at-ten/ Mon, 28 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/27/validation-machine/ Veronika Dräxler shut down her art blog after ten years. The thing is, it was actually working when she closed it. The blog, Selbstdarstellungssucht—roughly “self-presentation addiction”—had readers, won awards, had people asking to be featured. So shutting it down wasn’t the usual kind of blog death. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/27/validation-machine/ Sun, 27 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/26/no-apologies/ I watched this guy rap once—all attitude and posture, every word performed. What got me wasn’t even him. It was watching people want to believe so badly that they did. That’s the real power: not authenticity, just confidence that you don’t need it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/26/no-apologies/ Sat, 26 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/25/no-apology/ Yulia Nefedova’s drawings hit different because she refuses to choose. Sexually explicit, playful—usually featuring herself or people close to her—but also sharp and critical about consumption and capitalism. Most artists trying to do both end up with work that feels split down the middle, apologetic. Hers doesn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/25/no-apology/ Fri, 25 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/25/spongebob-unhinged/ Paul sent me a fan edit where SpongeBob’s become an anime character, the dark kind. Yellow suit, dead eyes, the perpetual anger of someone who’s lost everything. In this world, Squidward’s the villain, the starfish are corpses, and SpongeBob can’t smile anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/25/spongebob-unhinged/ Fri, 25 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/25/mana-reborn/ Your character falls off a bridge into a river. You wake up on shore with no memory. There’s a sword in the water. You pull it out, and that’s the game—a kid finds something and everything changes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/25/mana-reborn/ Fri, 25 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/25/bojacks-back/ September’s here and Netflix’s basically screaming at you through the algorithm to watch something—new seasons of Narcos, Chelsea Handler, whatever, all this stuff queuing up for your attention. You know how this goes. You scroll for forty minutes and end up watching something you’ve already seen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/25/bojacks-back/ Fri, 25 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/25/influencers-of-the-21st-century/ Instagram became the platform. For a couple years it was whoever—Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube—but Instagram won. That’s where you had to exist if you wanted to matter. We all knew that and clicked in anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/25/influencers-of-the-21st-century/ Fri, 25 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/25/worst-of/ Jennifer Weis doesn’t perform excitement. The frontwoman of Jennifer Rostock sounds like she’s just telling you something she noticed, and the fact that it’s scathing usually doesn’t sink in until later. The band’s been around for a decade, mixing pop-rock with social critique sharp enough that you can easily miss it on first listen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/25/worst-of/ Fri, 25 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/25/how-things-vanish/ De Maizière shut down Linksunten after the Hamburg riots. The whole Indymedia platform just vanished—not just certain posts, the entire thing. One day it existed, the next day it was gone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/25/how-things-vanish/ Fri, 25 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/24/everything-as-a-super-nintendo/ If I had enough money, I’d buy everything in Super Nintendo form. Everything. The console from the nineties had and still has basically everything I need to be happy. Secret of Mana, Super Mario World, Link to the Past—that’s the holy trinity right there, and that’s just the games. I’m not even counting the rest. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/24/everything-as-a-super-nintendo/ Thu, 24 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/24/bootleg-logic/ The thing about streetwear is that everyone agrees the logos are what matter. The actual quality of the hoodie, the actual comfort of the shoe—nobody’s checking. You’re buying the cultural capital, the three stripes or the swoosh or whatever Supreme put on a brick and made scarce. Companies spent billions making kids understand that wearing the right symbol is what makes you real. And then they acted shocked when kids found a way to get it without the four-hundred-dollar price tag. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/24/bootleg-logic/ Thu, 24 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/24/still-being-discovered/ There’s a moment in the middle of “Hallucinogen” where everything goes quiet except for Kelela’s voice layered with itself, and I realized someone had finally figured out how to make R&B feel like it’s still being discovered. It was 2013, and she was doing something that felt completely alive in the now—no nostalgia, no heavy-handed reference, just presence. The precision of her production choices. The way she knew when to leave silence. The confidence to let a song breathe. It was clear she understood the form deeply enough to move sideways through it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/24/still-being-discovered/ Thu, 24 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/24/getting-used-to-it/ Your face is being scanned at Berlin’s Südkreuz station. The camera doesn’t introduce itself. Just checks whether you match a watch list, decides within milliseconds. Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière is testing this technology with plans to expand it nationwide. He’s already thinking through how it works everywhere. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/24/getting-used-to-it/ Thu, 24 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/24/coco/ I came across Coco’s Instagram at some point—a six-year-old from Harajuku with more followers than I’ll ever accumulate. The outfits are genuinely good, the kind of thing that would make sense on an adult. Not cute-for-a-kid good, but actually well-proportioned, smart fabric mixing, visual sense that most designers take years to develop. Obviously an adult dressed her and shot the photos, but still. It works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/24/coco/ Thu, 24 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/24/ten-euros-per-nazi/ In Fulda, someone figured out how to turn Nazi marches into fundraisers for refugee aid. It’s elegant enough that I’m still not sure if I’m looking at genius or just devastating strategy. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/24/ten-euros-per-nazi/ Thu, 24 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/23/still-got-it/ The club was loud and stupid, but something worked anyway. By the time we got back to my place the whole thing was still going. Then she was naked and suddenly gone—worried about how she looked. Like that was the thing I was thinking about. Like my brain was anywhere but right there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/23/still-got-it/ Wed, 23 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/23/fake-fifties/ I read about these two students in Munich who figured out they could buy counterfeit €50 notes on the darknet. Twenty-three euros per note through Bitcoin, which was absurdly cheap if you stopped to think about it. They ordered a batch, one bill arrived, and when they used it to pay for a taxi with zero resistance, they decided they’d found a loophole in reality. Next order: twenty fake fifties. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/23/fake-fifties/ Wed, 23 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/23/what-do-you-champion/ Laurel Golio photographed three people in Champion’s new sweatwear for a collaboration with Urban Outfitters, and each one answered the same question: “what do you champion?” https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/23/what-do-you-champion/ Wed, 23 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/23/king-krule/ King Krule’s voice cuts through everything. You can have a dozen songs playing at once and Archy Marshall comes on and suddenly they’re all just noise. His voice isn’t technically impressive or polished. It’s just unmistakably his—pained, raw, but in an honest way, not a performed one. That’s rare enough that it matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/23/king-krule/ Wed, 23 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/23/the-english-problem/ You walk into a bar in Kreuzberg and everyone’s speaking English. A CDU politician gets mad about it. Jens Spahn went to Die Zeit and basically said Berlin hipsters are elitists who’ve abandoned German—they’ve built this separate world where English is the only language that counts, and nobody else gets in. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/23/the-english-problem/ Wed, 23 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/23/reputation/ I remember not wanting to put my phone down when the Reputation announcement dropped. Not because I needed to read news—I just felt something shift and I wanted to stay in that moment. Taylor had been quiet for over a year. The Kanye incident, the Katy thing, the internet deciding she was a snake and a villain. Everyone was waiting to see how she’d respond: apologize, explain, rehabilitate. Instead she came back like someone who’d already made peace with being exactly what people claimed she was. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/23/reputation/ Wed, 23 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/23/buying-twitter/ Someone named Valerie Wilson—former CIA officer, now author and activist—started a GoFundMe to buy Twitter and delete Trump’s account. The target was a billion dollars. They had raised about ten thousand. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/23/buying-twitter/ Wed, 23 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/23/playstation-now/ PlayStation Now launched with the promise of what everyone figured was coming anyway—game streaming, four hundred titles for seventeen euros a month. Red Dead Redemption, The Last of Us, Asura’s Wrath. Expensive games suddenly sitting there waiting to play. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/23/playstation-now/ Wed, 23 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/23/four-guys-did-the-pizza-delivery-episode/ Some guys from a YouTube channel called Froyo Gamers decided to recreate the SpongeBob “Pizza Delivery” episode. Not a parody or a reference. They did it scene for scene with real people acting out exactly what cartoon SpongeBob and Squidward do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/23/four-guys-did-the-pizza-delivery-episode/ Wed, 23 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/22/september-reprieve/ Summer in Berlin that year was barely a summer—wind and rain kept killing the festivals. I stopped planning and just checked the weather like it was stock data. By September I just needed something else to happen. The East Side Music Days came up over the 2nd and 3rd, free shows scattered across Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg, London MCs and newer names and the usual circuit. Nothing that was going to rewire me, but that wasn’t really the point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/22/september-reprieve/ Tue, 22 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/21/song-for-his-mother/ There’s something about making it as an artist that makes you want to write something for your mother. Not out of obligation or because it plays in an interview, but because she was there before any of this, when you were just a kid in a suburb with something to say. Romano did that on his album Copyshop. I haven’t heard the song, don’t know if it’s sentimental or clever or both, but I get the impulse. You spend years building something, learning to say what you mean, and eventually you turn back toward the person who believed in you first. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/21/song-for-his-mother/ Mon, 21 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/21/the-leak/ The hack dropped and suddenly everyone’s private photos are on Reddit. Miley was in it. She’d been trying to clean up her image, trying to be less controversial, and then that photograph—her pissing in the street—destroys the whole thing in one go. You can perform sexuality, you can perform transgression, but you can’t perform a bathroom break. That’s where the image breaks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/21/the-leak/ Mon, 21 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/14/pixx/ Pixx makes the kind of music that rewards paying attention. Hannah Rogers went to the BRIT School as a teenager, which is context but not the story. What matters is what she does with it—pulling Dylan and Joni Mitchell into something that also contains Aphex Twin, and having it actually cohere instead of sound like someone checking boxes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/14/pixx/ Mon, 14 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/10/tokyo-in-eight-bits/ These 8-bit GIFs of Tokyo are too specific to be nostalgia bait. They’re just what’s there—the subway packed until you’re breathing someone else’s air, ramen steam fogging up whatever space you’re sitting in, neon bleeding into rain on a street you’ve never heard of. Yuuta Toyo, a pixel artist working in Japan, has built his whole body of work around these small moments, looping them into these brief animations that somehow capture the feeling of being inside the city without trying to be beautiful. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/10/tokyo-in-eight-bits/ Thu, 10 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/10/fake-followers-real-money/ I watched a friend refresh her Instagram analytics at dinner once, checking engagement rates like they meant something. She’d been posting for months, photographs of her breakfast and whatever body parts she could get away with, grinding toward ten thousand followers. That’s the magic number where brands supposedly start throwing money at you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/10/fake-followers-real-money/ Thu, 10 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/10/liberal-country/ Germany’s always been good at the official story. Progressive laws, cosmopolitan culture, a country that believes in itself. And yet the violence against gay and lesbian people climbed steadily, year over year. More assaults, more hate crimes, more of everything. In the first six months of 2017 alone, there were 130 reported cases—beatings, harassment, extortion, property damage. A third more than the previous year. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/10/liberal-country/ Thu, 10 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/9/the-window-closes/ Netflix was beautiful for about five years. Ten euros a month, basically everything, no ads, no cable negotiations. That was the window. Disney looked at those numbers, did the math, and decided Netflix was just a distributor taking a cut. So they’re pulling all their content to run their own service. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/9/the-window-closes/ Wed, 09 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/8/the-caffeine-hack/ Every morning I’m pouring coffee before I’m fully conscious, operating on pure habit. I have no idea why it works, just that without it nothing starts. The coffee hits and something switches on. I become available. I have thoughts. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/8/the-caffeine-hack/ Tue, 08 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/8/what-comes-next/ I’d never tell my art-school friends that I paid for a streaming subscription just to watch Germany’s Bachelorette. I was stoned for basically the entire season, so I never really tracked the plot—something about a choice between two guys, something about Instagram announcements. Jessica Paszka was the lead, and at the end she picked someone or didn’t or maybe the system picked for her. I genuinely don’t know. But I wanted to watch it, and I did, and that was that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/8/what-comes-next/ Tue, 08 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/8/strobelite/ If Gorillaz aren’t sitting in your regular rotation, you’re doing something wrong. I’ve cycled through every track from 2D, Noodle, Murdoc, and Russell enough times that they blur into the background—work, driving, three in the morning, doesn’t matter. Only a handful of acts pull that off. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/8/strobelite/ Tue, 08 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/8/two-calls-a-minute/ Two phone calls per minute. That’s how many Berlin cops are listening in on, every single minute, according to their annual report. Not some paranoid thing—official numbers. A million-plus taps in one year. And most of it is drugs. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/8/two-calls-a-minute/ Tue, 08 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/7/alles-gut/ I’ve always been skeptical of German rap’s obsession with hierarchy and proof. Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt—they’re all trying to win something. Vienna doesn’t. The scene there operates at a different frequency, less concerned with dominance, more interested in just thinking out loud. Jugo Ürdens is one of the producers driving it, and EINFACHSO, nineteen, Polish-Austrian, feels like he could be leading whatever comes next. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/7/alles-gut/ Mon, 07 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/4/die-wasd/ I used to love gaming magazines. Total!, MANIAC!, GEE—the physical ones you’d find in shops. Something about the weight of them, the care in the design, the knowledge that someone had decided what belonged in this issue and then it was finished. Most of that’s gone now. Blogs, YouTube, Twitter discourse took its place. Fine for speed, but not the same. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/4/die-wasd/ Fri, 04 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/4/unbeaten/ You think because you’ve got a fashion blog where you pose in front of monuments, you’ve got the internet figured out. But there’s exactly one website I can look at without wanting to drive a nail through my temple, and it’s not going to be on some list of recommended reads. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/4/unbeaten/ Fri, 04 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/3/the-australian/ Most people are obsessing over some movie star, but I’ve been stuck on Kirin J. Callinan. There’s something about him—the way he carries himself, whatever’s happening behind his eyes, the whole magnetic pull. I can barely explain it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/3/the-australian/ Thu, 03 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/3/jhené-aikos-clothes/ Jhené Aiko’s music moves through you without trying. “While We’re Young,” “The Worst,” “Hello Ego”—they just exist in their own space, cool and unbothered. I played “Souled Out” for years, the kind of album that lives on your playlists without asking permission. There’s something about how she carries a song that makes you listen without being asked to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/3/jhené-aikos-clothes/ Thu, 03 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/3/what-zipcys-gets-right/ Zipcys—Yang Se Eun, a South Korean illustrator who goes by that name online—draws romance in a way that hits different. Sensitive moments between beautiful people, the kind that don’t need anything else. No irony, no cruelty, just two people and whatever’s happening between them. Looking at her work makes something ache a little. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/3/what-zipcys-gets-right/ Thu, 03 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/3/juliette-dominique-brown/ Saw Juliette Dominique Brown through Insuh Yoon’s work—a Colombian photographer and painter who shoots people, whoever catches her eye. I liked the directness of it, no manifesto or overthinking, just the confidence to make work about what interests you. That clarity is harder than it sounds. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/3/juliette-dominique-brown/ Thu, 03 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/3/when-the-nineties-came-back/ The nineties are back. Which makes sense—the eighties got picked to death. The nineties are less aggressively embarrassing to look back on, less apologetic. Just clothes that happened to look decent without trying too hard. That’s what makes retro work: not the decade itself, but the stuff that aged well enough to matter to people who didn’t live it the first time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/3/when-the-nineties-came-back/ Thu, 03 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/1/death-wish-coffee/ That state where you’ve had three cups of coffee and nothing’s changed—your eyes are still half-closed, your throat tastes like burnt beans, and you’re still thinking about going back to bed. That’s when you hear about Death Wish Coffee. World’s strongest. Nitrogen-infused. The kind of product that exists because someone looked at regular strong coffee and thought the actual problem was that it wasn’t strong enough yet. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/8/1/death-wish-coffee/ Tue, 01 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/31/miso-soup/ Miso soup arrives at your table as a kind of appetizer nobody thinks about—some pale, salty thing you drink while waiting for the real food. But in Japan it’s breakfast. It’s a national dish. You get a bowl of it and a bowl of rice and that’s how you start the day. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/31/miso-soup/ Mon, 31 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/31/four-colorways/ Tyler’s been running Golf le Fleur with this tight control for years—every piece feels considered, not just stamped with a logo. Most designer collabs feel like they’re trying to do everything: special materials, limited editions, some story you need to read on Instagram. This one is just Converse One Stars in four colorways. Airway Blue, Peach Pearl, Sulphur, Fuschia Glow. That’s it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/31/four-colorways/ Mon, 31 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/31/another-tokyo/ Tokyo gets shot to death, which is why it’s interesting to see it through Lauren Engel. She showed up with friends, hit the expected spots—Skytree, Yoyogi Park, Takeshita Dori—and came back with photos that make even the millionth picture of Shibuya feel like it might be worth looking at. She’s worked for Adidas, Beats by Dre, Folklore, shot for Vogue, Highsnobiety, C-Heads. That’s the kind of experience that teaches you to see differently. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/31/another-tokyo/ Mon, 31 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/31/the-chairmans-intent/ Most current rappers blur together for me—Lil this, Lil that, endless variations on nothing. But Action Bronson cuts through. He’s one of the few acts working right now who actually matters to me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/31/the-chairmans-intent/ Mon, 31 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/28/it-was-always-going-to-happen/ You know Lisa and Lena if you’re twelve or if YouTube has decided to recommend something. The Stuttgart twins got famous on Musical.ly, the app where kids lip-synced pop songs in their bedrooms and sometimes made it look easy. Lisa and Lena were the ones who made it look easy. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/28/it-was-always-going-to-happen/ Fri, 28 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/28/what-selenas-become/ I used to assume Selena Gomez was exactly what she looked like on the surface—another manufactured Disney product, squeezed into pop music’s tightest template, waiting for the inevitable breakdown that would make her tabloid fodder. It’s an easy assumption if you’re into obscure European records from the seventies, the kind of taste that makes you feel better about yourself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/28/what-selenas-become/ Fri, 28 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/25/my-religion/ I used to think 80s pop was whatever MTV told me to care about. Nena, Billy Ocean, the safe hits. But the real thing was in Tokyo the whole time, played on car radios and in discos—Momoko Kikuchi, Takako Mamiya, Yukiko Okada. Women singing over the lightest possible disco arrangements about love, friendship, the ache of the city. The aesthetic was ruthlessly simple: stay buoyant, stay bright, don’t let anything heavy sneak in. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/25/my-religion/ Tue, 25 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/25/rocko-still-works/ Everything was better, or that’s what we tell ourselves. The cartoons especially. Sailor Moon, Hey Arnold, Ren & Stimpy, Doug, CatDog—those shows admitted the world was weird and didn’t apologize. But Rocko’s Modern Life was different. It wasn’t just another cartoon. It was a refuge for the genuinely broken kids, the ones whose heads were already wired wrong. And it didn’t try to fix you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/25/rocko-still-works/ Tue, 25 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/25/until-the-last-player/ PUBG was impossible to escape in 2017. Every stream I checked, people were playing it—sometimes dead serious, sometimes just half-naked driving trucks off cliffs. The game had this chaotic, explosive energy that made you feel like you were part of something massive. Then Bluehole flew eighty of the world’s best players to Gamescom in Cologne that August for the first offline invitational. I remember thinking it was the moment everything became official. This wasn’t just the game everyone streamed anymore. This was competitive. Real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/25/until-the-last-player/ Tue, 25 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/24/full-moon-in-new-york/ After enough years sitting muddy and exhausted in the same tents at the same festivals—Melt, Rock im Park, Splash, the usual rotation—you understand why people start looking elsewhere. Damp, hungry, your tent smelling like every other summer body that’s sheltered there, too tired to move. At some point the novelty wears off. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/24/full-moon-in-new-york/ Mon, 24 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/24/costa-cordalis-hostage/ Some marketing executive in Germany decided the best way to sell creamy Greek yogurt was to imagine a Greek grandmother kidnapping a schlager singer as ransom for her stolen recipe. Costa Cordalis, legend of German pop-folk, held hostage by a sweet old woman over OIKOS. The logic is insane but somehow it works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/24/costa-cordalis-hostage/ Mon, 24 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/24/the-hamburg-tapes/ Hamburg that summer was inescapable. The G20 summit, the riots, the police, cameras everywhere—it was the only conversation. Merkel, Putin, Trump in some new concert hall listening to Wagner while the streets outside burned, and everyone with an internet connection had footage and a theory about what was really going on. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/24/the-hamburg-tapes/ Mon, 24 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/24/game-over/ I heard too late. Superlevel, the German indie game blog, was shutting down. Eight and a half years, finished. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/24/game-over/ Mon, 24 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/24/arms/ The Joy-Con motion controls are the entire design. Swing to punch, tilt to move. You get maybe an evening out of the novelty before your arm gets tired. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/24/arms/ Mon, 24 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/17/street-fighter-everything/ Street Fighter’s become one of those things that never really left. It’s everywhere, on everything, constantly remixed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/17/street-fighter-everything/ Mon, 17 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/13/when-soundcloud-almost-died/ I found out SoundCloud was running out of money the way you find out about most things these days—through a news article you didn’t know you needed. Fifty days of cash left, maybe less. The company had just fired 173 people, about 40 percent of the staff. Alex Ljung, the founder, was apparently trying to sell the whole thing to whoever would take it, maybe Deezer, before the whole place collapsed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/13/when-soundcloud-almost-died/ Thu, 13 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/4/blogging-was-a-macbook/ There was this week in Berlin—September 2017—when you could pay 99 euros to learn how to become a professional blogger. Workshops on food blogging, WordPress, SEO, how to turn words into money. The pitch was clean and simple: come learn from people who’d actually done it, and you could be next. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/7/4/blogging-was-a-macbook/ Tue, 04 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/22/hiraris-gospel/ You see them everywhere in Harajuku if you’re looking—people who’ve just decided that fitting in is somebody else’s problem. They wear whatever they want: big boots, fluffy jackets in the summer heat, makeup that looks like it took actual tactical planning. It’s the most aggressively apathetic fashion you can pull off in a culture that’s literally built on conformity. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/22/hiraris-gospel/ Thu, 22 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/22/the-female-penis/ Most guys think they’re good because they don’t finish in three seconds. They’re idiots. I was an idiot. I didn’t know anything about the clitoris—where it was, what it actually did, why it mattered. I just moved fast and assumed competence was automatic. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/22/the-female-penis/ Thu, 22 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/22/still-better-than-the-walking-dead/ The later seasons of Game of Thrones weren’t as good as the first ones. The writing got worse, the surprises stopped landing the way they used to, the whole thing became about spectacle instead of actual stakes. I made peace with it eventually. Shows fall apart all the time—most of them do if you give them long enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/22/still-better-than-the-walking-dead/ Thu, 22 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/21/gold-and-gray/ Everyone was there for the same reason—the perfect photograph, the one with sunlight, reflection, and the structure gleaming at its most photogenic. Gray afternoon didn’t cooperate. You could see the disappointment move through the crowds in waves. They’d come for the postcard and got a dull building in muted light instead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/21/gold-and-gray/ Wed, 21 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/21/when-they-become-the-strangers/ There’s this thing I’ve noticed people do when they’re scared: they find someone who looks different and blame them for whatever change they don’t want. Refugees, immigrants, accents, wrong clothes, wrong religion. It’s simpler than admitting you just want everything to stay the same. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/21/when-they-become-the-strangers/ Wed, 21 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/21/license-required/ Gronkh got a letter from Germany’s media authority. The message is simple: either pay for a broadcast license or stop streaming to everyone. He reaches 500 people at a time watching him play games, and apparently that makes him a broadcaster. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/21/license-required/ Wed, 21 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/21/two-thirds/ Two of the three TLC members just dropped new music for the first time in forever. “Haters” is the song—a very 2020s take on the cyberbullying thing, all confidence and dismissal. T-Boz and Chilli are basically shrugging at the internet’s bile, which feels right for them somehow. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/21/two-thirds/ Wed, 21 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/21/what-they-actually-want/ The leaked WhatsApp messages from inside the Alternative for Germany are the kind of thing that makes you feel like you’re reading fiction, except they’re not. This is what these people actually want to do when they get power. Suppress the media. Purge journalists. Close critical newspapers and websites. Make it work like Russia, China, Turkey. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/21/what-they-actually-want/ Wed, 21 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/21/your-real-city/ You’re building your mythology around döner at Kottbusser Tor, around the blur of Warschauer Straße, around the mythical pull of slipping into Berghain. Feed it to Instagram and the story feels true. There’s the shitty apartment you’re escaping soon, the unpaid internship you’ll outgrow, the whole narrative that you’re in the right place just enduring the wrong conditions—for now. Just give it time. You’ll make it. You’ll become the person who actually belongs here. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/21/your-real-city/ Wed, 21 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/21/whats-real-on-instagram/ I found Dain Yoon’s Instagram and didn’t scroll past. The first image that caught me was her face splitting—not digitally, not in a filter, but in actual makeup. Three versions of her stacked vertically on her own cheekbones and forehead, rendered in such precise shadow work that you could feel the geometry of it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/21/whats-real-on-instagram/ Wed, 21 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/20/no-talent-no-problem/ Bibi made a song called “How It Is” and it was the kind of bad that unites everyone in a room. Not entertainingly bad—just incompetent. The vocals are weak, the production is cheap, and it sounds like someone who thought confidence could make up for having no skill. Even people who usually defended her online kind of stepped back from this one. You know those moments when something is so objectively wrong that criticism becomes automatic, like pointing at a color and saying “that’s red.” https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/20/no-talent-no-problem/ Tue, 20 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/20/bad-liar/ She plays her dad in the video. Her mom. This hot blonde PE teacher she’s secretly into. The way Selena Gomez moves between all these characters—each one lying about something, hiding something—the video doesn’t make sense in any conventional music-video way. But that’s the point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/20/bad-liar/ Tue, 20 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/20/arale/ If you remember Dr. Slump from the early 2000s—and you probably do if you grew up watching bizarre things on late-night German TV—you remember Arale as the character who had no business being as funny as she was. A female robot built by an insane professor, obsessed with poop jokes and old Godzilla films, somehow the most chaotic and lovable entity in the entire show. She didn’t have layers. She didn’t have depth. She just was, completely unfiltered, and that was the whole joke. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/20/arale/ Tue, 20 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/20/polly-norrs-demons/ Polly Norr paints women in the middle of their own wreckage—wanting and despairing and caught in whatever dark thing is happening inside their head that day. She doesn’t flinch from the sex. It’s crude and unguarded. But right next to it are the demons, the self-doubt, the feeling that you’re drowning. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/20/polly-norrs-demons/ Tue, 20 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/19/still-there/ I caught One Piece on RTL II in the afternoons, back when you’d watch anything to put off whatever you were supposed to be doing. The show lived in my head—the Grand Line, Nami, all of it. That’s what happens when you watch something like that consistently at a young age. It roots itself deep. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/19/still-there/ Mon, 19 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/19/dead-music/ Music died, and DJ Khaled’s “Wild Thoughts” is just what we’re pretending is alive instead. It’s not even a song, really—he grabbed a beat, looped it, threw a couple of notes on top, and then got some famous people to mumble at it. That’s the whole formula now. No songwriting, no craft, just assembly. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/19/dead-music/ Mon, 19 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/19/no-men/ I’ve eaten ramen because I was broke, not because I thought it would make me smarter. That’s the real story. It’s cheap protein at midnight, a way to feed yourself for almost nothing. Every student knows this. The nutritional angle is a fiction we told ourselves to feel better about eating the same thing three times a week. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/19/no-men/ Mon, 19 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/19/the-letter/ The internet used to feel lawless. You could pull whatever you wanted through Napster, LimeWire, eMule—entire seasons, full discographies, things that didn’t exist anywhere else. That’s gone. Torrent sites collapse. People drift to private trackers, Usenet, wherever. Even getting US Netflix from outside the country is getting harder. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/19/the-letter/ Mon, 19 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/18/minimalustig/ I got tired of YouTube at some point—the feuding, the games, the people turning their lives into a product. Was looking for quiet when I found Minimalustig, this tiny channel where Mary just draws cartoons about being a student. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/18/minimalustig/ Sun, 18 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/18/everything-looks-like-sex/ You start noticing it and you can’t stop. A banana in someone’s mouth becomes a joke. A pair of smooth stones catches your eye the wrong way. A gap between two columns at the station is suddenly an optical illusion of something else. The world becomes this constant parade of shapes that shouldn’t mean anything but somehow do. Once you start seeing it, it’s everywhere. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/18/everything-looks-like-sex/ Sun, 18 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/18/instant-film/ The last thing I want on a beach trip is to babysit my phone and worry about sand in the charging port. But I also don’t want to leave my good camera at home. So I’ve always been drawn to instant cameras—the kind where you press the shutter, the mechanism whirs, and thirty seconds later you’re holding an actual photograph. No screen, no editing, no culling through four hundred photos of the same sunset. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/18/instant-film/ Sun, 18 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/18/shes-still-here/ Sailor Moon’s got this weird permanence. Three decades on from the original Japanese broadcast, and you’ve still got artists everywhere drawing it, reimagining it, pouring their own sensibility into these characters. That’s not typical. Most anime from the ’90s are historical artifacts now. Sailor Moon is still living. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/18/shes-still-here/ Sun, 18 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/13/collision/ Aston Martin and Hogan made a sneaker for Fashion Week in London. Three thousand pairs, $545 each. The press release didn’t bother describing the actual shoe—just the brands and the numbers. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/13/collision/ Tue, 13 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/4/campus/ The Campus has always been the one. Not the Basketball shoe for the court—the one for making things, for not overthinking it. From the moment it debuted in the 80s in those deep burgundy and forest green colorways, it became the default for anyone doing anything real in the street. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/6/4/campus/ Sun, 04 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/30/moscow-mule/ Every bartender in Berlin is ready to make you a Moscow Mule. Half of them actually know what they’re doing. The other half give you something watered down and flat with a cucumber slice, like that fixes it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/30/moscow-mule/ Tue, 30 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/30/pink-wig-3-am/ The Shibuya crossing at night. Someone in a pink wig standing in the middle of it, deliberately stopping pedestrians from crossing. That’s Julia Abe for you—half-Japanese, half-Brazilian, everywhere in Tokyo’s photography world. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/30/pink-wig-3-am/ Tue, 30 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/30/back-to-iphone/ Every time I end up with an Android phone for a few days—borrowed from someone, testing something out—I remember exactly why I left. Something doesn’t work the way I expect it to. A setting is buried three levels deep. The phone feels like it’s working around me instead of with me. Then I go back to my iPhone and it’s like coming home to a place that just gets it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/30/back-to-iphone/ Tue, 30 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/30/i-do/ Beatsteaks from Berlin are the kind of band where if you’ve seen them live, you know exactly what you’re getting. Arnim and the guitars and the bass, all that focused energy, hitting you right. It’s consistent. It’s why people keep showing up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/30/i-do/ Tue, 30 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/30/say-it-right/ There’s this weird anxiety that comes with being into hip-hop—the fear that you’ve been saying someone’s name wrong the whole time and some kid half your age is going to catch you. Jay-Z, Drake, Kanye. You think you know, but do you really? You’ve heard these names a thousand times and somehow you’re still not entirely sure if you’re doing it right. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/30/say-it-right/ Tue, 30 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/30/stüssy-and-harumi-yamaguchi/ Stüssy collaborated with Harumi Yamaguchi for their 2017 summer collection, and it was the kind of pairing that makes sense immediately. She’s a Tokyo-trained fine artist—Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku—whose work had been gaining attention well beyond typical design circles. Putting her illustrations on t-shirts felt natural rather than opportunistic. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/30/stüssy-and-harumi-yamaguchi/ Tue, 30 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/29/still-president/ It still sounds wrong when I say it. Trump’s president. After everything—the scandals, the chaos, things that should’ve ended it—he’s still there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/29/still-president/ Mon, 29 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/29/frank-underwoods-strange-afterlife/ House of Cards season five came out while Trump was president, which was the worst possible timing. The show is built on this idea that power is a game for smart people, that politics rewards cunning and patience. Frank Underwood is the villain you’re supposed to find terrifying because he actually understands how things work. But then Trump was in office doing none of that and getting everything anyway, and the whole premise just fell apart. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/29/frank-underwoods-strange-afterlife/ Mon, 29 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/29/still-white/ I keep thinking white sneaker trends have to crack at some point. They always do. Get enough people in perfect blank Stan Smiths and suddenly the people who actually think about it start craving the opposite—something aggressively ugly, pink sandals, whatever reads as wrong right now. It’ll happen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/29/still-white/ Mon, 29 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/29/why-games-ship-broken/ I think back to playing Super Mario World or Zelda as a kid, and there was something about the basic fact that nothing broke. The game arrived on a cartridge, fully done. If a door didn’t open, that was the world telling you something. If a wall stopped you, that was design. There was no Day-1 patch. There was no version 1.1. What you had was what you got, forever. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/29/why-games-ship-broken/ Mon, 29 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/29/sausage-beer-and-hitler/ When I told people in Tokyo I was from Germany, their faces lit up instantly. Castles. Green fields. Really good beer. There was genuine warmth in it, and something a little absurd—like I’d just admitted I was from some idealized storybook version of Europe. Compared to what I actually got from German tourists—a kind of grim efficiency, some defensive pride, usually at least one story about a war—the Japanese version was almost flattering. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/29/sausage-beer-and-hitler/ Mon, 29 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/29/gorillaz-still-weird/ Gorillaz came back in 2017 with Humanz, and I was probably too old to be this invested in a band that technically doesn’t exist. But the album had teeth—restless, overstuffed, guest spot after guest spot, like they were proving something to someone. They were touring again, and Cologne got the June gig at the Palladium. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/29/gorillaz-still-weird/ Mon, 29 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/29/girls-in-london/ Everyone acts like Berlin is the center of everything, but stand it next to London and it’s obvious—just a village that got cocky. No skyline, no clubs that survive more than a few years, no actual scene to speak of. London’s where something’s still happening. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/29/girls-in-london/ Mon, 29 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/29/benchs-90s/ I saw the pictures from Bench’s 90s capsule collection and something about it stuck with me. Shot in a Berlin skatepark, all these track suits and color blocks, the whole streetstyle aesthetic that was supposed to be gone by now. The thing is, I didn’t grow up thinking the 90s were cool. I just lived through them, wearing what my parents bought me or what I could scrape together. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/29/benchs-90s/ Mon, 29 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/28/dysnomia/ I’d say I have no friends, but that’s not quite right—I have Eddy, Nils, Simon, and Budi. They work for Rocket Beans TV and they don’t know me, but I watch enough of their content that I’ve basically decided we’re friends. It’s a relationship that works fine as long as I don’t examine it too closely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/28/dysnomia/ Sun, 28 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/26/gaffer-beton/ There’s a band from somewhere in Germany called Kaffkönig. Their album “Gaffer & Beton” sounds like it was made in a bar at closing time—I mean literally the energy of it, the weariness and the anger mixed together, the sound of people who work jobs they didn’t dream about and live lives they accepted rather than chose. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/26/gaffer-beton/ Fri, 26 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/25/game-of-thrones-again/ Game of Thrones hasn’t been good in years, but I watch the new season anyway. The early run had teeth—actual stakes, real surprise, writing that mattered. By season five or six you could feel it shift, the show becoming less a story and more a spectacle machine. It still beats The Walking Dead, which is a low bar. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/25/game-of-thrones-again/ Thu, 25 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/25/wireless-comes-to-frankfurt/ Wireless had always been the London thing. The festival you watched in June or July, the one where the actual biggest names in hip-hop and grime and pop showed up together. Not because Wireless was the only place they’d perform, but because it was the place that mattered. Drake played there. Kanye. Rihanna. You could read the year’s music world in its lineup. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/25/wireless-comes-to-frankfurt/ Thu, 25 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/25/seoul-station/ Seoul’s the place right now. The music’s better than America’s. The design moves there first. The fashion feels alive. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/25/seoul-station/ Thu, 25 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/25/vinyl-factory-soho/ London parties are hit or miss. This Hunter thing at Vinyl Factory in Soho was better than most. Festival kickoff supposedly, but really just an excuse to get beautiful people in a room with cocktails and music. Everyone was in good spirits without being obnoxious—a real accomplishment for that crowd. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/25/vinyl-factory-soho/ Thu, 25 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/24/first-time/ I can’t remember if I ever actually told my parents about mine, or if they just figured it out somehow. Maybe they have some kind of radar for it. I definitely never sat them down and said anything. That conversation either never happened or I’ve completely blocked it from memory. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/24/first-time/ Wed, 24 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/24/average-rob/ Think about who’s slept with the most celebrities. Has to be someone famous, right? Taylor Swift because she dates constantly. DiCaprio with his endless carousel of models. Clooney on some ineffable Clooney principle. But the answer is Robert, a Belgian guy on Instagram. Average Rob. His whole feed is just him asleep next to whoever happens to be important. Taylor Swift, Mila Kunis, Selena Gomez, Katy Perry, Margot Robbie, Obama, David Beckham. Nestled against them like he belongs there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/24/average-rob/ Wed, 24 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/24/rina-hashimoto/ People always ask me: if you love Japan so much, shouldn’t your type be Japanese women? I’d always have to think about it. Selena Gomez? No. Scarlett Johansson, who’s been there? No. Kate Upton? No. None of them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/24/rina-hashimoto/ Wed, 24 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/24/ahoj-brause-went-legitimate/ Ahoj-Brause was the German fizzy concentrate you made yourself—tablets or powder you’d dump in water, watch it fizz and dissolve into something sticky and sweet. Orange, raspberry, lemon, or woodruff, though what woodruff was supposed to taste like nobody ever figured out. The flavor wasn’t the point. The point was that you made it. You controlled the ratios, made it cloying or barely flavored, whatever you wanted. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/24/ahoj-brause-went-legitimate/ Wed, 24 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/24/dont-fuck-the-ocean/ The Lion King taught me that life is a circle. You throw a plastic bag in a bin, it ends up in the Indian Ocean, and from there it becomes a dildo. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/24/dont-fuck-the-ocean/ Wed, 24 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/24/office-hits/ You sit at your desk for eight hours pretending to look busy, hitting refresh on your email, telling yourself the day will end eventually even though it absolutely won’t. The printer’s jammed again. Your boss asked for something due yesterday at 4:47 PM today. Someone left their lunch in the fridge and it’s been there for three weeks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/24/office-hits/ Wed, 24 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/24/mockery-doesnt-touch-it/ There’s this German YouTuber—Bibi, I think—who made a song called “How It Is” that was apparently terrible enough that everyone from the internet to German TV comedians took shots at it. Carolin Kebekus did a parody on public television. The whole thing became this whole thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/24/mockery-doesnt-touch-it/ Wed, 24 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/23/whats-left-over/ Beige and burgundy keep appearing in what I’m seeing lately. Not because anyone decided they’re trendy, but because they’re the colors that actually work—the colors people reach for when they stop caring about impressing anyone. Beige is honest. Burgundy is dark enough to hide the world, but not so dark you look like you’re mourning something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/23/whats-left-over/ Tue, 23 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/23/tiny-tits/ I don’t particularly care what other people think is hot. That’s between me and whoever I’m with, and if they don’t like what I like, that’s their problem. But there’s something genuinely nice about finding other people who share your taste, who get why you’d take small breasts over the obvious kind that dominates everywhere else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/23/tiny-tits/ Tue, 23 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/23/why-instagram-works/ I’ve been scrolling through Instagram for ten years and somehow I’m still surprised when my mood tanks after twenty minutes. Turns out there’s actual research behind this. The Royal Society for Public Health ran a study with a couple thousand people between 14 and 24, and confirmed what you probably already know: Instagram is the worst thing for your mental health, Snapchat and Facebook are pretty bad, Twitter’s bad, and YouTube is fine—provided you’re not filling it with garbage. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/23/why-instagram-works/ Tue, 23 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/23/coogi-returns/ COOGI was the uniform of 90s hip-hop—rappers wrapped themselves in those oversized, garishly colored sweaters like they were armor and status symbol combined. I grew up watching those videos, Biggie and others in those knits, the excess of it. By the early 2000s it had faded into the nostalgia bin with everything else that decade touched. But fashion cycles. Puma brought the line back at Battery Harris in Williamsburg, and the event felt like stepping back into that mythology. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/23/coogi-returns/ Tue, 23 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/23/the-city-rebuilt/ In 1923, Tokyo stopped being Tokyo. The Great Kanto earthquake came through in September and destroyed the city so completely that most of it was just rubble. Two million people, most of them living in wooden buildings, and suddenly the buildings were gone. A hundred thousand dead. A million and a half homeless. That’s not a tragedy that happened to the city—that’s the city ceasing to exist. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/23/the-city-rebuilt/ Tue, 23 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/23/die-urbane/ Berlin started a hip-hop political party in 2017. Die Urbane. The founders took the values from seventies hip-hop culture—representation, participation, identity, power critique—and thought these should be political values. Not as irony. They were serious. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/23/die-urbane/ Tue, 23 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/23/nights-with-you/ I caught MØ at some Berlin influencer party—spirits brand, fashion label, doesn’t matter, they all blend together—back when she wasn’t famous yet. Karen Marie Aagaard Ørsted had this specific kind of presence you don’t forget. Not immediately magnetic, but the kind that grows the more people pay attention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/23/nights-with-you/ Tue, 23 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/22/crying-in-the-club/ The title said everything: ’Crying In The Club.’ Camila Cabello was out of Fifth Harmony, officially solo, and Sia and Benny Blanco had handed her a song that sounded like every confident-woman-in-pop-music moment of the last five years. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/22/crying-in-the-club/ Mon, 22 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/22/how-she-disappears/ Zara Larsson’s a strange figure because she doesn’t perform like one—no announcement, just shows up with an opinion and a voice that knows how to use itself. Confident without the gesture. Credible without the attitude. Both at once, which most artists can’t manage. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/22/how-she-disappears/ Mon, 22 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/22/bad-boy-forever/ I still remember hearing “Ready to Die” and just—having to listen through it, not being able to do anything else. Notorious B.I.G.’s voice did that, made everything around it sound small. Bad Boy Records was basically the whole thing you wanted to hear about in the 90s. The label had the artists, had the production, had something that felt like it actually mattered. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/22/bad-boy-forever/ Mon, 22 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/22/our-flickering-bible/ RTL II is a wasteland now. The afternoon used to be nonnegotiable—Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball, One Piece, Pokémon, the whole thing was there waiting for you after school. Now it’s just day-time reality garbage, people destroying themselves on camera, the embarrassing bottom of German television. But for maybe fifteen years, around the turn of the millennium, that channel was something like our Bible. Not in any sacred way—just essential. Required viewing for anyone with a shred of imagination. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/22/our-flickering-bible/ Mon, 22 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/22/kamehameha/ A festival named after a Dragon Ball attack—that’s the kind of branding decision that works if you commit completely, and whoever booked Kamehameha committed. Offenburg, on an old runway, every summer. By 2017 it was their fourth year, which means it had crossed over from novelty to tradition without ever losing the absurdity. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/22/kamehameha/ Mon, 22 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/11/the-sailor-moon-phone/ I loved my first phone like it was sacred. Kept it pristine, treasured it. Now I drag around an iPhone I genuinely don’t care about. Lose it and I’ll just buy another one. It works, it looks fine, it costs too much, and that’s it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/11/the-sailor-moon-phone/ Thu, 11 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/11/traumfrau/ I was obsessed with Nina Bott when I was younger. Completely, unambiguously obsessed. She was on this German soap called “Alles was zählt,” and I watched it for years, not because the show was good, but because she was in it. When she moved to other projects, I followed. Terrible TV movies, low-budget productions that aired at weird times on channels I’d never normally watch—”Ein unverbesserlicher Dickkopf,” “Die Sturmflut,” some forgettable thing where she seduced a guy with a serious problem. None of it mattered. If she was in it, I watched it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/11/traumfrau/ Thu, 11 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/11/osaka-in-squares/ You know it won’t fix anything, but you go anyway. Phone out, framing the shot before you even look at what’s actually in front of you. I did a whole trip to Osaka this way—Shinsaibashi district, the neon signs, the crowded shopping streets, whatever looked good through the screen first. Osaka’s the third-largest city in Japan, a trading hub, expensive as hell to live in, and completely indifferent to whether you’re there to experience it or just to prove you were. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/11/osaka-in-squares/ Thu, 11 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/11/say-my-name/ I was into Tove Styrke early, back when she was making her way through the Swedish talent show circuit and “Call My Name” landed—this urgent, lean thing that sounded like someone who actually needed something. Years later she’s back with “Say My Name,” and it follows the same emotional logic: that particular kind of desperation, but refined, quieter. The production stays minimal, her voice stays low, but the insistence is still there. You can hear it in the spaces between syllables. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/11/say-my-name/ Thu, 11 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/11/why-snapchat-died/ Every app has an expiration date, and it usually hits when your parents figure it out. Snapchat had maybe three good years before the generation that actually mattered moved on. Nothing technical killed it. Just the slow realization that everyone’s mom knew how to use it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/11/why-snapchat-died/ Thu, 11 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/11/malibu-miley/ She used to show up half-naked and high and unrepentant, and you knew exactly where you stood. Miley Cyrus, the Disney kid who decided the whole script was bullshit and set it on fire. That version mattered—someone fully committed to not giving a shit. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/11/malibu-miley/ Thu, 11 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/10/when-the-parodies-won/ Bibi is this YouTube personality from Germany who got famous young and has a gift for polarizing the demographic you’d expect—the tween crowd, the adjacent circles, that whole sprawl. The stans went to bat for her, tweets and emojis flying. But what actually formed around her was something else: a complete parallel industry of people whose only goal was to destroy her debut single. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/10/when-the-parodies-won/ Wed, 10 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/10/melon-soda/ “Melon Soda” hits you with this propulsive, gear-shifting architecture that shouldn’t work as a pop song but does. Tricot, the math-rock trio from Kyoto, has always built their tracks with this relentless intelligence—sudden time shifts, rhythms that feel locked into place until they splinter into something else. But “Melon Soda” is different. It’s the most immediate thing they’ve done, all guitar shimmer and rhythm that feels simple until you’re three listens in and still discovering new angles. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/10/melon-soda/ Wed, 10 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/9/how-it-actually-is/ Someone uploaded Bibi’s music video to YouPorn. The title: “German Girl Fucks German Music Industry.” Perfect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/9/how-it-actually-is/ Tue, 09 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/2/cherry-blossoms/ Spring gets everyone reaching for a camera. The light improves, everything blooms at once, and you’ve got maybe three weeks to document it before the blossoms scatter. It’s ancient at this point—couples in cherry trees, families standing still while someone figures out the exposure, strangers asking each other to take their picture. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/2/cherry-blossoms/ Tue, 02 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/2/ferropolis/ You pack your backpack, buy your rations of canned food, and tell your friends you’re taking a break from the world for three days. The Melt Festival in Ferropolis does something to you—night becomes day, beats become religion, and you end up friends with people you met soaked in dust at 4 AM. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/2/ferropolis/ Tue, 02 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/2/selfie-soaps/ RTL II decided it needed to own the youth market. The thinking was simple: kids live on YouTube and Instagram, so let’s make TV shows out of selfies. “Berlyn.” “Mjunik.” “dailyCGN.” Just people filming themselves on their phones for a couple minutes, which is somehow supposed to be different from actual YouTube people doing exactly that except these had corporate backing and the unmistakable stench of desperation. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/2/selfie-soaps/ Tue, 02 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/2/when-the-money-dried-up/ YouTube had to become respectable, which meant advertisers wanted in, which meant someone had to define what’s safe. A Wall Street Journal piece about ads appearing on racist videos spooked all the major brands. Starbucks, Pepsi, General Motors—they all pulled their spending. Millions gone overnight. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/2/when-the-money-dried-up/ Tue, 02 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/2/harajuku-broke/ I got to Tokyo with almost nothing left in my account. The flight burned through most of it, the hotel took the rest. Karaoke, the temples, the clubs I kept hearing about - all out of reach now. Not that it matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/5/2/harajuku-broke/ Tue, 02 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/22/konichiwa/ I keep coming back to “Konichiwa.” It’s a ridiculous title for a single—Gerard just straight up went with it—and the track is wound so tight you almost can’t tell what’s happening until the third or fourth listen. By which point you’re already committed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/22/konichiwa/ Sat, 22 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/22/ben-is-right/ Someone’s sprawled on a couch, completely gone, one hand reaching into a bowl of cereal. Someone else is pressed against a lover, skin on skin, the world narrowed down to touch. Another person’s bent over a toilet. That’s what Ben Evans illustrates—not the mythology around weed, just the actual middle of it. The unremarkable repetition of getting high with the same people, in the same room, again and again. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/22/ben-is-right/ Sat, 22 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/21/the-midnight-wave/ Ryan Adams does a show on Apple Music called The Midnight Wave. Once a month he’s in his LA studio with some friends and a robot, getting stoned and making radio the way it used to be made before it became a brand and quarterly earnings reports. Just conversation, music, no agenda. Perfect for three in the morning when you’re awake and the world’s finally quiet. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/21/the-midnight-wave/ Fri, 21 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/19/daddyofive/ When DaddyOFive was happening, it was just one of those YouTube things you’d stumble into. This channel where a guy and his wife filmed themselves screwing with their kids—destroying their toys, making them fight, hitting them. Called it pranks. The algorithm was pushing it, people were watching, nobody was stopping it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/19/daddyofive/ Wed, 19 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/19/a-year-without-razors/ Morgan Mikenas stopped shaving for a year and posted about it. The backlash came fast—vicious comments, vomit emojis, sexual threats dressed as criticism. What bothered me most was watching other women pile on, women so locked into the hairless standard they couldn’t tolerate someone refusing it. They’d swallowed the whole thing so completely they became the enforcers themselves. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/19/a-year-without-razors/ Wed, 19 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/19/tokyo-after-dark/ You go to Tokyo thinking you know what to see. Ginza, Harajuku, Shimokitazawa—these are the boxes you check during the day. The camera moments, the crowds, the whole city performing for an invisible audience. But the Tokyo that actually mattered only showed up after dark. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/19/tokyo-after-dark/ Wed, 19 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/19/pool-party-gravity/ Virgil Abloh was DJing, which tells you everything about the event’s target audience. A pool somewhere in the desert, drinks at festival prices, everyone’s carefully constructed version of looking like they hadn’t tried. The Levi’s party—another branded gathering where the actual clothes are almost secondary to the real product: the image of beautiful people in the right place at the right time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/19/pool-party-gravity/ Wed, 19 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/19/snes-returns/ When Nintendo announced the mini Super Nintendo in 2017, priced around €80, it felt inevitable. This was always going to happen. A tiny plastic box full of games I hadn’t thought about in years but also thought about constantly. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/19/snes-returns/ Wed, 19 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/18/snapchat-for-your-dick/ There’s this panic that gets sold to you about sending nudes. You get the rush, you hit send, and then immediate paranoia sets in—family, coworkers, screenshots, your whole life ending. The media’s been pushing this anxiety for years like it’s some real epidemic. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/18/snapchat-for-your-dick/ Tue, 18 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/18/sxtns-back/ There’s this moment in SXTN’s new track where Juju says “Du bist Haustier, ich bin Raubier”—you’re a pet, I’m a predator—while smoking and drinking champagne like she’s just stating facts. That’s the whole vibe of the song, and the whole vibe of them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/18/sxtns-back/ Tue, 18 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/18/ronin/ Superstudio Hamburg, Friday night, a hundred people in black looking at the NMD_CS2. Adidas was calling it the Ronin Pack—the latest in the City Sock line, a shoe with no excess. Minimal geometry, all black or near-black, restraint that only works when you know what you’re doing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/18/ronin/ Tue, 18 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/18/clear-coffee/ I’ve had three cups of coffee today and my teeth are getting darker. It’s the straightforward price of this habit: you stay awake, your teeth stain. Everybody knows it isn’t healthy. Everybody does it anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/18/clear-coffee/ Tue, 18 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/18/ffffound/ FFFFOUND! was the opposite of what social networks wanted to become. While everyone else chased growth and user count and eventual buyouts, this platform stayed small. Curated. Invitation-only. Started in 2007 by Yosuke Abe and Keita Kitamura, it became exactly what they wanted—a collection of the best image work on the internet, gathered by people who actually knew what they were looking at. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/18/ffffound/ Tue, 18 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/18/rihanna-the-designer/ Rihanna was in Berlin last week for her PUMA collection launch. She was actually there for it—not just showing up, but there because she designed the thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/18/rihanna-the-designer/ Tue, 18 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/18/microdose/ There’s a name for it now: microdosing. Every morning, a measured amount of LSD to make your brain work right, like a vitamin but for consciousness. It’s just addiction with a schedule and a scientific word attached to it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/18/microdose/ Tue, 18 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/18/disappearing-into-new-york/ There’s something about New York that makes you think you can disappear into it and become someone else. Leave everyone who knows you, step off a bus, and suddenly you’re nobody. You get to decide who you are. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/18/disappearing-into-new-york/ Tue, 18 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/12/ice-cream-shots/ Karl Hab made a magazine called Ice Cream Shots. It’s straightforward—photographs of ice cream in beautiful places. Los Angeles, Paris, Hong Kong. That’s the entire concept. Someone got something cold and frozen on a nice day and documented it. I like magazines that know exactly what they care about and refuse to overthink it. There’s a clarity in constraint. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/12/ice-cream-shots/ Wed, 12 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/12/cam-girlz/ I watched Cam Girlz, which follows Lily Madison, Amelia Twist, Lana Rose—young women streaming naked on MyGirlFund and sites like it. Some are broke, some just sick of worse work. They’re comfortable with their bodies. Society imagines it should be scandalous. Nobody actually cares. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/12/cam-girlz/ Wed, 12 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/12/the-baseline/ For a while I thought YouTube would figure itself out. Everyone kept saying I didn’t understand the appeal, that I was being unfair to creators like ApeCrime, Bibi, Sami Slimani. They’d explain about authenticity, connection, how this is where the culture actually is now. And I thought: okay, maybe I’m just skeptical and out of touch. I can wait a couple of years. Let the kids get bored. Let the algorithm shift. Something will break the cycle. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/12/the-baseline/ Wed, 12 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/12/wearing-gibberish/ I spent a lot of time looking at t-shirts in Tokyo. Not because I was looking for t-shirts, but because once you start noticing the English printed on them, you can’t stop. And almost none of it means anything. Not in a broken English way—fully incoherent. Power. Beagle. Wonderdrug. Just words arranged like they were supposed to make sense. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/12/wearing-gibberish/ Wed, 12 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/12/likes-and-tears/ Facebook’s story is always the same: it brings people together, keeps you connected to people everywhere, lets you see each other’s lives. The more you use it the better. That’s what they tell you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/12/likes-and-tears/ Wed, 12 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/12/permission-to-be-sexy/ I killed my TV ages ago—or rather, my ex did, firing a water pistol at it during an argument. That was the end of “Alles was zählt” for me. So I don’t know much about the show anymore, but apparently Juliette Greco, who’s on it, posed for Playboy again. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/12/permission-to-be-sexy/ Wed, 12 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/12/she-moved-on/ I haven’t listened to a new Rihanna album in years, but that’s mostly because she stopped making them. Somewhere around 2016 she decided that music was boring and pivoted to fashion, which was probably the smartest move she could have made. The Fenty empire doesn’t need my validation—it just keeps expanding while everyone else is still trying to figure out how to launch a luxury brand without looking desperate. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/12/she-moved-on/ Wed, 12 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/3/one-night-six-bands/ REMMI DEMMI is back at Bi Nuu in Kreuzberg on April 29. One ticket, one night, six bands. This format only works if someone actually designed the lineup rather than just assembling it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/3/one-night-six-bands/ Mon, 03 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/3/personal-shopper/ After Twilight, most actors just vanish or keep making the same movie. Kristen Stewart picked a different route—Olivier Assayas, Personal Shopper, Paris. French indie about grief and displacement, with nudity that no one’s asking for but which Stewart owns completely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/3/personal-shopper/ Mon, 03 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/3/battle-royale/ I first heard about Battle Royale in the early 2000s—Tarantino’s favorite film, which was reason enough to care. The premise: a class of high school students wakes on an island with explosive collars, told that one of them survives. That’s the whole setup. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/3/battle-royale/ Mon, 03 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/3/rick-morty-returns/ Season three dropped and the first episode is something else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/4/3/rick-morty-returns/ Mon, 03 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/3/28/in-the-viewfinder/ You show up in Tokyo with a camera and immediately you’re seeing the city through a viewfinder. Shibuya, Harajuku, Yoyogi—they’re all exactly what you expected. The neon signs, the costume shops, the weird little storefronts (a sex shop here, a bookstore there) tucked between larger buildings. You photograph it because that’s what you came for. The proof that you were here, that you saw the thing everyone else sees. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/3/28/in-the-viewfinder/ Tue, 28 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/3/28/forty-degrees/ David Collier was shooting the day Sydney hit forty degrees before breakfast. Hottest day of the year, and he spent it indoors with Bella Donovan and a camera. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/3/28/forty-degrees/ Tue, 28 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/3/28/seventy-three-questions/ Selena Gomez answered seventy-three Vogue questions in eight minutes, which works out to roughly one every seven seconds. She talks about being grateful—her favorite word, apparently—and names Natalie Portman as the most fashionable person she knows. Nothing unexpected, nothing that wasn’t already calculated. Just the performance of access, smooth and practiced. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/3/28/seventy-three-questions/ Tue, 28 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/3/28/replay/ I’ve always wanted one of those arcade cabinets in the living room, but not the junk that looks like it got pulled out of a basement bar from the ’80s. STOA, a UK design studio, made these things called REPLAY, and they actually figured out how to make one look right—white, black, and orange, clean lines, the kind of cabinet you don’t have to apologize for having around. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/3/28/replay/ Tue, 28 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/3/28/tinder-online/ Tinder went online. Now you can swipe from your laptop, which sounds pointless until you hit the data limit halfway through the month and your phone can barely load a picture. Most carriers sell you plans like a con man—unlimited until you actually use it—so Tinder’s web version isn’t innovation, it’s pragmatism. They know how the real world works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/3/28/tinder-online/ Tue, 28 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/3/28/casey-neistats-back/ Casey Neistat’s back to daily vlogging. He quit a year ago after selling Beme to CNN for something like $25 million. Made this whole announcement about being done, moving on, whatever you do after you’ve cashed out. Now he’s filming again. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/3/28/casey-neistats-back/ Tue, 28 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/3/27/bash-on-the-kudamm/ I went to the ba&sh store opening on the Ku’damm because I had nothing better to do that evening and free champagne is free champagne. The store was the kind of place you’d expect from a Parisian brand—white walls, good light, clothes that looked effortless because someone spent a lot of time making them look that way. Clean lines, neutral colors, nothing that challenges you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/3/27/bash-on-the-kudamm/ Mon, 27 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/3/27/selena-in-vogue/ Selena showed up in the latest Vogue looking exactly like what you’d expect—shot by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, lit to make her look like something between a person and a perfect photograph. The usual machinery of celebrity beauty in action. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/3/27/selena-in-vogue/ Mon, 27 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/3/27/when-calligraphy-carries-it/ There’s something about Japanese calligraphy on Western sportswear that shouldn’t work but does. When you see MIKITYPE’s katakana running down a tracksuit or pressed into the heel of an NMD, it’s not just text—it’s the whole design decision. Everything else gets to stay simple because the type carries all the weight. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/3/27/when-calligraphy-carries-it/ Mon, 27 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/3/27/1-night/ Charli XCX’s been getting brighter. True Romance was underwater—lo-fi and violet, everything muffled. SuperLove tightened it up, added shine. Now she’s somewhere else: more immediate, more color, something almost aggressive in how it moves. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/3/27/1-night/ Mon, 27 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/3/27/just-movement/ You’re jumping right along platforms, a spike pit opens beneath you, and you have maybe one frame to react. The screen scrolls forward regardless. No dialogue, no context, no apologies—just the question: are you good enough? Either you are or you aren’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/3/27/just-movement/ Mon, 27 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/15/when-words-stop-working/ John Oliver tore into Trump on Last Week Tonight, and the thing that stuck with me was a quote from a journalist covering him: ’It’s pretty difficult to report on Donald Trump because you often don’t know what he means when he says words.’ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/15/when-words-stop-working/ Wed, 15 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/7/the-sound-of-being-that-age/ Skins came out of Bristol, not Hollywood, which meant it got the texture right from the start. British television around 2007 didn’t coddle teenagers the way American TV did—no manufactured drama, no easy resolutions, just the actual mess of being nineteen and thinking your life meant something because your friends did. The show followed three generations of kids through the same school, same city, and it never flinched away from what that looked like: sex without romance, drugs without mystique, love that broke things. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/7/the-sound-of-being-that-age/ Tue, 07 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/7/superstar-boost/ Every few years I buy another pair of Superstars. Black leather, white stripes, shell toe. Nothing else fits into your life the way these do. Everything else is a costume; these are just shoes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/7/superstar-boost/ Tue, 07 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/7/nobody-cool-anymore/ Shoichi Aoki shut down Fruits Magazine because he couldn’t find anyone worth photographing anymore. Not because print was dying, not because the internet ate the business model—he just looked around and realized the fashion was gone. The magazine had been capturing Tokyo’s wildest style since 1997, pulling weird kids out of Harajuku and broadcasting their electricity to the world. Then one day Aoki looked around and decided there was nothing left to shoot. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/7/nobody-cool-anymore/ Tue, 07 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/3/rereading-1984/ I reread 1984 every few years, which seems excessive until you realize that Orwell’s sentences actually improve on memory and the world keeps changing in ways that make the book feel urgent again. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/3/rereading-1984/ Fri, 03 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/3/built-on-hate/ I hate a lot of things. While people are out there preaching about how “hate” is too strong a word, how we should be careful before using it, I’m pretty sure they’re wrong. Hate actually works. It bonds people in a way that liking stuff never does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/3/built-on-hate/ Fri, 03 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/3/rob-israels-rage/ Rob Israel started posting illustrations of Trump on Instagram during those early months of the presidency. Crude things, degrading, the kind of work you make when you’ve decided there’s nothing left to lose by saying it plainly. He tagged Trump in every one, which was either pure futility or pure honesty or both. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/3/rob-israels-rage/ Fri, 03 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/3/just-the-shoe/ Jürgen Teller shooting an adidas campaign on Berlin streets makes immediate sense. He’s built a career on the idea that the street doesn’t perform—you show up, work with what’s actually there, photograph the texture and light of a place in its own time. Berlin understands this. The city won’t stage itself for the camera. It’s too used to being exactly what it is. Every brand eventually figures out they need to come here. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/3/just-the-shoe/ Fri, 03 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/3/so-good/ You notice when someone’s actually got it. Zara Larsson had it the moment “Lush Life” landed—this Swedish teenager with a song that just worked, that got into your head and wouldn’t leave. The thing went everywhere, and she was suddenly the breakthrough everyone cared about. By 2016 she had gold certifications and awards, the whole trajectory compressed into months. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/3/so-good/ Fri, 03 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/2/still-learning-potter/ The first couple of Harry Potter films were probably my favorite movies, back when everything wasn’t quite so dark and hopeless. When it was still about ridiculous spells and talking portraits and ghosts living in bathroom stalls. I could recite the first one in my sleep. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/2/still-learning-potter/ Thu, 02 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/2/beyoncés-pregnancy-announcement/ Beyoncé announced her pregnancy with twins by posting nude photos to Instagram. Not a press release, not a magazine exclusive—just her body and her news, sent out to the whole world at once. The internet took notice, which I’m sure was exactly the point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/2/beyoncés-pregnancy-announcement/ Thu, 02 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/2/trump-regrets/ I came across a Twitter account called Trump_Regrets the other day and fell into it for a while. It’s just people who voted for Trump in 2016 posting about regretting it. No snark from whoever runs the account, just raw confessions. People saying things didn’t work out the way they’d hoped, jobs didn’t materialize, family got separated at the border, whatever the specific damage was to their own life. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/2/trump-regrets/ Thu, 02 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/2/lickster/ You’re never quite sure if you’re doing it right. You start with some confidence—you’ve read things, you think you know the territory—and then about thirty seconds in you realize you’re just guessing. Is this working? She seems into it, or maybe she’s just being nice. So you switch it up. Try something different. Try harder. Try less. Try adding your hand. You’re basically improvising, throwing combinations at a problem you can’t see clearly. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/2/lickster/ Thu, 02 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/2/rolling-badly/ Rolling a decent joint is something almost everyone figures out eventually. You get the hang of it, maybe spend some time refining your technique, and pretty soon you’re fine at it. Which leaves only one direction to go: the opposite. Roll something so aggressively bad, so structurally unsound, that people physically recoil. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/2/rolling-badly/ Thu, 02 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/2/the-nine-figure-graveyard/ All that money sloshing through the video game industry, and studios still release bombs constantly. You’d think budgets in the hundreds of millions would guarantee success. Somehow they don’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/2/the-nine-figure-graveyard/ Thu, 02 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/1/i-did-this/ There’s a Twitter account that started drawing Trump as a five-year-old kid showing off his finger paintings. A cat. A dinosaur. A house. Just scrawls, barely recognizable, each one captioned “I did this.” That was the entire joke. No hidden layer, no punchline underneath. It was just true. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/1/i-did-this/ Wed, 01 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/1/stoned-with-your-parents/ When you get high with friends, there’s this unspoken agreement that you’re all going to drop your guard at the same time. Nobody’s performing. Nobody’s got their armor on. It’s just people being stupid together and it’s fine because everyone signed up for it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/1/stoned-with-your-parents/ Wed, 01 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/1/steak-over-flowers/ My girlfriend kills every plant she touches and would choose steak over actual flowers any day. So when I found these beef jerky bouquets online—roses and daisies shaped from dried meat—it felt like I’d finally understood what a gift should be. The kind of thing that lands because I actually know her. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/1/steak-over-flowers/ Wed, 01 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/1/hoppegarten/ The walk from the city to Rennbahn Hoppegarten took about thirty minutes, which meant you left Berlin behind. That distance felt intentional for what was happening that weekend. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/1/hoppegarten/ Wed, 01 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/1/borrowed-accounts/ Some German celebrities—Joko Winterscheid, Palina Rojinski, Marteria, Prinz Pi, MC Fitti, and Laryin—gave their social media accounts to homeless Berliners in February. One day each, during what they called One Warm Winter. The idea was straightforward: let people see what a day actually looks like when you’re sleeping outside in winter, unfiltered, through a verified account instead of a news story. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/1/borrowed-accounts/ Wed, 01 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/1/pretty-fake/ Late night. You’re home alone and something has gone completely wrong. The job is shit. Someone left. You got news that stops you cold. And in those moments there’s something almost beautiful about the idea that none of this is real. That you’re not actually here. That it’s all just code running somewhere, in some machine that doesn’t know your name. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/1/pretty-fake/ Wed, 01 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/1/finally/ There’s always been something about a bigger man that just gets to me. A bearded guy at the bar, demolishing a double cheeseburger and a beer without once pretending to be anything other than exactly what he is. All the appeal. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/1/finally/ Wed, 01 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/1/your-place-or-mine/ I asked a friend once why she wouldn’t sleep with someone on a first date if she actually liked him, and she looked at me like I’d suggested something obscene. Her argument was that if she saw a real future, she had to protect it—wait, let him prove it wasn’t just about her body, give feelings time to settle before adding sex into the mix. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/2/1/your-place-or-mine/ Wed, 01 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/24/berlin-red/ Danny Reinke’s “Secret Desire” collection showed at Berlin Fashion Week inside a garden installation—apple tree, roses, topiaries, the whole Garden of Eden staging. He’s 24, from a fishing village on the Baltic, and he sent ten looks through this space that mixed sportswear and couture in a way that felt purposeful instead of confused. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/24/berlin-red/ Tue, 24 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/24/the-day-after/ I still think about those photographs from the day after Trump’s inauguration. The Women’s March spread across the country so fast you’d have thought it was inevitable. Crowds too big to see the edges, mostly women but men and kids too, all there to say no to what was coming. The pussy hats were everywhere - those pink knitted things with cat ears, a direct middle finger to the Access Hollywood tape. Crude and perfect because crudeness was honest. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/24/the-day-after/ Tue, 24 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/23/no-filter/ The billboards have changed. Five years ago fashion advertising was all hairless bodies, skeletal things airbrushed until they barely looked human. Now it’s completely flipped—cellulite, stretch marks, hair, actual fucking skin. Monki, the Swedish brand, made it explicit with #NoFilter: we’re selling underwear to girls who don’t look like Ariana Grande, who look like people with bodies. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/23/no-filter/ Mon, 23 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/23/dont-leave/ I’d heard “Lean On” everywhere for a while—that MØ voice over Major Lazer’s beat, the kind of thing that gets into taxis and shops and ruins playlists. Separately, Snakehips had “All My Friends,” which had the same easy confidence. So when they announced something together, it made sense in the way that obvious things do—like they’d been aimed at each other the whole time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/23/dont-leave/ Mon, 23 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/23/weight-and-movement/ Seeing loden on a modern runway hits differently when the designer knows what they’re doing with it. Marcel Ostertag wasn’t trying to make traditional Tyrolean wool feel contemporary through cutting or irony—he was pairing it with silk that moves, with draping that flows, letting the heavy stuff sit next to the gentle. The whole collection was a statement about texture and time wrapped inside fashion choices. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/23/weight-and-movement/ Mon, 23 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/18/text-bomb/ Someone sent me a text message that was supposed to crash my phone. It didn’t work—I’d already updated to whatever version patched this particular bug—but the whole thing made me curious about what was actually happening under the hood. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/18/text-bomb/ Wed, 18 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/18/what-you-want/ The music industry is soulless in a way that’s hard to even describe - it’s not just that the music is bad, it’s that the whole system is designed to protect mediocrity and call it strategy. Bieber, Adele, Skrillex, they all fit the pattern because the pattern works. Nobody at the top cares about actual artists; they care about products that move and sell. As long as they can manufacture the same shaped pop star over and over, there’s no reason to want anything better. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/18/what-you-want/ Wed, 18 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/18/anyone-can-be-a-dj/ Celebrity DJs proved it first: you don’t actually have to know anything to be a DJ. Paris Hilton figured it out. Giulia Siegel and Nadja Abd El Farrag got there too. They all walked through with zero apologies. Open Spotify, click a playlist someone else made, put on oversized headphones, nod like you’re studying the frequencies. That’s the whole job. No mixing, no music knowledge, no actual skill. Just the appearance of doing something while a premade playlist plays itself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/18/anyone-can-be-a-dj/ Wed, 18 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/18/yo-sperm-test/ Life is basically unfair. While Johnny from upstairs keeps accidentally knocking up different women, me and Mareike have been trying for years and nothing takes. We’ve tried everything. Different positions. Toys. Whatever works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/18/yo-sperm-test/ Wed, 18 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/18/shame/ Another year of that German jungle show where cable TV collects minor celebrities and watches them unravel—either exposing their demons or their bodies. Nicole Mieth, from some soap opera that hasn’t mattered in years, made the rounds. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/18/shame/ Wed, 18 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/15/tokyos-walls/ The walls in Shibuya, Harajuku, and Akihabara had Drake and Beyoncé next to cute manga girls in modified school uniforms, weird aliens and turtles with flowers on their heads. I walked through these districts one afternoon the way tourists do, hunting for street art in all the obvious places, certain there was something authentic underneath if I just looked hard enough. Street art’s supposed to be about breaking rules and marking territory without permission, but in Tokyo it all felt pre-approved somehow. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/15/tokyos-walls/ Sun, 15 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/14/game-boy-again/ The Game Boy in my hands as a kid—the weight, the grey-green glow, the cartridge slot that opened worlds. Super Mario Land, Zelda, Pokémon, Tetris, one after another. I spent more time with that machine than with some of my family. The hardware had limits that somehow felt right, like constraints made the thing better, not worse. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/14/game-boy-again/ Sat, 14 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/14/the-signal/ Gronkh’s fans organized on YouTube—Let’s Play creator, German, pretty big. Bibi was climbing his subscriber count and they weren’t having it. The plan was straightforward: unsubscribe from her, subscribe to him, flood the comments, keep him on top. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/14/the-signal/ Sat, 14 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/14/better-than-me/ There’s a panda at Dujiangyan Panda Base in China who takes better selfies than I do. Not because he’s trying—he’s just there being a panda—but his photos have this effortless quality that makes every selfie I’ve ever taken look desperate. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/14/better-than-me/ Sat, 14 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/13/the-long-game/ I’ve played more Shigeru Miyamoto games than I’ve played most other designers’ work combined, which says something about the man. Super Mario, Zelda, Star Fox, Donkey Kong—he shaped how an entire generation learned to play video games. But you’d probably walk right past him on the street. That’s the thing about Miyamoto: his influence is everywhere and his name is nowhere. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/13/the-long-game/ Fri, 13 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/13/mealworm-burgers/ The Swiss government approved insect meat in May, and Coop started selling mealworm burgers and grasshopper skewers. What got me is how normal it looks—the packaging, the shelf placement, the fact that nobody seemed to think it was particularly newsworthy. Which is fair, because two billion people already eat them regularly. It’s only in Europe that this counts as a future-food experiment. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/13/mealworm-burgers/ Fri, 13 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/13/tanabata/ I walked into Tanabata in Kyoto without planning to. The streets were crowded with festival-goers, vendor stalls everywhere, the usual summer chaos. But these girls kept appearing through the crowds—maybe five or six of them in proper kimonos, not rentals—and I found myself looking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/13/tanabata/ Fri, 13 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/13/somewhere-out-there/ I’ve always liked the idea that somewhere out there is someone who looks exactly like me. Not a twin—I don’t have a twin—but some random person in another city who has my face, my hair, my particular way of standing. Maybe they’re a better version. Maybe they’re worse. Doesn’t matter. There’s comfort in it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/13/somewhere-out-there/ Fri, 13 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/13/insta-fame-pills/ Daniel Allen Cohen made these pills called Insta-Fame. Eight of them in a box, designed to make you go viral instantly. No work, no talent, no soul-selling required—just swallow and watch the followers arrive. Obviously they don’t work. That’s entirely the point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/13/insta-fame-pills/ Fri, 13 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/13/hands-off-my-cuntry/ The exhibition was called ’Hands Off My Cuntry’—no irony, no softening, just fury. A group of artists (Nikki Pecasso, Mike Cockrill, Morgan Jesse Lappin, Courtney Frances Fallon, Savannah Spirit, Alexandra Rubinstein, Annique Delphine) created it when Trump took office, in response to every law they knew was going to disappear. The show ran in New York through January 22, and they sent him an open letter saying what had to be said: we’re afraid, and you’re going to destroy things that matter to us. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/13/hands-off-my-cuntry/ Fri, 13 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/13/facebook-was-reading-your-messages/ You could’ve been congratulating your aunt, gossiping about someone in the group chat, sending photos you wouldn’t want your family seeing—didn’t matter. Facebook was reading all your WhatsApp chats the whole time, encrypted or not. Cryptography researcher Tobias Boelter at Berkeley found the backdoor. Facebook had built one in and never told anyone. All those years claiming messages were end-to-end encrypted, only visible to you and the person you were talking to—complete lie. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/13/facebook-was-reading-your-messages/ Fri, 13 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/13/what-facebook-keeps/ In late December 2016, a twelve-year-old girl named Katelyn Nicole Davis livestreamed her suicide for forty minutes on Live.me, a platform connected to Facebook. She’d been abused by a family member. Her parents took down the stream immediately, but it was already spreading. YouTube removed it when asked. Facebook refused. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/13/what-facebook-keeps/ Fri, 13 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/13/ferngespräch/ TEA&TWIGS is one of the few fashion blogs I still follow, but not for the fashion part. Jasmin and Isabella are just interesting people. I’ve been on those press trips to coastal towns, we’ve drunk too much champagne on hotel rooftops in Portugal, hung around at one of those Lisbon parties where everything somehow makes perfect sense at the time. The kind of people who make you feel smarter for knowing them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/13/ferngespräch/ Fri, 13 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/12/when-pop-met-synth/ Another 80s party looming, and I’m already dreading the playlist. Tina Turner, Michael Jackson, Europe—the same five songs on repeat until someone cranks “Final Countdown” and you consider faking your own death. I needed something else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/12/when-pop-met-synth/ Thu, 12 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/12/when-shes-quiet/ The internet broke for a photo of Selena Gomez. She’d been quiet—one of those creative breaks where major artists just vanish from the timeline—and then something surfaced. Mert Alas had shot her, and suddenly everyone was looking at something they probably shouldn’t want to be looking at, except of course they did. That’s desire with built-in shame, with plausible deniability. The photo hits and the hunger happens and maybe that’s just what culture is now. You see something beautiful and you want to keep looking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/12/when-shes-quiet/ Thu, 12 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/12/the-audition/ Trump’s press conference the day after Obama’s farewell was like watching someone who’d already decided the whole game was beneath him. The wall thing. Ignoring CNN, taking Breitbart instead. There’s something genuinely magnetic about that kind of contempt for the process—this refusal to play along, just say what you think and let it burn. I get why people loved it. Years of politicians carefully weighing every word, and here’s someone who wouldn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/12/the-audition/ Thu, 12 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/12/the-fantasy/ TMZ has the photos. The Weeknd and Selena Gomez in Santa Monica, evening light. That’s all it takes for my brain to start building it. Lose weight, learn production, make something that matters, post it, watch it catch fire in LA. Show up at the right party. She’s there. Everything changes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/12/the-fantasy/ Thu, 12 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/12/the-validation-economy/ I watched that Nick Smith video about social media, the one that breaks down what we’re all actually doing when we’re scrolling and posting, and it landed harder than it should have. The internet used to feel like a place where people found each other and actually talked. Now it’s just this massive crowd, and the only way to matter is to be louder, prettier, or more scandalous than everyone else. Everything is a metrics game. Likes, shares, comments, followers—the numbers are the whole point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/12/the-validation-economy/ Thu, 12 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/12/the-brown-network/ This documentary traces the money and people behind far-right movements in Germany—the networks that operate unseen while the actual followers do the visible, audible raging. It’s less conspiracy-theory wild than you’d expect and more just… competent. They know what they’re doing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/12/the-brown-network/ Thu, 12 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/12/on-the-street/ Trump was inaugurated and Françoise Mouly, editor at The New Yorker, decided the right response was to make a newspaper and hand it out directly. She and her daughter Nadja, a cartoonist, assembled “Resist!”—comics and essays from various artists, all circling the same question: what do you actually do in this moment? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/12/on-the-street/ Thu, 12 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/12/who-gets-to-code/ There’s this assumption that’s been floating around forever—that tech is a boys’ thing. Not because of anything real, just because someone decided it was decades ago. Girls interested in coding get pointed toward design or marketing instead. Not because they can’t logic. Because of culture. Because the shape everyone assumes tech takes is male. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/12/who-gets-to-code/ Thu, 12 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/12/asakusa/ Walking through the Nakamise at Sensō-ji, I’m mostly looking at the back of someone’s head while incense smoke drifts past. The temple—the oldest in Tokyo—is somewhere ahead, visible in the photographs everyone’s taking but not quite as a lived space. I move through it as a tourist, which is what keeps it intact. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/12/asakusa/ Thu, 12 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/12/breast-envy/ My friend Lisa has this thing where she can’t be in the same room as certain body types without checking out mentally. We’ll be somewhere and a woman with a particular shape will pass, and I watch Lisa’s face close. She’s already decided she doesn’t belong there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/12/breast-envy/ Thu, 12 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/11/she-was-already-shaving/ Mehmet doesn’t like pubic hair. He’s fourteen. That’s enough for my thirteen-year-old cousin to spend an afternoon with a razor, scraping smooth everything—legs, armpits, asshole, the tiny hair between her eyebrows. They’d barely kissed, barely touched anywhere that would matter for the next decade. But she already knew the score: if he was going to want her, she had to stop being the way she naturally came. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/11/she-was-already-shaving/ Wed, 11 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/11/glacier-white/ Sony’s releasing a white PS4, and I can see the appeal immediately. The standard console is a bulky black rectangle, the kind of thing that announces itself in your entertainment setup whether you want it to or not. A white one would sit there differently—it’d actually work with a clean, minimal room instead of demanding design forgiveness. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/11/glacier-white/ Wed, 11 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/11/armed-with-condoms/ Sailor Moon’s already saved the world a couple times. Turns out that wasn’t the last battle. Right now in Japan, she’s enlisting again, except this time the enemy is syphilis and the weapon is condoms. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/11/armed-with-condoms/ Wed, 11 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/11/goodbye-mr-president/ Obama had his farewell speech. If you’re young enough, he’s the only president you really knew. He was cool—composed, thoughtful, the kind of articulate that felt like a relief when he spoke. Yeah, there’s all the stuff that fell short: NSA, Guantanamo, the compromises. I’m not pretending he was some perfect thing. But there was something there, a dignity and intelligence you could just see. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/11/goodbye-mr-president/ Wed, 11 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/11/the-rumor-wins/ That Trump rumor in early 2017—the one from BuzzFeed about the thing in Moscow—landed perfectly. Not because anyone actually believed it. Because it stopped mattering whether it was true. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/11/the-rumor-wins/ Wed, 11 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/11/fake-trump/ There’s something genuinely funny about how easy it is to sound like Donald Trump. The vocabulary’s simple, the rhythm’s blunt, the logic’s immediate. He just says whatever’s in his head. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/11/fake-trump/ Wed, 11 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/11/cold-and-stupid/ You stand at the top of a snowy hill in Berlin and for a moment it’s just that simple—you push off, pick up speed, hold on, stop at the bottom. Then you walk back up and do it again. Cold, stupid, perfect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/11/cold-and-stupid/ Wed, 11 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/11/dead-weight/ There’s this moment when you realize someone’s been using you. Not suspecting it, not worrying about it – actually seeing it. When their attention suddenly clicks into place and you understand that what they wanted was never you. It’s usually small. A comment that reveals what they actually think. The way they treat you when there’s nothing in it for them. Their eyes when you tell them you can’t help with whatever they actually came for. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/11/dead-weight/ Wed, 11 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/11/seventeen/ At seventeen I was tearing myself up on some guy’s dick that was way too big, convinced I was dying. That’s what I remember about that age. I certainly never thought I’d get pregnant. Not a fucking chance. Even though obviously I could have. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/11/seventeen/ Wed, 11 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/11/still-quiet/ I don’t know why I expected Murakami to want the Nobel Prize. The moment anyone said he could have turned it down, I thought of course he would—all that machinery, all those expectations hanging over the next book. He doesn’t work for audiences. He works for something quieter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/11/still-quiet/ Wed, 11 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/6/when-soundcloud-goes/ SoundCloud burned through fifty million euros in 2015 alone. By the end of 2017, if the money doesn’t turn around, the site’s done. No bankruptcy spectacular, no last stand—just a platform that runs out of cash and closes the servers. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/6/when-soundcloud-goes/ Fri, 06 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/5/the-snes-shoe/ The Super Nintendo is the best console ever made. “A Link to the Past,” “Secret of Mana,” “Super Mario World.” These aren’t just games I loved growing up. They’re design touchstones. The weight of that controller, the color palette, the menus. Sixteen bits, every decision intentional. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/5/the-snes-shoe/ Thu, 05 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/5/swallowed-by-tokyo/ You walk out of Narita and everything hits at once—the scale of it, the sound, the density. The train pulls you into the center and suddenly you’re in Akihabara or Shibuya or wherever, and there’s no way to prepare for how relentless it is. Skyscrapers that don’t seem to end, pachinko parlors and convenience stores stacked like puzzle pieces, people moving in this weird synchronized chaos that actually works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/5/swallowed-by-tokyo/ Thu, 05 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/4/sho-haze/ Sho Haze draws naked women into surreal, violent landscapes—colors that shouldn’t exist, worlds where everything’s dying. She’s from Birmingham, makes her own magazines, handles the whole thing herself. The work doesn’t perform. It just exists. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/4/sho-haze/ Wed, 04 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/4/in-between/ I’ve been cycling Gorillaz through my headphones for probably twenty years now, so waiting for new material has become its own permanent state. While 2D and the crew are working on whatever’s next, Noodle—the animated guitarist and keyboardist—dropped a mixtape on SoundCloud called 私 Noodle❗️ and it’s legitimately good. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/4/in-between/ Wed, 04 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/4/noah/ I first heard about Noah Cyrus because she voiced Ponyo, which made her interesting immediately—not because of the last name she can’t escape, but because she’d been given a real role in something that mattered. You don’t get that kind of work handed to you unless your parents are famous, which automatically makes you suspicious. But she treated it seriously, talked about the environmental message in Miyazaki’s film the way someone who actually paid attention would. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/4/noah/ Wed, 04 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/3/the-leica-phone/ I picked up the P9 at a shop and noticed the weight first. Huawei and Leica had partnered on the camera—dual lenses, optics supposedly better at catching light. In this case the claims actually held up. The camera was noticeably better than what most phones were doing at the time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2017/1/3/the-leica-phone/ Tue, 03 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/18/proving-nothing/ BuzzFeed had three women spend a week deliberately manspreading on the subway—taking up seats, being thoughtlessly inconsiderate—to demonstrate that men do this all the time. You watch waiting for the actual investigation, the thinking, and it never comes. It’s just three women being assholes on transit while someone films it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/18/proving-nothing/ Sun, 18 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/16/someone-has-to-watch/ The Süddeutsche Zeitung investigated Facebook’s content moderation operation in Berlin and talked to the people doing the work. Most are Syrian refugees working jobs they can’t get anywhere else—their qualifications don’t count here. They make just above minimum wage to spend shifts looking at reported posts they can’t preview. Beheaded bodies. Child abuse material. Nazi content. Whatever comes in the queue. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/16/someone-has-to-watch/ Fri, 16 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/15/the-last-office/ I actually love Twitter. I know that’s an unpopular thing to say now. The people who care about it are journalists, ADHD YouTubers, and actual Nazis in egg costumes, which is not exactly a compelling advertisement. Most people look at the whole thing and can’t fathom the appeal. They’re content if Facebook still loads. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/15/the-last-office/ Thu, 15 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/15/my-horse-prince/ Someone in Japan made a dating game where you fall in love with a horse. A literal horse, except it has a human face grafted onto it—supposedly a cursed prince—and you’re supposed to find it attractive. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/15/my-horse-prince/ Thu, 15 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/15/why-gigis-on-repeat/ Gigi Hadid lounging on a Tahitian beach, tan and glossy in actual sunlight, becomes essential viewing the moment winter arrives where you live. She’s lying there with nowhere to be, and you’ve got her on repeat because the real world is gray and cold and making everyone stupid. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/15/why-gigis-on-repeat/ Thu, 15 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/15/when-they-try/ I watched a video of an AfD politician trying to submit amendments in the Saxon parliament. He completely fell apart—couldn’t manage the procedure, kept stumbling, got completely stuck. It was painful to watch. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/15/when-they-try/ Thu, 15 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/15/alles-liebe-annette/ People film themselves endlessly and post it online. Got a free perfume in the mail. Went to see a movie. Had drama with some friend. Nobody cares. But they keep filming anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/15/alles-liebe-annette/ Thu, 15 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/15/red-lace/ There’s something satisfying about lingerie that actually understands bodies. Most of it is just marketing and terrible engineering, but a label like Conturelle pays attention to how it sits, how it moves, what actually matters to the person wearing it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/15/red-lace/ Thu, 15 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/15/what-actually-works/ Aleppo keeps appearing in your feed and you feel something—horror, helplessness, the vague guilt of being on the other side of the world. So you share a hashtag, maybe film a response, send out some words about bearing witness. It feels like you’re doing something. You’re not. What matters is money that reaches people who know how to use it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/15/what-actually-works/ Thu, 15 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/14/interchangeable/ Nikki Benz and Missy Martinez—performers in adult entertainment, titles like “Wetter Is Better 4” and such—did a Let’s Play of Mafia III. So porn actresses played a video game on camera and talked about it, which is exactly as absurd as it sounds until you realize it’s barely absurd at all. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/14/interchangeable/ Wed, 14 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/14/cowboy-avocado-fox/ I don’t know when emoji stopped feeling like an addition to language and became the language itself. There was probably a specific moment—some conversation where a single picture said what three sentences couldn’t—but I can’t pinpoint it. Now it’s automatic. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/14/cowboy-avocado-fox/ Wed, 14 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/13/melt-twenty/ Die Antwoord were coming to Melt for the first time. That alone was reason enough to plan the drive to Ferropolis that summer—a South African act existing somewhere between electronic music, hip-hop, and pure creative chaos. They weren’t playing everywhere, so seeing them at the festival meant something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/13/melt-twenty/ Tue, 13 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/13/this-is-fine/ A dog in a burning room, holding a coffee cup steady between its paws, and it says “This is fine.” That image became the emoji of 2016—the only thing anyone could point to that actually described what was happening. Everything was on fire and we were all just sitting there, pretending to be okay. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/13/this-is-fine/ Tue, 13 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/13/cheap-monday/ I was never really a fashion person, or at least I didn’t think I was until I found myself caring more about the details of a good knit than about being the guy with the expensive jacket. Cheap Monday gets this in a way most brands don’t. Their founder, Örjan Andersson, said something that stuck with me: he doesn’t sit front row at the shows. His inspiration comes from the street, from Stockholm, from watching how people actually dress when they’re just living their lives. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/13/cheap-monday/ Tue, 13 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/13/white-dots/ I remember holding the first pair and thinking how small they were—white dots you could lose in carpet. Apple’s pitch was frictionless: earbuds that just work, switch devices, understand when they’re in your ear, Siri built in. Five hours per charge, plus the case. It sounded too seamless to be true. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/13/white-dots/ Tue, 13 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/13/warm-up-3/ Berlin has the kind of people who just decide to do something and then do it. Mary Scherpe’s taste had already become the city’s reference point, and for her third Warm Up, she made a straightforward call: bring your best clothes to Voo Store. Not the garbage you want gone. The stuff you actually like. Warm coats. Good sneakers. Things you’d wear yourself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/13/warm-up-3/ Tue, 13 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/13/the-last-livestream/ December 2016, and Aleppo was ending on social media. People trapped in the eastern part of the city were posting goodbye messages on Twitter and Facebook as the siege closed in. Saying hello and goodbye to the world simultaneously, from their phones, while the bombing was still happening in the background. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/13/the-last-livestream/ Tue, 13 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/11/the-rain-cloud/ Why do lilies of the valley droop their heads? Why am I always tired? What keeps me going, what holds me to life? These are the kinds of questions Balbina asks on “Die Regenwolke,” the first single from her new album “Fragen über Fragen.” Most songwriters would turn these into a love song—the ache before the chorus, the setup for the confession. But these aren’t love songs. Balbina doesn’t write love songs, and she’s genuinely proud of this fact. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/11/the-rain-cloud/ Sun, 11 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/11/in-character/ Brock Lesnar on the cover is the obvious choice—intensity and damage, what a cover needs. But it works because WWE 2K17 understands what it’s actually selling: theater. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/11/in-character/ Sun, 11 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/10/we-already-lost/ XCOM 2 understands that failure is the point. I’m commanding the resistance from a flying headquarters twenty years after humanity lost to the aliens, and every turn is an exercise in damage control. Some soldier I trained dies in my stupid plan, and I spend the next few minutes doing the nauseating math of whether we can still pull this off. We can’t. We almost never can. But we keep trying. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/10/we-already-lost/ Sat, 10 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/9/making-bleeding-easy/ There’s a persistent genre of self-help content that keeps insisting your period is actually your month’s best days. You just need the right mindset, the right products, the right something. It’s always framed as a perspective problem—if you could just see it correctly, if you could just reframe the pain as opportunity, everything would change. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/9/making-bleeding-easy/ Fri, 09 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/9/postfaktisch/ German linguists basically admitted defeat in 2016. They picked “postfaktisch”—post-factual, post-truth—as their Word of the Year. Oxford had done the same in English. When the language establishment starts coining words for how broken things have become, you know something’s really shifted. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/9/postfaktisch/ Fri, 09 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/9/patent/ There’s something about opening a new shoebox. The smell, the tissue paper crinkle, pulling out an object that’s yours and just sitting with that for a moment. Stupidly good feeling. Right up there with eating a full bucket of fries at the end of the day. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/9/patent/ Fri, 09 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/9/no-clicks-no-subs-no-money/ There’s something uniquely helpless about building your entire income on a website you don’t own. Google tweaked the algorithm—nothing obvious, nothing announced, just enough to crash views, subscribers, and paychecks overnight. Creators woke up to collapsed numbers. The rules changed. Nobody explained why. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/9/no-clicks-no-subs-no-money/ Fri, 09 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/9/vollengas-chambers/ Rein Vollenga is a Dutch sculptor and performance artist. His work centers on physical expression—masks and sculptures that try to capture thought and emotion made tangible. When Hendrick’s gin commissioned him to create an experiential installation for an evening in Hamburg, they were essentially hiring his sensibility and taste. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/9/vollengas-chambers/ Fri, 09 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/8/the-sims-4/ I remember sitting down in front of the first Sims game and looking up three hours later with no idea where the time went. You start with the intention of quickly building a house, but then your Sim needs a job, the job requires skills, skills take time, and suddenly you’re orchestrating this entire miniature life. Someone you’ve just created needs to eat, sleep, maintain relationships. You become genuinely invested in keeping these digital people functional, which is absurd when you think about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/8/the-sims-4/ Thu, 08 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/8/nothing-happened/ A man with a beer and a cigarette pushed a woman down a staircase at Hermannstraße station, just after midnight. She was heading down to the platform when he and his friends came up behind her. He was faster. At the middle of the stairs he lifted his leg and shoved her in the back. She fell forward onto the landing. He watched her go down, took a drag, and walked away with his friends toward another exit like it was the most natural thing in the world. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/8/nothing-happened/ Thu, 08 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/8/liable-for-linking/ A Hamburg court just decided that linking to a stolen photo counts as copyright infringement if you make any money from your website. Not the person who actually hosted the stolen image—you, just for pointing to it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/8/liable-for-linking/ Thu, 08 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/8/superstar-politics/ Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stopped being a politician and became a celebrity somewhere along the way. I don’t know exactly when—maybe when YouTube made everyone famous, regardless of what they actually do. Turkish diaspora communities started defending and attacking him the way people do about movies or musicians. Passionate advocates. Passionate critics. Videos from both sides making the case about whether he’s a visionary or a tyrant, which is exactly how people talk about cultural figures, not political leaders. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/8/superstar-politics/ Thu, 08 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/8/why-were-still-having-this/ You see it all the time online—some YouTuber gets asked why feminism still matters, and suddenly everyone’s got an opinion. As if the past fifteen years of watching women get interrupted in meetings, passed over for promotions, or followed home at night somehow doesn’t prove the point on its own. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/8/why-were-still-having-this/ Thu, 08 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/7/when-the-show-worked/ The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show happened in Paris in 2016 and it was the exact thing it was always going to be—expensive, beautiful, engineered for desire. Gigi and Kendall and Sara and all the others in lingerie with wings on their backs while Lady Gaga or whoever performed in the background. The whole machinery of it, millions spent to create a fantasy that you could watch. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/7/when-the-show-worked/ Wed, 07 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/7/ten-years-in/ Jessica Weiß has been running Journelles for almost ten years, and that alone deserves respect. Anyone who stays with something that long and actually means it is doing the opposite of what most people do. I don’t understand fashion—the whole expensive-brand category means nothing to me—but I understand work. Her blog just finished a redesign that took over a year, partly because she had a baby, partly because the entire backend system needed to be rebuilt. That’s not a casual refresh. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/7/ten-years-in/ Wed, 07 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/7/follow-the-money/ Breitbart wanted to take Germany. It had already warped American politics; now it wanted to position itself as the voice of the concerned citizen in the dark corners of the German internet. And like every right-wing operation that wasn’t directly funded by billionaires, it was going to live off advertising. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/7/follow-the-money/ Wed, 07 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/7/the-english-lesson/ An old man in a Polish commercial orders an English for Beginners textbook. Allegro, that massive Polish auction site that’s basically Eastern Europe’s eBay, made it their Christmas ad. You can feel what it’s reaching for before it even starts—sentiment about time, family, connection, the familiar beat that plays every December. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/7/the-english-lesson/ Wed, 07 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/7/soundcloud-comes-back/ Everyone’s adding “Go” to their names now. Spotify figured it out first, and now the whole industry’s just stuck with it—Apple Music, SoundCloud, whoever’s next. It’s lazy but it works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/7/soundcloud-comes-back/ Wed, 07 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/7/person-of-the-year/ Trump got Time’s Person of the Year in 2016. He’d been fixated on it for a while—came in third the year before and complained loudly about it, tweeted that Time would never name him, said they’d picked “the woman who ruined Germany” instead. Then they went ahead and gave it to him. I remember thinking about how the magazine had also put Hitler on their cover in 1938 under the same heading. That’s the kind of historical fact you wish you hadn’t noticed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/7/person-of-the-year/ Wed, 07 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/6/in-and-out/ You walk into the store and grab whatever you need. No line, no cashier, no waiting. Amazon Go handles it with cameras and sensors that track what you’re taking and charge you automatically as you leave. Obviously better than standing in a supermarket line. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/6/in-and-out/ Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/6/the-unfairness/ Chrissy Teigen is the kind of person who makes Twitter actually interesting. The way she operates online is different from anyone else. She can destroy someone in a reply and it’s so precise, so measured, that you’re almost impressed at being roasted. It’s not the polite put-down kind of wit. It’s not even the cruel kind that makes you feel bad. It’s the kind that lands so perfectly you have to respect it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/6/the-unfairness/ Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/6/victorias-secret-in-paris/ The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show showed up in Paris ostensibly to sell underwear, which was obviously not the point. It was really about having Kendall Jenner, Gigi Hadid, and Sara Sampaio walk around being beautiful. Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars, The Weeknd performed. Everything was objectively perfect—the bodies, the hair, the staging, the music, all of it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/6/victorias-secret-in-paris/ Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/6/boost-on-the-tubular/ The adidas Tubular Instinct is getting the Boost treatment. Two new colorways—beige and black—both in that high-cut silhouette that was always somewhere between tech and elegance. The appeal is obvious: Boost cushioning on a shoe that already had some presence to it. Thick soles, that wrapped-around collar, the three stripes appliquéd at the heel instead of sewn along the side—it’s not a minimalist sneaker, which is probably why I like it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/6/boost-on-the-tubular/ Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/6/the-stack/ The moment you realize you want more than one of these is the moment the design clicks. Swarovski’s Crystaldust bracelets are minimal in a way that feels careful. An open bangle. Stainless steel end caps. Crystal details catching light. That’s the whole thing, and that’s deliberate. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/6/the-stack/ Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/6/persona-5/ Persona 4 Golden was my game of the year in 2013, even though it came out in 2012 and the original was from 2008. I don’t know if you’re supposed to fall in love with something you haven’t played yet, but that’s what happened. Then I played it, and every second of it confirmed what I already suspected. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/6/persona-5/ Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/6/friends-show-up/ There’s something almost impossible about that moment when someone you thought was far away suddenly appears. You’re on a screen talking to them, and then you hear something outside—a car door, a voice you know. The distance collapses. They’re actually there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/6/friends-show-up/ Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/5/back-to-helga/ Rock am Ring is going back to the Nürburgring. Two years at Mendig airfield and now it’s coming home, which is the right call. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/5/back-to-helga/ Mon, 05 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/5/the-other-family/ Lincoln Clay comes back from Vietnam knowing war changed what family means. It’s not blood—it’s who you die for. He wants peace in New Bordeaux, but the black gangsters who raised him get slaughtered by the Italian mob. Betrayed and destroyed. He’s alone now, just rage and a list of names. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/5/the-other-family/ Mon, 05 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/5/diamonds/ Emily Ratajkowski used to be a model in that distant way—photographed for magazines, existing in editorials but never directly heard from. Now she’s on Instagram. And so when she’s photographed wearing a diamond necklace and talking about being obsessed with diamonds, it doesn’t read as an advertisement. It reads like someone you know telling you what she actually likes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/5/diamonds/ Mon, 05 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/5/what-christmas-takes/ It’s mid-December. The kitchen smells like cinnamon and burnt sugar. The tree is up, every light working, decorated with the kind of care that takes hours. The gifts are mostly wrapped. I haven’t started shopping. She’s been at this since October. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/5/what-christmas-takes/ Mon, 05 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/5/flower-logic/ At Clark University, someone wrote survival tips about sexual assault that included this: giving flowers to someone you’re interested in is emotional manipulation, which makes it rape. That was the actual text. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/5/flower-logic/ Mon, 05 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/4/game-two/ Sometime in the early 2000s I realized that four German guys on television understood gaming better than most of the gaming press. Simon Krätschmer, Daniel Budiman, Nils Bomhoff, Étienne Gardé—they hosted Giga Games and then Game One, a show that mixed sketches, reviews, and stupid jokes into something that actually felt alive. If you were anywhere in Europe with a PC or console back then, you knew them. They mattered in a way that’s hard to explain now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/4/game-two/ Sun, 04 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/4/smart-tampons/ my.Flow designed a Bluetooth-enabled tampon. The logic is there: knowing when to change without checking is a real micro-problem. A sensor detects saturation, pings your phone, everyone moves on. Competent engineering, sensible product idea. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/4/smart-tampons/ Sun, 04 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/4/measured/ You clip it to your wrist and you can’t stop knowing anymore. Steps, distance, calories, active minutes—all day, all broken down by the hour. The watch nudges you every time you pause. Move 250 steps an hour, it insists. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/4/measured/ Sun, 04 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/4/both-sides/ I met Reichel in Koenji, one of those Tokyo neighborhoods with galleries tucked into alleys and everyone trying to figure out how to survive. She was wearing blue overalls and a white shirt—aggressively normal, the kind of outfit you don’t think about. Turns out she models. Not just models; she models for both women’s and men’s brands, and she’s cracked the code on how to be convincing in both. Different wig, different agency, different version depending on the job. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/4/both-sides/ Sun, 04 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/4/the-guardians-exception/ I hate superhero movies. The formula locks in place before they start writing. Spider-Man wins. Batman wins. Iron Man wins. You know it’s coming before you sit down. If he loses this time, it’s just so he can win next time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/4/the-guardians-exception/ Sun, 04 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/4/still-waiting-for-andromeda/ Jack. Jacob. Kasumi. I’ve spent more time thinking about those three than I probably should. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/4/still-waiting-for-andromeda/ Sun, 04 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/3/the-flame-in-the-flood/ Scout’s on a raft with her dog, drifting down a flooded river. The world’s been drowned. What’s left of America is mostly water, and she’s island-hopping, scavenging for food and weapons and shelter—anything to stay alive another day. You know from the start that this won’t be easy. One mistake and you’re done. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/3/the-flame-in-the-flood/ Sat, 03 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/3/8bit-music-power/ Hearing the opening bars of Super Mario Bros does something immediate and physical—drops me straight into being eight years old without any of the slow work of remembering. Same with Sonic, Zelda, Castlevania. One bar and I’m back in front of a screen with a controller in my hands, moving faster than I should, believing I’m invincible. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/3/8bit-music-power/ Sat, 03 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/3/body-without-apology/ So there’s a model named Melina DiMarco from New York who shoots nude, and she treats it like it’s not a big deal. Not provocatively, not as transgression—just as fact. Her body, documented, no apology attached. The photographer is Atisha Paulson, and the work ran in Yume, an Australian fashion magazine. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/3/body-without-apology/ Sat, 03 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/3/unfinished-business/ Joel shoots a surgeon in a hospital and lies to Ellie about what he’s done. Maybe he saves her. Maybe he condemns humanity. The Last of Us never tells you which—it ends before you have to decide. That uncertainty felt earned and final. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/3/unfinished-business/ Sat, 03 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/3/titanfall-2/ Titanfall 2 is about pilots and Titans—you’re inside a giant robot. The campaign follows someone who dreams of becoming a pilot, learning what it means to trust a machine and be trusted back. The multiplayer lets you actually live in that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/3/titanfall-2/ Sat, 03 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/3/the-real-game/ There’s a moment in watching competitive StarCraft where everything clicks. Two players, thousands of units, and then one move—a build order you didn’t anticipate, a scout at the exact right moment—that shifts the entire game. If you’re not paying attention, you miss it completely. If you are, you see the whole thing: the strategy, the reading of the opponent, the moment where one player understands something the other doesn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/3/the-real-game/ Sat, 03 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/3/suing-for-information/ Germany has a Freedom of Information Act that in theory gives you the right to ask the government for anything. No reason required, no explanation needed. The catch is that agencies deny requests constantly, and the only way to push back is to sue them. Actually sue. Your government. Over a document you’re asking for. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/3/suing-for-information/ Sat, 03 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/2/sanktionsfrei/ Six million people on Hartz IV in Germany. That’s what passes for a legal minimum to live on—the government’s calculation of what you need to not starve. The job centers can sanction that away. Miss an appointment, file something wrong, and they cut you down, sometimes to zero. The math says you can’t live on zero euros but that’s not the system’s contradiction to solve. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/2/sanktionsfrei/ Fri, 02 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/2/easy-money/ The internet is full of people trying to steal your money, and they’re not even pretending otherwise anymore. Two methods have emerged as particularly reliable, probably because fooling a lot of people at once is easier than anyone wants to admit. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/2/easy-money/ Fri, 02 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/2/the-classics/ Unboxing a new pair of sneakers hits different. That smell, the tissue paper, the weight of them in your hands—you open the box and there they are, perfectly laced, ready to go. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/2/the-classics/ Fri, 02 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/2/all-in/ I found Kiki 2 in Koenji while looking for vintage that wasn’t already picked over. Koenji’s west of Shinjuku in Suginami, quieter than the tourist zones—built in the 1980s around housing and small shops instead of chains. You stumble onto bars and places like this if you know where to look. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/2/all-in/ Fri, 02 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/2/the-cooling/ You remember the moment it felt possible. Germany would handle this. The whole country rallied around the idea, and then it just didn’t hold. The optimism curdled into something else—resentment, resistance, the kind of political backlash that made everyone involved feel stupid for believing in the first place. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/2/the-cooling/ Fri, 02 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/2/blaming-the-body/ Giulia Becker made a song called “Verdammte Scheiße” where she traces everything wrong in her life back to her vagina. School, work, being taken seriously—all of it follows from the same source. The song is entirely serious about this. She sings “I have a vagina” like it’s finally the answer to something, repeating “It’s my vagina’s fault” like she’s cracked a code. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/2/blaming-the-body/ Fri, 02 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/2/potato-salad/ There’s a German movie called Kartoffelsalat—potato salad—made by YouTubers and now free on YouTube. IMDb ranked it 25th worst film ever made, which is somehow both impressive and completely unsurprising. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/2/potato-salad/ Fri, 02 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/1/the-alola-games/ I remember when Pokémon was playground business. Your Charizard against my Blastoise, and nothing else mattered. These new games arrive in a weird place—they matter to the same people who played Red and Blue twenty years ago, and there’s this quiet acceptance now that Pokémon is just part of who those people became. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/12/1/the-alola-games/ Thu, 01 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/30/the-big-mac/ You don’t think about where it came from. You’re drunk or hungry or both, it’s late, you’re at McDonald’s because nowhere else is open and you need something in your mouth. The Big Mac tastes like every Big Mac ever—the bun somehow soft and stale at once, the meat thin and salty, the lettuce doing basically nothing, the sauce too sweet. It’s not really food. It’s the shape hunger takes when there are no better options. You eat it without considering who invented it, without considering much of anything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/30/the-big-mac/ Wed, 30 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/30/another-name/ The internet’s best gift is letting you become someone else. You pick a name that isn’t your name, load some photos, and suddenly you’re a new person. No one’s waiting for you to be consistent. No one knows your real life. You just show what you want to show, and people respond or they don’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/30/another-name/ Wed, 30 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/30/still-finding-tokyo/ Spent months in Tokyo and somehow there were still pockets of the city I’d never found. Ikebukuro’s not the kind of neighborhood that broadcasts itself—it’s pachinko parlors and game centers and small theaters buried in alleys. Book and Bed Tokyo is wedged right into that. A hostel that’s also somehow a library, which feels like a contradiction until you see it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/30/still-finding-tokyo/ Wed, 30 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/30/the-tweet-hereafter/ There’s a website called The Tweet Hereafter that archives the last tweets posted by people who died shortly after. Sometimes within hours. You can scroll through what looks like an ordinary day of thoughts—a joke, a complaint, someone sharing breakfast—and then hit the line ’Cause of death: suicide.’ Your stomach catches. That’s the whole point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/30/the-tweet-hereafter/ Wed, 30 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/30/the-quieter-kind-of-gone/ Şirin Manolya Sak left Turkey after two and a half years. She was a journalist, which in Erdoğan’s Turkey meant living with a specific kind of dread. The kind that doesn’t announce itself. You just carry it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/30/the-quieter-kind-of-gone/ Wed, 30 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/30/offline-at-last/ You’re stuck in a train. Or a plane. Or one of those aggressively overpriced Berlin cafes that promises WiFi but completely falls apart the moment three people try to stream something at once. You open Netflix. Nothing. Your phone’s already at ten percent, your commute stretches out empty. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/30/offline-at-last/ Wed, 30 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/30/stussy-does-the-one-star/ I’ve always liked that Converse and Stussy seem to understand something the same way. Both are rooted in California skate and surf culture, where how something looks is what it is. So when they put three Stussy graphics on the One Star ’74, it doesn’t feel like a collaboration so much as an obvious move. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/30/stussy-does-the-one-star/ Wed, 30 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/29/scott-parks-star-wars-ships/ Scott Park draws spaceships. The Death Star, the Millennium Falcon, the V-Wing—all those vessels from Star Wars rendered clean and precise in black space. He’s a Creative Director and Illustrator from Toronto, and he’s spent years pulling from the pop culture he loves: Transformers, Lord of the Rings, Back to the Future. Star Wars is his current focus. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/29/scott-parks-star-wars-ships/ Tue, 29 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/29/kerns-kylie/ Richard Kern photographed Kylie Jenner for Wonderland Magazine. I was curious what that would yield—Kern doesn’t do safe. His work lives in intimacy and provocation, close to the body, often uncomfortable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/29/kerns-kylie/ Tue, 29 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/29/made-to-order/ Everybody wants to feel loved. Not real love necessarily—that’s fragile and complicated. Just something that works well enough to keep you from feeling like a complete failure at the basic human experience. Everyone else seems to have someone. Why not you? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/29/made-to-order/ Tue, 29 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/29/fairknallt/ Marie Nasemann threw a launch party for her new blog in Hamburg, two hundred people at Goldmarie in St. Pauli. She’s been a model and actress, which means there was already an audience, but that kind of turnout suggests the actual subject hit something real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/29/fairknallt/ Tue, 29 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/29/what-yoshi-knows/ I found Yoshi one afternoon in the crush of Shibuya’s shopping streets, impossible to miss. Red coat, chains catching the light, a poncho that probably had a story behind it. Embroidered pants in bright colors, high heels, rings stacked on his fingers, red-dyed hair, a colorful sweater, a patched hood. Every piece competing for space in the crowd, no apologies. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/29/what-yoshi-knows/ Tue, 29 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/29/on-hold/ The xx’s video for “On Hold” is just people being young. Shirtless on couches, jumping in pools, dancing through the night. Moments that feel infinite while you’re in them, then years later you’re looking back. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/29/on-hold/ Tue, 29 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/29/wizardhood/ I watched someone describe Wizardhood—that’s an eighty-minute cut of all eight Harry Potter films made by Tim Stiefler—and my first thought was: why would anyone do that? My second thought was: actually, that’s useful. Most people don’t have the weekend commitment. They’ve got other things going on, or they don’t care enough, or they tried watching once and the pacing exhausted them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/29/wizardhood/ Tue, 29 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/28/how-super-mario-world-really-works/ I spent hours in front of the television playing Super Mario World. Dinosaur Land, Donut Plains, the Forest of Illusion—I moved through those worlds without thinking about how they actually worked. Jump, run, find the exit. Simple as that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/28/how-super-mario-world-really-works/ Mon, 28 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/28/stone-and-flesh/ Someone took a hammer to the Berlin Wall and did it topless so the moment would stick. FEMEN calling out the EU’s endless delays on Ukraine, using nakedness as a weapon because words have never landed hard enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/28/stone-and-flesh/ Mon, 28 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/28/back-to-stars-hollow/ The thing about Gilmore Girls is the talking. Lorelai and Rory and Sookie firing off dialogue so fast you can barely catch it, references stacked inside references, people who actually want to be around each other. It’s network TV from the early 2000s, but it lives somewhere else—in those kitchen conversations that run until two in the morning. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/28/back-to-stars-hollow/ Mon, 28 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/28/plant-your-mac/ There’s always an old Mac somewhere in someone’s apartment. Maybe an iMac from the 2000s, still taking up space on a shelf. Maybe a PowerBook you couldn’t bring yourself to throw away. You can’t use it anymore—the OS is stone-age by now, and nobody makes software for it—but it’s too real to just dump. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/28/plant-your-mac/ Mon, 28 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/28/something-with-media/ A decade ago, “something with media” was what people said when they had no idea what they actually wanted. Your guidance counselor would nod. You’d nod. Nobody knew what the hell it meant. Now the industry is concrete enough that you can be specific. Game programmer. Motion graphics. VR development. UX research. Name the thing and there’s probably someone hiring for it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/28/something-with-media/ Mon, 28 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/28/odaiba/ The Gundam statue is the first thing that hits you when you round the corner at Odaiba. It’s absurdly large, looming over the promenade with its arms spread, catching the light of the evening crowd flowing past it. The island is bright and crowded and completely unrefined—the opposite of what Tokyo usually presents to visitors. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/28/odaiba/ Mon, 28 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/28/what-gets-normal/ Rocco And His Brothers, a Berlin art collective, wired up a single U-Bahn car with 32 surveillance cameras to see what would happen. Not to make it safer. Just to push something invisible into view and see if anyone noticed the difference. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/28/what-gets-normal/ Mon, 28 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/28/jans-pro/ Jan Hoffmann got his pro board at twenty. The Attitude Skateshop in Bremen threw him a surprise party for it, which feels right—the ritual of it, the community officially signing on. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/28/jans-pro/ Mon, 28 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/25/chiaras-501/ Chiara Ferragni designed a Levi’s 501. By the time Levi’s asked her, she’d already shaped how millions of people dressed. The Blonde Salad was the reference point—not a blog anymore, just the place where taste was made. An official collaboration with a denim company felt almost inevitable, like confirming something that had already happened. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/25/chiaras-501/ Fri, 25 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/25/tokidoki-unicorno/ Tokidoki keeps making these Unicorno toys, and they’re on the fifth series now. The fact that they keep doing it is interesting—it means people keep buying them. They’re small painted unicorns, each one a different color, each one with this gentle expression like it’s genuinely happy. They’re cheap, like eight euros each. You buy them blind, which is the whole system. You don’t choose which one you get. If you want the complete set, you’re either buying a whole box or you’re on eBay later, hunting down the specific ones you need. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/25/tokidoki-unicorno/ Fri, 25 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/25/harmony/ Spring Breakers landed like a slap. Not because it was scandalous in the grand scheme of things, but because Selena Gomez was in it, and everything about Selena before that moment had been calculated brand management. The Disney girl, the safe choice, the artist who’d done voice work for animated films and wouldn’t push anyone’s boundaries. Then Harmony Korine called, and something shifted. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/25/harmony/ Fri, 25 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/25/reverse-engineering-yourself/ Marimar Hollenbach studied environmental science, hated it, so she taught herself design, then web development, then coding. It’s like she was reverse-engineering her own competence, stacking skills until something stuck. She found a mentor who believed in her work. Now she builds things as a creative developer in Berlin. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/25/reverse-engineering-yourself/ Fri, 25 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/25/last-night-in-hollywood/ David Collier had one night left in Los Angeles when he matched with Andrea Villarroel Lua on Instagram. They met and shot that evening—Hollywood Boulevard first, then his apartment after dark. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/25/last-night-in-hollywood/ Fri, 25 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/25/tokyo-in-neon/ Akira opens with the city at night—motorcycles, neon, streetlights cutting through darkness. Just the world before anything else happens. I watched it when I was younger and got caught up in the plot, the scale of it all. Watched it again recently and what actually hit me was the light itself, how the city looks, how every sign and glow does something to how you feel watching. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/25/tokyo-in-neon/ Fri, 25 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/25/shelter/ FYE and FENNEK met on one of those nights where everything’s too loose and suddenly you’re making a commitment. She surfs, photographs, sings—part of Velvet, this loose artist collective. He’s been producing for twelve years, the quiet type who makes things better. Together they don’t sound like anyone particular, though The Knife and Air are probably in there somewhere. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/25/shelter/ Fri, 25 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/24/made-for-love/ “I get paid so he’s not alone.” That’s Juju, opening SXTN’s new track, and it cuts straight to the core. Two rappers from Berlin, Nura and Juju, and Made 4 Love is probably the only anthem Germany’s underground has actually made for sex workers. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/24/made-for-love/ Thu, 24 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/24/pin-nap/ PIN NAP is where you go in Tokyo if you want vintage that isn’t hanging in some soulless shopping mall. It’s near the Meiji shrine, in the kind of spot locals know about. The inventory’s a rotating mix—80s, 90s, 2000s stuff, whatever he decides is worth stocking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/24/pin-nap/ Thu, 24 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/24/berlins-creative-machine/ Every year, young people from all over the world land in Berlin to do “something with media.” They start as unpaid or barely-paid interns at whatever agency takes them—PR firms, ad shops, design places. If they’re lucky, they eventually get promoted to junior something. That’s when things get serious. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/24/berlins-creative-machine/ Thu, 24 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/24/real-ting/ “Real Ting” hits and you know something’s shifted. Stefflon Don came out of London with this sharp, confident energy that made everything else in hip-hop at the time feel slightly wrong. She looked like she’d absorbed Nicki, Lil’ Kim, Rihanna, and Missy Elliott into something of her own, but the visual shorthand didn’t prepare you for what she could actually do on a track. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/24/real-ting/ Thu, 24 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/24/kottbusser-tor-for-the-kids/ Kottbusser Tor is a play mat now—the whole Kreuzberg intersection rendered in exact, obsessive detail by an artist named Vidam. Casino 36 is on there. The Möbel-Olfe furniture store. Dog shit, because of course dog shit, and it’s probably the most accurate thing on the whole mat. Stern bottles. The apartment buildings. Everything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/24/kottbusser-tor-for-the-kids/ Thu, 24 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/23/ditto-finally/ Ditto was the one you couldn’t catch. Not because it was rare or locked behind some paywall, but because Pokémon GO simply didn’t have it. The game was this weird walking-simulator thing Nintendo released, and for the people actually obsessed with it, Ditto was the missing piece—the void in the Pokédex where completion broke down. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/23/ditto-finally/ Wed, 23 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/23/miley-without-the-mouse/ Miley Cyrus decided the best way to leave Hannah Montana behind was to show up completely naked in a magazine shoot. Terry Richardson photographed her for Candy, no softening, no art direction to hide behind—she’s just there without her clothes on, in scenarios that make it clear she doesn’t give a shit what anyone thinks. A cop uniform, leather, on her knees. Completely unbothered. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/23/miley-without-the-mouse/ Wed, 23 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/23/before-frank/ Charles Moriarty has photographs of Amy Winehouse from before. They became a book called Before Frank. The images are quiet moments—off-stage, away from the machinery, before the machinery finished what it started. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/23/before-frank/ Wed, 23 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/23/making-washi/ Japan has this split personality. You can be in the futuristic neon part of town and turn a corner to find a temple that’s been there for five hundred years, completely unconcerned with progress. Kyoto is especially good at this. You can walk from ultramodern to ancient in maybe ten minutes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/23/making-washi/ Wed, 23 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/23/the-future-looks-like-ads/ Keiichi Matsuda made a short film called “Hyper Reality” that works on you in an uncomfortable way. He’s showing you a near-future where physical and virtual reality have completely merged into a single augmented landscape. The world without all the tech layered on is just an ordinary gray street—quiet, unremarkable, almost peaceful. Then the AR kicks in. Ads everywhere. Notifications stacking on surfaces. Gamified tasks demanding your attention at every angle. Your reality is hijacked. Every moment becomes a sales opportunity. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/23/the-future-looks-like-ads/ Wed, 23 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/23/taking-up-space/ Aino Jawo and Caroline Hjelt make you pay attention. Not because they’re performing—they’re doing the opposite. They take up space without apologizing for it, and that’s the kind of confidence that stops you in your tracks. Icona Pop embody something rare: female power without any of the theater. No soft edges, no trying to make it palatable. Just two Swedish women who know exactly what they want and couldn’t care less whether you’re listening. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/23/taking-up-space/ Wed, 23 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/23/nmd-in-camo/ I’ve never understood why the NMD_XR1 stuck around. It breaks every rule of sneaker design in ways that feel half-baked—the TPU cage, the waxy suede heel cap, all these details that shouldn’t add up to anything worth looking at. But adidas keeps releasing colorways, and people keep buying them, and somehow it just works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/23/nmd-in-camo/ Wed, 23 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/22/the-pill-problem/ The first time you have sex without a condom after using one for years, the difference is obvious. Better sensation, less friction, just better. So when someone you’re with decides to go on the pill, there’s this immediate relief. You don’t have to negotiate it. Everyone gets what they want—or everyone thinks they do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/22/the-pill-problem/ Tue, 22 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/22/hipster-nativity/ Christmas stops being fun somewhere around the age you can afford to buy your own gifts. As a kid you’re waiting for things you actually need, or at least things you want badly enough to feel that electric moment on Christmas morning. Later you’re just sitting around wondering why you bothered showing up at all, why you’re eating things you didn’t choose, why no one’s talking about anything worth talking about. You could be anywhere else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/22/hipster-nativity/ Tue, 22 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/22/before-you-arrived/ I fall in love with people constantly—not seriously, just that immediate pull toward a face, the way someone moves, a quality in their expression you can’t name. Usually girls. There’s something about the way some carry themselves that makes you forget what you were thinking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/22/before-you-arrived/ Tue, 22 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/22/dragon-radar/ I spent hours on early Dragon Ball when I was young—just watching kids hunt for these magic orbs, with no real stakes, no world-ending threats. The show was small and strange and genuinely funny. Then it became something else. Z stretched everything out, tournaments went on for seasons, then you had the aliens, the time travel, and by GT it was just watching increasingly powerful versions of the same guy break things. I get why that worked for people. It didn’t work for me anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/22/dragon-radar/ Tue, 22 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/22/osaka-after-dark/ I went to Osaka thinking it would be the warm-up before Tokyo, the appetizer. It turned out to be the meal. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/22/osaka-after-dark/ Tue, 22 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/22/new-wallpaper/ You’re streaming your whole elaborate life to strangers on Snapchat, Periscope, Instagram—people who don’t know you and are mostly just hoping you’ll embarrass yourself so they have something to laugh about. But you feel superior for being there. Ahead. Not like the older people still stuck on whatever came before. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/22/new-wallpaper/ Tue, 22 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/22/lara-snow/ Lara Snow is actually two people—Valery Sherman and Jonathan Harpak from Tel Aviv. I don’t know why that detail matters except that every city’s underground has its own flavor, and Tel Aviv’s sounds meticulous and genuinely weird in equal measure. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/22/lara-snow/ Tue, 22 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/22/the-last-party/ Blumentopf played their final show on November 22 at the Zenith in Munich, a sold-out room for a band that spent three decades throwing parties better than most people’s careers. PULS documented the whole thing, which feels right for an ending like this. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/22/the-last-party/ Tue, 22 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/21/dreamin/ Adi Ulmansky. That name already sounds cool. She keeps it short to just Adi anyway, which is the right call. Guarantee some German athletic brand is already trying to figure out how to collab with her, inevitable really, but that’s beside the point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/21/dreamin/ Mon, 21 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/21/killing-tegel/ Tegel was closing. After decades as Berlin’s main airport, it was scheduled to shut down once BER opened. The only thing that actually made it good was that it existed within the city. You could get there in twenty minutes on a single transit ticket—A and B sections, no surcharge, no long journey to the edge of civilization. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/21/killing-tegel/ Mon, 21 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/21/all-white/ There’s something about all-white fits in Harajuku. I spotted Kim at one of the side crossings—not the famous intersection from the photo essays, but far enough in that the crowd spread out enough to actually see faces. White fluffy boots, white pullover, white pearl necklace, then a Nike shirt with yellow accents that cut right through. Black hair making it work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/21/all-white/ Mon, 21 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/21/going-live/ Snapchat, Periscope, Twitch—I’ve watched people livestream their lunch, their commute, their thoughts, just broadcasting their mundane lives to strangers who barely care. Now Instagram’s joining in. They’re adding livestreaming to Stories because apparently 100 million daily users weren’t enough of an audience for your unfiltered moment. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/21/going-live/ Mon, 21 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/21/still-hot/ Takoyaki hits different when it’s still hot. The outside’s fried to a blistering crisp, nearly burnt in spots, and inside it’s soft—almost molten. You bite in and it’s too hot but you don’t care; you burn the roof of your mouth because waiting feels impossible. Bonito flakes curl in the steam. Mayo and that thick, almost sweet sauce pooling on top. You eat these standing up, usually with a toothpick, moving fast. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/21/still-hot/ Mon, 21 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/21/loser/ Someone’s always better. Nobody tells you this when you’re young and everyone’s telling you that you can be anything, that your dreams are achievable, that you’re special. But everyone gets that speech. So there’s millions of us, all special, all destined for something, and mathematically only one of us can actually get there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/21/loser/ Mon, 21 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/21/patient-surfaces/ Gum machines all over Berlin and nobody looks at them. Just street fixtures, weathered and forgotten, made to disappear into the background. Max Schwarck spent two years actually looking—shooting them across six districts, Kreuzberg to Prenzlauer Berg, exactly as he found them. Scratched. Faded. Patient. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/21/patient-surfaces/ Mon, 21 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/20/logged-in/ We’re online all the time. Nobody thinks about it anymore, just the baseline. So when the UK government decides to keep a year of your browsing history, your messages, who you talk to—the whole map of your digital life—it doesn’t feel like surveillance anymore. It’s just how it works. Theresa May figures security beats privacy. That’s the trade we made, whether or not anyone asked. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/20/logged-in/ Sun, 20 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/20/bored-stiff/ Sarah Nicole Harvey makes self-portraits in Toronto. She’s been working as a model for a few years—bridal campaigns, beauty shoots, magazine placements, the professional circuit—but the work that actually matters is what she does alone, with her own camera and no one else’s direction. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/20/bored-stiff/ Sun, 20 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/20/the-same-mistakes/ I keep watching Orange is the New Black even though it’s not perfect—no show is. Something about these women in prison, the laughter and cruelty and weight of it, keeps pulling me back season after season. I need to know what happens. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/20/the-same-mistakes/ Sun, 20 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/20/lollyphile/ When Chupa Chups came out with the tongue-staining gimmick, I was totally into them. The colors—bright industrial blues and greens—would stain your mouth black, which felt dangerous in a ridiculous kid way. But the flavors were just standard candy. Apple. Strawberry. Nothing unexpected. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/20/lollyphile/ Sun, 20 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/20/no-escape/ Three weeks ago I heard Red Velvet’s “Russian Roulette” and I was done. No resistance, no real explanation, just gone. I don’t understand Korean. I don’t understand K-pop. I understand that the production is clean and the melody hooks something in your brain that language never reaches, and that’s enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/20/no-escape/ Sun, 20 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/20/williams-buttons/ Went to a will.i.am headphone launch at the Voo Store in Berlin. Influencers and models, Kendall Jenner didn’t make it. Will.i.am’s actually into technology—he’s been interested in it for years—so the whole product launch felt less hollow than it usually does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/20/williams-buttons/ Sun, 20 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/18/the-350-v2/ The Yeezy Boost 350 V2 dropped in three black colorways that November—copper stripe, green stripe, red stripe—and everyone wanted them. By then the original 350 had already become something real, something Kanye designed rather than just slapped his name on. The V2 refined it: Primeknit upper, Boost sole, a ribbed rubber outsole that looked like contour lines on a map, the SPLY-350 lettering running down as a code that started as an inside reference and became an outside symbol. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/18/the-350-v2/ Fri, 18 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/18/one-song-each/ They gathered at Gretchen one night with a simple constraint: each DJ plays one song. Just one. It sounds small, almost pointless, until you realize what it actually forces. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/18/one-song-each/ Fri, 18 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/18/kate-upton-housewife/ I’d be lying if I said I had noble ambitions. Peace on earth, bread for the world—sure, those would be nice. But what I actually want is Kate Upton. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/18/kate-upton-housewife/ Fri, 18 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/18/borrowed-openly/ Nike took five existing shoes and synthesized them into the LunarCharge. The neopren upper borrowed from the Air Flow, the bootie shape from the Presto, the lacing from the Air Max 90, the silhouette from the Air Current. Plus their latest Lunar running tech. On paper it sounds like a corporate spreadsheet, but the shoe actually comes together when you look at it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/18/borrowed-openly/ Fri, 18 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/18/the-vending-machine-everywhere/ When you first land in Tokyo, you notice them before anything else. Not the neon, not the crowds—the vending machines. They’re on every corner, down every alley, in the middle of nowhere on country roads. You can’t escape them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/18/the-vending-machine-everywhere/ Fri, 18 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/18/the-partys-over/ Late nights in the offices, dancing until the cleaners showed up. Every week tape.tv threw a party—another band, another reason to stay out and pretend it was building something. I was there for most of it. Met good people. Saw good shows. Andi and I papered some small Austrian villages with tape.tv stickers while English guys in that particular state of drunkenness yelled encouragement and threw vodka around. Karl and I found the worst bars in Weißensee and made them worse. Wenke and I somehow ended up terrorizing Melt. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/18/the-partys-over/ Fri, 18 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/17/the-505-never-left/ The 505’s been around since 1967. That’s long enough to watch the Summer of Love unfold and then outlast most of the people who were actually there. By the seventies, it had already moved from counterculture artifact into punk uniform—Debbie Harry wore them, the Ramones wore them, and suddenly a pair of Levi’s became the thing you wore if you mattered. They still look the same now, which might be why they still work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/17/the-505-never-left/ Thu, 17 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/17/drum/ MØ’s hot. That’s not news and it’s not the whole picture, but it’s the first thing you notice. She’s got the kind of presence that fills whatever space she’s in—not because she’s trying, but because she just doesn’t fit anywhere else. When she started performing, the temperature changed in every room she walked into. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/17/drum/ Thu, 17 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/17/before-eighteen/ “I had three children. Two of them died. Only one is left.” Kamala Kumari Pariyar said this to someone from Human Rights Watch, sitting in the shade outside her house in Nepal’s southern Terai. She was married when she was thirteen. That’s where it started—everything else came after. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/17/before-eighteen/ Thu, 17 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/17/eva-doesnt-change/ The box arrived Monday afternoon in December. June Korea opened it with shaking hands. Eva was inside—still in parts—and he assembled her carefully, gave her a name, started taking her everywhere. Restaurants, parks, bed. Ten thousand dollars for a woman who would never age, never leave, never surprise him. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/17/eva-doesnt-change/ Thu, 17 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/17/sunshine/ I’m missing summer. Really missing it. I thought if I got the right setup—decent pillows, Netflix, hot cocoa—I could coast through the dark months without feeling it. But I’m missing summer. Can’t shake it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/17/sunshine/ Thu, 17 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/17/proportion/ Finding actual good tea in Germany is harder than you’d think. Supermarkets are full of tea, but it’s mostly dust and flavorings—your basic blends are indistinguishable once you’ve had something real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/17/proportion/ Thu, 17 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/17/the-ramen-years/ You can see it in my flat stomach and the way my hands shake—I lived on instant ramen for years. Nissin mostly, whatever packet was cheapest. Duck, beef, vegetable flavors all tasting like the same salt. If you’ve been broke, you know this food. It’s not food you think about, it’s just math. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/17/the-ramen-years/ Thu, 17 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/16/the-margins-ogiwara/ Rakutaro Ogiwara photographs Japan’s youth the way someone who actually loves the country sees them—not through some tourist lens, but as people navigating a specific kind of pressure. Creative, playful, often lonely. The loneliness isn’t weakness; it’s the feeling of being bright in a system built on constraint. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/16/the-margins-ogiwara/ Wed, 16 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/16/what-a-shirt-said/ The Orlando shooting happened in June 2016, and it was one of those moments where doing nothing felt obscene. Some designers—Fabian Hart and a few others—decided to make something instead. A T-shirt. It sounds small, maybe it was, but they put real thought into it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/16/what-a-shirt-said/ Wed, 16 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/16/fucking-for-the-fatherland/ A startup gets a regional innovation prize for designing a quiet vibrator. Third place, five grand. Pretty normal innovation stuff, the kind of thing that gets announced and forgotten. Except the AfD decided to make it mean something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/16/fucking-for-the-fatherland/ Wed, 16 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/16/cats-in-space/ I found these t-shirts on Kai-You, a Japanese site that traffics in exactly the kind of novelty design that shouldn’t work but somehow does. Cats in space. Cats on pizza. Cats exploding in front of impossible fireballs. Not clever. Not trying to be clever. Just pure, unfiltered absurdism on a t-shirt. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/16/cats-in-space/ Wed, 16 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/16/black-plastic/ Every piece of tech I own looks basically the same—black plastic, cables, nothing worth looking at twice. At some point the industry decided design doesn’t matter, or at least matters less than whether something works. I stopped looking for beautiful technology years ago. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/16/black-plastic/ Wed, 16 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/16/old-clothes/ Most of what people wear now comes from three sources—the same creators, the same algorithm, the same warehouses. After a certain age you want something that doesn’t look like everyone else’s attempt at looking everyone else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/16/old-clothes/ Wed, 16 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/16/christmas-consumed/ Something that happens every December: the department stores get crowded around 3 PM, people looking panicked, kids crying, someone’s mother-in-law trying on the same sweater in three colors. I used to go to one of these places on December 23rd, thinking I could pick up whatever was left, and it was always chaos—people shouting at their kids, the checkout lines snaking through the toy section, everyone moving like they’re the only one in the store. You’d think by now we’d know better. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/16/christmas-consumed/ Wed, 16 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/15/the-influencer-pool/ At some point they stopped calling them bloggers and started calling them influencers. Caro Daus, Sara from Collage Vintage, Nicole Mazzocato, Lisa Olsson—the people you followed because they had taste and the camera loved them. Levi’s had the straightforward idea: pool party with all of them in 501s, photogenic, let it run. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/15/the-influencer-pool/ Tue, 15 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/15/the-nmd-never-left/ The NMD never quite went away. It had that moment in the mid-2010s when it stopped being a design thing and became actual culture, and now it’s comfortable enough in itself to support rereleases and collaborators without getting nostalgic about it. The shoe works because it found something useful in the space between technical and casual. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/15/the-nmd-never-left/ Tue, 15 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/15/bad-nerd/ Nerds used to be the worst thing you could be. Kids with allergies running the chess club and computer labs—they’re CEOs now. Someone’s probably a billionaire. They won, and everything shifted around them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/15/bad-nerd/ Tue, 15 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/15/sailor-moon-hit-different/ Sailor Moon wasn’t the kind of show you watched and forgot about. It was the kind of thing that stuck in your head different, that rewired something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/15/sailor-moon-hit-different/ Tue, 15 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/15/still-showing-up/ Masaharu Morimoto started cooking when he was eighteen and just never stopped. That was forty years ago. Born in Hiroshima, he could have been a baseball player—that was the dream—but an injury changed the trajectory and now he’s spent more time with a knife than most people spend at their jobs. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/15/still-showing-up/ Tue, 15 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/15/looking/ I was looking at Bradford’s photographs of Jessica moving through the vintage shops on Brick Lane and realizing that there’s a specific kind of attention baked into the work. Not just technical skill, though that’s there—the light’s controlled, the composition’s solid. But something about the way he’s positioned the camera catches the moment when someone’s actually looking at something, really seeing it, not just performing for the camera. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/15/looking/ Tue, 15 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/15/dressed-against-it/ A photographer named Aston Husumu Hwang—or Sungmin Hwang, depending on which context you’re in—shot something in Seoul that most people miss when they’re busy streaming K-pop. He documented young people who have something to prove, not to the world but to themselves. Proof that you can live in a system designed to optimize you into nothing and still dress like you know exactly who you are. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/15/dressed-against-it/ Tue, 15 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/15/hipster-cartoons/ Matt Lassen, an illustrator for MAD Magazine, decided to reimagine cartoon characters as hipsters. Bart Simpson with a man-bun and vintage frames. SpongeBob in thrift-store chic. The Smurfs as the kind of guys who’d spend three hours discussing single-origin coffee. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/15/hipster-cartoons/ Tue, 15 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/14/quiet-design/ A Bathing Ape, the Tokyo streetwear label that somehow managed to stay cool for thirty years, did what high-end designers occasionally do when they discover that video games exist: they made t-shirts. The collaboration was with Capcom, so we’re talking about actual franchises—Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, Mega Man, Phoenix Wright, Super Ghouls ’n Ghosts. Not some random licensed grab. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/14/quiet-design/ Mon, 14 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/14/kawaii-monster-café/ You walk through a door in Harajuku and normal Tokyo evaporates. The salary men, the towers, the strangled subway cars—gone. Sebastian Masuda designed the Kawaii Monster Café, so the sweetness that replaces everything is completely intentional, which is somehow worse and better at the same time. Unicorns you can actually sit on. Pink cakes the size of actual furniture. Milk bottles the size of your head dangling from the ceiling. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/14/kawaii-monster-café/ Mon, 14 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/14/fuck-2016/ It’s November and 2016 still isn’t fucking over. You’d think by now it would be finished with us, but instead there’s something new every day. Another shock, another betrayal, another thing to learn to live with. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/14/fuck-2016/ Mon, 14 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/14/cocks-not-glocks/ This actually happened at UT Austin. Hundreds of students showed up with oversized rubber dildos strapped to their bodies to protest the campus carry law—you know, the Texas law that lets anyone 21 and older carry a loaded gun on campus and basically everywhere else. They decided the only way to fight absurdity was with more absurdity. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/14/cocks-not-glocks/ Mon, 14 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/14/vs-big-night/ V Magazine threw its annual party in New York again, which means a certain density of beautiful people in one room at the kind of event where everyone’s dressed to prove something. Troye Sivan performed. The guest list read like a modeling agency roster mixed with people who exist primarily on Instagram—Taylor Hill, Gigi Hadid, Kacy Hill, and a bunch of others whose names blur together when you’re scrolling through photos the next day. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/14/vs-big-night/ Mon, 14 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/14/the-nutella-burger/ McDonald’s Italy had a Nutella burger and it was exactly as ridiculous and perfect as it sounds—a bun with what must have been an entire jar of Nutella shoved inside and nothing else. I found out about it in 2016, back when the internet still showed you things you wanted to see instead of things it calculated would get you to click. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/14/the-nutella-burger/ Mon, 14 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/14/close-enough/ YouTube is mostly unwatchable trash for me. Prank videos from morons, endless Let’s Plays, comment sections that are just pure vitriol. I don’t know why anyone spends time on it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/14/close-enough/ Mon, 14 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/13/branching-paths/ Watching someone make something from nothing—no studio, no budget, just a person in a room spending a year on something nobody asked for—that’s where the real work is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/13/branching-paths/ Sun, 13 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/13/the-bluèzzzrn/ POORGRRRL has this song called The BluèzZz…rn. It doesn’t look away. It’s about the heavy times—pills, grief, the kind of darkness that stops feeling temporary and becomes the actual shape of things. Nothing redemptive about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/13/the-bluèzzzrn/ Sun, 13 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/12/parallel-internets/ I didn’t realize how completely walled off Chinese social media was until I actually looked into it. No Facebook, no Instagram, no Twitter—blocked or irrelevant, depending on who you ask. Instead, a whole universe of apps I’d never heard of: Douyu, Longzhu, Xiandanjia, Ingkee. These aren’t Western knockoffs that somehow failed; they’re the dominant platforms for a billion people, built from the ground up for an entirely different internet. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/12/parallel-internets/ Sat, 12 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/12/the-design-works/ You notice it if you’re paying attention: the economic collapse, the refugees, the conspiracy theories filling in what people can’t understand otherwise. Someone offers simple answers and someone to blame. People take them. The pattern’s obvious enough that it feels stupid to point out, but here we are. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/12/the-design-works/ Sat, 12 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/12/tiki-tabu/ Theophilus London was performing at a party for Amuse, a Vice subsidiary, at Tiki Tabu on the Lower East Side. That was reason enough to pay attention. He was at that point where everything he made felt necessary, where you could feel him becoming something the moment couldn’t contain. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/12/tiki-tabu/ Sat, 12 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/12/the-unwritten-rules/ Everyone past 21 is basically dead on social media. You cross some invisible line and suddenly you’re not getting the memos anymore, doing everything wrong without realizing it. It’s all unwritten rules that everyone else just knows. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/12/the-unwritten-rules/ Sat, 12 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/12/and-july/ Most people in the West still think K-pop is something that started three years ago, or maybe they caught one song on the radio and thought that was the whole thing. But South Korea’s been running this entire parallel music industry for decades, and every year it gets bigger. The factories are insane—they take teenagers, train them for years, manufacture these perfect idols. You’d think it’d be soulless, but a lot of the music is actually good. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/12/and-july/ Sat, 12 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/12/plastic-orgastic/ Pink everywhere—balloons, candles, this glibbering substance that shouldn’t work in photographs but somehow does. I found myself staring at Bruna Reis’s “Plastic Orgastic” for longer than I meant to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/12/plastic-orgastic/ Sat, 12 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/12/kabalagala/ A Peace Corps worker described Kampala’s Kabalagala bar district as “Tijuana on LSD,” which tells you something. He saw girls there in bars who were trying to seduce him and his girlfriend while scrolling through photos of their own kids on their phones, these two desires running parallel, and he couldn’t tell whether he was shocked or disgusted or both. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/12/kabalagala/ Sat, 12 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/11/brewdog-lands-in-mitte/ BrewDog opened in Mitte, between Nordbahnhof and Rosenthaler Platz. The interior is concrete and steel, the look every Berlin bar is chasing now—designed to feel real. They stock local breweries next to everything else, which is the contradiction right there. BrewDog isn’t from Berlin but they’re pouring Vagabund and Berliner Berg. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/11/brewdog-lands-in-mitte/ Fri, 11 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/11/the-ceremony/ The Komische Oper in Berlin hosted GQ’s 18th annual awards ceremony for their “Men of the Year,” and eight hundred and fifty people showed up to watch other people get trophies. That’s a lot of people to convince that this matters, but they managed it, mostly because Bill Murray was in the building. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/11/the-ceremony/ Fri, 11 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/11/another-girl-another-planet/ You know that moment when someone stops thinking about the camera? When the awareness just drops and they’re living again? Valerie Phillips has learned to wait for it. Her new book is full of those moments—girls and women caught in the midst of their actual lives, unguarded, in all the texture and contradiction of living. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/11/another-girl-another-planet/ Fri, 11 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/11/still-in-witcher-3/ I still think about Witcher 3 constantly, which is pathetic for a game that’s been out for years. The problem is it’s full of these what-if moments that never leave you. I’ll find a Reddit video about some alternate Ciri or Triss fate and suddenly I’m replaying the entire thing in my head, different choices, different endings—except I already know I’d make the exact same calls. It’s always Triss. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/11/still-in-witcher-3/ Fri, 11 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/11/out-of-the-van/ Møme records from a van. Not metaphorically - an actual converted van he’s been driving around, mostly in Australia, making music between surf sessions. Jérémy Souillart is the name, but the van’s the fact that matters. This isn’t a lifestyle brand or a content angle. He genuinely lives this way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/11/out-of-the-van/ Fri, 11 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/11/something-in-the-water/ Tom Grennan’s from Bedford. His voice has this weight to it that makes you listen without trying. Around the third song I realized I’d stopped thinking about anything else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/11/something-in-the-water/ Fri, 11 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/11/mari/ Harajuku’s thing is that everyone’s got style, or at least everyone’s trying. You see it everywhere—kids mixing the wildest colors and shapes, throwing stickers of anime and Disney characters all over themselves like they’re creating some kind of beautiful mess. There’s no restraint, just intensity. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/11/mari/ Fri, 11 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/10/that-miley-video/ The morning after Trump won, my feed filled with the usual grief—friends posting apocalypse memes, sharing dread in group chats, people trying to joke their way through genuine panic. Everyone was processing the same thing in the same way, which meant nobody was really processing it at all. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/10/that-miley-video/ Thu, 10 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/10/the-most-expensive-joint/ 420 Science Club just made the world’s most expensive joint. I saw something about it in passing—a German YouTube channel that’s basically dedicated to documenting the experience of smoking increasingly elaborate weed products. I haven’t watched the video. Honestly I probably won’t. But the basic concept stuck with me in a way I can’t quite shake. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/10/the-most-expensive-joint/ Thu, 10 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/10/all-in/ The black eyeliner, the black hair, the whole committed aesthetic—Masha Sedgwick looked like she meant it when she was going through that emo phase. You could tell she wasn’t just trying it on. Everyone else was performing a little, testing the waters, but she had gone all in. I noticed her because of that seriousness. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/10/all-in/ Thu, 10 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/10/the-basic-issue/ Die BLONDE put out a new issue—they’re calling it Basic, which as a title is almost aggressive in its refusal to be clever. It’s the kind of magazine you don’t think about constantly, but when you encounter it you remember why you liked it in the first place. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/10/the-basic-issue/ Thu, 10 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/10/what-freedom-costs/ The internet got way less free, way faster than anyone expected. Governments started regulating it, corporations started controlling it, intelligence agencies started collecting everything moving through it. The NSA, GCHQ, BND—they’re all drowning in data now, grabbing more than they could ever parse, just because they can and nobody’s stopping them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/10/what-freedom-costs/ Thu, 10 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/10/mickey-in-tokyo/ I could quit my job right now, buy a ton of ice cream, and watch animated Disney films until I die. I mean the real ones—not those garbage live-action movies where teenagers dance and sing like it matters. I’m talking “The Little Mermaid,” “Cinderella,” “Beauty and the Beast.” Those are genuinely good films. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/10/mickey-in-tokyo/ Thu, 10 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/10/voting-to-burn-it-down/ There’s a pattern in how people talk about working-class voters. Someone votes for Trump or supports Brexit, backs the AfD, and the instant assumption: stupid, hateful, nostalgic for fascism. What’s harder to consider is that they might just have reasons. Real ones. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/10/voting-to-burn-it-down/ Thu, 10 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/9/what-suzy-was-making/ Suzy was the kind of person you spot in Tokyo and immediately read the whole outfit like it’s a sentence in a language you understand. M.I.A, Rita Ora, Natalia Kills—all embedded in the way she wore things, references so tight that if you didn’t know those names you’d miss the point entirely. That specific era in pop where everything suddenly felt engineered but urgent. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/9/what-suzy-was-making/ Wed, 09 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/9/wearing-anger/ Jesse Fox made a series called Sticks & Stones where her friends wore Trump masks and were photographed looking absolutely furious. This was 2016, when everything felt like it was collapsing and there wasn’t much you could do except stay angry. She had the masks from a music video shoot, and what the photographs showed was raw anger—not performed, just real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/9/wearing-anger/ Wed, 09 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/9/a-parallel-world/ PLAY16 was Hamburg’s games festival in November. Not the polished convention thing - just indie developers, artists, students, people showing work they made for its own sake. Workshops, exhibitions, talks about design and creation. Everything centered on bodies and presence, physicality in games. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/9/a-parallel-world/ Wed, 09 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/9/when-it-became-real/ The night of the election I kept watching the map, waiting for it to shift. It didn’t. By the time it was mathematically impossible to turn around, I’d already stopped looking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/9/when-it-became-real/ Wed, 09 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/9/tilt/ Maeckes keeps coming up in rotation. His new album “Tilt” holds its own against “Zwei”—maybe better, still deciding. If I had to listen to one song until I die, it’d be “Tisch,” the track with Balbina where they’re basically saying that needing someone while being too much of a mess to actually commit is at once pretty hot and completely selfish. There’s a real confession in there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/9/tilt/ Wed, 09 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/8/super-tamade/ Walking into Super Tamade for the first time in Osaka felt like stepping into a neon fever dream. The place is impossibly bright, aggressively bright, with these garish illustrated signs everywhere—stars and carrots and spaceships rendered in the most unhinged color combinations. Yellow price tags mark deals that seem almost insulting in how cheap they are, like the store is daring you to buy whatever’s underneath. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/8/super-tamade/ Tue, 08 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/8/magazine-for-people-who-hate-teens/ A few years ago, every major publisher suddenly panicked that they were losing the youth market, so they started throwing money at digital magazines designed for teenagers—shiny, mobile-first operations with sunglasses-on energy and headlines about YouTubers. Most of them died quietly. Celepedia was one of them, and it’s worth thinking about why, because it’s the clearest possible example of adults trying to buy cultural relevance and fucking it up entirely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/8/magazine-for-people-who-hate-teens/ Tue, 08 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/8/seoul-eventually/ I haven’t made it to Seoul yet, which is probably weird considering how much I think about going. Been to Japan the way I wanted. Dragged myself through America. Canada was fine, you know? Pretty enough. But South Korea keeps showing up in my head, never quite landing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/8/seoul-eventually/ Tue, 08 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/8/the-hate-mail/ Once the blog hit a certain size, the hate mail changed. Not “I disagree” hate. Actual threats. “Kill yourself, hang yourself, die of AIDS.” You read some at first because you’re curious what people will say. Then you stop reading them. Then you start again. Then you stop again. Eventually you just scroll past them, except some days one lands different and you pause on it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/8/the-hate-mail/ Tue, 08 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/8/vanishing/ Tajikistan’s government picks people up and they vanish. A journalist. An activist. Someone who posted something on Facebook that contradicted the official line. The police arrive, they’re gone, and then—nothing. Sometimes their families find out they’ve been tortured. Sometimes they just never hear from them again. Thousands have fled because staying is essentially asking to be made to disappear. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/8/vanishing/ Tue, 08 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/8/rafaela-camilo/ There were these photographs circulating online—intimate shots of a woman from Rio, shot in a way that felt serious even though she was barely wearing anything. The kind of image that makes you curious about who’s in it. Her name’s Rafaela Camilo, and she’s a DJ. Once I listened to her mixes, the photographs made sense. They weren’t just good-looking; they were documenting someone who actually knew what she was doing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/8/rafaela-camilo/ Tue, 08 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/8/ned-flanders-is-a-metal-god/ There’s a metal band called Okilly Dokilly devoted to Ned Flanders. They made “White Wine Spritzer” as a hymn to his wholesomeness. This is real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/8/ned-flanders-is-a-metal-god/ Tue, 08 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/7/five-cans-a-day/ Brown urine. Yellow skin. A construction worker somewhere in Florida showed up at the doctor’s office wondering what was happening to his body, and when they ran the blood work, the numbers came back almost unreadable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/7/five-cans-a-day/ Mon, 07 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/7/hate-mail/ Here’s what I’ve learned from a decade of people telling me I’m garbage: the ones worth reading are the ones that point at something true. Stefan’s message is almost respectful—he’s thought it through, compared us to reptilians of tabloid journalism, asks whether we’d put this on a resume or if we wrote everything intoxicated. That’s commitment. Natalie’s shorter: we’re all dumb, the writing’s boring, no amount of fucking or drugs will fix it. Cassandra just wants to unsee us. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/7/hate-mail/ Mon, 07 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/7/what-he-wants/ The guy’s spent his entire career doing exactly what I scribbled in the margins of my school notebooks and then threw away. Jonny Negron just never stopped. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/7/what-he-wants/ Mon, 07 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/7/yung-oettinger/ Günther Oettinger was an EU Commissioner who spoke English like it was being routed through corrupted audio files. I remember encountering clips of him talking and waiting for my brain to catch up to what was actually being said—words just getting destroyed as they came out of his mouth. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/7/yung-oettinger/ Mon, 07 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/7/pale-breeze/ Black’s Beach near San Diego is one of the places where nudity is legal. So when photographer Lauren Marie decided to shoot her subject Alexandra Sweiss topless, that’s where they went. A.J., as she goes by, travels constantly and loves being in different places, learning how different cultures work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/7/pale-breeze/ Mon, 07 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/7/breaking-the-dead/ The Walking Dead never bothered explaining what started the apocalypse. That blank space is where fan theories live. Someone had the thought: what if Breaking Bad’s Walter White caused it? What if that blue meth, cooked in a desert RV, got into someone’s system and rewired them into something hungry and undead? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/7/breaking-the-dead/ Mon, 07 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/7/pull-up/ Music loses me fast. I’ll obsess over something on Apple Music for a couple of days, loop it until I’ve dissected every background layer, and then the spell breaks. That’s just how I listen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/7/pull-up/ Mon, 07 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/7/what-they-did-to-no74/ I keep ending up at the adidas store on Torstraße in Berlin. Not that I’m hunting for specific shoes—it’s more like the kind of place you drift into when you’re with people and a few drinks deep, and you look up realizing an hour’s passed while you were examining sneakers by Raf Simons or Rick Owens or Pharrell Williams. People who actually care about proportion and material. The store had that pull. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/7/what-they-did-to-no74/ Mon, 07 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/6/las-vegas/ I went to Las Vegas once and spent the whole time aware of two different cities existing at the same time. The lights, the casinos, the money—that part is real. But one wrong turn and you’re somewhere completely different. Same place, same city, but a different world. The casinos still glow over the rooftops even from the parts where nobody’s winning anything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/6/las-vegas/ Sun, 06 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/6/everyones-circling/ I read a handful of pieces that week that kept bumping into the same wall—everything that’s supposed to be authentic keeps getting sold back to you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/6/everyones-circling/ Sun, 06 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/6/bape-star/ I’ve been an adidas guy for years. Superstars mostly. That’s the most minimal thing you can do with a shoe, and I like that about it. Before some anniversary campaign turned them into the unofficial footwear of every Berlin teenager, I was already wearing them. Stan Smiths too. The logic is the same: minimalism, nothing you don’t need. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/6/bape-star/ Sun, 06 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/6/what-they-refused/ There’s something about following activism in other countries—you see the problem through a different lens, hear it in a different accent. In Brazil, the women making noise about harassment and beauty standards weren’t being gentle about it. Models were refusing the jobs that came with a side of groping. Rappers like Lay from São Paulo were making it part of the record. Activists just kept pushing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/6/what-they-refused/ Sun, 06 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/6/yuri/ Quiet girl meets popular girl and something shifts that neither of them expected. Hand-holding that makes her heart race. A look that lasts a second too long. The air between them becomes charged. This is where yuri manga always starts, and it’s the same story because it works—the moment someone realizes another person has become necessary to them in a way that changes everything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/6/yuri/ Sun, 06 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/6/how-it-starts/ Can Dündar was the editor of Cumhuriyet when the Turkish government decided editors needed to go. They locked him up on espionage charges, he got out somehow, fled to Germany, and now he’s writing about what’s actually happening back home. It’s the kind of warning you read and then have to sit with because it’s too much to process quickly. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/6/how-it-starts/ Sun, 06 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/6/tsukiji/ Early morning at Tsukiji and the whole place operates in this practiced chaos. Tuna auctions in the corner, bidders shouting, fish getting wheeled away to be broken down. The restaurants are stalls really—you sit at a counter with maybe seven other people and watch someone who’s been making sushi the exact same way for decades work through the morning. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/6/tsukiji/ Sun, 06 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/5/shibuya-calling/ Shibuya churns through hype cycles—a new shop opens, you either catch it or you don’t, everyone’s looking for what comes next. I went to Banny’s opening near Meiji-jingumae mostly just because I was around. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/5/shibuya-calling/ Sat, 05 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/5/i-cant-help-myself/ You spend enough effort becoming an adult and leave certain things behind, and then the decade you thought you’d escaped comes crawling back. First the old Nintendo games, then the plastic pocket gadgets, and now the Kelly Family reunion tour. I can’t help myself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/5/i-cant-help-myself/ Sat, 05 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/5/plant-yourself/ TOY bolted flower boxes onto Berlin S-Bahn trains in daylight. Actual plants, actual dirt, masked and deliberate and not in any hurry. They called the action “Pflanz dich hin.” Deutsche Bahn spent the afternoon pulling them off, probably. The cops may have been involved, may not have. But for a few hours, commuters had prettier trains, which is a weird kind of victory to get from a quasi-legal afternoon. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/5/plant-yourself/ Sat, 05 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/5/what-adblockers-sell/ I installed my first adblocker sometime in the mid-2000s, because I was tired of banner ads and autoplay videos and the whole exhausting ecosystem of online advertising. Seemed obvious. Smart, even. Free software that protected your privacy. Win-win. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/5/what-adblockers-sell/ Sat, 05 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/5/alexandra-rubinstein/ Alexandra Rubinstein’s a painter from Brooklyn who decided to paint male celebrities giving head, with thought-bubble captions about what they’re thinking while they do it. Leonardo DiCaprio: “What’s Gilbert Grape Eating?” Drake: “Best I Ever Had!” Beckham: “Eat It Like Beckham.” Justin Bieber: “Is It Too Late Now?”—which is perfect because you can feel the desperation in that one, some pathetic maybe-this-fixes-it energy. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/5/alexandra-rubinstein/ Sat, 05 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/5/pay-attention/ Most guys are terrible at this. I don’t mean in theory - I mean most real guys. They’re confidently, completely incompetent, and almost none of them know it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/5/pay-attention/ Sat, 05 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/5/two-jackets/ The back alleys of Glebe don’t look like anything—streets that don’t go anywhere, walls tagged years back, vegetation growing out of concrete. Spring light hits them a particular way, though. Raw and honest. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/11/5/two-jackets/ Sat, 05 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/7/older-people-like-video/ Somewhere around 2016, every editor in the world decided text was dead. Video was the future. Adobe Premiere was the new literacy. If you couldn’t cut in Final Cut you might as well start looking for another job, because everyone said the kids were done with reading—YouTube was the only language they understood anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/7/older-people-like-video/ Fri, 07 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/7/two-weeks-of-magic/ I’m not good at League of Legends. I need to establish that first. But there were maybe three weeks where I wasn’t completely useless. I was playing Riven, and something about it felt different. I could see what the game wanted to be, in the spaces between getting destroyed by twelve-year-olds. Before and after that window I was just food for better players, but those weeks I felt it—something real buried under the grind. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/7/two-weeks-of-magic/ Fri, 07 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/7/fucking-berlin/ A proper film about Berlin needs three things. Young people who actually leave the house after 10 PM instead of ordering three extra-cheese pizzas and binging Game of Thrones until they fall asleep. Sex—lots of it, ideally involving boys and girls and maybe an entire Spanish exchange class. And dark clubs where beats and ecstasy are the only currency that matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/7/fucking-berlin/ Fri, 07 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/7/done/ Germany keeps telling itself it’s liberal, progressive, welcoming. A model for Europe. But that welcome’s got fine print. Cross certain lines and you feel it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/7/done/ Fri, 07 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/7/the-bunker/ In the late ’90s, Michael Teufele and Norbert Thormann had been running a gay club called Snax that kept getting forced to move. They finally found a permanent space in an old factory building in Friedrichshain—the kind of concrete block that used to repair trains, all gray walls and industrial bones. No theme, no concept, no decoration. Just a warehouse. They named it Ostgut and opened the doors. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/7/the-bunker/ Fri, 07 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/7/maeckes-wont-sell/ You know exactly how it would work. Spend thirty years making music nobody pays attention to, or let the industry remake you into something marketable and digestible, and you’re famous. The choice is stupidly clear. The manufacturing process is brutal but effective—every rough edge smoothed, every weird impulse calibrated, every trace of actual personhood veneered over with something that photographs well and plays well with algorithms. It’s a real transaction: your self for their distribution. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/7/maeckes-wont-sell/ Fri, 07 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/6/before-and-after/ There are basically two periods in a life. The time before you understand sriracha, and everything after. This is not hyperbole. It’s a Thai hot sauce from Si Racha—a coastal city that’s given its name to something most people will use for the rest of their lives. Chilies, vinegar, garlic, sugar, salt. That’s it. That’s the entire thing, and it’s somehow perfect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/6/before-and-after/ Thu, 06 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/6/izas-pikachu/ You see someone walking through Tokyo with a Pikachu on their head and you have two choices: assume they’re in costume, or accept that this person has simply decided to live this way. Iza chose the latter. That’s actually her head. That’s how she moves through the world. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/6/izas-pikachu/ Thu, 06 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/6/on-repeat/ When “Love on Top” comes on in a club, I scream “That’s my song!” like I wrote the thing myself. Beyoncé doesn’t know this, but that moment when you think it’s over and she just screams “Baby it’s YOU!!”—I’ve heard it a thousand times on long drives and it never gets old. It owns you completely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/6/on-repeat/ Thu, 06 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/6/the-dental-camera/ Huge photographs of vaginas at STUDIOLO Berlin, shot with a dental camera. Peter Kaaden was testing equipment on things he actually wanted to look at, which has a certain logic—why waste the magnification on dental applications? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/6/the-dental-camera/ Thu, 06 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/6/where-she-fits/ Crystal Moselle made a short about a girl named Rachelle who lives outside New York and feels completely locked out of the skate scene. She’s intimidated by the people in it, sure it’s not for her, small in the face of people who make it look effortless. Then she meets a group of girls who skate without needing to prove anything, and something in her shifts. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/6/where-she-fits/ Thu, 06 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/6/pills-to-glory/ Most drugs are shit. Not all—pizza’s basically a drug, love is one too, coke definitely counts. A little coke always works. The weird thing is, this was supposed to stay hidden, something that only happened in cycling and Olympic doping scandals. But in esports, it’s become the whole story: no fame without chemistry. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/6/pills-to-glory/ Thu, 06 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/6/nicolas-tokyo/ Nicola Formichetti did the art direction for Diesel’s 30-year anniversary show in Tokyo, and that’s the kind of gig that makes sense for him. His mother was a Japanese flight attendant, his father an Italian pilot - the kind of background that gives you claim to two places at once. He got discovered by Katy England, who gave him a column at Dazed & Confused when he was just starting out, which is basically the story of him existing at the intersection of underground and mainstream fashion without ever seeing those as separate things. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/6/nicolas-tokyo/ Thu, 06 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/6/borrowed-skins/ I get the desire to disappear into another life. Your actual existence feels constrained—job, habits, the same people expecting the same things from you. You want to be someone else. You want to feel like you’re fighting for something real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/6/borrowed-skins/ Thu, 06 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/5/jan-böhmermann-can-talk-now/ Jan Böhmermann posted a press conference on YouTube looking genuinely relieved. A German comedian had just been cleared of charges for—and this is the whole insanity—writing a satirical poem. The plaintiff was Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s president. The case had taken years. Angela Merkel even apologized for his joke at one point. When it ended, Böhmermann’s relief was visible. ’I can make jokes about anything again,’ he said. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/5/jan-böhmermann-can-talk-now/ Wed, 05 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/5/flea-market-manga/ I’ll admit it: despite being an almost comically devoted anime fan, manga never stuck with me. I found those first Dragon Ball volumes at a flea market once and felt this weird happiness, then it just… evaporated. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/5/flea-market-manga/ Wed, 05 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/5/not-performing/ Cara Delevingne doesn’t seem to do things that don’t feel like her. That’s the thing about her. You watch her and there’s no performance, no sense that she’s acting out a role in her own career—she just does what feels right and doesn’t apologize. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/5/not-performing/ Wed, 05 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/5/the-same-light/ I’d seen Thailand in a hundred photographs before I ever got there. The temples, the night markets, that light between the buildings at dusk. All of it was already familiar from other people’s travel feeds and magazine features. Duran Levinson, who’s shot for VICE and Red Bull and everyone else you’d expect, spent time there recently. The work he brought back isn’t pretending to reveal some undiscovered side of the place. It’s doing something quieter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/5/the-same-light/ Wed, 05 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/5/when-anime-was-simple/ Curtis Newton’s adventures on the Comet were just another Tuesday afternoon on German TV. The ship, the crew, the general sense that someone had cobbled together a space opera from spare parts and optimism. I didn’t know then that this stuff had been edited and remixed, re-dubbed into something barely recognizable from the original Japanese. It was just space opera, simple as that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/5/when-anime-was-simple/ Wed, 05 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/5/after-hannah/ I’ve seen Miley Cyrus naked so many times I’ve basically memorized her body. And yeah, I know exactly what that makes me, and I’m not sorry about it. But there’s more going on with the Plastik shoot than just the nudity, and that’s what keeps me thinking about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/5/after-hannah/ Wed, 05 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/5/berlin-slowly/ Berlin in the afternoon feels different than Berlin at night or in the morning. There’s this particular exhaustion to the daylight hours, a sense that the city has already shown you most of its hand and now you’re just picking through what’s left. We went to Dandy Diner first—vegan food that doesn’t feel like penance, which is harder to find than you’d think. Then Made in Berlin, a vintage shop that has the kind of inventory that comes from someone with actual vision instead of someone who just opened a store in a gentrified neighborhood. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/5/berlin-slowly/ Wed, 05 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/4/how-it-falls-apart/ Nazis function better in groups. Surround them with their friends and the performance is complete—beer, slogans, the whole theatrical monologue. But isolate one, put him across from someone asking genuine questions, and the facade cracks. Suddenly he’s stammering, backpedaling, finding reasons why that foreigner isn’t so bad after all. The conviction was never real. It was just the crowd noise. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/10/4/how-it-falls-apart/ Tue, 04 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/8/24/standing-in-line/ Cosplayers everywhere, some genuinely great, most just enthusiastically committed. Professional esports players locked onto screens. Hours-long lines of people willing to wait for five minutes with whatever the industry had decided was going to be huge that year. That’s Gamescom in Cologne. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2016/8/24/standing-in-line/ Wed, 24 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/10/10/weekend-rotation/ It’s dark and cold outside, the kind of weekend you just surrender to. Dump yourself on the couch, grab whatever snacks are around, and don’t plan on leaving. Here’s what I’ve had on rotation for exactly this situation. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/10/10/weekend-rotation/ Sat, 10 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/10/9/the-songs-that-made-me/ Blink 182 were my only friends from fifteen to eighteen. Tom DeLonge, Travis Barker, Mark Hoppus—they lived in my Discman and I didn’t need much else. We rode bikes, played too many video games, got dumped repeatedly, hung in internet cafes, bought fake Fubu hoodies by accident. Their albums don’t lose anything even now. But Take Off Your Pants and Jackets is the one—it has this bright season feeling, first real love, decent people around me, actual normal teenage life. Something like American Pie, which I wanted so badly. With “Anthem Part Two” I’m still there, the whole vivid thing playing out in my head. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/10/9/the-songs-that-made-me/ Fri, 09 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/10/9/making-mario/ Super Mario World is what made me care about games in the first place. Had my Super Nintendo and my friends’ consoles running constantly. I could argue endlessly about how perfect it was—and it still is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/10/9/making-mario/ Fri, 09 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/10/9/sneaker-season/ The weather shifts in a way that’s hard to name until it’s obvious—the light changes, the air gets thinner—and suddenly you’re thinking about shoes again. New ones, always, even though you know exactly which ones you’ll end up buying. That’s the thing about sneakers. You develop a relationship with specific models the way some people do with hoodies or jeans. You own three pairs of them. You’ve owned three pairs of them for the past decade. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/10/9/sneaker-season/ Fri, 09 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/10/9/from-the-same-circle/ I came across Bravo Ko after spending time with Chih Hsien Chen’s photographs from Taiwan, and it turns out they’re not just from the same city—they’re in the same friend circle. That kind of proximity, where artists are actually living and working together instead of performing for an audience, is what makes the work feel alive. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/10/9/from-the-same-circle/ Fri, 09 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/10/9/revival/ I never cared much about Selena Gomez. She seemed perpetually trapped by whatever happened to her - the Disney past she couldn’t shake, the relationships that didn’t work, the illness, the relentless attention. Other people created the story; she just had to live in it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/10/9/revival/ Fri, 09 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/10/8/dorfdrift/ There’s a moment when you’re at the supermarket, hand on an apple, and you think for maybe a second about where it came from. You imagine a farm somewhere, probably not that far away actually, definitely somewhere in Germany if you’re shopping at EDEKA, and then you put it in your cart because you’re hungry and the moment passes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/10/8/dorfdrift/ Thu, 08 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/10/7/making-it-official/ Johannes Huebl was discovered at eighteen in Hannover. A few years later he’s working for Ralph Lauren, Hugo Boss, the luxury brands. One day you’re a kid in a German city, the next you’re a model in international campaigns. The fashion industry doesn’t groom people so much as it claims them—someone sees potential, and that’s enough. The rest just follows. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/10/7/making-it-official/ Wed, 07 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/29/pixelporno-what-i-actually-saw/ The first time I left Ul’dah in Final Fantasy 14, I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. The game presents itself as a standard MMORPG: dragons, magic, knights, the whole formula. You spend the opening hours grinding on rats and spiders, watching veterans zip past on giant mounts in glowing armor. It’s fine. It’s what you expect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/29/pixelporno-what-i-actually-saw/ Tue, 29 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/29/whats-actually-there/ The acoustic version of “Hotel” by BOY is just Valeska Steiner and Sonja Glass with nothing else—no production, no tricks. The song is all there is, and I think that’s the whole point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/29/whats-actually-there/ Tue, 29 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/29/magnets/ Disclosure’s new album Caracal has a track called “Magnets” with Lorde on it, and the whole thing is almost an afterthought, which is why it lands so well. She’s barely there, just a voice drifting through the production like she wandered into their studio and decided to stay for a few takes. Guy and Howard built the actual song; she’s just there, not trying to own any of it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/29/magnets/ Tue, 29 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/5/munichs-welcome/ The BBC sent video from Munich’s train station. Refugees arriving by rail, and the platform erupts—not in anger, in applause. Helpers handing out candy to kids. Doctors already there. You watch the faces change. First shock. Then the slow realization that someone is glad they’re here. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/5/munichs-welcome/ Sat, 05 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/4/the-critic-inside/ You pay for German public broadcasting whether you watch it or not. The Rundfunkbeitrag comes out of your account every month, a mandatory fee, and most people spend about as much emotional energy on it as they do on their water bill: none at all. It funds ARD, ZDF, dozens of regional stations. Billions of euros every year. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/4/the-critic-inside/ Fri, 04 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/4/lollapalooza-berlin/ Lollapalooza at Tempelhof that year had a solid lineup: Muse and The Libertines and Seeed, and enough else worth finding. What made it work was the whole thing—the music was fine, but the food and street art and the general design of the space mattered just as much. Most festivals had turned into brands by then, so it was good to see one that understood what you’re actually paying for: a day that feels right. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/4/lollapalooza-berlin/ Fri, 04 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/4/die-ärzte-number-one/ A German punk band’s thirty-year-old anti-Nazi song somehow landed at number one on iTunes. Strange, but not the strangest part of this story. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/4/die-ärzte-number-one/ Fri, 04 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/4/if-it-means-nothing/ The photos got everywhere. A small boy, drowned. Three years old. Aylan Kurdi. You see it once and it doesn’t leave. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/4/if-it-means-nothing/ Fri, 04 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/4/the-worlds-ending-hooray/ You wake up reading about the next war. Not as metaphor—as actual next. Everyone’s been waiting for it. Putin, Kim Jong-un, the familiar architects of collapse. Refugees. Walls. Bombs. The same machinery of power and cruelty, running exactly as designed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/4/the-worlds-ending-hooray/ Fri, 04 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/3/what-i-dont-know/ I don’t know anything about Taiwan. Not its history, not what matters to the people there, not what they need or what they’re building toward. Twenty-five million people live on that island in East Asia. There’s a republic that started in 1912 after the mainland fell apart. I know this from reading about it, not from understanding it the way you do when you live somewhere. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/3/what-i-dont-know/ Thu, 03 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/3/my-new-hero/ Tara Monroe shows up to Texas State every day in a hot-pink Barbie Jeep, which is where this story starts. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/3/my-new-hero/ Thu, 03 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/2/cry-for-love/ Die Ärzte put out “Cry for Love” in 1993 as a straight-up attack on fascism. Germany’s most beloved punk band making their most obvious statement. The song became the anthem—the thing you’d hear screaming at rallies, in the streets, anywhere people were trying to fight back against the right-wing tide. So when the fascists started creeping back into the conversation again, someone had the obvious idea: push the song back. Get it charting. Get it on the radio. Make it impossible to ignore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/2/cry-for-love/ Wed, 02 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/2/at-scale/ The thing about Instagram art is that it disappears. You see something clever or beautiful for a moment and then you’re scrolling past the next image. There’s no time to sit with it. So there’s something interesting about what happens when you pull that work off the feed and print it huge on a wall in a real room where you have no choice but to stop and actually look. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/2/at-scale/ Wed, 02 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/1/the-true-king/ I’ve been thinking about Joffrey Baratheon way too much. He’s universally hated—complete agreement on this—which creates a kind of pull. All that concentrated contempt makes you wonder what’s underneath. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/1/the-true-king/ Tue, 01 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/1/the-nerd-queen/ Every few months the Japanese anime industry churns out a batch of new shows, and I sift through the first episodes because most of it is terrible. I’m picky about anime, always have been. What kills a show for me is cheap animation, figures drawn with dead eyes and weird proportions. High school kids with superpowers saving the world for the millionth time. Mechas. I know everyone expects me to love all mechas because I worship Neon Genesis Evangelion, but the rest of them just don’t do it for me. Most of them are dumb. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/1/the-nerd-queen/ Tue, 01 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/1/casual/ Joachim Herrmann, a CSU minister, was on a German talk show about refugees when he decided to demonstrate how well Black people had integrated. He smiled as he did it. He talked about Roberto Blanco, that wonderful Black singer everyone loved, and all those Black players on Bayern Munich—see, we accept them, everyone likes them. He called them n-words. Said it while smiling, said it on television at prime time like it was the most natural word in his mouth. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/9/1/casual/ Tue, 01 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/31/mileys-vma-stunt/ Miley Cyrus hosted the VMAs last night, and she was on this whole campaign to make sure every person on Earth saw her breasts. Every. Single. One. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/31/mileys-vma-stunt/ Mon, 31 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/31/wildest-dreams/ Brunette Taylor lying before a lion is the image that stayed with me from the Wildest Dreams video. The whole thing is shot in this elaborate African setting—giraffes, zebras, impossible landscapes, romance against a safari backdrop. She has the resources and creative control to build any world she wants, and she built this one well. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/31/wildest-dreams/ Mon, 31 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/31/adequate/ I’ve gotten plenty of mediocre blow jobs. The kind where you’re lying there thinking about your grocery list, waiting for it to finish. Most people assume it’s intuitive. Put it in your mouth, move around, everyone’s satisfied. Except it doesn’t work that way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/31/adequate/ Mon, 31 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/31/dead-petz/ Miley moderated the VMAs last night, which nobody really cares about anymore, but she used the platform to drop a new album and a video that’s actually worth watching. The album’s called Miley & Her Dead Petz. It’s free. The first track is Dooo It, and the video is what you get when someone famous enough to do whatever she wants decides to make something completely unhinged. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/31/dead-petz/ Mon, 31 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/31/where-it-ends/ One of my exes messaged me once asking why I bothered with all the refugee advocacy, whether I’d actually taken anyone in myself. Bad logic, worse spelling. We weren’t together much longer after that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/31/where-it-ends/ Mon, 31 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/31/the-s-bahn-nazi/ On the Berlin S-Bahn, a man and his friend got drunk and pissed on children. They screamed Nazi slogans while doing it—”Heil Hitler, you Jews,” master-race nonsense. I read about it years ago. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/31/the-s-bahn-nazi/ Mon, 31 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/31/dick-pics/ Every online creator gets them. Dick pics arriving unsolicited, usually from anonymous accounts, at hours that feel personal even though they’re totally random. It’s the background noise of being visible on the internet—so constant it becomes routine, but strange enough to never quite feel normal. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/31/dick-pics/ Mon, 31 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/31/kate-upton-and-small-bikinis/ Kate Upton does something to me. The way she moves, the way she laughs, the effortless thing she’s built around just being completely captivating in a frame. Model, actress—she’s good at both. I’ve followed her rise, and it’s not exactly for the acting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/31/kate-upton-and-small-bikinis/ Mon, 31 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/29/male-nipples/ I found out there’s a Japanese magazine called “I Love Everyone! Man’s Nipple.” The entire thing is dedicated to male nipples. Different colors, different sizes, hairy, smooth. That’s the magazine. Just nipples. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/29/male-nipples/ Sat, 29 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/28/what-we-call-them/ Böhmermann had this bit about language, how you can dress up almost anything if you pick the right words. Call something a Nazi and everyone knows what you mean. Call them an asylum critic and suddenly there’s room in the mind for thoughtfulness. For nuance. For rigor. The word creates space for all the things the reality isn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/28/what-we-call-them/ Fri, 28 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/28/california-here-we-come/ I was completely devoted to The O.C., California. Wednesday nights were sacred, Saturday afternoons the same. I had the DVDs, all the soundtracks. It was just… everything to me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/28/california-here-we-come/ Fri, 28 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/28/what-she-called-her/ There’s a video from 2015 of a woman at a protest in Heidenau, screaming at Merkel as she arrived. Not just angry—screaming a slur at her. The word out there in daylight, in front of cameras and police, like it’s normal. Like everyone gets it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/28/what-she-called-her/ Fri, 28 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/28/pearls-from-freital/ I came across Perlen aus Freital a while back—Christopher and Frederik’s website where they collect racist Facebook comments and send them to people’s employers. Guy gets fired. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/28/pearls-from-freital/ Fri, 28 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/28/i-proposed-to-miley-cyrus/ I’m in love with Miley Cyrus. Actually in love. She’s cool because she just does what she wants—doesn’t perform, doesn’t ask permission. She’s modern the right way: feminist, vegan, refuses to be what anyone else decided she should be. She’s smart and beautiful and says whatever’s on her mind, and her voice will destroy you. How could anyone not love her? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/28/i-proposed-to-miley-cyrus/ Fri, 28 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/28/pizza-won/ I watched RTL cut off a live interview with the Chancellor to cover pizza. This was August 2015, when Germany was watching refugee homes burn, when kids were getting attacked in the street, when something actually felt wrong. Merkel had driven to Heidenau to make a public stand against it. Their afternoon magazine show had her on live. Then they killed the segment for a pizza story. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/28/pizza-won/ Fri, 28 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/28/the-correspondent/ She dressed up as an Australian reporter and walked around LA asking random people what they thought about Miley Cyrus. When they answered, she pulled her shirt up. Just showed them. That was the marketing push for the MTV VMAs she was hosting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/28/the-correspondent/ Fri, 28 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/27/vegan-nudist/ Miley Cyrus shows up on this blog, usually without anything on, always making something happen. It’s her move. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/27/vegan-nudist/ Thu, 27 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/27/squares-arent-everything/ For years Instagram was just squares. Everything you wanted to share had to fit that format. Sunsets, feet, breakfast cereal, your whole visual life cropped and compressed into those equal sides. The square became so total you stopped thinking about it as a limitation. It was just how Instagram worked. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/27/squares-arent-everything/ Thu, 27 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/27/takashi-yasui/ You walk through Kyoto or Osaka or Tokyo and something about those streets doesn’t exist anywhere else. The wide pedestrian zones where you’re lost in the crowd, narrow alleys that hide basement bars and ancient shops, temples consumed by moss and time. You feel it immediately—this is a place with real depth. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/27/takashi-yasui/ Thu, 27 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/27/underweight-too-fat/ Agnes Hedengård is nineteen, Swedish, and was a model until her agents started saying no. Your hips are wrong. Your ass is too fat. She’s 5’11” with a BMI of 17.5—underweight by medical standards—but the numbers she has don’t match the ones they need. She posted videos on YouTube laying it out: agencies are interested until they see her measurements, and then she’s out. The mechanism is simple. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/27/underweight-too-fat/ Thu, 27 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/26/the-mcwhopper/ For years the question hangs over you like an eternal choice: Big Mac or Whopper? It’s stupid and tribal, one of those meaningless brand loyalties you’re born into and never question. You know which one you prefer, and the preference probably has nothing to do with the actual burger—it’s about what you grew up eating, where you sat, who you were with. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/26/the-mcwhopper/ Wed, 26 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/26/small-and-loud/ SPIEGEL TV showed up at the houses of people posting hate on Facebook. Kill them, drown them, gas them. Freital. The videos are weird—confrontation meets boredom, like watching someone get caught in a lie they’ve told themselves long enough to actually believe. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/26/small-and-loud/ Wed, 26 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/26/open-your-mouth/ Joko and Klaas made a video calling out the right-wing hate preachers, the Facebook nazis spreading bile about refugees. They used the hashtag #MundAufmachen—open your mouth, speak up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/26/open-your-mouth/ Wed, 26 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/25/she-came-in-neon/ Every moment a UFO could land on this planet and some tired alien could step out, squinting at the trees and rivers and people. What would they look like? Small and green? Tall and gray? Nothing like us? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/25/she-came-in-neon/ Tue, 25 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/25/billund/ Moving in with someone means IKEA is mandatory. There’s no way around it. You go to the warehouse, you walk the showroom, you measure wrong, you come home with things you didn’t plan to buy. That’s the deal. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/25/billund/ Tue, 25 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/25/what-your-friends-think/ There it is, under his name—a rant about refugees in the specific language of contempt they’ve apparently been marinating in. Posted like a status update about the weather, or what he had for lunch. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/25/what-your-friends-think/ Tue, 25 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/25/white-sweaters/ Deichkind performed at the Echo Awards in 2015 wearing white sweaters printed with “Refugees Welcome” and sold them afterward for fifty euros each. The profit went entirely to ProAsyl. No hidden calculations, no brand gymnastics underneath—just the transaction. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/25/white-sweaters/ Tue, 25 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/25/father-of-the-year/ I’ve seen enough fathers raise sons who turn out exactly like them—same small thinking, same fear of anything different. They don’t even realize they’re passing it down. It calcifies young, before the kid even knows what’s possible. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/25/father-of-the-year/ Tue, 25 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/24/vindication/ I bought a white bed and everyone laughed at me. Full commitment—white frame, white sheets, white pillows, the whole thing. Then V Magazine comes out with a shoot: Kate Upton, Miranda Kerr, Candice Swanepoel, Amber Valletta, all half-naked on white beds, shot by Sebastian Faena. Suddenly my taste in bedroom furniture doesn’t look stupid. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/24/vindication/ Mon, 24 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/24/why-id-go-back-to-gamescom/ I went to gamescom in Cologne two weeks ago. Old news by now, but I’ve never been quick about writing things down anyway. And since this blog basically disappeared for a bit, I figured I’d post the nice photos and talk about which games actually got to me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/24/why-id-go-back-to-gamescom/ Mon, 24 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/24/wir-schaffen-das/ 2015 and the country was losing its mind about refugees. News cycles, online arguments, politicians giving careful non-answers that nobody believed. Then Merkel did a press conference and just said what she thought. “Wir schaffen das.” We can do this. You could feel the country split right there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/24/wir-schaffen-das/ Mon, 24 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/24/brown-disgrace/ Two drunk nazis get on the S41 in Berlin on Saturday night. They see a family that looks Eastern European and immediately start screaming—”Heil Hitler,” the usual garbage—telling them to get out of Germany. One of them drops his pants and pisses on the kids. Other passengers call the police. They get arrested. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/24/brown-disgrace/ Mon, 24 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/24/before-the-internet-got-cool/ The first site I ever made was neon green text on a flashing orange background with animated GIFs I ripped from a Sailor Moon fan page. It was GeoCities, 1997 or so, and I had no idea what I was doing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/24/before-the-internet-got-cool/ Mon, 24 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/24/wide-awake/ Everyone knows “Lieblingsmensch” by now—it’s one of those songs that just exists in the cultural background, played in cars and apartments until it becomes part of how you experience that moment. The kind of song that reaches across to all kinds of people, from the ambitious ones planning their futures to the ones who’ve already fucked up and are trying to move on. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/24/wide-awake/ Mon, 24 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/24/nazis-in-heidenau/ I have this terrible habit of empathizing with everyone. No matter what they’ve done, where they’ve done it, or why—I’m there, trying to understand, reaching for the reason beneath the act. My friends know this about me. They’ve stopped waiting for me to come around. I’ll still be explaining some asshole’s point of view long after they’ve moved on. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/24/nazis-in-heidenau/ Mon, 24 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/24/what-helps/ You know what’s wrong in the same way everyone else does. The news hits the same for all of us. But knowing doesn’t make anything less real or less cold or less unfair when winter comes and someone’s sleeping outside because there’s nowhere else to put them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/24/what-helps/ Mon, 24 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/6/summer-loud/ You’re three weeks out from the first festival and already digging through your closet, trying combinations that probably won’t work, putting them back. You’ll end up in the same outfit three days running anyway, but choosing still takes effort, still takes thought. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/6/summer-loud/ Thu, 06 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/5/still-working/ Paul Kalkbrenner’s been making techno for long enough that you can trace Berlin’s whole shift toward electronic music through his catalog. His new album is his seventh, and at this point he’s less of an artist releasing an album and more of a landmark—someone whose work you use to measure where the city’s sound has gone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/5/still-working/ Wed, 05 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/3/motorcycle-on-water/ I’ve been thinking I need a better way to travel between tropical places. Forget planes and boats. Just motorcycle across the water. It’s obvious in retrospect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/3/motorcycle-on-water/ Mon, 03 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/3/the-true-god/ Lost in Translation is the best film ever made. Scarlett Johansson is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Bill Murray is God. Those are the three constants in an inconsistent universe. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/3/the-true-god/ Mon, 03 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/3/sofias-anaconda/ Sofia Ashraf sampled Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” and made it a weapon. “Kodaikanal Won’t” is a direct attack on Unilever, the massive corporation that poisoned an Indian town and never bothered to clean it up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/3/sofias-anaconda/ Mon, 03 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/3/girl-and-the-trip/ Some media only works under the right conditions. You know this. Watch Hangover alone, sober, depressed—it’s painful. Watch it with your best friends at midnight, beer in hand, in a dark theater? It’s perfect. Some art demands you bring everything to it. Knight Rider was the greatest thing I’d ever seen when I was ten. Same show now is almost unwatchable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/3/girl-and-the-trip/ Mon, 03 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/2/the-detour/ Attack on Titan was the anime event of its time. The battles, the plot twists, humanity’s last walls against colossal naked giants—it made everything else look small. Rightfully. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/2/the-detour/ Sun, 02 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/1/the-act/ Watched an NPD video where Safet Babic and some guys are trying to sound intellectual. Whole thing’s a production - policy discussion, economic ideas, immigration - designed to prove they’re not what people think. That they’re serious, cultivated, real thinkers. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/8/1/the-act/ Sat, 01 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/31/comfortable-with-hatred/ There’s a photo going around of a kid beaten against a wall, the guy who did it smiling at the camera with a thumbs-up. The replies are what you’d expect if you’ve scrolled Facebook: “Right move.” “Self-termination for the left would solve things.” Most people don’t even pause. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/31/comfortable-with-hatred/ Fri, 31 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/31/just-a-door/ The steel door at Berghain is just steel. No sign, no indication. Sven Marquardt stands behind it every night, turning people away. You stand in front of it during the day and there’s nothing—just blank metal. But behind that door, every night, people are getting fucked up, fucking, losing their minds to music. That happens. And the door looks like nothing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/31/just-a-door/ Fri, 31 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/31/tomato-burgers/ I get fatter every week because I’m too lazy to run and gyms disgust me. So I cut carbs sometimes—try to keep it minimal at mealtime, tell myself I’m being good about it. The problem is burgers. You can’t order one without a bun and still pretend you’re trying. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/31/tomato-burgers/ Fri, 31 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/31/the-prosecution/ There’s a moment when a state reveals what it fears most. Usually an indictment does the job. In 2015, Germany prosecuted Netzpolitik—an independent tech news blog—for treason. Their crime was publishing accurate reporting on government surveillance programs. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/31/the-prosecution/ Fri, 31 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/30/the-quiet-work/ Fascism looks good, which is part of what makes it work. Architecture, symbols, uniforms—everything’s designed to pull at something specific. That’s not accidental. That’s the whole plan. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/30/the-quiet-work/ Thu, 30 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/30/treason/ German federal prosecutors charged two journalists at Netzpolitik—Andre Meister and Markus Beckedahl—with treason. Their crime was publishing classified documents about the government’s plans to expand surveillance on social media. They faced up to two years in prison. It was the first treason prosecution of journalists in decades. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/30/treason/ Thu, 30 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/30/the-späti-deal/ Three in the morning on a Thursday, out of cigarettes, and the Späti on the corner is still open. Bier, Zigaretten, Schokolade, Kondome, Gebäck, Wein, Magazine, Chips—they have it all. You stop thinking about what you need the moment you walk through the door. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/30/the-späti-deal/ Thu, 30 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/29/tao-kae-noi/ Some friends came by with Tao Kae Noi seaweed snacks—thin green sheets, crispy and salted. The kind of thing you try because it’s there, and then forget about. Just strange Asian food, one of those things you sample and move on. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/29/tao-kae-noi/ Wed, 29 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/29/stop-performing/ My best friend is obsessed with social media. Genuinely obsessed. When she’s not sleeping, showering, or beating me up for stealing her chocolate, she’s on her phone swiping through apps. But she doesn’t just want to do it herself—she wants me to do it too. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/29/stop-performing/ Wed, 29 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/29/free-delivery/ A 25-year-old from Lower Bavaria posted on Facebook that he had a gas bottle and a hand grenade waiting for the asylum seekers. “Free delivery,” he wrote. The court in Passau fined him seven thousand euros for incitement to hatred. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/29/free-delivery/ Wed, 29 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/28/what-norwegian-television-got-right/ I had three solid theories about sex in elementary school. Something was wrong with me because I got hard whenever Christina—straight-A Christina—walked past my desk. Sex meant putting your dick in the girl’s ass, because that’s where the hole was. Once you did that, you got AIDS, and you were ruined. That was the entire understanding. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/28/what-norwegian-television-got-right/ Tue, 28 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/28/narrowing-it-down/ There’s this feeling when you arrive in a city you don’t know—everything looks interesting but nothing tells you what’s worth your time. Tokyo especially. All those blocks of restaurants and bars, most of them serving people who already know the code. How do you find what matters? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/28/narrowing-it-down/ Tue, 28 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/28/reading-material/ Most internet time is wasted, obviously. Every few months though you stumble on something someone actually thought about instead of just optimized for, and it reminds you why you still bother scrolling. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/28/reading-material/ Tue, 28 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/28/finally-going-to-gamescom/ I’ve been trying to get to Gamescom for years. Even when it was still in Leipzig, I’d tell myself it would happen eventually. Something always came up. This year, finally, I’m actually doing it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/28/finally-going-to-gamescom/ Tue, 28 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/27/getting-to-work/ There’s always this debate about refugees—security, integration, belonging, the whole political apparatus. What gets buried is the thing nobody actually argues about: they want to work. Not out of some narrative about becoming part of the community. They want money. A routine. A reason to wake up. The basic human stuff. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/27/getting-to-work/ Mon, 27 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/27/what-zett-wants-to-be/ There’s this Saturday morning ritual with die ZEIT—the German weekly where you’re supposed to kick out whoever you brought home Friday night, make good coffee, get a warm roll with light ham, cross your legs on the balcony in the sun, and read with complete focus. No phone. Peak civilization. It’s aspirational stuff. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/27/what-zett-wants-to-be/ Mon, 27 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/27/even-karl-lagerfeld-looks-good-as-a-minion/ Minions are everywhere now. Pasta jars, phone cases, bedsheets, car air fresheners—they’re inescapable. I hit peak saturation years ago and just stopped noticing them, which is the only survival strategy. Your brain learns to filter them out or you go insane. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/27/even-karl-lagerfeld-looks-good-as-a-minion/ Mon, 27 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/27/highlight-of-my-lowlife/ I was bored, scrolling through Vevo watching music videos, and it was all garbage. One trash thing after another. Then That Poppy’s “Lowlife” came on. The video’s cheap—some Kyary Pamyu Pamyu knockoff with none of the actual vision, just the surface-level weirdness. Demonic makeup, an old guy in a wheelchair, shock value with no point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/27/highlight-of-my-lowlife/ Mon, 27 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/27/sailor-moon-sells/ They made Sailor Moon branded sanitary pads. Not a joke product—actual pads with full character designs, multiple versions for different flows, the whole thing available in Japanese drugstores starting in August. Someone pitched this in a meeting and it shipped. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/27/sailor-moon-sells/ Mon, 27 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/27/when-everyone-shows-up/ Sara and Marcus were playing. The steak was tough and undercooked. Someone was going on about Bangkok. These are the details I remember from Blogfabrik’s opening last weekend. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/27/when-everyone-shows-up/ Mon, 27 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/23/the-year-of-bambus/ There’s this German thing where every year older people sit down and vote for “the youth word of the year.” They’re trying to figure out how kids are actually talking when they’re not sending each other nudes on Snapchat or spamming shit-emojis on WhatsApp. It’s absurd and also kind of sincere—they genuinely want to understand. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/23/the-year-of-bambus/ Thu, 23 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/23/mockingjay-still-doesnt-bite/ The Hunger Games franchise could have been great if it wasn’t built from the ground up for middle schoolers. Battle Royale understood what dystopia required—genuine dread, genuine consequences that stick. These films have the pieces for that: dead kids, a dictatorship butchering people, rebels getting executed in the streets. And then the filmmakers sand every edge down until it’s safe, managed, bloodless. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/23/mockingjay-still-doesnt-bite/ Thu, 23 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/23/standing-out-in-tokyo/ Summer in Tokyo tries to kill you. Either you’re drowning in humidity so thick you can taste it, or the Tsuyu season shows up and it rains for weeks straight. The city becomes a greenhouse. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/23/standing-out-in-tokyo/ Thu, 23 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/22/that-tick/ I’ll be straight: I’m not some huge Marsimoto fan. I could live without most of his stuff. Marteria’s voice thing, the recycled rap moves—take it or leave it. But he’s still better than 99 percent of what German music is putting out right now, which is basically just machines to separate stupid people from their money. So I’m waiting for the next Marteria album. He’s probably my favorite German rapper these days. Maybe. Who knows, really. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/22/that-tick/ Wed, 22 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/22/made-the-list/ I love rankings. First, because they’re different every time depending on how you measure stuff, which means they’re complete garbage and also weirdly honest. Second, because they make people competitive. Third, because watching someone who didn’t make the cut convince themselves it doesn’t matter is deeply satisfying. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/22/made-the-list/ Wed, 22 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/22/pleasure-face/ You know that feeling after a brutal day—the kind that beats you down for twelve hours straight—when you get home and can think about exactly one thing? Food. Not just food, but the kind you’ve been fantasizing about since morning. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/22/pleasure-face/ Wed, 22 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/21/the-click-is-dead/ I watched a girl on BRAVO’s Facebook page refuse to click a link. Someone posted a weird photo and said “Click here to find out what it is,” and instead of clicking, people just waited in the comments. Then someone took a screenshot and posted it in the feed. Sixty-one likes. People actually thanking them for not making them leave Facebook. “Hab keinen Bock, auf den Link zu drücken,” one girl said—I can’t be bothered clicking, and apparently neither can anyone else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/21/the-click-is-dead/ Tue, 21 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/21/lost/ There’s this song called “Lost.” MØ and Major Lazer made it, and for a while I couldn’t stop playing it—not because I kept discovering new things in it, but because it had already given me everything and I was trying to find that feeling again. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/21/lost/ Tue, 21 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/21/concentrated-sadness/ MoTrip decided the perfect setting for an emotional ballad called “So wie du bist” was a dark strip club. Everyone’s concentrated and sad, staring into mirrors, really feeling it. Where’s it more dramatic and deep than that? Nowhere. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/21/concentrated-sadness/ Tue, 21 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/21/the-original-151/ Only 151 mattered. Everyone knew this. Bulbasaur, Charmander, Squirtle, and if you were a kid with any taste, you’d pretend there was nothing after those. Maybe Pikachu if the moment called for it. Everything past that was noise—oversized whales, talking keychains, whatever they kept dreaming up. The real ones fit in a single generation. They had personality. They had restraint. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/21/the-original-151/ Tue, 21 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/20/suiyoubi-no-campanella/ I found Suiyoubi no Campanella through Komuai, who raps for this Tokyo collective. One listen and something clicked—the production is precise and strange at once, nothing trying too hard. Music that doesn’t apologize. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/20/suiyoubi-no-campanella/ Mon, 20 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/20/blindfolded/ I probably know Super Mario World better than any other game in the world. Maybe Pokémon Blue. Maybe Chrono Trigger. Link to the Past. But Super Mario World is the one that shaped how I think about games, shaped it completely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/20/blindfolded/ Mon, 20 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/20/nothing-between/ Alyssia McGoogan in grass, naked, shot by Alessandro Casagrande. It’s obvious why this works—the body is there, the light is perfect, there’s nothing between skin and landscape. But what makes it interesting is the comfort level, the fact that this doesn’t feel staged or self-conscious. It feels like they found the angle and didn’t overthink it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/20/nothing-between/ Mon, 20 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/20/yesterday/ Three things first. One: I actually loved “Where Is The Love?” when it came out—genuinely loved it. Two: I had a thing for Fergie back then. Don’t ask why. Three: by “I Gotta Feeling,” I wanted to scrape it out of my brain with something sharp. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/20/yesterday/ Mon, 20 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/20/permission/ I followed the attack counts from Germany that summer because I couldn’t quite believe what I was reading. Berlin. Dresden. Freital. Five men corner a family at a red light and beat them because of their faces. A jogger gets his head smashed. A kid takes a punch from a grown man because her parents look foreign. By June there were 130 recorded attacks. Fires at shelters. People throwing rocks at paramedics. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/20/permission/ Mon, 20 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/20/cobra-club-perfecting-the-dick-pic/ I have this habit late at night—scrolling through old contacts, half-horny and bored. There’s that girl from my friend’s party, someone I’d talked to a few times. The idea arrives fully formed: send her a picture of my dick. She’ll be shocked, impressed maybe. Except she won’t be. She’ll ignore it completely. And that’s when the brain weasels kick in. Obviously the problem wasn’t the stupid idea. The problem was execution. Bad angle. Bad lighting. I didn’t present it right. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/20/cobra-club-perfecting-the-dick-pic/ Mon, 20 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/16/the-web-we-lost/ There’s a photo of Hossein Derakhshan with the singer Lovefoxxx, both of them younger, both of them in a moment before everything changed. He was a blogger in the 2000s, when blogs still felt like the future—when millions of people were typing their thoughts, their politics, their obsessions into their own little corners of the internet. Some of it was noise. A lot of it was noise. But some of it was dangerous, in the way that real ideas can be dangerous. Hossein used his blog as a weapon against a rigid political structure, and the Iranian government noticed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/16/the-web-we-lost/ Thu, 16 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/14/holding-hands-in-moscow/ Two guys held hands walking through Moscow and someone filmed what happened next. You don’t need context to understand why that matters. Russia’s the kind of place where doing that gets you hunted. The government doesn’t hide its position. Youth gangs operate openly. The law’s fine with it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/14/holding-hands-in-moscow/ Tue, 14 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/14/how-to-get-boys-to-notice-you/ BRAVO arrived every month like it had answers. I read every page without question, trusted it completely. It knew things about surviving adolescence that nobody else would tell you. It was scripture. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/14/how-to-get-boys-to-notice-you/ Tue, 14 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/2/meaner/ Pop music is basically Rihanna and Taylor Swift—listen to both and you’ve heard all that matters. Everything else is just sad noise, the same beats and melodies and tired phrases looped forever. Of course both of them destroy anything else in their path. And one of them just escalates. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/7/2/meaner/ Thu, 02 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/29/when-the-word-changed/ I asked my friend what she thought about feminism, and she looked confused before saying something vague about equality. Honest answer, probably the most honest one I’ve heard to that question in years. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/29/when-the-word-changed/ Mon, 29 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/29/spell-breaking/ I watched a video from a Pegida rally in Nuremberg where someone stole the banner. Two guys, quick grab, vanish around a corner. The whole thing took maybe ten seconds. The people holding the banner looked stunned—like they couldn’t believe what just happened. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/29/spell-breaking/ Mon, 29 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/29/ferropolis-in-july/ Ferropolis itself is what matters first. It’s industrial ruins outside Berlin, the kind of place that would be depressing on any regular weekend. But for one week in July, it becomes a festival ground. Not glamorous, not polished, just honestly interesting. The stages are built into the landscape itself. You walk past sculptures. Nothing feels manufactured from corporate templates—it all feels like it happened naturally, even though obviously someone planned it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/29/ferropolis-in-july/ Mon, 29 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/29/enclosed-living-small/ I spent a few months in Tokyo and walked into my apartment after a long flight ready to cry. Gave up a much larger place in Berlin for a room barely bigger than the bed, a sink, a TV. But it could’ve been worse. It definitely was worse for plenty of people. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/29/enclosed-living-small/ Mon, 29 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/26/the-expected-move/ Jessica Weiß did what everyone assumed she eventually would: she started a fashion line. At this point the trajectory is so familiar you could almost predict it—blogger gets big, offers come in, brand launches. Swedish bloggers did it. Italian photographers did it. Germany’s most famous fashion blogger was always going to do it too. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/26/the-expected-move/ Fri, 26 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/19/i-have-nothing-for-you-only-sadness/ Jon Stewart came back on air after the Charleston shooting and said, “I have nothing for you, only sadness.” Just that—sitting there with his pen, no jokes, no framing. What he said next was the clearest thing I’d heard about race in America: not that this was a tragedy to process and move past, but that it was reality. Black people lived inside a country built on white history and the wound never closed because nobody wanted to acknowledge it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/19/i-have-nothing-for-you-only-sadness/ Fri, 19 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/19/the-shaolin-grind/ The music video for GENER8ION and M.I.A.’s “The New International Sound Pt. II” features two kids from the Shaolin Tagou school in China. Xin Chenxi is nine, Chen Xi is fifteen. The school trains about twenty-six thousand kids total—basically an assembly line for discipline. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/19/the-shaolin-grind/ Fri, 19 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/18/curtis-blair/ Curtis Blair fixated on Scandinavia—Sweden especially, Iceland, Norway—and made a series photographing women up there. “Nordic Girls,” he called it, shot in 2015 with Swedish models in London and Stockholm. There’s a book from it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/18/curtis-blair/ Thu, 18 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/8/sixteen-bits/ I’d give anything to transplant my brain into 16-bit hardware and live out my days in Secret of Mana or Super Mario World. Actually, scratch that—I’d give a lot, but not my actual life. The point is, I love those games with a devotion that modern releases have never come close to matching. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/8/sixteen-bits/ Mon, 08 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/8/still-shocking/ Miley Cyrus hit the PAPERMAG cover that month, naked with a pig. The pig’s face was honest—genuine concern about what was happening. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/8/still-shocking/ Mon, 08 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/8/wrong-timing/ Morning used to mean stumbling through the house like something freshly reanimated, waiting for enough coffee to make sense of the world. Not one cup—that stopped working years ago. More like I’d need increasingly industrial amounts just to feel approximately human. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/8/wrong-timing/ Mon, 08 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/5/wasteland-what-it-felt-like/ I spent 2015 glued to my phone like everyone else—Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Periscope, YouTube, WhatsApp, Twitch. The apps blurred together into background radiation, and by then I’d stopped questioning it because it had become the default. You learned to live inside those feeds the way you learn to live in any environment, until it just was. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/5/wasteland-what-it-felt-like/ Fri, 05 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/3/where-the-clubs-are/ You come to Berlin to dance in some warehouse until you’re soaked and your ears are ringing—which is the whole point anyway. Berghain, Chalet, Gretchen, Watergate. Everyone knows these names before they arrive, but finding them scattered across the city is a different problem. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/3/where-the-clubs-are/ Wed, 03 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/3/undisclosed/ It’s a weird thing to notice about people you follow online. Someone posts about loving a product, seems genuinely into it, and then weeks later they’re pitching a completely different product with the exact same energy. Different brand, different category, same performance of enthusiasm. And you realize they’re probably getting paid for these posts without mentioning it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/3/undisclosed/ Wed, 03 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/3/fallout-finally/ Nothing’s grabbed me in gaming hype lately. GTA V, fine. Bloodborne, sure if I’m bored. The Witcher 3, maybe eventually. Then Fallout 4 and suddenly I don’t care about any of that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/3/fallout-finally/ Wed, 03 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/3/the-girl-next-door/ Sports Illustrated’s basically got four Kate Upton clips and they’re going to milk them forever. Beach, ice, space—same footage rearranged into different videos with different music, different themes. She’s laughing, dancing, smiling, just standing there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/3/the-girl-next-door/ Wed, 03 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/3/stars-of-a-new-generation/ I’m 31 now and I don’t have much use for the German YouTube ecosystem. Quick cuts, pseudo-funny outtakes, confused faces I’d love to throw in a bucket of acne cream and send back to the unemployment line. But you have to give them this: they’re the stars of a new generation. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/3/stars-of-a-new-generation/ Wed, 03 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/3/where-they-actually-shot-it/ One of the recent episodes of Game of Thrones worked on me in a way the show hadn’t managed for a while. There’s this moment that lands exactly right—not because the writing is suddenly brilliant, but because the images are there and they carry weight. After watching it, I couldn’t stop thinking about visiting the actual places where they filmed these scenes. Not the sets, not the reconstructions—the real locations, the ground you could walk on. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/3/where-they-actually-shot-it/ Wed, 03 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/3/pokémon-never-left/ I was unstoppable at Pokémon. Level 100 team, always perfect—Charizard, Mewtwo, Articuno, Mew, Dragonite, Zapdos. I’d spent months getting there, exploited every move set, every advantage. It felt like owning something nobody else could touch. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/3/pokémon-never-left/ Wed, 03 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/2/how-to-roll-when-youre-not-that-guy/ I remember being at parties where rolling was just something people knew how to do, like it was coded into them as teenagers. I showed up late, helped pick songs, asked obvious questions about things everyone else took for granted. When someone handed me papers and a bag, I’d fumble through it the way you’d defuse a bomb based on a YouTube tutorial. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/2/how-to-roll-when-youre-not-that-guy/ Tue, 02 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/1/cooking/ Everyone claims they can cook. Which usually just means they can turn on the oven without setting something on fire. Some people will absolutely panic if the asparagus spends an extra forty-five seconds in the water. Same word. Completely different thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/1/cooking/ Mon, 01 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/1/food-is-better-than-sex/ Food never really interested me. A brown bread sandwich and an apple at school, lentil soup or fish sticks at home, cheap soda from the corner store with my friends—I was satisfied with all of it. Happy even. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/1/food-is-better-than-sex/ Mon, 01 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/1/miss-platinum/ Miss Platinum is Ruth Maria Renner, a Berlin-based artist from Romania, and her music in German just refuses to fit anywhere obvious. Her tracks—Babooshka 2009, Lila Wolken, 99 Probleme—are personal and strange without seeming self-conscious about it. She sounds like someone who knows what she’s doing and doesn’t care if you follow. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/1/miss-platinum/ Mon, 01 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/1/macintosh-phone/ Designer Pierre Cerveau sketched what he thought a Macintosh Phone would look like in 1984. There’s a lot he got right—the proportions, the way it’d sit in your hand, the sense that personal computing was going to shrink down to something you’d carry. He was picking up on Steve Jobs’s vision, that computers could be intimate and almost spiritual, and somehow that intuition pointed him toward something real even though the technology didn’t exist yet. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/1/macintosh-phone/ Mon, 01 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/1/big-and-juicy/ Taiwan’s selling enormous penis-shaped popsicles at night markets right now. Handmade ice in bright colors—raspberry red, orange, strawberry—with anatomically detailed veins running up the shaft. They’re huge, apparently, the kind of thing you can’t bite through. You have to lick. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/1/big-and-juicy/ Mon, 01 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/1/desk-in-a-courtyard/ Blogfabrik sits in a Kreuzberg courtyard off Oranienstraße, next to an ad agency, a late-night shop, and a tango studio. When I first walked through, the place was mostly scaffold and exposed brick—construction dust in the air, tools stacked in corners—but people were already working at tables, heads down over laptops like the unfinished walls didn’t matter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/6/1/desk-in-a-courtyard/ Mon, 01 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/31/still-cool/ There’s always someone outside with a cigarette. At 8 AM before work, in the parking lot, at the party when everyone’s inside. They’re usually doing the thing—leaning, exhaling, that whole performance of not caring while visibly caring quite a lot. And they probably think it still looks good. It doesn’t, but I understand why they think that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/31/still-cool/ Sun, 31 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/28/adobe-in-berlin/ Every creative I know runs on Adobe. Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign—not luxuries. If you’re doing visual work for a living, these are what you use. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/28/adobe-in-berlin/ Thu, 28 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/27/sziget/ Every summer you hit the same circuit: Rock im Süden, Electro up north, Indie in the middle. After a few years it all blurs together. Same stages, same fields, same predictable progression. By August you’re tired and ready for something completely different. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/27/sziget/ Wed, 27 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/18/bad-blood/ Taylor Swift went from being someone you had to apologize for liking to actually being interesting. Back when she was this blonde country singer singing about fairy tales, you could write her off. Now she’s figured something out. You can see it in every frame—the way she moves, how much control she has, the sense that she knows exactly what she’s doing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/18/bad-blood/ Mon, 18 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/16/whos-driving/ The desert in Fury Road is just dead. Water’s a legend, cities are scattered bone, everything between is sand and hostile sky. Miller doesn’t waste time explaining any of this. He throws a truck convoy into the waste and doesn’t let it stop. Two hours of machinery and drums and something like an electric guitar cutting the air in half. Max (Tom Hardy) is basically passenger—barely there, barely speaking, just holding on. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/16/whos-driving/ Sat, 16 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/16/the-promised-land/ I flew into Tokyo on an Aeroflot flight from Moscow—the route wasn’t particularly full, and I had half the cabin to myself, which meant I could sleep in pieces rather than trying to pretend the experience was anything other than a long, uncomfortable interval between here and there. You just push through it. Eight hours of recycled air and bad movies, and then you’re supposed to arrive magically renewed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/16/the-promised-land/ Sat, 16 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/13/by-water/ The Berlin Festival is May 29-31 at Arena Park on the Spree. Fritz Kalkbrenner, James Blake, Westbam, Agoria. There’s a detail this year that actually appeals to me: rafts from the Oberbaum bridge taking you straight onto the grounds. It’s the kind of detail that shouldn’t matter but does—arriving by water instead of trudging through a car park changes the shape of the evening somehow. Might actually go this time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/13/by-water/ Wed, 13 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/9/inside-akihabara/ You come down the stairs from the Akihabara station and immediately the street hits you - this wall of light and noise and screens, every surface bright and moving, selling something. It’s the future according to 1985, or maybe according to right now but turned up past human tolerability. Nothing quiet here. Nothing that’s trying to let you think. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/9/inside-akihabara/ Sat, 09 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/9/the-stan-smith-returns/ The Superstar took 2015. Everyone wanted it, myself included. But it overshadowed something that had owned the year before—the Stan Smith in clean white with green accents. One moment it was everywhere, people obsessed over it, the next everyone wanted something else. The Stan Smith just vanished. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/9/the-stan-smith-returns/ Sat, 09 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/8/the-boob-chart/ Lessa Millet did this chart a while back that named pubic hair styles with straight documentation and no bullshit—the Vaj Hairstylez. Now she’s done the same thing with breasts, twenty-four different versions, each with a name. The Owl, The Cold War, The Robot—the obvious ones stick in your head. But there’s something about the quieter ones like The Hillside and The Kisses and Just the Nipple. It’s specific without being cute about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/8/the-boob-chart/ Fri, 08 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/8/still-moving/ I found out about Jessie Andrews the way most people do - through her adult film work, specifically the scene that made her name. Then I kept hearing about her other stuff. Model, DJ, jewelry designer, Instagram presence. All of it living in the same public space, no separation, no shameful hiding. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/8/still-moving/ Fri, 08 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/8/the-only-shoe/ I’ve been saying it for years in different cities, different bars, to people who either got it immediately or thought I was being ridiculous: the adidas Superstar is the only shoe. Not the only good one. The only one that matters. So when 2015 showed up and the Superstar suddenly became the focus of everything—entire magazine issues, fashion shoots, cultural retrospectives—it felt less like vindication and more like watching the world finally notice something obvious. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/8/the-only-shoe/ Fri, 08 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/7/still-ready/ I still remember crying at the scene where Tai and the kids are riding the train back from the digital world. Just fully crying, like a child. Something about the ride home felt more final than the entire adventure, and it broke something in me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/7/still-ready/ Thu, 07 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/7/oyasumi-hologram/ Japanese pop basically splits into two camps: idol groups, and everything else. The idol formula is crystallized—underage girls, bright school uniforms, cute-above-all-else, simple pop songs engineered to be likable. It’s an entire economy built on cute. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/7/oyasumi-hologram/ Thu, 07 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/5/empty-water/ Kalle Ljung shot this on a GoPro a few months back, down from Argentina to the Melchior Islands. Two weeks in the Palmer Archipelago with some friends. The footage is just the visual fact of it—ice, water, whales, birds, bare rock. A place that would kill you without hesitation, completely empty, somehow beautiful in a way that feels almost hostile. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/5/empty-water/ Tue, 05 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/4/just-the-bricks/ I was completely into LEGO as a kid—had the membership card, had an entire room just for it. But I never watched the LEGO movies, never played the games, never even went to LEGOLAND despite living practically next door to one. That whole ecosystem just didn’t register with me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/4/just-the-bricks/ Mon, 04 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/2/shibuya-109/ Walking through Shibuya 109 on a Saturday afternoon, the first thing that hits you is the refusal to hold back. Neon makeup sprawling across entire walls. Plushies the size of small children. Platform shoes that could double as furniture. Graphic tees with such specific, elaborate illustrations they must be selling to five people. The schoolgirls in various states of uniform rebellion moving through it aren’t shopping. They’re attending some kind of temple to permission. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/2/shibuya-109/ Sat, 02 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/2/may-day-in-kreuzberg/ Forget Christmas, Easter, German Unity Day—the biggest holiday in Berlin is May 1st, this shift between cops and party freaks, Kreuzberg turning into one massive celebration. Food and music and people everywhere, so many people, all trying to cram as much fun as possible into a few wild hours before they get dragged back into the crushing depths of normal life. Or so the story goes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/2/may-day-in-kreuzberg/ Sat, 02 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/1/street-fighter-in-westeros/ Orkimides made pixel sprites of Game of Thrones characters rendered as Street Fighter sprites, and now I can’t stop thinking about this SNES fighting game that doesn’t exist. It’s just concept art. But the idea sits in my head like a tuning fork. Arya and Joffrey squaring off over King’s Landing, rendered in that beautiful chunky 16-bit style—you see it once and you want to play it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/1/street-fighter-in-westeros/ Fri, 01 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/1/the-two-euro-catch/ A turquoise vending machine showed up on Alexanderplatz one day, right in front of Primark. You know the setup—thousands of people streaming through those doors every week, loading their bags with clothes made for almost nothing, cheap enough that you don’t really think about it. The machine was bright, eye-catching, offering T-shirts for 2 euros. A deal. Who wouldn’t bite? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/1/the-two-euro-catch/ Fri, 01 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/1/suds-and-smiles/ Samantha Fortenberry photographs strangers naked in bathtubs. It’s straightforward work—people sitting in water, surrounded by whatever she decided would be perfect for that moment. Cookies one time, books another, confetti another. The series is called “Suds and Smiles.” https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/1/suds-and-smiles/ Fri, 01 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/1/white-geometry/ I’ve got a thing about white sneakers. Blank canvas, absolute whiteness, zero compromise—they have to be nearly pristine. The ideal is still the adidas Superstar, but I’m not a zealot about it. If something nails the proportions and keeps the purity, I’ll look. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/1/white-geometry/ Fri, 01 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/1/electronic-beats-at-fifteen/ Cologne got Electronic Beats again in May, fifteen years into the festival’s run, with Roisín Murphy and Django Django headlining at E-Werk. The festival had been traveling—Warsaw, Bratislava, Prague—but Cologne was always home base, which meant something. The city doesn’t flinch at loud speakers or late hours. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/5/1/electronic-beats-at-fifteen/ Fri, 01 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/30/naked-in-the-woods/ The city sells you convenience and you take the deal. Food whenever you want. Everything within reach. But at some point you notice what’s missing—space, mostly. The ability to move without thinking about surveillance or decency or what anyone else thinks. You miss the feeling of being in your body without permission. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/30/naked-in-the-woods/ Thu, 30 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/30/spare-room/ I ran across this thing in Berlin called Flüchtlinge Willkommen where three people decided to place refugees into regular shared apartments instead of just letting them pile up in mass housing. The basic idea is straightforward: you’ve got an empty room because your roommate got it in his head to find enlightenment in India or whatever. Someone from Syria or Kenya or Russia needs a place to live. You weren’t going to do anything useful with those four square meters anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/30/spare-room/ Thu, 30 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/24/martys-shoes/ The future was supposed to be insane. Time machines, hoverboards, self-lacing sneakers. Marty McFly had it all. Then October 2015 came and went and we got nothing. Still tying our shoes like people from the eighties. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/24/martys-shoes/ Fri, 24 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/24/still-kiz/ K.I.Z. came back the way K.I.Z. does everything—without apology. They didn’t slip a single into the world with some tasteful announcement. They made a video that looks like it was pulled from a History Channel documentary about the world ending, paired it with a song where Tarek, Maxim, Nico, and DJ Craft spend three minutes congratulating themselves. No subtext. No irony guardrails. Just four guys celebrating how great they are. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/24/still-kiz/ Fri, 24 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/24/the-vanishing/ Look, I’m too old for Snapchat. Not age-wise, but in the I-don’t-care sense. Fifteen-year-olds with constant running commentary on their snack choices, drunk friends filming blurry garbage from parties that were already unbearable sober—I can do without all that. The whole thing’s too fast to even get a proper hard-on out of it, if we’re being honest, and that ruins it for half the people using it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/24/the-vanishing/ Fri, 24 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/24/the-green-in-hollywood/ Los Angeles isn’t what you picture. I’d built it up as palm trees and billboards and manufactured light. But the actual city, the one Jessica Morrow showed me, hides in the hills. Cactus and brush climbing those famous slopes, dry and overgrown, nothing like the image. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/24/the-green-in-hollywood/ Fri, 24 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/22/better-in-paint/ A few months back I went to some kind of premiere for the new Turtles movie—maybe unofficial, maybe a press screening, I honestly don’t remember. Pizza and beer. Megan Fox was there, and at the time that seemed significant. I think she’s incredibly hot. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/22/better-in-paint/ Wed, 22 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/22/yakuza-apocalypse/ Takashi Miike made a film called Yakuza Apocalypse about a vampire crime boss and a gang war and schoolgirls and the apocalypse—or something in that neighborhood. Honestly, the actual plot doesn’t matter. What I actually remember is the giant yellow toad. Just this massive toad, inexplicably present in a gangster film. And that detail alone is enough to make me watch it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/22/yakuza-apocalypse/ Wed, 22 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/22/privilege-as-self-protection/ I was going to eat fried fish last night, drink Japanese beer, watch some stupid farm anime. Instead I spent three hours on Twitter getting into it with people who seemed absolutely convinced that every problem in their lives came down to exactly two things: gender and skin color. Not luck, not effort, not anything they actually did. Just those. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/22/privilege-as-self-protection/ Wed, 22 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/21/why-they-go/ A hundred and thirty Canadians left to join ISIS. That’s not a small number for a country that size. Suroosh Alvi made a documentary about them—how they got there, why, what it looks like from inside and from outside, if you’re a parent waiting for a phone call that doesn’t come. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/21/why-they-go/ Tue, 21 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/21/what-futurama-did/ The show opens with a kid from the 20th century waking up a thousand years later, and his first move is to find the one person he knew before the time jump, but she’s been dead for a thousand years. So he gets a job at a delivery company, gets adopted by a robot, and everyone treats the whole thing like a joke, which it is, but also isn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/21/what-futurama-did/ Tue, 21 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/21/gold-doesnt-stick/ You run out of ways to impress people. Designer sneakers from Japan? Dead. Endangered fish from the Pacific? Doesn’t land. Models, cars, whatever—nothing sticks. So you keep escalating, trying weirder shit, because something has to work eventually. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/21/gold-doesnt-stick/ Tue, 21 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/20/blue-water-wrong-hemisphere/ Came across photographs of the Australian coast by Janneke Storm, a photographer who shoots weddings for work and makes images like this on her own time. Just light and a model named Sophie in water that’s too blue to be real. The kind of image that makes you feel the salt and understand why people leave. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/20/blue-water-wrong-hemisphere/ Mon, 20 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/20/how-they-built-it/ The second trailer dropped the other day and I watched it ten times. This despite knowing Abrams has let me down before, despite the effects getting bloated, despite everything being better in the original. The thing hijacks your brain. You rewind. You pause on frames. You’re asking questions you won’t get answers to for a year. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/20/how-they-built-it/ Mon, 20 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/20/marvels-infinite-formula/ Watched the Fantastic Four trailer and felt nothing. Not anger or disappointment, just that flat recognition of, okay, here’s another Marvel film. The formula’s been stamped into everything: some comedy, action sequences that blur, whatever the actual story might have been gets buried under a quip about how absurd the whole thing is. Safe. Efficient. Dead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/20/marvels-infinite-formula/ Mon, 20 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/20/all-blue/ I brought an expensive camera to Comic Invasion and somehow managed to turn every single shot blue. Some setting I’d never bothered to learn, hidden somewhere in the menus. The EOS 700D has been the worst gear investment of the year. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/20/all-blue/ Mon, 20 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/20/when-to-go-back/ I sat with Christine in a café in Friedrichshain last week—someone who actually knows how to live online—and we talked about whether we’d stay in Berlin forever, whether anything here really anchored us anymore. She hit on something that wouldn’t leave me alone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/20/when-to-go-back/ Mon, 20 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/20/adanowsky-would-you-be-mine/ Adanowsky is Jodorowsky’s son. Jodorowsky, the guy who blew John Lennon’s mind and spent decades making things so strange they barely qualified as entertainment. So when his kid makes a music video featuring Stoya, two geishas, and what appears to be an infinite amount of pink, I’m going in assuming there’s a point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/20/adanowsky-would-you-be-mine/ Mon, 20 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/17/goldfisch-still-beautiful/ I was arguing with a friend in this café in Kreuzberg about whether German is actually dying—whether the language as we know it is slowly disappearing. I think about this sometimes. Languages mix with each other like genes, right? Mix in enough English, some Mandarin, some Spanish, and in a hundred years German is just gone. Replaced. That bothers me more than it probably should. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/17/goldfisch-still-beautiful/ Fri, 17 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/16/still-there/ The Force Awakens trailer dropped in December and people acted like the world had just been saved. I watched it the next morning and felt that old pull—half genuine excitement, half the bone-deep certainty that this couldn’t possibly matter the way the original trilogy did. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/16/still-there/ Thu, 16 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/16/stay-focused/ Japanese TV has been doing inexplicable shit for decades. Takeshi’s Castle was the first time most of us saw it—game show where elderly men got thrown into water—and I genuinely thought that was the ceiling. There’s no ceiling. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/16/stay-focused/ Thu, 16 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/16/salted-caramel-brownie-brown-ale/ Three weeks in and you’re rotating ice cream and whiskey at eleven in the morning. The Notebook is on its fourth viewing. You’re not sure if you’re sad anymore or just committed to the performance. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/16/salted-caramel-brownie-brown-ale/ Thu, 16 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/16/1up/ The U-Bahn smells like piss and spray paint. Late nights, riding home, half the tunnel is tags. 1UP everywhere. Überfresh. Berlin Kidz. Names that mean nothing outside Berlin but inside they’re the whole conversation—who’s bombing where, who painted over who, who got arrested. The kids doing it are seventeen, eighteen, too young to care about consequences, moving through the city with cans in their jacket. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/16/1up/ Thu, 16 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/15/fuck-off/ Raised by Wolves, a Canadian brand, makes slides that say FUCK OFF across the strap. Black, around thirty euros, and the message is the entire design. There’s something clarifying about that—no subtle messaging, no plausible deniability, just the two words in bold letters on something you wear to the pool. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/15/fuck-off/ Wed, 15 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/15/the-berghain-shortcut/ Berlin has three types of people: the ones who get into Berghain, the ones who get rejected, and the ones who don’t bother trying anymore. If you’re in the last two groups, there’s now supposedly a way around it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/15/the-berghain-shortcut/ Wed, 15 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/14/everything-was-better-then/ There are people who could talk for days about the 90s—the games, the TV, the stupid shit that mattered when you were a kid. Radio Nukular is basically a podcast of those people sitting around for hours just talking. No structure, no real plan, whatever nostalgia tangent pulls them in. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/14/everything-was-better-then/ Tue, 14 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/14/siri-doesnt-do-gay/ Ask Siri in Russian about gay stuff and she blanks you. I’d blush if I could, she says. I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that. This emotion should be rated negative. So you don’t exist, but she says it nice. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/14/siri-doesnt-do-gay/ Tue, 14 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/14/hire-cheerleaders/ Every time someone wins money on one of those game shows and they’re asked what they’d do with it, you get the same answers. A car. A house. Some ridiculous collection. And everyone nods along like these are normal dreams when they’re just the most boring version of having money. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/14/hire-cheerleaders/ Tue, 14 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/14/dogs-in-cars/ I have a friend with a dog named Boris. According to her, he’s this charismatic little face—always making expressions. What I see is something else. Boris mostly just lies in the corner, staring at nothing, panting. He’s not particularly animated about anything. He’s neutral, mostly. But I find myself watching him and wondering what’s actually happening in there. What he dreams about. What he’d tell me if he could, when he’s at the dog park sniffing around other dogs’ asses, what thoughts are turning over in his head. What deep, world-shifting, utterly destructive things might be churning around inside him. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/14/dogs-in-cars/ Tue, 14 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/14/all-of-them-tiny/ Christopher Lee drew Sailor Moon, Batman, Pokémon, all your favorite characters, and made them impossibly cute. We’re talking oversized heads, tiny bodies, the full chibi treatment. It’s the kind of thing that hits different when you already care about these characters—you’ve spent years with them in their proper forms, and then someone draws them small and soft and suddenly you see them completely differently. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/14/all-of-them-tiny/ Tue, 14 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/13/unsolicited/ There’s this conviction some guys have that women are just waiting to see their dicks. Like it’s wired into the female brain—you send a photo out of nowhere and she instantly opens it and becomes a different person. Grateful. Awed. Ready. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/13/unsolicited/ Mon, 13 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/13/tokyo-alone/ Hisatomi Tadahiko photographs Tokyo the way it actually feels: empty, even when people are there. A girl sits on concrete in one frame. In another, someone stands alone in a parking garage. The city in his work is all gray apartment blocks and distances, and the people move through it like loneliness is the default setting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/13/tokyo-alone/ Mon, 13 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/13/game-boy-archaeology/ The Game Boy’s sound chip was four channels, a handful of waveforms, basically built from spare parts. But that constraint is exactly why those sounds stuck. No room to hide or get fancy. The opening of Super Mario Land, the Pokémon battle theme, the little victory fanfare—they hit because they had to be immediate, memorable, and endlessly repeatable. A noise that works on you directly. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/13/game-boy-archaeology/ Mon, 13 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/13/still-into-ariel/ I was five when I watched The Little Mermaid, and Ariel did something to me that I understood halfway through. The red hair, the blue eyes, the way she moved through water. I was old enough to register what attraction felt like, young enough not to care that the whole proposition was impossible. That mixture of desire and futility stuck around longer than I expected. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/13/still-into-ariel/ Mon, 13 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/13/sanft-sorgfältig/ I love getting a mention somewhere you don’t expect. Not in the usual places—angry Facebook comments, blogs doing damage control, the kind of internet corners where people are actively disturbed. Just somewhere normal, out of nowhere. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/13/sanft-sorgfältig/ Mon, 13 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/13/spring-break-anyway/ I have two completely opposite opinions about Spring Break. First: would you really want to compress your soft, tragic body through a sea of thousands of drunk students while the sun drills into your skull and bass music doesn’t shut up? Second: party forever anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/13/spring-break-anyway/ Mon, 13 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/13/cherry-bomb/ Tyler, the Creator doesn’t soften things. Cherry Bomb announces that immediately—track titles like “Blow My Load” and “Fucking Young” make it clear he’s not concerned with being liked. The album doesn’t try to seduce you. It just exists, committed fully to what he heard in his head. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/13/cherry-bomb/ Mon, 13 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/12/early-christmas/ The whole point of waiting for a new season is that you build a ritual around it. Monday nights, cheap takeout, the slow consumption of a story over weeks. You’re not just waiting for television—you’re waiting for that specific shape your week takes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/12/early-christmas/ Sun, 12 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/12/indignity/ An earthquake moved things just enough to rattle glasses off a table. A woman watched them fall and laughed—”It would be so humiliating to die here,” she said. Not panicked, just thinking out loud. The specific shame of it: ending in the wrong moment, in a place that wouldn’t make sense in the retelling. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/12/indignity/ Sun, 12 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/12/orphe/ As a kid I was certain everyone would wear glowing clothes by the time I grew up. Not rave neon—actual luminescent gear, color-shifting as you moved. Because the tech would exist and it would look insane, so obviously everyone would do it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/12/orphe/ Sun, 12 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/12/checking-in/ Saw this illustration of Alf last week and just stopped scrolling. This Spanish studio called Hey Creative publishes a minimal pop culture drawing every day on Instagram—account’s called EveryHey. Started in February, and I check back regularly enough that I’ve probably seen a hundred of them by now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/12/checking-in/ Sun, 12 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/11/cat-heaven-island/ On Tashirojima in Japan, there are more cats than people. The cats watch the fishermen work their nets. They wander through an abandoned school. On the highest hill, in pale moonlight, they mate without concern for observation. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/11/cat-heaven-island/ Sat, 11 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/11/the-island/ I cried through the last episodes of Barakamon. Me—this bearded guy with a belly and a sharp mouth. Not because anything legendarily dramatic happened in those twelve episodes, but because the characters had gotten under my skin in a way that normally takes other shows years to pull off. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/11/the-island/ Sat, 11 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/11/this-is-your-brain/ Meaghan Liist designs the kind of work that doesn’t waste your attention—clean, purposeful, nothing extra. She made a series a few years back called “This Is Your Brain On Drugs” that I’ve thought about since, mostly because reductive work this good is harder to pull off than it appears. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/11/this-is-your-brain/ Sat, 11 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/11/beer-and-a-room/ I was in Paris years ago. Can’t remember why now, or with who, or what the actual point was. Some pale memory of walking around with a camera like everyone walks around with a camera there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/11/beer-and-a-room/ Sat, 11 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/10/dead-mans-high/ Mexican kids figured out they can smoke poisonous frogs and get completely obliterated. Not lick them like Homer Simpson, actually smoke them. The compound inside is 5-MEO-DMT, and apparently the high feels like you’re dying. Which is apparently the whole point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/10/dead-mans-high/ Fri, 10 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/10/the-adventure-time-comics/ I was never really a comic person. The Simpsons comics seemed too expensive, superheroes bored me, and despite being obsessed with Japan, manga never did much for me. I’m a TV person, always have been. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/10/the-adventure-time-comics/ Fri, 10 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/10/fucking-young/ Tyler’s dropped two new tracks—”Fucking Young” and “Death Camp”—and they sound like N.E.R.D at their best, back when Pharrell could make something brilliant without needing to announce that it was brilliant. The confidence is just there, quiet and infuriating in how rare it is. No forced posturing, no default gangsta-rap drama, no pretending that suffering is personality. Just craft, the kind that makes you realize how much of everything else is just noise. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/10/fucking-young/ Fri, 10 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/9/solaryman/ I couldn’t sleep in Tokyo once, so at sunrise I walked out into the quiet residential streets with cats and cockroaches and old men jogging, past empty parks and closed schools. The city at that hour was something else entirely—soft, strange, nothing like what you think Tokyo is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/9/solaryman/ Thu, 09 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/8/vaj-hairstylez/ There’s been this generational debate about how to groom yourself down there. Totally bare or totally wild, carefully maintained or just letting it grow, on display or completely hidden—everyone settles somewhere different. For a while the trend was total hairlessness, but now you’re seeing this swing back toward the natural thing. Feminist reclamation of the bush, basically. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/8/vaj-hairstylez/ Wed, 08 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/8/so36-on-weeknights/ I’ve never found a turntable at Kreuzberg’s flea markets, but I understand why you’d look. Polaroid cameras, old Casio watches, lamps shaped like cats, sneakers that stopped being made ten years ago—the hunt is very specific. Everyone there is looking for something they didn’t know they needed until they saw it in a cardboard box. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/8/so36-on-weeknights/ Wed, 08 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/8/you-dont-want-jon-snow-at-your-dinner/ Jon Snow’s on Seth Meyers doing a dinner party bit, trying to seem normal about it, but you can see it underneath—all that dread about what’s coming, the winter, the dark things in the north. He can’t just sit there and enjoy wine like a regular person. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/8/you-dont-want-jon-snow-at-your-dinner/ Wed, 08 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/8/the-filter-cycle/ I’ve spent way too much time scrolling past breakfast. Not eating it, just scrolling past other people’s breakfast—all carefully filtered, each plate more composed than anything I’d ever make. Eggs and toast put through some warm vintage grain that makes the morning look like it happened in 1987. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/8/the-filter-cycle/ Wed, 08 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/8/american-oxygen/ Rihanna’s “American Oxygen” video lays out the contradiction without flinching. The title is the setup—oxygen is what keeps you alive, except here it’s metaphorical and suffocating. The video cycles through imagery of American life and death, side by side: the freedoms and the violence that props them up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/8/american-oxygen/ Wed, 08 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/8/pacapong/ I found this game called Pacapong, which is what happens when you take Pong, Pac-Man, and Space Invaders and decide they should exist in the same screen. Dutch developers called kingPenguin made it for a game jam where the theme was Pong, and that’s apparently all the justification they needed. It should be absurd—three foundational arcade games in one messy screen—but it isn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/8/pacapong/ Wed, 08 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/8/chocolate-cookie/ I fall in love about seventeen thousand times a day. More or less, usually more. Vanessa Anela Moez. Rianne ten Haken. Airi Matsui. Anna with no last name brought back my whole thing for underarm hair, so clearly I’m inexhaustible. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/8/chocolate-cookie/ Wed, 08 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/7/trollface-money/ Trollface got trademarked by Carlos Ramirez in 2010, right after he posted it on 4chan. Now he makes between five and fifteen grand a month off it. And before you say anything about the internet being a free space or memes being communal property—yeah, you’re wrong. Carlos has the paperwork. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/7/trollface-money/ Tue, 07 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/7/daily-portraits/ Martin Pavel brought his Daily Portrait project to Berlin. The concept’s straightforward: you photograph someone naked, they photograph you, you photograph the next person. Daily photographs, published daily, for a year straight. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/7/daily-portraits/ Tue, 07 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/7/game-boy-again/ Five euros at a flea market, years ago, got me a Game Boy with Tetris on it. I don’t regret that purchase for a second. That gray box is still a time machine. Super Mario Land, Link’s Awakening, Pokémon—stuff that holds up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/7/game-boy-again/ Tue, 07 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/7/white-gold/ VIOVIO went quiet for a while. Not defunct, just silent—the kind of silence a brand goes into when it’s thinking about what comes next. For an independent Stuttgart label with people who actually care, you feel that absence. When something like that disappears, you notice. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/7/white-gold/ Tue, 07 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/7/how-your-dick-fights-terrorism/ John Oliver went to Moscow to ask Edward Snowden why the NSA keeps photographs of people’s genitals. That should tell you everything about the state we’re in. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/7/how-your-dick-fights-terrorism/ Tue, 07 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/7/before-the-world/ I’m about to sound like the world’s most insufferable hipster, but I was already obsessed with Lykke Li when you were still discovering “Electric Feel” in Berlin clubs that have disappeared. You could look it up—I have the proof somewhere. My whole world was “Little Bit,” “I’m Good, I’m Gone,” “Dance, Dance, Dance.” I had “Youth Novels” memorized completely. If I had a functional memory, I’d argue it’s the best album I’ve ever heard, and somehow it still doesn’t embarrass me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/7/before-the-world/ Tue, 07 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/2/raw-spring/ There’s a venue in Berlin called Neue Heimat on the RAW-Gelände, basically two enormous falling-apart industrial halls facing the Spree. The kind of place you can’t tell is active until you see people inside it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/2/raw-spring/ Thu, 02 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/2/ecke-weserstraße/ You’re at some gallery opening on a weeknight. Cheap beer tastes fine in the dark. You’re nowhere near home and tomorrow you’ll drag yourself to work with this same hangover you’ve had for three years. Emma, Tom, and Vincent live inside that exact space—the soap opera “Ecke Weserstraße” tracking them through the stretch of time when you still believe you can sustain this forever. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/2/ecke-weserstraße/ Thu, 02 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/2/die-another-day/ Beatrice Eli’s “Die Another Day” has been stuck in my head for days, and I think it’s because I needed to hear someone just say it plainly. Not as inspiration porn, just as fact. You’re living now. This is it. Stop waiting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/2/die-another-day/ Thu, 02 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/2/understatement-in-black/ The best parties are the ones where you can look in any direction and see someone you know. Good company, good drinks, everyone comfortable just being there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/2/understatement-in-black/ Thu, 02 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/1/when-google-was-funny/ Google’s April Fools’ jokes were actually funny, which is to say they were the only ones that worked. When the company still had some kind of personality, they’d drop something sharp every year. You could catch Pokémon on Google Earth one April, find Pac-Man on Google Maps in Berlin the next. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/1/when-google-was-funny/ Wed, 01 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/1/priorities/ The Berlin Senate shut down Görlitzer Park’s special status. It used to be one place in the city where weed was basically fine—10 to 15 grams and nobody would touch you. Now that’s gone. The reasoning is sound: kids found cocaine packets on the playground, a child with a joint in his mouth, parents asking what it takes before the city does anything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/1/priorities/ Wed, 01 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/1/langsam-langsamer/ When you think about German pop music you’re up against Helene Fischer, Frei.Wild, Unheilig. By the time Xavier Naidoo enters the picture you’ve already checked out. It’s not a scene built on faith. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/4/1/langsam-langsamer/ Wed, 01 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/31/low-shoulder/ There was this playlist once—every song that played on Skins. Chemical Brothers, Bloc Party, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Ludacris somehow. Toro y Moi was on there too, “Low Shoulder,” this track that existed for like five minutes on Pandora before it disappeared. That show ate years of my life, and the music was wired into all of it, the exact right sound for feeling like everything meant something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/31/low-shoulder/ Tue, 31 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/31/what-scares-silicon-valley/ Instagram will nuke a photo of a nipple within hours but let recruitment videos sit there for weeks. The priority makes no sense. Mark Zuckerberg talks about community safety, but what he’s actually enforcing is this ancient squeamishness around female bodies that nobody even consciously decided to care about anymore. It just got coded in, automated, inherited. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/31/what-scares-silicon-valley/ Tue, 31 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/31/navigation-by-accident/ You end up carrying your phone through Berlin like an anchor. You’re looking for a good burger place, or a café that doesn’t serve flat whites to influencers, or a shop where something costs less than a month’s rent. The phone promises to answer these questions. Usually it just takes you to wherever the algorithm thinks you should go. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/31/navigation-by-accident/ Tue, 31 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/31/heavy-heavy/ I knew Laura Carbone when she was writing on The Fucking Fuck, a blog that doesn’t exist anymore. Early 2000s internet, the kind of place that felt essential because it was the only space for this particular kind of thinking—scattered, urgent, unmediated. She moved past blogging like everyone eventually does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/31/heavy-heavy/ Tue, 31 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/31/brik-case/ I want my MacBook pristine, that cold aluminum glow, untouched by the world. And then I see someone’s laptop covered in stickers—band names, place pins, the actual evidence of living—and I want that instead. But stickers happen by accident, accumulating over time without plan. You end up with something haphazard that might’ve been cool once. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/31/brik-case/ Tue, 31 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/31/hipstory/ Israeli artist Amit Shimoni made a series called “Hipstory” where he reimagines historical figures and leaders as contemporary hipsters. Angela Merkel with piercings and tattoos. Che Guevara in a beanie. Nelson Mandela in full ironic drag—nose rings, vintage-store aesthetic, the works. He turned the concept into merchandise: prints, pillows, phone cases. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/31/hipstory/ Tue, 31 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/31/plumber-in-3d/ Watching Super Mario 64 on a supermarket display screen in 1997, my brain just stopped working. This was something completely outside my experience—a gateway to a new dimension of what games could be. The controller looked like a prop from a science fiction movie, the 3D graphics made no sense, and I stood there unable to comprehend what I was watching. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/31/plumber-in-3d/ Tue, 31 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/30/warm-hands/ April rain, gray and persistent. The kind of morning where you want something warm but you’re sick of coffee. Not sick of high, exactly, but sick of the sitting around waiting for it to hit, the pointlessness of timing your own intoxication like you’re measuring for a recipe. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/30/warm-hands/ Mon, 30 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/30/supercolor/ Superstars used to be white. That was the shoe—white with the three stripes, everyone had them, everyone wore them. Then Pharrell Williams and adidas released the Supercolor Pack, which was fifty Superstars in fifty different colors. A rainbow, basically. Each one the exact same shoe, just in a different color. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/30/supercolor/ Mon, 30 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/30/braids-and-bass/ I didn’t know you could do that until I saw Romano. Metal and rap seem like they shouldn’t work together—different origins, different energy, different everything about how they move. But watching the clips, him standing there expressionless in a bomber jacket with braids down his back, it clicks: they’re closer than they seem. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/30/braids-and-bass/ Mon, 30 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/30/good-drinks/ Axel knew his vodka—not in the pretentious sommelier way, but because he’d actually spent time with it. He knew the Swedish distillery, the history, which details mattered. He could talk about it without performing. The knowledge was just there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/30/good-drinks/ Mon, 30 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/30/topless-for-freedom/ The doubt comes first, naturally. “If I get naked, will Google own me?” Steffi asks, standing in a room somewhere in Germany before a FEMEN action. It’s such a ridiculous question that it almost makes sense. You’re about to strip to your waist and write political slogans across your chest, and your worry is Google’s algorithmic memory. But it tracks—there’s something about making yourself this visible, this deliberately exposed, that makes you hyperaware of invisibility. Of being captured, recorded, catalogued. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/30/topless-for-freedom/ Mon, 30 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/30/the-birdhain/ There are two kinds of people in Berlin: those who get past the Berghain door, and everyone else standing outside in the cold getting shut down. The door guy takes one look and shakes his head. That’s the whole religion of the place. Berghain isn’t a club—it’s rejection as policy, and the rejection is the entire point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/30/the-birdhain/ Mon, 30 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/30/prag/ I had this thing for Nora Tschirner back when German television was inescapable and MTV still existed. She was in everything—bad movies, good comedies, these shows I half-watched with the kind of attention you’re not supposed to give people. The way you notice someone beautiful against your own will, when you’re young enough that it still registers as a small humiliation. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/3/30/prag/ Mon, 30 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/18/selena-gets-it/ I get why Selena Gomez matters. She’s got the same thing I do underneath—that constant hum of depression and solitude sitting under whatever face you put on for the world, because the alternative is falling apart completely. In that V Magazine spread she’s topless, which is what got the attention, but what actually stuck was everything she said underneath the photographs. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/18/selena-gets-it/ Wed, 18 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/16/permission-slip/ Print’s supposedly dead, but every few years some book claws its way out of the corpse and becomes a thing. Fifty Shades of Grey was one of those things. A barely twenty-one-year-old named Anastasia Steele, a billionaire asshole named Christian Grey (the names are exactly as stupid as they sound), and six hundred pages of poorly written BDSM fan fiction that somehow became the biggest book in the world. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/16/permission-slip/ Mon, 16 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/16/what-time-is-it/ Look at these Adventure Time Doc Martens. Finn on one boot, Jake on the other, or both if you’re committed. The real damage is thinking about all the versions that don’t exist yet—green BMO, purple Marceline, pink Princess Bubblegum. I want them all. It’s pathetic to want something this badly over cartoon boots, but here’s the thing: you see the character and something lands. You remember what it meant, or who you were, and it feels possible that a boot with Finn on it could matter again. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/16/what-time-is-it/ Mon, 16 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/16/anonymous-declares-war/ Anonymous is hacking ISIS. Stealing social media accounts, tearing down websites, trying to choke off the propaganda machine that’s pulling kids worldwide into their orbit. Internet kids taking on a terrorist organization with passwords and exploit code. Medieval cosplayers getting dunked on by bedroom warriors. Whether it actually changes anything is beside the point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/16/anonymous-declares-war/ Mon, 16 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/16/something-new/ Kate Upton’s everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Sports Illustrated keeps running the same beach footage from years back, and after The Fappening, there’s nothing left to imagine anyway. She’s become background noise. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/16/something-new/ Mon, 16 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/16/what-i-sold/ I was twelve when I called into an Austrian kids’ TV show because they were giving away a Super Nintendo with Donkey Kong Country, and a green Game Boy on top of it. I had to guess what was wrong with a picture riddle—there was a lion where there shouldn’t be—and I got it right. They mailed it all to me. That was the best day of my life. Actually, genuinely the best day. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/16/what-i-sold/ Mon, 16 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/16/the-japanese-charts/ I stumbled onto the Japanese charts the way you find anything interesting online—by accident, clicking through something, and suddenly realizing you’ve entered a completely different world. The bands here aren’t just different from what gets played in the West. They operate by entirely different rules. NMB48, B´z, JYU—names that feel like they’re from another planet, and the music backs that up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/16/the-japanese-charts/ Mon, 16 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/16/night-map/ An urban planner named Jakob Schmid made an interactive map of Berlin’s nightlife, showing where the bars and clubs cluster, where people actually spend their nights and money. Mitte, Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain light up in all the right places. It’s a clean visualization, and there’s something different about seeing it all mapped out at once versus just knowing it from going out. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/16/night-map/ Mon, 16 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/16/everything-soft/ I keep coming back to Truck Torrence’s work. He posts under 100% Soft, which is the perfect name for it: takes characters from every dark corner of pop culture and softens them. Pastels, rounded lines, a relentless gentleness. The Ghostbusters arriving at a tea party. The Bride from Kill Bill rendered as if she’s apologizing. Shaun of the Dead characters as if the zombie apocalypse is just background noise they’ll laugh about later. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/16/everything-soft/ Mon, 16 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/15/style-without-apologies/ Fell down a Harajuku Hipster rabbit hole this week. It’s a Tumblr that just collects kids from Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai—whoever’s walking around with the kind of confidence that comes from not checking if what you’re wearing is supposed to work together. Schoolgirls in Shibuya layering colors that shouldn’t sit next to each other. Models from Seoul who make you think they’ve figured something out. Guys from China in outfits that look like three different aesthetics somehow became one person. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/15/style-without-apologies/ Sun, 15 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/15/how-they-paid-for-it/ I can’t sleep so I’m deep in the Arte archive at three in the morning, looking for something to keep my brain from looping. I find this documentary about ISIS—specifically how they funded themselves. Not the usual terror doc. This one’s about money. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/15/how-they-paid-for-it/ Sun, 15 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/15/work-it/ I remember watching Missy Elliott’s videos and there was always this kid dancing. She had moves that made you sit there thinking about how unfair it was that anyone could move like that. I must have watched those clips a hundred times, and she was always there, just completely in control. I didn’t know her name—just that she was impossibly good at something that seemed simple until you tried to understand it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/15/work-it/ Sun, 15 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/15/through-the-night/ I’d been down a rabbit hole of documentaries—heavy ones, atrocity after atrocity—when I stumbled into this German TV show around midnight. Durch die Nacht, “Through the Night,” just follows two guys, a rapper named Haftbefehl and comedian Oliver Polak, driving around Offenbach at night. The episode I watched jumped between depression, döner kebab, mothers, carnivals, Jewish history, and Udo Jürgens like it was all part of the same conversation, which I guess it was. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/15/through-the-night/ Sun, 15 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/13/when-you-were-young/ ’When You Were Young’ was the sound of 2006 for me. I listened to it enough times that I probably heard it more than my own voice, the kind of song that doesn’t wear out no matter how much you play it. The whole Sam’s Towns album hit like that—massive, perfect—and The Killers never made anything that big again. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/13/when-you-were-young/ Fri, 13 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/13/ten-little-missions/ Every Friday I make a list. Ten things to do, ten small reasons to think the weekend might be worth something. Here’s what I’ve got this week. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/13/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 13 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/13/style/ The “Style” video is this perfect moment where Taylor figures out how to be cool—actually cool, not trying-hard cool. She’s bored, detached, moving through rooms in a 70s haze with some guy who doesn’t matter. The video gets it right: that feeling of moving through someone else’s life like you’re already gone, already elsewhere. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/13/style/ Fri, 13 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/13/a-day-in-the-life/ I’m no good at waiting. The gap between seasons felt like stolen time, just refreshing pages that had nothing new to say. Game of Thrones had this gravity to it though—the kind of show that made the wait feel less like patience and more like withdrawal. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/13/a-day-in-the-life/ Fri, 13 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/13/the-moon-keeps-falling/ “Majora’s Mask” was always the weirder Zelda. Three-day cycles, a moon descending toward the earth, the same world recycled and reshaped across the loops. Most people point to “Ocarina of Time” as the peak, but anyone who actually spent time with “Majora’s Mask” understood it was the stranger masterpiece—darker, more ambitious, uncompromising about what it wanted to do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/13/the-moon-keeps-falling/ Fri, 13 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/12/friends-in-2015/ The thought experiment is stupid but inevitable: what would Friends look like if someone rebooted it in 2015? The core stuff wouldn’t change—the breakups, the desperation, the way they can’t function without each other. But everything else would invert. Rachel’s closet becomes a studied Instagram aesthetic, the coffee shop turns aggressively artisanal, and Ross somehow acquires a podcast nobody listens to. The characters would stay identical underneath, still needing and failing in the same ways. Just now they’d know they were performing it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/12/friends-in-2015/ Thu, 12 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/12/when-television-works/ I’ll be honest: I loved sitcoms in the nineties. Friends, Scrubs, Malcolm in the Middle. The ones that actually felt like something. Then television got cuter and meaner. HIMYM showed up and something in comedy died—some essential thing about character and warmth, replaced entirely by irony and smugness. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/12/when-television-works/ Thu, 12 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/11/kitsune-mura/ Kitsune Mura is a village in Japan full of small, beautiful foxes living together. They spend their time chasing camera operators, which is already perfect, but the idea keeps pulling at me: what if I just sold everything, got a fox costume, and moved there? Integrated myself completely and stayed forever. Became one of them. Because after thinking about it for years, I’m convinced foxes are the best animal on earth. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/11/kitsune-mura/ Wed, 11 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/11/my-superstars/ We get superstars fed to us constantly—through competitions and viral moments and carefully managed brands. And I’ve chased enough of them to figure out it doesn’t matter. The people who actually change how I think and work are almost never the ones with the biggest platforms. They’re photographers I found by accident, musicians nobody’s heard of, designers solving problems sideways. That’s the group that matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/11/my-superstars/ Wed, 11 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/10/tongue-tied/ Miley Cyrus made “Tongue Tied” to tell you exactly what she thought about still being Hannah Montana. Not with words, but with movement, with skin, with direct stares at the camera. It was 2010 and she was done with the child-star agreement—you know, the one where the audience gets to keep you frozen in time in exchange for career opportunities. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/10/tongue-tied/ Tue, 10 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/10/different/ This video made the rounds of Japanese women saying they’d date foreign guys. The setup’s transparently built on a fantasy—the one where being Western, foreign, and vaguely interesting-because-you’re-different automatically means something. The video basically says: no, that’s not how it works. Attraction is specific, individual, indifferent to your origin story. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/10/different/ Tue, 10 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/10/the-sauna-party/ We rented out a hotel sauna in London for an afternoon. Me, Simon, Hikmet, Dominik, a few others. People I do stupid things with. The idea was straightforward: half-naked people in an overheated room throwing white towels around until something gave. We hit that limit in about twenty minutes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/10/the-sauna-party/ Tue, 10 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/10/basement-arcade/ Asics flew me out to London last weekend for some anniversary thing—twenty-five years of the Gel-Lyte III, European launch of a new Tiger colorway. The event was at one of those deliberately secret locations, just an address texted when you arrived, which turned out to be a basement somewhere in the city with an arcade setup and proper Japanese food. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/10/basement-arcade/ Tue, 10 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/10/the-blogging-graveyard/ There’s this thing that happens when you’ve been online long enough: you start recognizing the patterns instantly. Dead blogs announce themselves. The generic WordPress template nobody bothered to customize. The endless scroll of stolen Reddit posts, reblogged memes, BuzzFeed listicles with one sentence of commentary attached—usually just “Lol” or “Same.” That’s the entire post. That’s someone’s contribution to the internet today. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/10/the-blogging-graveyard/ Tue, 10 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/10/high-there/ Sitting at your window with mediocre weed, watching it turn to ash, and all you really want is someone to share it with. Not making a thing out of it, not performance, just someone who gets it, who’d sit down and smoke without needing to talk around it. That’s the whole fantasy when you’re alone at night. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/10/high-there/ Tue, 10 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/5/ramen-lasagne/ Those fifty-cent ramen packets with the shelf life of forever—they taste better than they have any right to. There’s always been a stack somewhere, backup food for when money runs out or I stop caring about effort. David Chang’s Lucky Peach video takes that bottom-shelf staple and transforms it into lasagne, which is the kind of absurd alchemy that happens when a chef with real skill decides cheap food is worth taking seriously. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/5/ramen-lasagne/ Thu, 05 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/4/marina-still/ I got real into Marina and the Diamonds a few years back. “I Am Not a Robot,” “Mowgli’s Road,” “Oh No!”—there was something about those tracks that just worked. Even the ones that didn’t hit as hard had this weird sincerity underneath them that made you believe she meant it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/4/marina-still/ Wed, 04 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/4/better-left-unbuilt/ There’s a sketch by an artist named Takumi of what a Studio Ghibli theme park could look like. I’ve been staring at it because it captures something that actual theme parks don’t even try for anymore: the feeling that you’re stepping into a place that was already there before you showed up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/4/better-left-unbuilt/ Wed, 04 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/4/pretty-puke/ Late nights in LA look nothing like what America is supposed to be. Miller Rodriguez photographed people moving through lit rooms and bright streets doing exactly what they want—no darkness to hide in, no basement door policy, just pure visibility and zero apologies. The transgression is all out front. There’s something actually darker about that kind of honesty, about being seen, than any basement ever was. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/4/pretty-puke/ Wed, 04 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/4/mean-girls-game/ I actually love Mean Girls. Not in a guilty-pleasure way, but genuinely love it—it’s sharper and funnier than films three times its budget, and everyone in it is perfectly cast. So when I heard they made a mobile game, I knew I was going down. “Mean Girls: The Game” looks like a soulless tie-in cash grab, which is exactly what it is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/4/mean-girls-game/ Wed, 04 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/4/the-comments/ A woman posting online gets maybe a dozen messages a day. Guys asking her to do things, insults dressed as flirtation, pictures she didn’t ask for, threats wrapped in compliments. Kelly Svirakova, a YouTuber under the name MissesVlog, stopped quietly deleting them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/4/the-comments/ Wed, 04 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/4/contact-high/ I didn’t buy this book for the art history. There’s a naked girl smoking on the cover, and that was the whole pitch. Opened it and got what I was looking for—more naked girls, more weed smoke, same unbothered vibe. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/4/contact-high/ Wed, 04 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/4/city-bones/ Kim Laughton deleted the textures from Grand Theft Auto V and drove around Los Santos with a camera, documenting what the city looks like underneath all the visual detail. What you get is pure geometry—the wireframe skeleton of a place, all the structure and none of the seduction. It’s depressing in exactly the way you’d expect a city stripped of everything that makes it feel alive to be depressing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/4/city-bones/ Wed, 04 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/3/fourfiveseconds/ Kanye brought Paul McCartney and Rihanna into the studio and came out with ’FourFiveSeconds.’ The song sounds like nothing any of them usually make—it’s quiet and kind of broken. The video’s black and white, everything restrained and held at a distance. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/3/fourfiveseconds/ Tue, 03 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/3/the-hunger/ There’s a Rihanna issue of i-D Magazine and some weeks she looks like the coolest person alive and other weeks she looks like a disaster, but both versions of her deserve to be on my wall. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/3/the-hunger/ Tue, 03 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/3/show-em-what-youre-made-of/ There’s a Backstreet Boys movie and I’ve lost my mind in exactly the right way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/3/show-em-what-youre-made-of/ Tue, 03 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/3/tove-styrkes-ego/ I’ve been following Tove Styrke through a few really strong singles—’Call My Name,’ ’High and Low,’ ’Million Pieces’—and there’s a quality to her work that reveals itself on the third or fourth listen. ’Ego’ is her doing that sparse, Tokyo-at-night aesthetic, the kind of pop production where nothing’s wasted. Sweden’s got people who understand that better than most. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/3/tove-styrkes-ego/ Tue, 03 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/3/for-the-story/ My roommate Leni is starting a blog. She had one years ago—fashion and lifestyle stuff—but it just faded the way most blogs do. Not a dramatic collapse, just a quiet descent into irrelevance. She stopped posting, forgot about it, moved on. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/3/for-the-story/ Tue, 03 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/3/tokyo-permission/ In Harajuku, the animals dress better than Berlin’s entire fashion scene. Machi the fox and Neko the cat are there listening to MUCC, existing in a reality the rest of us barely touch. It’s the first thing that hits you about Japan—everything there seems to know something we haven’t figured out yet. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/3/tokyo-permission/ Tue, 03 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/3/pokémon-gets-weird/ Someone had the idea to get a bunch of artists to each redraw a scene from the original Pokémon opening. Not remake it in a coherent way—just hand off different chunks to different people and see what happened. The result was like watching your childhood memory get processed through a broken photocopier, twisted and refracted through everyone’s personal style until it barely resembled what you remembered. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/3/pokémon-gets-weird/ Tue, 03 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/2/the-sharks/ Katy Perry’s 2015 Super Bowl halftime show was loud and expensive and very committed to being a spectacle. But the only moment I cared about was this backup dancer in a shark costume who clearly had no idea what was happening. His partner was executing the choreography, totally locked in, and this guy was just sort of moving around like he’d woken up seconds before they went live. Not in a funny way—just completely lost. I watched him instead of the actual performance the whole time, and that tells you everything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/2/the-sharks/ Mon, 02 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/2/make-your-way/ In February 2002 we got home internet for the first time. A 56k modem, which meant that everything moved at the pace of 5 AM, me stumbling home after a terrible party, drunk enough that the world had gone all swimmy and sideways, just trying to get to my bed before I threw up on myself. That’s how slow everything was. You’d click and wait. You’d wait some more. You’d think maybe something broke. Then finally the page would load, ten years later. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/2/make-your-way/ Mon, 02 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/2/perfect-and-nerdy/ Paul Robertson and Ivan Dixon took Homer’s drive to the nuclear plant and rendered it in bright, blocky pixels. It’s the intro we’ve all seen countless times, but they made it worth watching again. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/2/perfect-and-nerdy/ Mon, 02 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/2/sega-forever/ I wasn’t always a Nintendo kid. Early on I was all in on Sega—Sonic, Alex Kidd, Ecco, that whole weird corner of gaming that didn’t become the default way everyone played. Saying you preferred Sega feels like admitting you picked worse, except I didn’t feel like it was worse. It was just different. It was mine. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/2/sega-forever/ Mon, 02 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/2/winter-was-coming/ April 12 meant something that year. Season 5 of Game of Thrones was coming and the internet was holding its breath. The trailer had just landed and everyone was watching it, talking about what would come next. You’d see it everywhere—the same excitement, the same countdown. Winter is coming. Winter was definitely coming. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/2/winter-was-coming/ Mon, 02 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/2/fantasy-life/ I’ve got a PS4 sitting around with GTA V and Dark Souls and all the things you’re supposed to have strong opinions about if you want to be culturally relevant. What am I actually doing? Spending a hundred hours on the toilet playing Fantasy Life on my 3DS. This small, cute game is a colorful, addictive drug and I cannot put it down. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/2/2/fantasy-life/ Mon, 02 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/28/samis-bad-week/ Ines was at Fashion Week in Berlin, doing what she does—catching people off-guard with the questions that matter. This time she asked who, out of Simon Desue, LeFloid, and Sami Slimani, they’d most want to blow if it meant saving the world. Three options for models, designers, hangers-on, the whole machine. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/28/samis-bad-week/ Wed, 28 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/28/a-thousand-euros-for-sharing/ You learn fast in Germany that you can’t repost a photograph without risking legal destruction. Jan Böhmermann found out the hard way when he shared a photo on Twitter—a Nazi, shot by photographer Martin Langer, nothing crazy. The cease-and-desist came immediately. A thousand euros for one tweet. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/28/a-thousand-euros-for-sharing/ Wed, 28 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/28/mistaken-enka/ I thought Yumi Zouma’s “Catastrophe” was a Japanese enka artist. Obviously not. But I’m ten listens in, so something’s working. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/28/mistaken-enka/ Wed, 28 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/27/well-miss-u-bb/ Back when Uffie still mattered, when Cory Kennedy was the it-girl of the moment, when your sister—now probably deep into whatever drug habit she picked up—was just getting dragged against her will to her first dubstep rave, Hipster Runoff was the most important website in the world. For me, for anyone trying to figure out what actually mattered in that scene, it was the template. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/27/well-miss-u-bb/ Tue, 27 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/27/the-authenticity-game/ YouTube authenticity is the easiest product to sell because it seems like the one thing you can’t buy—realness, access, a person without a filter. These guys build empires on it. The kids believe it because how could thousands of people be wrong? But Böhmermann, who spent a career on German television identifying elaborate bullshit, kept it simple in an interview: the whole thing is designed. There’s no version of these people that exists outside the system keeping them profitable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/27/the-authenticity-game/ Tue, 27 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/27/the-internal-compass/ She’s all over the place. Berlin TV sets, clubs, airports to warm beaches where she’d rather swim with dolphins than watch them on TV. You’d think someone living like that would get swallowed by the city’s noise and hedonism. There are plenty of people who moved to Berlin young and ambitious, and now they basically live in the basement of Berghain, completely sucked in. But Palina’s different—she’s stayed intact somehow. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/27/the-internal-compass/ Tue, 27 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/26/kamehameha-bitches/ A Bathing Ape just dropped Dragon Ball merch, and there’s something satisfying about watching a high-fashion brand treat anime like it’s obvious why that matters. Because it is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/26/kamehameha-bitches/ Mon, 26 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/23/grandmas-turn/ Five hours into GTA 5 and I couldn’t beat this one street race. Same pattern every time: I’d be winning, then something would clip me—a parked car, a light pole, something I didn’t see coming—and I’d be finished. Two hundred attempts, maybe more. At some point you stop counting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/23/grandmas-turn/ Fri, 23 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/23/salzio/ Ines used to write for this place - sharp observations, whatever came to mind. She wrote about terrorism in Germany one week and tamagotchis the next, wrote about girls kissing, just real thoughts scattered across posts. That was nearly five years ago now. She moved to Hamburg, got a job at an ad agency, mostly disappeared except for occasional Twitter updates about her actual life. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/23/salzio/ Fri, 23 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/23/tokyo-substitute/ Dreams about Tokyo come most nights. Not the tourist version—the real thing, moving back, waking up to food that actually tastes like something and existing without turning every moment into content. That’s supposed to happen this year if the money works out. For now there’s Crunchyroll, cycling through anime like it’s going to help. Switch Girl, Nobunaga Concerto, No Dropping Out. They’re good but they’re also constant proof of what they’re not. The food especially. Fresh fish the way it is there. You know it won’t fix anything but you can’t stop thinking about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/23/tokyo-substitute/ Fri, 23 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/22/harajuku-wont-do-grey/ Sometime in February, every winter-locked European city looks the same—black coat, black pants, black hat, black mood. You watch it happen every year without anyone really deciding it’s happening. The sun disappears around November and everyone just agrees to dress like the world ended, for three months straight. It’s not discussed. It’s not conscious. It’s just what happens when the light dies and nobody questions it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/22/harajuku-wont-do-grey/ Thu, 22 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/22/doing-it/ Charli XCX and Rita Ora made a video and the real star is this older guy in a leopard thong. He shows up, he dances, he grins—completely unbothered. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/22/doing-it/ Thu, 22 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/21/denken-sie-groß/ Deichkind released a new video for “Denken Sie Groß” and it’s everything you’d expect from a band with zero restraint—chaotic, colorful, completely absurd. The song is pure adrenaline and attitude, made for that moment when you’re running on fumes but need to convince yourself you can keep pushing. They included a warning about not watching if you’re high, which seems fair. Spring tour if you want the live version. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/21/denken-sie-groß/ Wed, 21 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/21/why-not/ Every year people are standing in the rain waiting for some delayed show. The whole thing’s there if you want it—networking, photographs, good clothes. I used to think I should want it. Honestly, I stopped. Now I’m home in sweatpants with warm cheese and spicy sausages, playing GTA, and I’m completely fine with that choice. The clothes are sometimes great, but the week was never about clothes anyway. It’s about being somewhere you can be seen, and I’ve never been bothered enough by visibility to spend an evening getting wet for it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/21/why-not/ Wed, 21 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/20/concerned-citizen/ Toyah Diebel made a makeup tutorial once: how to look like Kathrin Oertel, the woman who became the face of PEGIDA (Germany’s anti-immigration protests) while insisting she was just a regular, concerned citizen. Follow the steps and you’re her exactly—which is entirely the point of the satire. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/20/concerned-citizen/ Tue, 20 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/20/poster-child/ Found an old V Magazine with a full-page nude of Miley Cyrus, which would’ve been genuinely scandalous in 2008, back when her Hannah Montana posters were everywhere. She’d spent the next decade systematically burning down that image, though, so by the time this magazine dropped it didn’t even feel like scandal anymore. The wig was just a costume, and she’d been shedding it for years. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/20/poster-child/ Tue, 20 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/20/what-stuck-around/ I met people who grew up in the DDR and they all wanted to talk about the food. Not from some deep nostalgia—just people remembering what they ate. The East German government didn’t hand out abundance. You got rations, basics, whatever it could manage. That’s what you cooked from. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/20/what-stuck-around/ Tue, 20 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/20/the-toothbrush/ In Cambodia, three Norwegian fashion bloggers tried to live on factory wages. Anniken, Frida, Ludwig—young, styled, used to 600 euros a month for clothes—suddenly couldn’t afford a toothbrush. They documented it for Aftenposten because they wanted to see where their clothes actually came from, to understand the people on the other end. You can watch the film with English subtitles if you want. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/20/the-toothbrush/ Tue, 20 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/19/the-unrecognizable-man/ Friedrich Liechtenstein, Germany’s most beloved punk musician, shaved his beard. Just like that. The face that had been obscured and distinguished by facial hair for years vanished into whatever he wanted to be instead. I remember seeing the photos and honestly not recognizing him at first. That’s the thing about iconic looks—they calcify. You see someone with the same face and hair for long enough and it becomes who they are. The look and the person fuse. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/19/the-unrecognizable-man/ Mon, 19 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/16/everything-at-once/ I’ve had Ibeyi’s “Ghosts” running through my head for weeks now. Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Diaz, those French-Cuban sisters, doing these creeping atmospheric tracks that just sit in your skull without trying. The kind of music that doesn’t announce itself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/16/everything-at-once/ Fri, 16 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/16/the-one-true-emoji/ Emojis have basically become our language, honestly. Little angels, pizza slices, yellow faces attempting to mean something. It’s kind of ridiculous and it mostly works. But there’s one that actually wins - the pile of shit with eyes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/16/the-one-true-emoji/ Fri, 16 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/16/say-the-magic-word/ Sailor Moon was the show where everything mattered. Some weird creature was trying to destroy the world, and Bunny and her friends had to stop it, and it felt like life and death even though it was absolutely ridiculous. Then a song would start playing, and suddenly it actually was life and death. The music in that show was doing all the heavy lifting. The story was fine, the fights were fine, but when those songs came in—when you heard “Force of Eternity” or “Only You Alone” or whatever the German dub had called them—that’s when you felt something real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/16/say-the-magic-word/ Fri, 16 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/16/chrissys-superstars/ Chrissy was too young and wore adidas Superstars with white socks pulled short, the way they were supposed to be worn. We’d find her at parties or behind the abandoned house, the one with the broken windows and a door that wouldn’t shut right. She didn’t stick around. The shoes did. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/16/chrissys-superstars/ Fri, 16 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/16/just-floating/ I listened to “Sober” and it’s just there. No effort showing. Donald Glover floating over something like Michael Jackson, singing about something minor and romantic without making a thing about it. That’s the whole point. He’s done it so many times by now that he doesn’t even have to announce what he’s doing. Act in a TV show, make an album, direct a film, whatever. Just move between them like they’re not different languages. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/16/just-floating/ Fri, 16 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/15/pointless/ Sports Illustrated runs these behind-the-scenes videos of Kate Upton all the time. She talks about a photoshoot, or how great it is being a model, or magazines her family had around the house, and meanwhile she’s just wandering on a beach like she’s naturally there. Then it ends and I’m aware that I haven’t learned anything, haven’t taken away anything except the obvious fact that this is a commercial for a magazine that’s basically just selling the concept of Kate Upton. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/15/pointless/ Thu, 15 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/15/pendulum/ “Pendulum” has been stuck in my head since LP1 came out. The video just dropped, and it’s exactly what the track needed—FKA twigs alone in a studio space, dancing with the kind of focused intensity where you can’t tell if it’s work or pleasure. Every gesture precise, nothing wasted. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/15/pendulum/ Thu, 15 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/15/real-enough/ These four guys—Daniel, Etienne, Simon, Nils—were launching a 24-hour stream channel. If you knew German internet at all, you’d recognize them somewhere: GIGA back when that mattered, Game One, various projects over the years. Always making something, always hungry. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/15/real-enough/ Thu, 15 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/15/the-perfect-youth/ Elodie Bambi Tann’s photographs document something specific: youth when wine, drugs, and love are the main events, when you’re surrounded by people who feel things the way you do. Her early work came from her shared apartment and the house parties that seemed to contain entire worlds. These photographs are strong and real and intimate—no styling, no distance, just what happened and what it looked like. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/15/the-perfect-youth/ Thu, 15 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/14/sushi-sweater/ If I had to choose between world peace and this sushi sweater, I’m taking the sweater without a second thought. No hesitation, no pretending to deliberate. I’d start yelling about it before they finished asking the question, waving my arms around like an idiot. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/14/sushi-sweater/ Wed, 14 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/14/before-the-jungle/ Every year, someone heading into Dschungelcamp does a Playboy spread first. Last year it was Gabby Rinne. This year Sara Kulka and Angelina Heger. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/14/before-the-jungle/ Wed, 14 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/14/simple-sneakers/ Chris Anderson draws sneakers the way someone might draw cars if they actually gave a shit about cars. Adidas, Nike, Converse—just the shoes, clean lines, and somehow they make you want to go back and buy something you’ve probably owned five times already. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/14/simple-sneakers/ Wed, 14 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/14/palina-in-phase/ You always knew Olli Schulz would work with Palina Rojinski eventually. She’s Germany’s most visible pop-culture presence, the kind of person who shows up everywhere because everyone wants her to, so it was only a matter of time before he made a move. The video for “Phase” features her, along with Donnie O’Sullivan, photographer Oliver Rath, and someone with the most gloriously unpronounceable German name: Gisbert Wilhelm Enno Freiherr zu Innhausen und Knyphausen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/14/palina-in-phase/ Wed, 14 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/14/still-playing/ All I really know about Chip Tanaka is that his melodies are permanent now. They’ve been playing in the background of every thought since I was young enough to hold a controller, and they’re not going anywhere. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/14/still-playing/ Wed, 14 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/13/subtropical-solitude/ Masafumi Nagasaki is 78 and naked on an island in Okinawa, the southern tip where Sotobanari sits by itself. He got there by walking away years ago and never coming back. Built a hut. Doesn’t wear clothes. Is apparently happier than you or me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/13/subtropical-solitude/ Tue, 13 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/13/between-shows/ Miley had just blown up the Hannah Montana thing and everyone was waiting to see what she’d actually do. The Bangerz Tour was the answer - not a press release version of rebellion, but something genuinely in-progress. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/13/between-shows/ Tue, 13 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/13/cute-dictator/ Brazilian artist Butcher Billy thought: what if Kim Jong-un was Batman? Or Super Mario? Or just went straight for Hitler? He built a whole project around these dumb hypotheticals called “Friend Or Foe”—pop culture icons with a dictator’s face. The result is genuinely absurd: one of the world’s most brutal murderers rendered as a cute comic-book character. Evil in primary colors. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/13/cute-dictator/ Tue, 13 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/13/disko/ My grandfather fled Lithuania during the war. Years later I got a box of his old negatives—photographs from before he left, from a time and place that no longer existed. Reason enough to go back to somewhere I’d never actually lived. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/13/disko/ Tue, 13 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/13/everything-is-forgiven/ I keep thinking about what it must have felt like to walk back into that office. After what happened, after losing people, to sit down and just make the next issue. Charlie Hebdo, the magazine that wouldn’t stop drawing, wouldn’t stop pushing back. They came back. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/13/everything-is-forgiven/ Tue, 13 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/12/roots-and-wings/ I’d own a continent by now if I got paid every time I fell in love. A small one. Today it’s Roos Vughts. I don’t know anything about her except that Dave Fransen photographed her for Satiety Paper, and these pictures—straightforward, natural, beautiful—are enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/12/roots-and-wings/ Mon, 12 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/12/the-j-pop-shock/ There’s this YouTube genre where they show American teenagers Japanese pop music for the first time, and I get why it works. Most of these kids have grown up on whatever’s on TikTok or Top 40 radio, which means they’re primed for one-or-two-minute hooks and maybe a feature verse. Then you hit them with AKB48 or Perfume and their brains actually short-circuit. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/12/the-j-pop-shock/ Mon, 12 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/5/how-much-is-the-fish/ Saw H.P. Baxxter in an EDEKA supermarket ad the other day. Just him grocery shopping, checking prices, nothing dramatic. Which is its own kind of funny when you’re used to thinking of him as the guy jumping around on stage in the 90s screaming “How Much Is the Fish” to massive crowds. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2015/1/5/how-much-is-the-fish/ Mon, 05 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/28/leaving-television/ Game One is dying. Not the kind of death where there’s a funeral and people say goodbye properly. The kind where the show gets moved to Comedy Central, then back, then forward again, each decision taking another year off its life until one day they just stop. Etienne Gardé, one of the creators, talks about how it’s not that they got worse—they filled every requirement, met every quota the network wanted. But it doesn’t matter. Somewhere in an office, someone decided the thing that made tens of thousands of people happy wasn’t worth the slot anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/28/leaving-television/ Sun, 28 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/12/somewhere-warm/ Winter mornings are a specific kind of misery. You wake up in the dark, shower in the cold, and all you can think is: please, anything but this. But you go out anyway. You freeze all day. You come home and you’re still cold. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/12/somewhere-warm/ Fri, 12 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/12/red-ranger/ Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was everything to me at twelve. Not the sequels—those don’t count. The originals. That was it. A group of teenagers with a secret, fighting in giant robots against obviously cheap monsters, the same setup over and over. It probably shaped me more than my actual teachers did, though I might be romanticizing it now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/12/red-ranger/ Fri, 12 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/5/flesh-market/ Gunsmithcat is the online name for Luis Quiles, a Spanish illustrator whose work hits different than most art commentary. His collection Flesh Market is relentlessly dark—girls on their knees for a handful of likes, children carved up by cute video game characters, people medicated into a functional gray. He illustrates homosexual Teletubbies, loan sharks rendered as predatory flesh, censorship as bodily violation. All of it with a sickness that feels less like satire and more like documentation. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/5/flesh-market/ Fri, 05 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/5/2014s-best-songs/ 2014 could have broken you or saved you—I’m still not sure which it did for me. At least the music made sense. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/5/2014s-best-songs/ Fri, 05 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/4/deichkind-still-here/ The new Deichkind video has everyone hopping around like their triangles never went out of style. Five guys of a certain age, no sense of fashion, and somehow still making music that matters to people who absolutely should have moved on by now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/4/deichkind-still-here/ Thu, 04 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/4/what-sticks/ I’m one of those people who figures out what works and then just wears it forever. UNIQLO, DIESEL, Adidas - specifically the Superstars. I’ve worn the same shoe for years because once you find something that fits right you don’t need to think about it anymore. The Made in France Consortium version costs more but doesn’t really change anything. A shoe that works is a shoe that works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/4/what-sticks/ Thu, 04 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/4/make-up-ice-cream-underwear/ I’d have been the world’s greatest teenage girl. I’m certain of it. I would’ve invited my friends—Anna, Laura, Thu—and we’d have done that thing where you cake makeup on your face at midnight and eat ice cream straight from the container and laugh at how much better you are than the boys at football. The kind of night where nothing happens and everything matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/4/make-up-ice-cream-underwear/ Thu, 04 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/4/my-addiction/ Lindsay Lohan was everywhere once—that Disney kid, the Mean Girls girl, the whole trajectory from untouchable to completely wrecked. The mugshots, the rehab, the years when she just disappeared. It’s the kind of public destruction that’s weirdly fascinating and genuinely sad at the same time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/4/my-addiction/ Thu, 04 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/3/already-over/ Charli XCX’s “Breaking Up” sits in that gap between the 80s and 90s, all synth and forward momentum, and it doesn’t convince you to end anything. It just makes what you already decided on feel less like failure and more like moving your body out of the way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/3/already-over/ Wed, 03 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/2/over-pharrell/ I like Pharrell Williams. Which is weird, because now I’m sick of him. Look, “Happy” makes me want to burn down a radio station, but underneath that the guy seems genuinely cool. He’s got real connections, real access to things you can’t normally get. Good company, if you ran into him. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/2/over-pharrell/ Tue, 02 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/2/still-waiting/ In ninth grade my best friend Marc handed me three CDs full of porn. First one was those “teen” videos—thirty-year-old prostitutes in pigtails and school uniforms. Second was terrible quality Dolly Buster files, basically unwatchable. The last disc was packed with hundreds of megabytes of naked old women, the kind you’d see advertised late-night on TV—”Call us!” I actually went through some of it. Some of them weren’t terrible to look at, even for eighty-five. But it did nothing for me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/2/still-waiting/ Tue, 02 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/2/too-cold-for-color/ First winter day and I’m already dead inside. Not the poetic kind—just the cold that makes you move faster without moving at all, and you dress for it by grabbing whatever was black yesterday. Coat, pants, boots, gone. Everyone looks the same, which is exactly the point. Winter here means you pick a uniform and stick with it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/2/too-cold-for-color/ Tue, 02 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/2/tetris-on-the-big-screen/ You’re three hours into staring at the TV and nothing’s worth watching. The Xbox is still downloading some update nobody asked for. Everything else is garbage. So your brain keeps circling back to something old—your Game Boy, that little piece of plastic that actually had games worth playing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/2/tetris-on-the-big-screen/ Tue, 02 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/1/pixel-porn-beyond-earth/ When I was a kid I used to lie awake imagining aliens visiting Earth, arriving with technology and magic and whatever, transforming this boring world into something better. We’d be best friends, me and these misunderstood creatures. Then I played Civilization: Beyond Earth and now I just want to vaporize the slimy bastards. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/1/pixel-porn-beyond-earth/ Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/1/armpit-forest/ Hannah showed me Anna’s blog. Twenty-two, from Denmark, posts gorgeous visuals about watches, makeup, good food. Then I watched her video about maintaining dreadlocks. For one moment her arms went up. That’s all it took for Anna to make me into someone who finds armpit hair attractive. Apparently I’m officially more evolved than all of you now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/1/armpit-forest/ Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/1/rhymeberry/ Miri, Hime, and Hikaru of Rhymeberry don’t rap about the usual things. Love, friendship, orange juice—that’s their lane, not money or street cred or any of the stuff that supposedly matters in hip-hop. Which should be completely stupid. It’s not. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/1/rhymeberry/ Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/1/what-i-didnt-see/ Claire Oelkers, an entertainer and TV presence I know mostly from magazines and music television, made a series about what “German-ness” actually means when you strip away the clichés. Not the official version - the one buried in places most people don’t explore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/1/what-i-didnt-see/ Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/1/september-in-hong-kong/ Monday morning I’m groaning into coffee while somewhere in Hong Kong, students are crashing against the gates of government. Hundreds of them, helmets, umbrellas against the pepper spray. Some get hurt. Some get arrested. This has been going on since September. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/12/1/september-in-hong-kong/ Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/28/star-wars-still-isnt-it/ The new Star Wars trailer dropped and everyone’s losing their minds, and I’m sitting here with nothing. No spark, no anticipation, nothing at all. Star Wars just doesn’t work for me, never has, and a shiny new trailer isn’t changing that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/28/star-wars-still-isnt-it/ Fri, 28 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/28/resistance-theater/ I see this image on Facebook constantly. White text on black: something about protecting your photos from commercial use under the new terms of service. Perfectly formatted to feel like a legal stand, the kind of thing that seems urgent until you realize no one actually wrote it with any legal knowledge. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/28/resistance-theater/ Fri, 28 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/26/waiting-for-april/ If some old woman crawled out of the bushes and offered to skip me ahead a few months to April, I’d say yes before she finished talking. That’s where we are with Game of Thrones right now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/26/waiting-for-april/ Wed, 26 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/25/peter-chungs-princesses/ SNEEZE Magazine released a skateboard set with Mulan and Jasmine drawn exactly how I imagined them as a teenager—massive breasts, tight jeans, holding each other like they’re about to have sex. Peter Chung did it, a Korean-American artist, and he basically rendered pure fantasy without pretending any of this serves the actual character narratives. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/25/peter-chungs-princesses/ Tue, 25 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/25/mockingjays-spark/ There’s this moment where Jennifer Lawrence is crying into the camera, surrounded by rubble and smoke and heat, telling the oppressed masses that the time for revolution has come. In about two minutes, I went from someone who didn’t really care about anything to someone who wanted to burn it all down. Well, almost. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/25/mockingjays-spark/ Tue, 25 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/25/the-kingdom-of-dreams-and-madness/ I still think about Spirited Away at random moments. The way No-Face moves through the bathhouse. The sound of the train. I’ve watched Miyazaki’s films enough times that they’ve woven themselves into my thinking like memories of places I actually lived, except they were never real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/25/the-kingdom-of-dreams-and-madness/ Tue, 25 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/22/kiko-in-reebok/ Kiko Mizuhara in the GL 6000 and Freestyle Hi Spirit—those Reeboks just sitting there, not trying to do anything but exist. There was a moment when sneaker design understood that simplicity was enough, and the GL 6000 is that moment in shoe form. Clean lines, almost flat geometry, everything in service of not announcing itself. What stuck with me was how perfectly the shoe solved its own problem, and then stopped. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/22/kiko-in-reebok/ Sat, 22 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/18/borrowed-days/ You ever fantasize about swapping lives with someone for a while? Just picking up and living in a different city as a different person, with different routines, everything novel instead of worn smooth by familiarity. Claudia Zalla, an Italian photographer, wasn’t content to fantasize. Timberland was running this campaign called Life-Swaps, moving creatives around Europe, and she signed up. Came to Berlin, took on the life of a blogger named Willy Iffland for a few days. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/18/borrowed-days/ Tue, 18 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/18/s-club-again/ S Club 7 is reuniting for a tour. This is actually happening, yeah. If you missed them somehow, I’m not here to judge, but you know the deal: “S Claaaaaaab!” https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/18/s-club-again/ Tue, 18 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/17/against-the-season/ September’s bleeding into October and suddenly nothing in your closet works anymore. That first morning when the air’s actually cold and you realize you’ve been pretending the season wouldn’t change. All your favorite pieces are too thin. Everything looks wrong. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/17/against-the-season/ Mon, 17 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/17/thats-river/ Darren Ankenman shoots for Purple. Someone asked him about his work with a model named River—the concept, the meaning, what he was saying with these photographs. And he basically said: That’s River, she’s great. That was his answer. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/17/thats-river/ Mon, 17 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/17/actually-human/ I don’t care what celebrities look like. Jennifer Lawrence gets a new haircut, Ryan Reynolds wears a new suit, Kim Kardashian gets a new ass—and everyone treats it like it’s important. It’s not. None of it is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/17/actually-human/ Mon, 17 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/17/what-they-get-told/ I watched journalists from major outlets sit in front of a camera and read aloud the tweets they get hit with every single day. Emma, Julie, Katie—people you’d recognize if you paid attention to cable news or the internet. They weren’t reading compliments. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/17/what-they-get-told/ Mon, 17 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/16/the-long-walk/ Every year, neo-Nazis from across Europe would come to Wunsiedel, a small German town, to march. They were drawn by Rudolf Heß—Hitler’s deputy—whose grave was there from 1988 until 2011. Even after they moved his remains, the marches kept coming back, an annual ritual connecting old Nazis to new ones, which probably made the townspeople want to leave and never return. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/16/the-long-walk/ Sun, 16 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/14/the-dealer-map/ Someone made a Berlin U-Bahn-style map except it’s dealers instead of stations. Udo’s a megaspinner. Dolli’s elevator doesn’t work. With Malte you don’t discuss anything. Every person listed with a character note, not just a location. The bureaucratic confidence kills me—someone spent time on this, actually built it out like they’re documenting a functional municipal system. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/14/the-dealer-map/ Fri, 14 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/14/the-crazy-one-from-osaka/ Mariko Goto’s set in Tokyo was genuinely surreal. She was opening for Negoto, this Japanese girl group, and the crowd in the front rows was entirely middle-aged men, sweating through their glasses, vibrating with fandom and desperation. It was loud and pathetic and very Japanese in a specific way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/14/the-crazy-one-from-osaka/ Fri, 14 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/14/in-the-name-of-safety/ A far-right party in Dortmund filed a city council request asking for data on how many Jews are registered and where they live. For security purposes. Their Facebook statement explained it as a reasonable administrative concern: they needed demographic information to analyze potential threats from proxy wars. To keep people safe, obviously. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/14/in-the-name-of-safety/ Fri, 14 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/14/kate-upton-for-christmas/ I want Kate Upton for Christmas. Not the idea of her, not her career or brand—just her, whatever that means. I know how that sounds. Crude, obviously impossible, missing the point of Christmas, all of that. But at least I’m saying what I actually want instead of lying about wanting a PlayStation while thinking about something else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/14/kate-upton-for-christmas/ Fri, 14 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/13/the-cleopatra-of-now/ So if you thought Kim Kardashian’s astronomical ass—engineered down to the molecule to break every platform at once—was the apex of what she’d show us, you’ve been wrong before and you’re wrong now. The woman can move around. She has other angles. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/13/the-cleopatra-of-now/ Thu, 13 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/12/by-design/ Jean-Paul Goude photographed Kim Kardashian for PAPER Magazine. Goude’s built a career on images designed to provoke—so putting him in front of Kardashian, whose entire operation is built on provocation, makes a kind of sense. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/12/by-design/ Wed, 12 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/12/shohei-otomo/ Shohei Otomo probably can’t escape the fact that his father created Akira. That’s not something you get to put behind you. So he didn’t try—he just went in a completely different direction and became an illustrator, which is its own kind of honest response to inheriting that weight. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/12/shohei-otomo/ Wed, 12 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/12/anime-lately/ I got completely absorbed in Terror in Resonance last summer. Two orphans blowing up Tokyo to avenge their childhood, hunted by a burnt-out cop and an unraveling secret agent, with a high school girl accidentally swept into the whole thing. The soundtrack is Yoko Kanno. That’s the show that made me remember why anime matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/12/anime-lately/ Wed, 12 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/12/hunger-map/ Lara Kleiner made a map that works in the dumbest, smartest way possible. It’s the Berlin U-Bahn redrawn so every burger joint becomes a station—Tommi’s in Mitte, Burgeramt in Friedrichshain, Burgermeister in Kreuzberg. Not real stops, of course, but the idea sticks anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/12/hunger-map/ Wed, 12 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/12/missingno/ There’s this process to find it. Talk to the old man in Viridian City, let him show you how to catch Pokémon. Fly to Cinnabar Island. Surf the eastern coast, that narrow strip where the game’s code starts to tangle. Eventually it appears: a corrupted block of pixels, data bent into something almost physical. Missingno. Missing number. We called it that because there wasn’t anything else to call it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/12/missingno/ Wed, 12 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/11/the-rib-man/ The first time I saw Mark Gevaux I thought his ribs couldn’t possibly be as good as people said. How could they be. He’s got one leg, a dead eye, and a look that makes you instinctively distance yourself. You know the type—the creepy uncle everyone’s got, the one people stop talking about when you walk in the room. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/11/the-rib-man/ Tue, 11 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/11/that-pizza-party-look/ When I’m at home eating pizza with friends—cheap wine going down in embarrassing quantities, something half-watched on the screen, half the time scrolling through stuff that has no business being on my phone—I look like I’m doing exactly that. Comfortable shirt that’s too soft from too many washes, grease on my sleeve by the second slice. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/11/that-pizza-party-look/ Tue, 11 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/11/cooking-with-weed/ Once you find someone who actually sells real weed—not the brown dust that smells like dried dog shit, but good weed—the last thing you want to do is spend it on getting high with people who claim to be your friends. You want to cook with it. You want to treat it like an ingredient. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/11/cooking-with-weed/ Tue, 11 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/11/red-light-green-light/ Found a Japanese horror trailer that’s basically Red Light Green Light, except when you lose, your body explodes in a spray of gore. The film is Kamisama no Iutoori—As the Gods Will—and it’s exactly as committed to its own shock value as you’d expect from something made to go viral on 4chan. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/11/red-light-green-light/ Tue, 11 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/10/blank-space/ Everyone told me Taylor Swift was trash. I had to learn it early, absorb it from older siblings, from the kids in school who read music magazines, from that guy who wouldn’t shut up about which artists were “real.” Hating her was the price of not being laughed at. So I paid it. Years of it. I said the songs were shallow, the videos vapid, made sure I looked the right way when her name came up—unimpressed, bored, above it all. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/10/blank-space/ Mon, 10 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/10/radio-silence/ I open my eyes and the sun’s already too bright. My alarm—this ancient piece of shit—never went off even though I set it for eight. Monday morning and I’m supposed to feel ready, like I’m back in the world. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/11/10/radio-silence/ Mon, 10 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/10/15/send-nudes/ Hose runter, Beine breit, Foto gemacht—and sent. That’s the phrase running through my head after the Snapchat leak. A few hundred thousand photos got pulled out of the servers, and sure, most were garbage—a dog, a burnt pizza, a sunset. But the people who like digging through other people’s intimate moments started sifting for nudes, and that’s the part of the story that sticks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/10/15/send-nudes/ Wed, 15 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/10/15/the-right-kind-of-thin/ I used to stand in the mirror and think, okay, this body is fine, nobody’s actually going to care. Then I found out Brandy Melville cares. A lot. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/10/15/the-right-kind-of-thin/ Wed, 15 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/10/15/the-banker/ You know the situation. Your supplier got arrested, your stash is gone, and you’re standing around broke wondering what to do next. This is where Francesco Moracchini’s machine comes in. It’s called the MO-CLEAN/14, but people know it as The Banker. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/10/15/the-banker/ Wed, 15 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/10/14/kate-upton-2011/ 2011 is gone. I can’t pull up any real shape to it, just the vague sense that it happened. But somewhere in that summer Kate Upton shot for Sports Illustrated Swimsuit in the Philippines, and there’s a video of her between takes—happy, genuinely happy, not performing for the camera the way you’d expect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/10/14/kate-upton-2011/ Tue, 14 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/10/14/yulin/ Yulin, in Shaanxi province, has a meat festival. Every year, fifty thousand dogs and cats—mostly illegally bred or stolen off the street—get killed and cooked for it. I went to see what that looked like. The cages are cramped, animals packed in barking. The vendors stand behind stalls that reek. You see dogs waiting and meat already hanging and the casual brutality of it all hits different when you’re standing in it rather than reading about it on your phone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/10/14/yulin/ Tue, 14 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/10/10/carrying-the-evening/ Made it to Friday, which these days feels like its own achievement. Usually means I’ve actually organized something for Saturday—people coming over, need food, need music that doesn’t make everyone regret being there by the third hour. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/10/10/carrying-the-evening/ Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/10/9/israeli-girls/ When you think about Israel, you get the missiles and the rubble—the newsreel version, the one that’s designed to be easy to understand and hard to look away from. But there’s another country there, the one where the actual business of being young and restless and vain happens in suburban bedrooms and parking lots, the same as anywhere else. Nobody’s filming that part. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/10/9/israeli-girls/ Thu, 09 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/10/9/couch-and-wreckage/ The ritual requires three things: the space, the company, and enough beverage to stop caring about the sequence of films. Someone starts queuing things up. Someone disappears to get something to smoke. By the fifth film, the room smells like mutual surrender and bad decisions. No one planned this progression. It doesn’t matter. The point isn’t the films—it’s the state you enter and how long you can stay there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/10/9/couch-and-wreckage/ Thu, 09 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/10/1/tokyo-remix/ There’s so much absurd content coming out of Japan’s pop world every week that it all blurs together. But some weeks certain things stick. This week: thick girls, dying heroes, and synchronized dancing that actually works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/10/1/tokyo-remix/ Wed, 01 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/10/1/long-distance/ Long distance is its own special torture. You watch each other jerk off over Skype, you try to dirty talk through the lag, you pretend that counts as sex. It doesn’t. You both know it doesn’t. You come, you close the laptop, you feel worse than before. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/10/1/long-distance/ Wed, 01 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/30/pharrell-gets-anime/ Pharrell’s been showing up in anime spaces. After that animated-hat appearance in the Miku Hatsune video—”Last Night, Good Night (Re:Dialed)”—he’s now opposite a wistful manga girl in his “It Girl” video, both of them drifting through space. It’s the kind of thing that would’ve felt like you were in on a niche in-joke a few years ago. Now it’s just what he’s making. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/30/pharrell-gets-anime/ Tue, 30 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/29/waiting-for-the-exit/ Those Ello invitations came with passwords that looked like they were generated by throwing words at a wall. Soldiers-round-life. House-found-species. Country-give-flower. Something about the randomness felt like a promise—that you were getting into something real, something that didn’t care about your data. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/29/waiting-for-the-exit/ Mon, 29 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/29/kyary-pamyu-pamyu/ People with PS4s and 4K setups don’t like admitting that handhelds are fun. I stopped pretending somewhere last year, when my Nintendo 3DS XL became the only thing I wanted to use. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/29/kyary-pamyu-pamyu/ Mon, 29 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/29/batman-burger-hong-kong/ While Hong Kong was in the streets demanding democracy, McDonald’s was running a Batman special. The Diner Double Beef came with salty fries and a fizzy drink that tasted like green tea and apples, and if you couldn’t leave your apartment, they’d bring it to your door. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/29/batman-burger-hong-kong/ Mon, 29 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/29/just-melanie/ I get hammered all day with notifications and loud opinions and hot takes streaming past faster than I can absorb. All I want is to sit by a window with some tea and let my mind drift. The internet doesn’t cooperate. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/29/just-melanie/ Mon, 29 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/29/hertzfeldt-in-prime-time/ I watched a Hertzfeldt couch gag buried in a forgettable Simpsons episode, and the moment his style hit the screen, everything shifted. The animation changed completely - jagged, hand-drawn, alive in a way the show hasn’t been in years. His whole thing is controlled chaos: ink and intention, not much else. When you watch his longer pieces, space and time get weird. You feel like you’re inside someone’s nervous system coming apart. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/29/hertzfeldt-in-prime-time/ Mon, 29 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/28/still-lost/ You’re halfway through the night wandering the internet looking for nothing in particular when you find a Chinese restaurant that’s grinding poppy seeds into ramen to make it addictive. An abandoned building rotting in central Tokyo. Someone making art from pills. A video of the Game of Thrones intro but every time it cuts to a new location someone’s eating soup. These are the things that happen when you let the web pull you wherever it wants to go. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/28/still-lost/ Sun, 28 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/28/hitchhikers-11/ I watch the 11(ELEVEN) video and it’s pure visual noise from the start. Glittering dancers, strange puppets making sounds, cars smoking through Seoul streets. I have no idea what it’s actually about and I don’t think that matters. It’s designed to overwhelm, and it works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/28/hitchhikers-11/ Sun, 28 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/26/smash-bros-again/ I remember staring at that old tube TV in my room, four of us crammed in front of it playing Super Smash Bros. like it was the only thing that mattered. I was always Sheik—unbeatable, or so I thought. That was years ago. Childhood, basically, though I was already old enough to know I was living through something good. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/26/smash-bros-again/ Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/26/ten-little-missions/ Spent a Friday night making up a list of stupid things to do. Nothing better going on. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/26/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/26/awesomo/ There’s this South Park episode where Cartman disguises himself as a Japanese robot named Awesomo to trick Butters into confessing his secrets. Money Boy found that robot and made it a music video. The message is simple: he’s awesome. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/26/awesomo/ Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/25/trading-places/ Waking up in someone else’s apartment in a city that isn’t yours—that’s the kind of temporary escape fantasy everyone has at some point. Not the tourist version, just living like someone who actually belongs there, knowing their streets and shortcuts, understanding why they chose this particular place. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/25/trading-places/ Thu, 25 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/24/in-defense-of-11-freunde/ I hate football. Really hate it. Not the kind of person who makes an exception for the World Cup or anything like that—for me football is basically the religion of the stupid, the hobby of the clueless, the love of the masses. But sometimes I’m jealous of people who worship football, because they get to read magazines like 11 Freunde, and holy shit, what a magazine. The October 2014 issue has this article about the loyal fans of smaller clubs, the ones who show up in any weather to cheer on their team no matter what happens, no matter if they win or lose. It’s like a love letter to that whole way of living. The rest of the issue kind of lost me—interviews with managers and trainers nobody’s heard of, talking about how you turn a club successful, which decisions matter, where the money comes from. I could feel my brain just shutting down. But that first part. I understand why people love this magazine. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/24/in-defense-of-11-freunde/ Wed, 24 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/24/le-burger-extravagante/ 2 Chainz ordered a three-hundred-dollar cheeseburger from Serendipity 3 in New York. Le Burger Extravagante: caviar, truffle, gold leaf—the works. The ingredients are so fresh you have to order a day ahead. This is from GQ’s ’Most Expensivest Shit’ series. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/24/le-burger-extravagante/ Wed, 24 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/24/ghosts-of-aleppo/ VICE’s war documentaries have this quality where you’re actually in the room. Bullets are flying, the sound is raw, and there’s no mediation between what’s happening and what you’re seeing. Most news organizations maintain distance. VICE doesn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/24/ghosts-of-aleppo/ Wed, 24 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/23/manhattan-cosmopolitan/ Part of me just wants a decent cocktail sometimes. Something sweet, properly made. Not the cheap stuff you’d force down at a dive bar, but something that tastes like the person pouring it knew what they were doing. Formulas that have held up for fifty years because they work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/23/manhattan-cosmopolitan/ Tue, 23 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/23/what-mario-left-behind/ Nintendo’s 125 years old today. Started as a playing card company in Kyoto—the kind of origin story that would seem too neat if you invented it. The whole arc, from cards to owning a generation’s childhood to somehow still mattering, almost writes itself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/23/what-mario-left-behind/ Tue, 23 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/23/the-horsin-around-years/ I was scrolling through Netflix one afternoon, caught in that same cycle where nothing looks decent, and I wasn’t about to watch Family Guy for the 97th time. Then I saw BoJack Horseman. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/23/the-horsin-around-years/ Tue, 23 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/23/that-lady/ The Isley Brothers’ “That Lady” from 1973 is one of those samples that’s been everywhere in hip-hop for so long it barely reads as a sample anymore, just part of the standard vocabulary. Kendrick took it for “i”—just him, the sample, that warm horn line and the groove it sits in, nothing else. Two minutes of him rapping like he’s halfway through a thought, casual enough that you almost miss the control underneath. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/23/that-lady/ Tue, 23 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/22/the-convenient-evil/ People need enemies. That’s what I’ve noticed anyway. Not just actual adversaries—imaginary ones, the kind you can point to and say there’s the problem. Societies run on them. So we get a rotation: one year it’s Putin calmly invading, the next it’s ISIS, al-Qaeda, Kim Jong-un, whoever plays the part well enough. The ranking shifts constantly, sometimes dramatically. One decade Bashar al-Assad is the worst thing alive, the next we’re almost friendly with him. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/22/the-convenient-evil/ Mon, 22 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/22/still-reaching-for-pixels/ I grew up inside Super Nintendo games built from pixels - snow-capped mountains, dark caves, the infinite ocean. All of it real in your head. That was never supposed to stick with you past adolescence. Pixels were a placeholder, a technical limitation we were supposed to graduate past. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/22/still-reaching-for-pixels/ Mon, 22 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/22/when-the-friend-dies/ Summer ends in Berlin and nobody pretends it’s anything but a death. The sun tries—I’ll give it that—but the air thins when you’re moving fast through these streets. Leaves go yellow when they lose the fight with time. Your heart gets harder when that’s exactly when you need it to be soft. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/22/when-the-friend-dies/ Mon, 22 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/22/recipes-for-caution/ A cookbook where every recipe uses condoms as the main ingredient. Condom sushi, stuffed condoms, condoms over rice. Japanese author Kyosuke Kagami titled it something like “Condom Dishes I Want to Make for You”—and he wasn’t joking around. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/22/recipes-for-caution/ Mon, 22 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/22/asking-for-help/ There was this line in Emma Watson’s UN speech about knowing men who won’t ask for help because of what it means about their masculinity. Not the applause moment but the quiet one, where something true gets said and hangs there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/22/asking-for-help/ Mon, 22 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/22/the-bakery-heists/ I’m on a Murakami binge. Shameless about it. He’s one of the best writers alive, has been for decades, probably will be forever. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/22/the-bakery-heists/ Mon, 22 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/22/not-in-my-name/ A young Muslim woman looks directly into the camera. “In my religion,” she says, “we are taught tolerance toward women. And you have no respect for women.” She’s part of #NotInMyName, a UK movement where Muslims are publicly distancing themselves from ISIS, reclaiming their religion from something that’s claimed it for atrocities. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/22/not-in-my-name/ Mon, 22 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/19/still-got-it/ Jennifer Lopez at 45, mother of two, from the block, shows up in a “Booty” video doing that classic Madonna panic thing—desperate to prove she still matters the way she used to. But Iggy Azalea’s got the better response: a video where she rubs her enormous ass against an old woman’s. No irony. Just commitment. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/19/still-got-it/ Fri, 19 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/19/japanese-commercial-rabbit-hole/ Japanese commercials operate on a completely different logic. I keep falling down these rabbit holes every few months, binging hours of stuff that would never get approved anywhere else, caught in a space where the normal rules of what makes sense just don’t apply. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/19/japanese-commercial-rabbit-hole/ Fri, 19 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/19/the-happiness-problem/ The video was nothing special—Iranian teenagers dancing to Pharrell’s “Happy,” moving around in daylight, completely ordinary, goofing off and smiling. They got arrested for it. By Wednesday they had their sentence: one suspended prison term, the rest getting six months suspended plus ninety-one lashes each. For a dance video. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/19/the-happiness-problem/ Fri, 19 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/18/all-brightness/ Pharrell’s adidas sneakers landed in loud primary colors—red and blue against black. The kind of shoes that announce themselves. This fits his whole approach. Music, fashion, his personality, all the same brightness and commitment. Never hedged, never compromised. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/18/all-brightness/ Thu, 18 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/18/free-netflix/ Someone mentioned a Netflix party. We had a car and nothing better to do, so we went. This was the advantage of living with people who got invited places—no convincing required. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/18/free-netflix/ Thu, 18 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/17/everything-breaks/ I tore through Attack on Titan in two days. Twenty-five episodes of people walled in, waiting for the exact moment everything breaks. A giant tears through and people start dying in numbers you can’t process. The camera doesn’t look away. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/17/everything-breaks/ Wed, 17 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/17/kiosk-haul/ Grimes has some stickers in POP magazine now. Black and white, actually usable, the kind of thing you tear out and actually apply to something. She’s also photographed in natural light looking good, and I’m partially in love with her. I know the internet has complex opinions on Claire Boucher, but I don’t care. The magazine doesn’t help—it’s designed to keep rotating beautiful people past your eyes every few pages, new faces constantly. At some point you just give up and flip through looking at pictures. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/17/kiosk-haul/ Wed, 17 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/17/the-dog-takes-over/ A small dog inheriting a fashion empire is funny because it’s not actually that different from how fashion works already. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/17/the-dog-takes-over/ Wed, 17 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/17/when-resignation-wears-thin/ Ten years I’ve been at this. Putting work out there, inviting people to discuss it, think about it, just sit around talking about pop culture or whatever else lands. And for ten years I’ve watched strangers unload their worst thoughts in the comments. Something about the internet gives permission. You open a door and everyone who’s had a bad day suddenly has a target. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/17/when-resignation-wears-thin/ Wed, 17 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/17/the-slang-election/ Every few years some official committee of older Germans gathers to vote on what they think youth slang should be, which is roughly as useful as asking fashion magazines to predict what teenagers will actually wear. In 2014 they came back with a list so aggressively divorced from reality that you wonder if they polled at a convention for substitute teachers. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/17/the-slang-election/ Wed, 17 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/16/the-kirishima-thing/ The Kirishima Thing is a 2012 Japanese high school film built on a simple premise: the star athlete disappears, and everything below the surface starts to show. Director Daihachi Yoshida uses the different social groups—athletes, musicians, the cinema club outsiders—as a kind of prism. Same event, different people, completely different understanding of what happened. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/16/the-kirishima-thing/ Tue, 16 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/16/knockoff-air-mags/ I’ve wanted Marty McFly’s shoes from Back to the Future 2 for way too long. Not even because they’re particularly cool sneakers, but because something about that movie got into my head young and never really left. Every time I rewatch it, those shoes show up and I feel the same stupid pull. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/16/knockoff-air-mags/ Tue, 16 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/16/rain-words/ Japanese kids learn fifty-some words for rain. Not fifty variations on “rainy”—fifty distinct things. Rain that falls from trees. Rain that starts gentle and turns heavy. Spring rain, summer rain, autumn rain. A word for each one. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/16/rain-words/ Tue, 16 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/16/in-the-cold-im-standing/ “Midnight City” got played so much I stopped actually hearing it. Good song, sure, but saturation kills anything eventually. So when “In the Cold I’m Standing” showed up—new to me, anyway, though it’s actually from 2005—I was willing to listen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/16/in-the-cold-im-standing/ Tue, 16 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/15/the-barisieur/ The worst part of Mondays isn’t Monday itself—it’s the moment your alarm pulls you out of sleep. Nothing prepares you for it. The sound is designed to be awful, a jolt, a punishment. You open your eyes to darkness and the immediate weight of the day ahead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/15/the-barisieur/ Mon, 15 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/15/taking-it-back/ This goes out to every Twitter junkie out there. Every person who can’t stop themselves from making jokes in the replies. Everyone addicted to the back-and-forth. Because here’s the thing: I’m taking this back. Again. Finally. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/15/taking-it-back/ Mon, 15 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/15/the-toys-that-mattered/ Every few days the same thought comes back: everything used to be better. The light was different, your friends were different, the whole world felt more interesting and alive. It hits hardest when you see something like David Lo’s illustrations. He’s a Chinese artist who drew all the toys we actually cared about in the eighties and nineties—the ones that felt like they meant something. The Game Boy, obviously. Hot Wheels. Super Soaker. G.I. Joe. The Talkboy if you remember that one. The Rubik’s Cube. Just the toys that mattered. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/15/the-toys-that-mattered/ Mon, 15 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/12/los-santos-returns/ I’d played GTA V for longer than I should admit. Hours in Los Santos, the usual chaos—mugging pensioners, starting gang wars, driving recklessly. The game doesn’t ask anything of you. It’s just a sandbox. That’s all it needs to be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/12/los-santos-returns/ Fri, 12 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/12/for-love-and-justice/ Sailor Moon Crystal arrived as a proper manga adaptation after the franchise had sat quiet for years—Takeuchi’s story straight through without the 90s anime’s divergences and filler. Bunny’s still lazy. The girls still don’t want this. The animation budget finally existed to make the transformation sequences feel like something worth looking at. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/12/for-love-and-justice/ Fri, 12 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/12/diggin-in-the-carts/ I whistle Super Mario World without thinking about it. Tetris themes, Secret of Mana, the whole catalog is just embedded in me. My iPod is loaded with video game remixes—Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy XIII, Ocarina of Time—and the title themes from Grandia and Terranigma and Illusion of Time have burned themselves into my brain permanently. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/12/diggin-in-the-carts/ Fri, 12 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/11/clouds-above-tokyo/ Clouds at normal speed are wallpaper. Compress a day into four minutes and they become characters—shifting, revealing light you never notice in real time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/11/clouds-above-tokyo/ Thu, 11 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/11/just-them/ Italian artist Ale Giorgini spent weeks on a series called “That’s Amore!”—illustrations of famous pop culture couples in this warm, lived-in style that makes them feel like they’re standing in a room with you. Homer and Marge Simpson. Batman and Robin. Charlie Brown with Snoopy curled next to him. Popeye and Olivia Oyl. John Lennon and Yoko Ono the way you imagine them alone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/11/just-them/ Thu, 11 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/11/a-round-watch-would-have-been-better/ For years I had a stock answer when people asked if I’d ever buy a smartwatch: no. Not interested. Then Apple showed the Watch at a keynote in 2014, and I remained uninterested. Geometry and minimalism bolted to your wrist. The future was fine, but I wasn’t buying into it. That’s when I learned something about myself: I’m not immune to want. I’m just waiting for the right version to come along. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/11/a-round-watch-would-have-been-better/ Thu, 11 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/11/mein-rostock/ Marteria’s been making songs I keep coming back to—there’s something about the way he moves through them. “Kids,” “Lila Wolken,” stuff that sticks. So when he came out with a love song to Rostock, his hometown, I was ready for it to feel obligatory. Hometown anthems are easy to get wrong. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/11/mein-rostock/ Thu, 11 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/11/pigeon-romance/ I downloaded Hatoful Boyfriend as a joke and ended up spending hours completely absorbed in it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/11/pigeon-romance/ Thu, 11 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/10/forever-sailor-moon/ Sailor Moon never actually stops selling. You’d think after twenty-some years and however many product cycles that people would be done buying, but they’re not. Bandai just announced new lingerie sets—each one matched to one of the Sailor Guardians, colors and styling designed for each character. Which is exactly what you’d expect them to announce, at exactly this moment in the cycle. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/10/forever-sailor-moon/ Wed, 10 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/10/three-magazines/ I still buy magazines. Three or four a week, whatever looks interesting enough. Last time it was SPEX, Nero, and something called Total tierlieb! that turned out to be almost entirely pictures of animals. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/10/three-magazines/ Wed, 10 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/10/the-kuro-burger/ Burger King Japan introduced the Kuro Burger in September—a completely black cheeseburger with squid-ink bun, squid-ink beef, black cheese, the works. Five bucks if you’re there at the right time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/10/the-kuro-burger/ Wed, 10 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/10/greasy-mother-of-god/ I’m doing this thing where I eat only fish and salad and the occasional bean, and I’d nearly convinced myself it was sustainable. Then Clifford Endo, who runs some food blog in Brooklyn, posts a recipe for pizza where he replaces the dough entirely with fries. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/10/greasy-mother-of-god/ Wed, 10 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/10/showing-kids-an-nes/ My best friend back then lived with his mother in the apartment downstairs, and they had an NES. That meant we spent whole days on Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles before we’d demolish whatever pasta bake his mother had made. The thing is, most of you weren’t even born yet. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/10/showing-kids-an-nes/ Wed, 10 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/10/shepard-faireys-berlin/ Shepard Fairey was coming to Berlin in fall 2014, and it was his only European stop. Mural project, some afterparty with Hennessy and a DJ set—details that didn’t really matter. The draw was the work itself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/10/shepard-faireys-berlin/ Wed, 10 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/9/still-springfield/ I spent years thinking anime had replaced Western animation in my head. The energy, the honesty, the sex—American cartoons felt slow by comparison. But The Simpsons never left. It’s still there, some older circuit, voices I’ve known longer than most real people. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/9/still-springfield/ Tue, 09 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/9/ifa-in-a-limousine/ Blogger outings are the actual best—genuinely, not in some ironic way. Everyone shows up in various states of tech obsession or design delusion, you pile into some ridiculous scenario (a limousine, this time), and for a few hours you’re just hanging with people who think about the same things you do and don’t pretend to be normal about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/9/ifa-in-a-limousine/ Tue, 09 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/9/still-bulletproof/ Her 2009 debut was everywhere for me back then—“In for the Kill,” “Quicksand,” “Bulletproof.” She got the 80s-revivalist thing right without making it feel like costume parties, which most people can’t manage. She did. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/9/still-bulletproof/ Tue, 09 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/9/antarctica/ Sports Illustrated flew Kate Upton to Antarctica to photograph her in a bikini. The appeal is obvious—you’ve seen models on beaches everywhere, but Antarctica sounds like the edge of the world, so that’s where magazines go when they need a story. They needed the location more than they needed her, really. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/9/antarctica/ Tue, 09 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/9/afternoon-in-berlin/ Elif Kalkan made a video of visiting her friends in Berlin. Just filmed their apartments, their dogs, the quality of afternoon light in someone’s living room, the kind of nothing that happens when you’re with people you know. No narration explaining it, no point beyond the thing itself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/9/afternoon-in-berlin/ Tue, 09 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/9/the-quietest-film/ There’s a moment in ’Petal Dance’ where Miki walks into the water wanting to die, and I can’t stop thinking about how simple Hiroshi Ishikawa makes it look. Not simple like it doesn’t matter. Simple like he’s stripped away everything except what’s actually happening. The waves aren’t cinematic. The other two women aren’t reacting like they’re in a film. It’s just someone at the edge, and people who notice. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/9/the-quietest-film/ Tue, 09 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/8/what-good-sushi-costs/ I want to live in Tokyo’s fish market. Not as some romantic idea—actually move there, eat my way through whatever came in that morning, fish still warm and bleeding, the stuff people lose their minds over. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/8/what-good-sushi-costs/ Mon, 08 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/8/the-sand-storm/ Everyone’s sure the next war is about water. Not oil, not minerals—water. The scarcity’s real, the math is simple, and corporations have already started treating it like every other commodity. The future looks like drought and then desperation and then conflict. Just a question of when. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/8/the-sand-storm/ Mon, 08 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/8/why-were-still-here/ We came back from summer break with real plans. New writers, new sections, content we’d been thinking about for months. For about three days it seemed like it was actually working. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/8/why-were-still-here/ Mon, 08 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/7/everything-at-once/ I was scrolling through what people were sharing online and came across everything mixed together. There’s Emma Sulkowicz walking around with her mattress, carrying it everywhere as a statement about what happened to her and a refusal to let anyone forget. Anita Sarkeesian put out a video on feminism in games—real work, real thinking—and got death threats for it, because that’s what happens when women have opinions on the internet. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/7/everything-at-once/ Sun, 07 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/7/the-shark-float/ Brad was bored, which in LA means you’re sitting by your pool wishing something would happen. So he called Sara Cummings. He wanted to celebrate summer, he said, but not just with nakedness—he needed a story to go with it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/7/the-shark-float/ Sun, 07 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/7/japanese-commercials/ I went to Japan thinking the TV would be all anime and game shows. Instead it was talk shows about food and people stretching on mats. Not much better than what airs in Germany, just in a language I didn’t understand. The only thing that actually worked was the commercials. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/7/japanese-commercials/ Sun, 07 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/6/stan-smith-gospel/ Half of Berlin’s still walking around in them. The green-and-white Stan Smiths have become the standard-issue shoe for anyone who works in design, media, anything creative. If you care about how things look, these are what you wear. It’s not even a choice anymore; it’s just the uniform. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/6/stan-smith-gospel/ Sat, 06 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/6/brass-band-chaos/ Marteria appeared behind a deer shaman—some kind of sculpture or puppet, I’m still not sure—and rapped his way through the crowd toward the stage. Within minutes, sweat was literally dripping from the ceiling in streams. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/6/brass-band-chaos/ Sat, 06 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/6/one-button-press/ There’s something vertiginous about it: you only exist because a handful of people with the will and knowledge to destroy everything haven’t actually done it. Yet. The ones who know exactly what they want and how to get there. The rest of us are just waiting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/6/one-button-press/ Sat, 06 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/4/the-open-way/ Ren Hang’s photographs hit the same way Mian Mian’s early novels do—that unguarded look at young Beijing, the version of being alive that the government would rather burn. He shoots people without the shame they’re supposed to carry, and you can feel the refusal in every frame. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/4/the-open-way/ Thu, 04 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/4/your-shoe/ Adidas Originals released an app called #miZXFLUX that let you customize ZX FLUX sneakers with your own photos. You’d upload an image, position it on the shoe using a butterfly-shaped overlay, scale and rotate it however you wanted, preview the result in 360 degrees, and order it. A few weeks later, your custom sneaker showed up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/4/your-shoe/ Thu, 04 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/3/cailin-russo-on-a-meadow/ Kassia Meador shot Cailin Russo on a flower meadow for Monster Children, and the image just works. No angle, no performance—just someone in good light who looks like they belong in the frame. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/3/cailin-russo-on-a-meadow/ Wed, 03 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/3/grilling-with-lava/ There’s always the guy with the expensive grill. He brings it up constantly, this thing he spent money on, how well it seasons meat, how masculine the whole setup is. You smile and move on. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/3/grilling-with-lava/ Wed, 03 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/3/tokyo-fashion-summer/ Tokyo Fashion is just a site where someone shoots street style in Tokyo. Not styled, not curated—just people in Harajuku who got dressed. Most of them look like they coordinated their colors with their eyes closed, and somehow it works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/3/tokyo-fashion-summer/ Wed, 03 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/3/rita-ora-everywhere/ Rita Ora was everywhere then—radio, clubs, that space where dance-pop and UK garage were still mixing together. When adidas Originals brought her in to design a collection, it felt inevitable. Her momentum was real, and brands know how to spot attention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/3/rita-ora-everywhere/ Wed, 03 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/2/what-youtube-changes/ Two million people watched Kelly run up a staircase talking about what it takes to be a woman—the basics, really. High heels hurt. Sleep matters more than showers. Shaving eats your time. Nothing you couldn’t figure out on your own, but something about the way she explained it made you watch anyway. By twenty-one, closing in on half a million subscribers, she’d turned observation into a platform and a platform into a life. I wanted to know what that actually felt like from inside. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/2/what-youtube-changes/ Tue, 02 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/2/vhs-decks/ I miss VHS tapes. Actually miss them. We had stacks at home—nothing special, just whatever landed there. You’d pull one out, rewind it, feed it into the player. The movie would start. It was the most direct form of ownership you could get. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/2/vhs-decks/ Tue, 02 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/2/edible-bricks/ I used to shove LEGO bricks in my mouth as a kid without really thinking about it, the way you do at that age with objects that shouldn’t go in your mouth. They tasted like plastic, obviously, and were probably leeching some kind of poison into my bloodstream, but I didn’t care. I just kept imagining them as something else—soft cheese, cooked sausage, dark chocolate that melted on my tongue. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/2/edible-bricks/ Tue, 02 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/2/back-to-school-armor/ Every August the dread starts. Summer’s almost gone, the lazy afternoons are disappearing, and you’re about to get funneled back into school for nine months of bells and fluorescent lights and rooms full of people you’d rather avoid. Here’s what nobody wants to admit though: what you wear on the first day matters. Not because anyone with sense cares, but because school’s a machine where your clothes are basically your opening statement. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/2/back-to-school-armor/ Tue, 02 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/2/unguarded/ Darren Ankerman photographed Sylvia Elizabeth for Purple Magazine, and I couldn’t look away. I don’t know who she is—some artist in Brooklyn, someone building something. But the photos feel direct in a way most photography isn’t anymore. No affectation. No trying to be cool. Just a person, specific and present. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/2/unguarded/ Tue, 02 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/2/the-korea-university/ The Korea University in Tokyo has over 700 students, all from North Korea, all here to study what amounts to advanced propaganda classes while living in one of the world’s most connected cities. I didn’t know it existed until someone mentioned it the way you mention a building you pass every day. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/2/the-korea-university/ Tue, 02 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/1/sitting-still/ I keep thinking about this one image from the book. Tsukuru’s at Shinjuku station with a cup of hot coffee, just sitting on a bench watching people get on and off trains. He’s terrified to get on one himself. That’s the whole thing. A guy who builds train stations for a living, completely paralyzed by the idea of actually boarding one. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/1/sitting-still/ Mon, 01 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/1/where-the-sun-was-warm/ Summer’s always gone before you notice it. All the things you were going to do—they stay theoretical. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/1/where-the-sun-was-warm/ Mon, 01 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/1/hannahs-letter/ We were sitting on a park bench reading the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung out loud when Leni found it, about a week after we’d bought the paper that morning. We were laughing so hard that people were actually annoyed at us, which only made it funnier. Hannah Lühmann had written about this blog. She called it the “Bild newspaper of the hipsters” and just went from there directly into this architecture-adjacent disgust—how we were derivative, epigones, how we’d borrowed this exhausted-but-horny energy from Vice and never had a real thought about anything. We fixated on celebrity breasts. We had these stupid headlines about crystal meth and other people’s dogs and whether Nazis should be allowed to keep the swastika because it’s actually about love and peace. When she laid it out like that, it was pretty indefensible. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/1/hannahs-letter/ Mon, 01 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/1/polygon-animals/ You sink into Super Mario World or Pokémon or A Link to the Past and you’re gone for hours. Those pixels have this pull—something about them just takes you out of time. But somewhere along the way other artists figured out a different version: instead of grids, they started building with polygons. Same gravity, different geometry. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/9/1/polygon-animals/ Mon, 01 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/8/25/move-your-brass/ I’ve always been curious about that moment when someone decides something is possible. Not whether it’ll be good—just possible. Someone looked at techno, hip-hop, pop music, and thought, “Yeah, but brass band,” and then actually did it. That’s “Move Your Brass!”—the Jägermeister Blaskapelle’s debut album, and the concept is exactly what it sounds like: brass arrangements of popular songs from completely different genres. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/8/25/move-your-brass/ Mon, 25 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/8/22/a-little-fun-must-be/ The song just comes out. I can’t help it. In the subway, waiting in line, middle of the night with nothing to do—suddenly I’m singing it. “Ein bisschen Spaß muß sein,” the whole thing, Blanco’s voice somehow deep in my head like a splinter I can’t extract. It’s been happening for years, probably longer. The kind of thing that just attaches to you and you never find out why. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/8/22/a-little-fun-must-be/ Fri, 22 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/8/11/wacken/ Wacken’s one of those places where the myths turn out to be true. The hospitality, the creativity, the fact that your neighbors three sites over adopt you within hours. Ines and I drove out there mostly just to see—maybe to confirm, maybe to disprove, honestly not sure which. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/8/11/wacken/ Mon, 11 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/8/10/where-empathy-stops/ I can’t get my head around the Islamic State. I’m usually good at understanding people—following their logic, seeing what drives them, even when I completely disagree. But this reaches a limit I didn’t know I had. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/8/10/where-empathy-stops/ Sun, 10 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/8/5/unseen-scenes/ I ended up in a club in Tokyo one night and the music was completely unfamiliar in a way that made sense instantly. Dancehall. Had been the sound here since the early ’90s, working its way deeper without most of the world noticing. Batty Bombom, Mighty Crew—names that mean everything in certain rooms and nothing to anyone I know back home. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/8/5/unseen-scenes/ Tue, 05 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/8/1/rita-oras-originals/ adidas just put out a magazine dedicated to people who don’t conform. The whole thing’s structured around individuals who found their own aesthetic and stopped caring what everyone else thought—not performing it, just genuinely indifferent. Rita Ora’s got a collaboration in it, a full line with her name on it. She’s the kind of person who understands color and space, so it reads as a real thing, not a celebrity cash grab. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/8/1/rita-oras-originals/ Fri, 01 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/29/dogs-at-night/ Nathan Whipple takes pictures of dogs at night. The premise of “Doggies At Night” is simple enough: point a camera in the dark and catch whatever expression lands. It’s always confused, always stupid. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/29/dogs-at-night/ Tue, 29 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/29/untouchable/ BANKS makes songs designed to pull you close, songs that feel like they want your body against another body, want you to feel that friction. But she’s never there—she’s somewhere else, untouchable. “Beggin For Thread” is just the latest version of this move. The video’s black and white, beautiful people in that fever-dream state, skin and heat and proximity, and she’s keeping distance from all of it even as it’s built around her. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/29/untouchable/ Tue, 29 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/29/charismacom/ I found Charisma.com—MC Itsuka and DJ Gonchi—through club videos out of Tokyo, and there’s something immediately sharp about what they’re making. Not trying to be difficult, just genuinely uninterested in the J-Pop formula: the automatic cuteness, the same words recycled, the whole safe machinery. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/29/charismacom/ Tue, 29 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/28/rockets-and-revenge/ You sit down and watch soldiers talk about killing people they’ve never met, and then mothers trying to explain to children why there’s no electricity and no obvious escape. Danny Gold made a documentary series for VICE News about what it looks like when the killing is happening now, between Israel and Palestine. He goes back and forth between the two sides and just lets people talk—soldiers, residents, doctors working in the dark. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/28/rockets-and-revenge/ Mon, 28 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/28/rebuilding/ For months this site spiraled through every possible direction at once—serious, trashy, minimal, magazine-like, a blog, back to something else entirely. The design kept changing. The voice changed. I tried on different versions constantly and never landed on anything that felt real. Somewhere in that I lost track of what the whole point was supposed to be in the first place. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/28/rebuilding/ Mon, 28 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/24/when-design-stops-asking/ Official fashion weeks are dead machinery—Berlin’s included. Every year they strain to match Paris or Milan and something real gets crushed in the process. It’s all performance. Designers convincing themselves they matter, models like ghosts, the whole scene performing significance while nothing actual happens. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/24/when-design-stops-asking/ Thu, 24 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/24/casagrande-knows/ Polanski Magazine’s third issue came out with Mariana Braga on the cover, shot by Alessandro Casagrande. What stopped me was how completely he saw her—not just in technical skill, though the light and framing are flawless, but in the way she looks when a photographer actually understands them. There’s a gap between someone who can point a camera and someone who can really look. Casagrande is in the second camp. The magazine sold out immediately, which made sense. The images are still online, and I kept returning to them, trying to understand his thinking. That’s what good work does—you come back not because it’s showy, but because you want to know how it got made. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/24/casagrande-knows/ Thu, 24 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/23/she-knows-what-people-want/ Micaela Schäfer’s got something figured out that most people never do: she knows what people actually want, and she just delivers it without hesitation or apology. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/23/she-knows-what-people-want/ Wed, 23 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/23/wacken/ Every July, Wacken Open Air fills a field in Schleswig-Holstein with thousands of people who know exactly why they’re there: Slayer, Motörhead, volume that probably breaks some kind of law. The festival doesn’t apologize for itself. It’s just mud, sound, and thousands of metalheads completely clear about what they came for. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/23/wacken/ Wed, 23 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/22/the-robots-remember/ Basement Jaxx brought ’Never Say Never’ back, and it’s exactly what they do best—that propulsive, restless sound that moves through you before you notice it’s there. Built to repeat, to nest in clubs and cars until it’s just the sound of summer. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/22/the-robots-remember/ Tue, 22 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/21/free-drinks-baby/ The Closed afterparty was at the Monkey Bar in the 25hours Hotel, which was as close as I ever got to the actual Fashion Week. Haute Couture and I don’t speak the same language, so I’d skipped the runways and gone straight for the free drinks. It seemed simpler that way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/21/free-drinks-baby/ Mon, 21 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/20/tokyo-tribe/ Sion Sono’s adapting Tokyo Tribe2, a manga that ran for nine years in street-culture magazine Boon before it folded in 2008. The plot: a bomb in Shibuya, gangs carving up the city, Wu-RONZ working through the opposition, Kai Deguchi stuck between his captain’s pacifism and the mounting body count. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/20/tokyo-tribe/ Sun, 20 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/19/still-smiling/ Three young women in Kabul want what anyone wants—to study, play music, have a future. Watching the documentary about them, the first thing that hits you is how much they smile. Sadaf, Sahar, and Nargis are driving through the city, practicing drums, attending protests, and they’re constantly grinning. The camera doesn’t flinch from what’s happening around them—bombs, harassment, women disappearing—it just holds both at the same time. The laughter and the darkness, coexisting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/19/still-smiling/ Sat, 19 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/16/off-the-ground/ On hot days when you’re stuck at a desk and the sun’s doing that thing where it burns straight through the window, you start thinking about stupid comfort solutions. A fan that barely helps. A cold drink with ice that melts in six minutes. Anything to make sitting still feel less like punishment. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/16/off-the-ground/ Wed, 16 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/15/lykke-lis-gunshot/ I don’t know how to explain Lykke Li to people who don’t get it. There’s no argument that works. You either find her hypnotic or you don’t, and if you do, there’s only one way forward. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/15/lykke-lis-gunshot/ Tue, 15 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/15/taking-back-the-swastika/ The black rectangles in South Park where the swastikas used to be—that always bothered me. We censored the symbol so hard that we basically handed ownership of it to the Nazis permanently. That’s not how you fight them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/15/taking-back-the-swastika/ Tue, 15 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/14/how-i-wreck-it/ I’ve always had this thing where I wreck myself. Other people chase happiness—money, love, freedom—and sometimes they find it. Me, I seem built for destruction. Give me two paths and I’ll take the one that burns everything down. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/14/how-i-wreck-it/ Mon, 14 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/14/apple-city-after-hours/ I’ve got an iPhone in my hand. I’m not thinking about who built it. I’m texting someone, scrolling through something, taking a picture of myself. The people who assembled this thing are somewhere in Zhengzhou in a place called Apple City, and they’re not in my head. Maybe I’ve heard about suicides and packed dormitories once or twice, but those are the kinds of things you hear and then move past. The newer model is faster anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/14/apple-city-after-hours/ Mon, 14 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/14/we-go-forward/ There’s a moment in “We Go Forward” where you realize the game isn’t going to let you undo anything. You move forward through these little scenes—stages of life, choices, moments—and once you pass them, they’re gone. No going back to save someone, to say something different, to choose differently. The whole thing’s dressed up like a playful comic in video game form, but that’s the real weight of it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/14/we-go-forward/ Mon, 14 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/14/skin-song/ Three in the morning, beaten down by something unspecific and everything at once, and Natasha Khan is singing to you like she understands. She does. New track called “Skin Song” and it’s exactly where you’re already lying. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/14/skin-song/ Mon, 14 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/14/still-shooting/ Terry Richardson was getting demolished with sexual misconduct accusations from all over the place, but nothing stuck legally, so he just kept shooting. Scandal didn’t slow him down. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/14/still-shooting/ Mon, 14 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/14/what-japan-wont-print/ Rokudenashiko built a kayak shaped like her own vagina. That kind of project makes a certain sense—you recognize the person, the headspace, the refusal to make apologies for it. Her real name is Megumi Igarashi, she’s in her early forties, and she ended up arrested for uploading a 3D model online. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/14/what-japan-wont-print/ Mon, 14 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/12/my-own-zx-flux/ I went to a Fashion Week event in Berlin where adidas showed off an app for designing your own ZX Flux sneakers. The concept is simple: upload a photo, mess with the colors, order the shoe. Around 120 euros for the finished product. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/12/my-own-zx-flux/ Sat, 12 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/12/namakopuri/ I found Namakopuri scrolling through whatever algorithmic abyss I’d fallen into that week. Two artists—Mako Principal and Namacolove—making something that manages to feel weirder than the usual Japanese pop insanity, which is genuinely impressive given that Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and Babymetal already exist. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/12/namakopuri/ Sat, 12 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/12/after-pond/ I watched the later seasons of Doctor Who almost entirely because of Amy Pond, which really means because of Karen Gillan. Not because of the character—because of what she was doing in it. She had this red hair, sharp angles, this Scottish edge, and she made the whole production feel less like it was running on fumes. I was completely into it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/12/after-pond/ Sat, 12 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/11/when-summer-actually-starts/ Winter in Germany is a held breath. Months of gray, wet nothing while you tell yourself it’s temporary, it’s building toward something. You survive on the idea of summer. Then April comes and the festivals announce their lineups and suddenly the waiting gets specific. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/11/when-summer-actually-starts/ Fri, 11 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/11/francesca-jane-allen/ For a few years now, Francesca Jane Allen has been photographing girls she knows. Friends in London, colleagues, people around her—the series “Girls! Girls! Girls!” mixes documentation with portraiture, her own youth reflected in theirs. The work keeps shifting because she keeps shifting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/11/francesca-jane-allen/ Fri, 11 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/9/the-winning-streak/ That summer Germany’s football team couldn’t lose. Every match felt predetermined, like watching something that was supposed to happen finally happen. The whole country had permission to care without irony. It was strange. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/9/the-winning-streak/ Wed, 09 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/4/paint-it-on/ I found this thing a Japanese beauty magazine shared—a way to paint your breasts to look bigger. Three shades, some blending, practice. That’s it. The simplicity made me laugh out loud. While people are booking surgeries, going under the knife with silicone that expires, this magazine figured out you can just paint them instead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/4/paint-it-on/ Fri, 04 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/4/polka-actually/ There’s a high school girl from Fulda named Marilena who does that folk-music-variety-show thing—Musikantenstadl—and her new single is called “Hey DJ leg a Polka auf.” Play a Polka, DJ. The contrast is the joke: here’s someone from the most traditional, wholesome corner of German music entertainment asking a club DJ to abandon techno for polka. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/4/polka-actually/ Fri, 04 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/4/crystal-meth/ Someone gets caught with crystal meth—a politician, a celebrity, someone who’s supposed to know better—and suddenly it seems less apocalyptic. If a person like that is using it, maybe it’s manageable. Maybe there’s some version of it that doesn’t destroy you, some way to use it that keeps you functional. People want to believe there’s a formula, a way to do dangerous things safely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/4/crystal-meth/ Fri, 04 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/3/kids-who-cant-write/ Little kids are hilarious. Unless you’re stuck next to one on a plane screaming for nine hours straight because they don’t understand what’s happening. Most of them are too stupid to walk, too stupid to eat without making a mess—and definitely too stupid to write. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/3/kids-who-cant-write/ Thu, 03 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/3/what-john-heard/ Caught Yoko Ono at Glastonbury and tried to figure out what everyone else was hearing. Her voice sounds like a dying animal—squeaking halloumi getting flattened by a tire, a bagpipe on fire. She was singing “Don’t Worry, Kyoko” and thousands of people were just standing there. Some of them loved this, apparently. I kept wondering what John Lennon heard in that voice. I couldn’t find it. Just the wrongness. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/3/what-john-heard/ Thu, 03 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/3/sailor-moon-ascending/ The new Sailor Moon transformation dropped last month. I watched it three times. The animation is immediately better than the original—smoother, more confident, with cleaner lines in the costume design itself. It’s the kind of thing that catches you off guard because you don’t expect a transformation sequence to matter that much, but here it does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/3/sailor-moon-ascending/ Thu, 03 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/3/if-berlin-were-syria/ I saw a website that mapped the Syrian civil war onto Germany to make it feel real. If Syria’s destruction became Germany’s: Leverkusen would be empty. Berlin would be a ghost city. Munich, Frankfurt, all hollow. Eight and a half million people on the road. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/3/if-berlin-were-syria/ Thu, 03 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/3/emily-ratajkowski/ There’s a video from treats! Magazine where Emily Ratajkowski is wearing a white wig and decided that clothes weren’t necessary, which I guess is what happens when you’ve accepted that you’re the kind of attractive that exists outside normal rules. The wig is what gets you though. Not the obvious part. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/3/emily-ratajkowski/ Thu, 03 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/3/plants-can-hear-you/ Plants can hear when they’re being eaten. University of Missouri researchers played the sound of chewing to plants and watched them panic—defensive chemicals flooding their system, basically a silent scream. The plants heard the danger and completely lost it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/3/plants-can-hear-you/ Thu, 03 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/2/back-to-piep/ My Tamagotchi lasted 21 days before it died or flew back to its home planet. I don’t remember which—it was 1997, I was too young to care about the difference. Those little pixel creatures were everywhere that year, piping and beeping during class until every teacher in the building lost their mind. Feed them, play with them, clean them up—it was constant, and I was into it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/2/back-to-piep/ Wed, 02 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/2/storm-in-a-lamp/ I love a real storm - not the idea of one, but an actual storm where you position yourself by a window with something warm and just watch the sky do its worst. Trees bowing, rain coming sideways, the full dramatic thing. You know it won’t fix anything, but you sit with it anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/2/storm-in-a-lamp/ Wed, 02 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/2/marijuana/ Had “Marijuana” by Kitty on repeat this morning. New York groove, entirely unbothered—just a track that sits there making everything feel easier. No hooks, no announcement, nothing trying to grab you. It’s a song that knows what it is and doesn’t care if you’re listening. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/2/marijuana/ Wed, 02 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/2/cant-breathe/ I had no idea who Bianca Balti was. Still don’t, except that Playboy put her on the cover of the July/August issue, shot by Greg Lotus in Malibu. That’s all I need to know. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/2/cant-breathe/ Wed, 02 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/1/hodor/ “Yo” was an app that only let you send the word “Yo,” and somehow that became a thing people wanted. Then Hodor showed up doing the exact same thing with a Game of Thrones reference, and I watched the entire trend lifecycle collapse in about a week. The joke dies the moment someone imitates it. That’s how fast things move now—stupid idea becomes funny becomes joke becomes dead becomes replaced by something identical with a different name. Nobody remembers why any of it mattered. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/1/hodor/ Tue, 01 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/1/small-strange-graves/ Finding dead animals as a kid left marks. I’d discover one by the road or in the grass at my grandmother’s house—a bird, a rabbit, sometimes a cat—and I’d just stand there. They’d look almost fine, just still, and something in me would break. I’d think about whoever owned it, or whoever it knew, and I’d start crying. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/1/small-strange-graves/ Tue, 01 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/1/sushi-luggage/ Someone’s luggage at the airport catches my eye. A Japanese company called OMISE PARCO makes these sushi-shaped covers—tamago, salmon, shrimp—and they cut through the monotony of identical black bags. Strange choice. Sushi as luggage. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/1/sushi-luggage/ Tue, 01 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/1/sailor-moon-redux/ The premiere was in Tokyo on Usagi’s birthday, which felt like the kind of detail the Sailor Moon franchise would architect. Someone recorded it despite the warnings, and the new opening plus transformation sequence were already scattered across image boards and forums by the time the official embargo lifted. That’s when it actually mattered, not the scheduled July 5th launch. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/1/sailor-moon-redux/ Tue, 01 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/1/the-surgery-that-wasnt-about-her/ Some gossip site was passing around a story about Selena Gomez supposedly planning surgery, the implication being that she wanted to be more attractive for a guy. I don’t even know if it’s true—none of us do—but that’s not really the point. The point is how instantly believable it is that a young woman would hate her own body badly enough to go under the knife, and how perfectly that fits the narrative we’ve all been sold about what women are supposed to look like and what they’ll do to keep a man’s attention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/1/the-surgery-that-wasnt-about-her/ Tue, 01 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/1/becky-g-shower/ Becky G made “Shower” happen and somehow it stuck around. It’s nothing complicated—just a catchy hook, shower metaphors that don’t mean anything, la-di-da vocals that get lodged in your brain for weeks. For a minute there it was in genuine competition with “Call Me Maybe” and “Friday” for most obnoxious earworm of the summer. G’s got this distinctive thing going on—the voice, the look—that makes her read differently than the usual plastic pop stars, and the song doesn’t try smoothing that out. It’s minimal, it’s dumb, and it works better than it has any right to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/7/1/becky-g-shower/ Tue, 01 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/30/that-world-cup-summer/ Summer could’ve been the thing—the Spree, late-night rooftops, sun on your face in some park, Murakami or Mian Mian in your hands. Quiet, drifting, unscheduled. That summer. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/30/that-world-cup-summer/ Mon, 30 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/30/enrique-in-malta/ Leni and I flew to Malta on a whim—we had one free night and Isle of MTV was happening in Floriana, and that seemed like enough reason. The lineup was standard festival stuff: Hardwell, Kiesza, Dizzee Rascal, Nicole Scherzinger. Then, late in the night, with the church behind the stage lit up white and the crowd at maximum density, Enrique Iglesias walked out. Just appeared, like he’d been backstage the whole time, waiting for the exact moment when everyone had sweated enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/30/enrique-in-malta/ Mon, 30 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/30/what-normal-looks-like/ A woman I know was genuinely worried her vulva looked abnormal. When I asked what she meant, she said she’d been comparing herself to pornography. Not even thinking of it as pornography—just as the default reference point for what vulvas are supposed to look like. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/30/what-normal-looks-like/ Mon, 30 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/28/kira-kira-killer/ Kyary Pamyu Pamyu makes pop music that shouldn’t work but does, backed by videos that look like someone fed a synthesizer LSD and asked it to direct a commercial. “PONPONPON,” “Fashion Monster,” “Invader Invader”—each one a new way to make you forget what you’re doing and just stare at the screen. Her latest, “Kira Kira Killer,” is more of the same: all sparkle and color and good vibes, the kind of thing that could only come out of Harajuku. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/28/kira-kira-killer/ Sat, 28 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/28/three-minutes/ Three minutes. That’s what CollegeHumor asked in a video years back—can you just sit still and watch? Don’t move, don’t check your phone, nothing. Three minutes. Simple. Turns out it’s basically impossible. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/28/three-minutes/ Sat, 28 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/27/everything-was-better/ Someone posted a Game of Thrones intro from the 1980s. Fake, obviously—no such thing exists—but the commitment is solid. Old cassette aesthetic, the whole package. And it works because the first thing your brain does is think: yeah, of course it was better in the 80s. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/27/everything-was-better/ Fri, 27 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/27/grimes-is-back/ Visions is one of the best albums of the last ten years. I’ll just say it directly. “Genesis,” “Oblivion,” those tracks lived on endless repeat. The whole record had this kind of broken elegance that made it hard to listen to anything else for a while. And almost nobody cared. It hit 67 in the UK, barely scraped the US top 100. People sleep on obvious things. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/27/grimes-is-back/ Fri, 27 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/27/funland/ Bompas & Parr just turned the Museum of Sex in New York into the room I didn’t know I needed. They call it “Funland: Pleasures & Perils of the Erotic Fairground,” but what it is is a space packed with enormous, soft, gleaming breasts in every color and texture, and you get to spend hours bouncing around it like you’re eight years old again, except the playground equipment is entirely made of tits. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/27/funland/ Fri, 27 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/27/permission/ You watch girls get smaller. Not just their bodies—everything. The magazines, the TV, the weight of it. They learn that existing means being looked at, that strength looks wrong on them, that wanting anything is ungracious. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/27/permission/ Fri, 27 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/26/the-tata-top/ Men walk around topless all summer and nobody panics. Nobody deletes their photos or flags them as obscene. It’s just normal. Women wear a bikini and suddenly there are rules, social media algorithms going haywire, this entire machinery designed to regulate your body and make you ashamed of it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/26/the-tata-top/ Thu, 26 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/24/permission-to-curse/ Chris Broad brought a book to Japan about swearing—specifically about the word fuck and how to use it. Which makes sense if you understand that Japanese culture doesn’t really allow that kind of emotional venting. Everything stays bottled, polite, restrained. There’s a social weight against it that starts early. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/24/permission-to-curse/ Tue, 24 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/24/emily-ratajkowski-is-summer/ Kate Upton owned the girl-next-door thing for a while. Then Emily Ratajkowski showed up and that was basically it. Started with that “Blurred Lines” video—a deliberate provocation that worked exactly as intended, everyone suddenly knew who she was, and she’s been careful enough since not to waste it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/24/emily-ratajkowski-is-summer/ Tue, 24 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/24/blasting-down-kudamm/ We piled into a bus one afternoon in Charlottenburg heading up toward the Ku’damm with the music loud enough that every tourist on the sidewalk turned and glared. Just a group of us, some drinks, some food, and the kind of chaotic energy that Berlin lets you indulge as long as you’re not thinking too hard about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/24/blasting-down-kudamm/ Tue, 24 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/24/booboo/ A guinea pig named Booboo is currently the internet’s favorite animal, which is strange because he’s just a guinea pig. He lives with his owner Megan and two other guinea pigs named Titi and Teddy, they’re all very small and fuzzy, and for reasons I don’t fully understand, this is what the internet has decided to love right now. Somewhere between Reddit and 9Gag and Facebook, a collective decision was made that this rodent is the cutest thing to have ever lived. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/24/booboo/ Tue, 24 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/23/what-youre-holding/ Your foot catches. Your body’s falling. For a moment—maybe a tenth of a second—you stop thinking about your face or your hands or how bad this is going to be. You’re thinking about the thing in your hand. The phone. The bag. The coffee. You grip it tighter. That instinct is stronger than bracing yourself. That’s what matters more. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/23/what-youre-holding/ Mon, 23 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/23/the-reset/ I kept thinking Sailor Moon would stay finished. That was the ending—Usagi made it to the moon, destroyed the thing trying to destroy the world, and that was supposed to be it. The final act, the actual conclusion. Fifteen years went by and I basically forgot about it. Now they’re remaking the entire thing from the beginning, starting over from the 1992 manga, which means I’m about to watch her become this cosmic savior again like it’s brand new. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/23/the-reset/ Mon, 23 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/23/germany-in-14/ Everyone in Berlin was watching the same thing that night. We crowded into some corporate event—the kind that sounds meaningless until you remember that you actually wanted to be there, that nobody coerced you, that the World Cup mattered and Germany was playing America. The screens were enormous, the beer was cold, and nothing existed beyond the next ninety minutes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/23/germany-in-14/ Mon, 23 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/23/pizza-bed/ Claire Manganiellos, a designer in Brooklyn, made a bed shaped like a pizza. That’s it. That’s the thing. It looks like a slice of pizza—the shape, the fabric patterns mimicking cheese and sauce and pepperoni, everything reads as pizza. You lie down and you’re sleeping inside a pizza. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/23/pizza-bed/ Mon, 23 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/23/equal-rights-for-some/ Gay and bisexual men are banned from donating blood in Germany. Not for medical reasons. Just because of a law written decades ago that nobody bothered to fix. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/23/equal-rights-for-some/ Mon, 23 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/17/hi-brit/ Gal Volinez made a video called ’Hi Brit’ where he inserted himself into ’Work Bitch’ in Britney’s place. Same choreography, same outfit, same everything. The joke’s obvious but it lands on execution. There’s something satisfying about a parody that doesn’t punch down but just slides in sideways, matching every move so exactly that you almost stop noticing the swap. It’s the kind of thing that only works if you know the original perfectly—if you can step into that space and have it still feel the same way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/17/hi-brit/ Tue, 17 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/17/worn-thin/ Anita Sarkeesian made a series of videos called “Tropes vs Women in Video Games” that pointed out something pretty obvious if you’d been paying attention: women in video games are usually set dressing. The girlfriend who dies to motivate revenge. The love interest with no personality. The woman designed for a specific male gaze. You see it once, you can’t unsee it. Documenting these patterns apparently made her a target for death threats, doxxing, the full coordinated harassment that only the internet really produces. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/17/worn-thin/ Tue, 17 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/17/walk-this-way/ “Walk This Way” hit different this time. MØ (Karen Marie Ørsted) keeps getting better at whatever this is - a melody that lands immediately and stays, a video where she dances through something expensive-looking with the confidence of someone who’s practiced. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/17/walk-this-way/ Tue, 17 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/16/i-know-what-im-getting/ You know that moment, drunk at 2 AM in a Burger King, where you’re staring at the menu board and the burger looks absolutely perfect. Every detail is there. The bun is golden. The cheese is draped. The lettuce is neon green. You order it anyway, knowing full well what you’re going to get. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/16/i-know-what-im-getting/ Mon, 16 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/16/tokyo-from-above/ Seeing a city from altitude changes how you understand it. Tokyo becomes pure geometry at that height—the grid of buildings, streets cutting through in neat lines. All that order is startling when you move through it on the ground, where it dissolves into chaos. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/16/tokyo-from-above/ Mon, 16 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/13/the-bikini-brief/ Someone built a men’s G-string bikini and put it up for sale at seven euros. JQK Mens Sexy Bikini G-string Thong Jock Brief Underwear 3303 Red—the name is pure catalog maximalism, every descriptor crammed in hoping something sticks. It’s a red pouch, small and shameless. The marketing swears it’ll make you the undisputed star at the pool. And it will—everyone will look. Just not for the reasons the copy wants. Seven euros for instant infamy. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/13/the-bikini-brief/ Fri, 13 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/13/the-video/ There’s this Sports Illustrated video of Kate Upton on a beach. She’s smiling, bouncing around in the sun, and she looks like she’s actually having fun—not faking it, just enjoying herself. That’s the whole thing right there. You’re supposed to look, and you do, because she’s beautiful and it’s clear she knows it and doesn’t mind. No shame in that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/13/the-video/ Fri, 13 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/13/nothing-like-it/ The sun hits your head, cold beer in one hand, water gun in the other, driving through the American middle with friends toward whatever lake comes next—past cemeteries and junkyards and desert, thinking about nothing but cold water and the next mile. That’s summer. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/13/nothing-like-it/ Fri, 13 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/13/ecke-weserstraße/ You’re twenty-five in Berlin-Neukölln and you understand, finally, that your life is the kind of life people make art about. Not because you’re special, but because you’re young and you’re doing drugs and you’re having sex that feels like an emotion and you’re listening to electronic music at the right venues with the right people. It’s what happens when you’re that age in this city with money and free time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/13/ecke-weserstraße/ Fri, 13 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/12/astra-nackt/ Astra made a summer beer called Nackt—the whole campaign around nakedness and freedom. The bottle’s designed to stand out, curvy and bare. You see it in the shop and grab it because it’s cold and you’re hot, not because the marketing convinced you. Every beer brand tries the escape angle, but it only sticks because sometimes cold beer really is the escape. By the time you’re halfway through, you’ve forgotten the campaign ever existed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/12/astra-nackt/ Thu, 12 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/12/what-actually-sticks/ Berlin’s got this reputation for being where everyone goes to lose themselves—the sex, the drugs, the clubs that don’t close until some impossible hour. That’s why people move here in their twenties thinking they’re invincible. But underneath the haze is a question nobody wants to ask out loud: can you actually build a real connection in a city like this? Or is the constant circus just going to tear you apart? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/12/what-actually-sticks/ Thu, 12 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/12/still-not-enough/ I remember when having a big TV meant something. Twenty-five inches felt like cinema. Thirty-six inches felt obscene. A projection screen was the fantasy of someone rich enough to waste money on it. Now everyone’s got a screen the size of a small car, and somehow it’s still not enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/12/still-not-enough/ Thu, 12 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/10/what-its-worth/ Bride Price was an app that launched in Nigeria—created by the agency Anakle—where you’d input measurements about women (leg length, facial symmetry, weight) and get back a number. A price. The creator defended it as honoring tradition, which is what you say when you want to scale something ugly and keep your conscience clean. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/10/what-its-worth/ Tue, 10 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/10/the-stare/ Six in the morning outside Berghain. Still moving, barely—reeking of the night, pupils blown out, the kind of drunk where you stop noticing how cold it is. Sven Marquardt’s at the door. He looks at me the way he looks at everyone, and I understand immediately that I’m failing a test I didn’t know I was taking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/10/the-stare/ Tue, 10 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/10/kids-watching-ducktales/ I watched a video of kids seeing DuckTales for the first time and it was like watching someone look at a photograph and ask why it’s not moving. They didn’t get it. Most of them had never heard of it, which made sense—it’s been decades. But the confusion was real. Who’s the old guy? Why is he so attached to money? Why would anyone follow him anywhere? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/10/kids-watching-ducktales/ Tue, 10 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/10/seventeen-kinds-of-beef/ Carpaccio, brisket, cheese steak, parmesan patty, ground beef with jalapeños, tongue, jus, beef ham—seventeen different kinds of beef stacked in one sandwich at Red’s True BBQ in Manchester and Leeds. Around 2,500 calories, thirty quid, served on Father’s Day because the timing felt right. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/10/seventeen-kinds-of-beef/ Tue, 10 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/10/sheena-ringos-world-cup/ Sheena Ringo did the theme song for Japan at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. I remember thinking it was exactly right. I’d been obsessed with her work for years—’Kofukuron,’ ’Honma,’ ’Tsumi to Batsu’—songs that feel carved out of something private and strange. She doesn’t smooth anything out for the listener. She just makes what she wants to make. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/10/sheena-ringos-world-cup/ Tue, 10 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/10/pixel-panties/ Retro game aesthetics on underwear is such a specific category of merchandise that you have to admire the audacity. Two designers in Lisbon decided the world needed Super Mario-style pixels printed on something no one would ever see. I get the appeal in theory—taking something you loved as a kid and finding a way to wear it—but there’s a massive gap between the idea and the actual wearing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/10/pixel-panties/ Tue, 10 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/9/kyary-pamyu-pamyu/ Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s house looks like the bedroom of a six-year-old American girl, which somehow feels like the most honest thing I’ve ever heard about a pop star. Found an interview with Francesca Dunn where she just talks about it plainly—champagne, Miyazaki, the recurring nightmare where someone’s chasing her, how she’s moved on from Draco Malfoy to Katy Perry. No performance. No explanation. Just what’s true. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/9/kyary-pamyu-pamyu/ Mon, 09 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/9/bubble-friends/ When I moved to Berlin, seven years ago now, I quickly found myself scattered across all these different friend groups. Packaging designers, military guys, electronics store workers, Catholic schoolgirls, internet café people, hairdressers, apprentices—this chaotic mix doing completely different things. Their opinions clashed constantly. We’d argue, laugh, sometimes agree, sometimes not. It was good. Educational. Important. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/9/bubble-friends/ Mon, 09 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/9/john-oliver-and-fifa/ John Oliver did a segment on “Last Week Tonight” about FIFA and got it completely right. He went after them hard—the corruption, the money, the way they sit above governments and national interests. He clearly loves football, which is part of what makes it work. He’s not dunking on the sport; he’s angry at the people running it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/9/john-oliver-and-fifa/ Mon, 09 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/8/heat/ The day the thermometer hit thirty-six degrees, I spent the afternoon looking at Gavin O’Neill’s photographs of Barbara Fialho for Australian GQ. She was at the beach, which was the obvious choice when it gets that hot. The summer had already won; this was just acknowledgment. At least the light was good. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/8/heat/ Sun, 08 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/8/brooklyn-baby/ There’s something about Lana’s voice that pulls you backward through time, even when you’re standing still. “Brooklyn Baby” does this—it makes you want to live in a specific version of New York, a specific version of yourself, even though everything in the song suggests that life is already over. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/8/brooklyn-baby/ Sun, 08 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/7/that-looks-like-water/ First time I saw one, I thought it was a joke—this perfect sphere of clear liquid no bigger than a cherry, sitting on a leaf like it had fallen from the sky. Someone told me it was dessert and I laughed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/7/that-looks-like-water/ Sat, 07 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/6/sailor-moon-grown-up/ Sailor Moon gets remade enough that you stop expecting anything. These reboots tend to split two ways: either full nostalgia where everything’s soft and warm, or hard anime where you lose what made the manga interesting. The new Crystal trailer is different. The designs actually look aged up instead of just redrawn bigger. Usagi’s still Usagi, but she has edges now. There’s actual structure. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/6/sailor-moon-grown-up/ Fri, 06 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/6/space-dandy-returns/ Caught the trailer for Space Dandy season two and I’m already sold. It’s coming in July, same beautiful chaos as before—the character designs are outrageous, all huge breasts and impossible proportions, story twists that go nowhere interesting but somehow work, the general sense that nothing matters and everything’s a joke. Shinichiro Watanabe has this gift for making anime that feels like someone’s fever dream but actually coheres. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/6/space-dandy-returns/ Fri, 06 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/6/zombie-toothpicks/ I picked up these zombie toothpicks somewhere—little picks shaped like the undead crawling out of your food. Eight euros or so, though I’ve long since stopped tracking what I paid for them. They live in a drawer with the other party supplies, next to things I bought five years ago and never used. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/6/zombie-toothpicks/ Fri, 06 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/6/the-snorlax-bed/ Found this Snorlax bed on Etsy from Christine Kim, an artist in Seoul. It’s a large poly-cotton plushie built to sleep on, lean against, whatever. Around 220 euros. What caught my attention is the proportions: cute without being saccharine, substantial without being overwrought. The stitching’s clean and deliberate. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/6/the-snorlax-bed/ Fri, 06 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/5/forty-two-seconds/ I was twelve when I finally beat Super Mario World on my Super Nintendo. Took most of a year—longer if you count the time stuck on the Vanilla Dome. When I finally got past it, that end screen felt earned. Like I’d actually done something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/5/forty-two-seconds/ Thu, 05 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/5/sun-in-your-head/ Rain somewhere, everywhere—the kind that just settles on you. Makes you want to be literally anywhere else. Not the thoughtful kind of rain, just the stuck kind. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/5/sun-in-your-head/ Thu, 05 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/4/solid-gold-solid-gonzo/ Three bikes stolen in Berlin. Not in three years—faster than that. One chained to a pole outside a café, gone by the time I finished my coffee. Another locked to itself, which somehow made sense at the time. The third just… disappeared from a basement I’d locked the door to. After that, you stop pretending. You buy the cheapest possible bike—twenty euros if you can find it—and you ride it like you stole it, because the math is brutal. Replacement cost: same as a month of not caring. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/4/solid-gold-solid-gonzo/ Wed, 04 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/4/banks-drowning/ There’s a specific moment when BANKS’ music takes over—usually the third or fourth play, sweat cooling, someone’s hand on your ribs, and “Waiting Game” or “Brain” winding through whatever’s happening. It’s music that only works when you’re already there, already committed to something physical and dark. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/4/banks-drowning/ Wed, 04 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/4/greatest-rides/ Ido Yehimovitz from Israel made a series called Greatest Rides—basically every iconic vehicle from film and television, all redrawn in the same visual language. What makes it work is the constraint itself. Each vehicle has to read instantly, has to feel like the thing it is, but also has to belong in the same world as every other one. That’s harder than it sounds. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/4/greatest-rides/ Wed, 04 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/3/thats-me-now/ I know I’m old because I remember Netscape Navigator. Remember “cybernet” as an actual word. Remember when downloading a single image took enough time to make coffee and come back. So when Teens React put some kids in front of a 90s internet video and watched them fail to parse what they were looking at—that hit different. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/3/thats-me-now/ Tue, 03 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/3/three-bottles-deep/ I’ve walked into Berlin offices where the trash can looked like a Club Mate graveyard—empty bottles stacked like evidence of hours spent at a desk. Three bottles before noon, four by evening, someone talking about their pivot while their hand moved mechanically toward another one. The drink had become oxygen for that world, less a beverage than a ritual. You didn’t drink Club Mate because you were thirsty. You drank it because you had convinced yourself you couldn’t think without it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/3/three-bottles-deep/ Tue, 03 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/3/nathalie-emmanuel/ Nathalie Emmanuel showed up as Missandei in Game of Thrones and I was sold immediately. I’d seen her before in Misfits, that British show where nobody stays dead, but appearing in HBO’s bloody medieval fantasy was different. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/3/nathalie-emmanuel/ Tue, 03 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/2/summer-in-photographs/ I love summer because it feels like the only time things actually happen. The heat, the light, days that stretch out. You remember summers. A smell, how someone looked in a moment, the burn on your shoulders. They stay. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/2/summer-in-photographs/ Mon, 02 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/2/boom-clap/ In 2014, good pop music still felt like something to notice. The radio was full of the usual machinery, but Charli XCX kept showing up with actual ideas in her head. She landed “Boom Clap” as the title track for The Fault in Our Stars, a film I had no interest in watching, but the song itself was sharp in a way that mattered—nervy production, the melody played with rather than just ridden. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/2/boom-clap/ Mon, 02 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/2/red-clouds-over-kreuzberg/ Kreuzberg on a warm summer evening—a beer in one hand, someone worth having there in the other, the sky turning red. That’s the Berlin I loved, if that makes sense. Heat off the pavement, the city loosening, everything suspended, not promising anything, just open. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/2/red-clouds-over-kreuzberg/ Mon, 02 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/2/the-gatekeepers/ John Oliver did a segment on Last Week Tonight about net neutrality and cable companies in America. Time Warner, Comcast, Verizon—they want to charge Netflix and YouTube for faster access. It’s just throttling with a business card. Everyone else gets slower speeds, those companies pay, and the internet becomes a utility for people who can afford it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/2/the-gatekeepers/ Mon, 02 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/2/your-conception-song/ Porktrack is a website that tells you which song was playing when your parents conceived you. You enter your birthdate and it generates an answer with no hesitation. Mine says “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson, which is both perfect and deeply unsettling to know about yourself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/2/your-conception-song/ Mon, 02 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/1/otaku-rooms/ Shiori Kawamoto made a book of photographs. Otaku rooms. Not tours or confessionals, just spaces—walls covered in anime posters, shelves packed with figurines, character pillows stacked everywhere, the works. He visited these people in their homes and photographed what he found, and he didn’t mock any of it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/1/otaku-rooms/ Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/1/mattys-cheeseburger/ I know it’s cruel—someone feeding me a Matty Matheson cheeseburger video while I’m lying here with my pathetic cheese sandwich. Matty Matheson from Parts and Labour, the guy who basically owns Toronto’s burger culture, standing there with the kind of ingredients and focus that turns a simple thing into something perfect. Good meat, real care, the clarity of someone who’s made this a thousand times and still does it right. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/1/mattys-cheeseburger/ Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/1/all-that-heat/ I’m completely weather dependent. Gray skies and I’m done for—I’ll spend the day in bed playing bad games, waiting for it to clear. But the moment the sun breaks through, something wakes up in me. I want cold drinks, music, people, movement, that electric feeling of summer arriving. You can feel it working on your body. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/1/all-that-heat/ Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/1/blog-money/ Everyone thinks they know what blog money is before they’re actually dealing with it. There’s this fantasy that went around—that the internet is democratic, that if you have something interesting to say people will find you and pay for it. Some people did make that work. Most didn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/6/1/blog-money/ Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/31/fonotune-an-electric-fairytale/ I found out about this film from a tip: Fonotune, An Electric Fairytale, directed by Fabian Huebner. It’s still being made, caught between idea and finished work. Retro-futuristic, which usually signals someone’s going to synth their way through a bad screenplay, but this one feels different. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/31/fonotune-an-electric-fairytale/ Sat, 31 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/31/problem/ I had no idea who Ariana Grande was. Apparently she came from Nickelodeon—one of those former child stars who got a complete pop star makeover. The song itself is discount disco-pop, nothing I’d normally care about. But Iggy Azalea’s on the feature, and Iggy Azalea is genuinely good, which is enough for me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/31/problem/ Sat, 31 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/31/kate-upton-in-garters/ Garters have never really appealed to me. They read as costume—the housewife-in-heels fantasy, all that. There’s always this sense of performance, of asking to be looked at a certain way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/31/kate-upton-in-garters/ Sat, 31 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/30/mario-gets-a-sedan/ Japanese car commercials hit different—they’ve got this fearlessness about doing something genuinely weird that no Western brand would touch. Mercedes-Benz figured this out and made a Super Mario ad for the GLA, which is genuinely one of the most absurd marketing moves I’ve ever seen, in the best possible way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/30/mario-gets-a-sedan/ Fri, 30 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/30/pixel-nostalgia/ There’s something surreal about seeing Mario on a dress in a shop window. Not ironic surreal—just genuinely weird, the way pop culture moments become strange once they’ve aged enough. When I was actually playing Super Mario World, you kept it quiet. Games were for kids, or basement dwellers, or both. Now the aesthetic is everywhere: the pixelated mugs, the retro controllers as phone chargers, the graphics that intentionally look cheap because that’s what we’re supposed to find beautiful. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/30/pixel-nostalgia/ Fri, 30 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/30/back-at-the-yaam/ The YAAM was reopening. Weboogie x A Million Friends, with Jimmy Edgar, MeLo-X, SEVDALIZA—names that carried weight if you’d been paying attention. Berlin club nights have a way of returning like that: the same venue, the same strangers, the same dark room where you go to stop thinking for a few hours. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/30/back-at-the-yaam/ Fri, 30 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/30/caramel-marshmallow-pizza/ Pizza Hut Japan made a caramel-marshmallow pizza—no irony, no winking at the camera. Just straight caramel and marshmallow on a pizza base, about six euros, a tie-in with some Japanese candy brand. The kind of move that could only happen in Japan. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/30/caramel-marshmallow-pizza/ Fri, 30 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/30/why-bacon/ Bacon doesn’t have to try. A piece hits a hot pan and that smell takes over—your kitchen, your morning, whatever you were thinking about two seconds ago. Nothing else exists until it’s done. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/30/why-bacon/ Fri, 30 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/30/the-chaos-budget/ Eight teams competing in a Ford marketing campaign, each challenge more specific than the last. Social media stunts, sheep herding, dancing. You can’t say Ford didn’t try—there’s a kind of honesty in the randomness, the sheer confidence that absurd tasks plus audience equals engagement. Did it work? Doesn’t really matter. The fact that this happened, that someone championed this idea and got budget approval and it actually went through—that’s the real story. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/30/the-chaos-budget/ Fri, 30 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/30/the-constant/ Jessica Alba has been showing up in things I watch for most of my adult life. “Dark Angel” was the obvious entry point—a show where she could do action without winking at the audience, without pretending to be anything other than what she was. Then “Into the Blue,” which didn’t bother with subtext, just put her in a bikini on a beach and called it a done deal. “Honey.” “Entourage.” Over the years she’d appear in something and I’d register her before the scene even settled. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/30/the-constant/ Fri, 30 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/30/the-mobile-coffeeshop/ Oliver Becker was this cannabis activist who thought the best way to promote his legalization book was to load a camper van with Moroccan hash and just park it in Görlitzer Park on June 21st. Not grass—only hash. He’d worked it out so he wouldn’t interfere with the West African dealers already working the park. Different products, no conflict. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/30/the-mobile-coffeeshop/ Fri, 30 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/29/osaka-neon/ Colors bleeding into each other. That’s what Osaka is now—neon and beer and video games and voices calling from doorways, fried meat, the feeling of being exactly where I shouldn’t be and exactly where I needed to be. It started with a drinking contest, me and some guy who was way too confident about his stamina, both of us ordering Asahi Super Dry like we were settling something. When it was over the sky had turned that particular gray that only cities get at night, and I was standing in front of Osaka Castle somehow, with a train about to leave the platform. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/29/osaka-neon/ Thu, 29 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/28/pharrells-stan-smiths/ Pharrell sketched ten different versions of the Stan Smith, and Adidas put them out in limited quantities. Simple sketches—the kind anyone could do in a few minutes. No manifesto, no artist statement, no elaborate concept. Just someone with taste taking a shoe everyone already knows and making ten small different marks on it. That’s what a real design collaboration feels like. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/28/pharrells-stan-smiths/ Wed, 28 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/28/three-magazines/ Grabbed three magazines at a kiosk because I had an hour between things. NEON, BEEF!, ZEIT Campus. They’re apparently how you understand who you’re becoming. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/28/three-magazines/ Wed, 28 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/28/the-travel-test/ Bill Murray says if you think you’ve found the one, don’t plan a wedding. Buy plane tickets. Go somewhere difficult to reach, somewhere that makes you stick together because leaving would be harder than staying. Then fly back to JFK. If you still love them when you land, you’ve got something real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/28/the-travel-test/ Wed, 28 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/28/the-panda-problem/ Google built a car that drives itself and it looks like something you’d want to stay far away from. All rounded edges and bug eyes, genuinely unimpressed-looking. The kind of thing that would be cute if it weren’t about to make a decision that could kill you. That’s the part people get stuck on, I think—we’ve spent a century treating the car like an extension of ourselves, something you grip and steer and feel beneath you. And now we’re supposed to just sit there while it happens. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/28/the-panda-problem/ Wed, 28 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/27/you-didnt-eat-that/ There’s this Instagram account called “You Did Not Eat That” that exists purely to mock one of social media’s most transparent lies: photos of conventionally attractive people posing with enormous burgers, colorful cupcakes, whole pizzas, grinning at the camera like they’re about to devour the thing, when everyone knows they ate maybe two bites before setting it aside. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/27/you-didnt-eat-that/ Tue, 27 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/27/princess-bubblegum/ Took a BuzzFeed quiz about Adventure Time and got Princess Bubblegum. Super sweet, smartest character on the show. I’d have preferred Marceline, though. She’s cooler. Deadpan, cynical, dragging this whole history with the Ice King around. Marceline doesn’t need the validation. The quiz is designed to flatter you into sharing it, so of course it won’t put you in a character you don’t want to be. But Marceline wouldn’t take the quiz anyway. That’s the move. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/27/princess-bubblegum/ Tue, 27 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/26/tetsuo-kondos-cloud/ There’s a cube in Tokyo. Six meters on each side, transparent, with a cloud suspended inside it like it’s trapped in amber. Not a model or projection—the cloud itself, changing throughout the day, its color and density responding to the weather outside, to the time, to conditions beyond anyone’s control. Tetsuo Kondo built it. When you climb the stairs in the middle and stand surrounded by it, something shifts. For a moment, you stop looking at a cloud. You’re inside one. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/26/tetsuo-kondos-cloud/ Mon, 26 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/26/emma-lily/ Harley Weir shot Arvida Emma Byström for Double Magazine, with another model named Lily. Arvida’s been using her Tumblr to push back against beauty industry standards – her work is feminist, pointed, refusing the usual compromises. Weir shoots the same way, so the collaboration made sense. The result is explicit and candid, bodies visible without the cosmetic removals that editing usually performs. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/26/emma-lily/ Mon, 26 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/26/shibuya-without-moving/ I’ve never been to Tokyo, which feels like a genuine failure at this point. I wanted to go when I was young enough to think travel just happens to you if you want it bad enough. Life got in the way. So now I visit through music that was basically designed for travelers stuck at home. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/26/shibuya-without-moving/ Mon, 26 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/26/die-zeit/ A satire show called Die Anstalt did what satire’s supposed to do—went after major newspapers for sleeping with power. Sure, papers like Bild and Die Welt, you see their editors hanging around with CEOs and defense contractors, money flowing in one direction and editorial independence flowing out the other. Doesn’t surprise anyone. But Die Zeit was different. That was the paper that felt separate from all that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/26/die-zeit/ Mon, 26 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/26/polygon-thrones/ When you see Arya Stark rendered in geometric planes, something clicks. It’s still unmistakably her, but you’re looking straight through to the structure underneath, all those sharp decisions that make a face readable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/26/polygon-thrones/ Mon, 26 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/26/lana-del-rey-shades-of-cool/ Every summer, around May or June, I need Lana Del Rey’s voice the way I need cold sheets and the smell of someone else’s skin. Shades of Cool comes back, and it doesn’t announce anything profound—nothing epic, nothing that needs explaining. It’s just that whisper of hers, that cool restraint, the way she lets certain words hang until you finish them yourself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/26/lana-del-rey-shades-of-cool/ Mon, 26 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/24/the-gray-brick/ I spent years with that gray rectangle. Link’s Awakening first—which was weird for a handheld, actually. Koholint Island had this melancholy that made you forget you were squinting at a four-inch screen in the back of a car. Then Pokémon Blue, and I built a team that made no sense strategically but felt right. Charizard obviously. Alakazam for the raw power flex. A Lapras because someone in my class said water types were overpowered. You’d arrange and rearrange your party at the Pokémon Center, betting on combinations like they meant something, like your choices actually mattered in a way they didn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/24/the-gray-brick/ Sat, 24 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/24/they-just-are/ There’s a point where wearing your favorite TV show stops feeling like a statement and just feels like showing up as yourself. ELEVENPARIS and colette made a collection of Simpsons T-shirts, which is just what happens when something’s been around long enough that it doesn’t need defending. The show’s been on for over thirty years. The characters haven’t aged a day. They’re not cool or uncool anymore—they just are. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/24/they-just-are/ Sat, 24 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/23/under-the-indigo-moon/ Natasha Khan basically saved my life with Two Suns and Daniel. I don’t say that lightly. Those records were guides through some genuinely dark years—the kind of companion pieces you put on at two in the morning when nothing else makes sense. Two Suns especially sits near the top of everything this industry’s ever made. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/23/under-the-indigo-moon/ Fri, 23 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/23/another-castle/ I saw these images the other day—video game characters completely hollowed out. Mario, Sonic, the princess. Christopher Hemsworth made a series called “Dear Inner Demons” that strips away the fantasy and shows what these characters would actually feel if they had to sit with their own lives. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/23/another-castle/ Fri, 23 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/23/rubber-tracks/ Converse ran a recording studio for a few years. They called it Rubber Tracks, and it started in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—a legitimate recording space with engineers and equipment, and they let you use it for free. If you were a young musician and had the time to book a session, you could walk in and make something real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/23/rubber-tracks/ Fri, 23 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/23/ghost-cities/ Watched a documentary called Geisterstädte on Arte about the towns around Fukushima, and walking through them in the footage is genuinely unsettling. You see these empty streets, shops still stocked, cars still parked, and it feels like everyone just stepped out thirty seconds ago. Except it’s been years. The apocalypse already happened and you missed it—that’s the feeling you get. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/23/ghost-cities/ Fri, 23 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/23/no-boys-allowed/ There’s something genuinely unfair about gendered swimwear that nobody really talks about. Men get board shorts—basically interchangeable rectangles in different colors—or actual swim briefs that make you feel like you’re auditioning for the Olympics. Women get an entire spectrum of choices: cuts, coverage, colors, patterns. It’s not even close. Been Trill and PacSun’s “No Boys Allowed” capsule is basically just acknowledging that reality and doing something with it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/23/no-boys-allowed/ Fri, 23 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/22/cyberpocalypse/ Carter Baldwin built a LEGO city called Cyberpocalypse at Brickworld—industrial, dark, neon bleeding through the concrete gray. Dense, nothing wasted. It shouldn’t work in toy bricks, but it works. Punk sensibility in plastic form. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/22/cyberpocalypse/ Thu, 22 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/22/summer-stretched/ Sports Illustrated kept uploading Kate Upton beach videos for months—slightly different crops, slightly different lighting, but the same photoshoot stretched across dozens of uploads. It works because Kate Upton is pleasant to look at, and they know exactly how to package that. But you can see the machinery completely bare: one day of shooting turned into a summer of content, each video a marginal variation designed to feel fresh enough to click on. It’s so transparent about what it’s doing that you almost respect the efficiency. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/22/summer-stretched/ Thu, 22 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/22/what-we-want/ Alex Solis draws the characters we know as if they’d actually lived here. Darth Vader, Superman, Mickey Mouse—all of them fed on the cheap burgers and ice cream and endless cupcakes that are everywhere, living the life that real abundance offers. Not the heroic ideal. The real thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/22/what-we-want/ Thu, 22 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/22/rock-am-ring/ Festival season hits and Rock am Ring’s lineup appears. Iron Maiden, Metallica, Slayer, Linkin Park, The Offspring, Fall Out Boy, Kings of Leon, Haim—no coherence, just whatever acts the promoters could afford that year, all thrown at a racetrack in Germany’s Eifel region. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/22/rock-am-ring/ Thu, 22 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/21/kyoto-made-sense/ Everyone’s going for Tokyo. It’s the obvious choice—millions of people stacked into vertical blocks, pachinko glow at midnight, trains that make you feel like a cell in a circulatory system. I understand the pull. But a few hours west on the Shinkansen there’s something else, a place that was the capital for a thousand years, and after two days walking around it started to become clear why you might skip Tokyo entirely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/21/kyoto-made-sense/ Wed, 21 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/21/design-your-own/ Uniqlo announced this app called UTme! where you upload a photo, pick some colors, and they print it on a T-shirt. Design your own thing, basically. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/21/design-your-own/ Wed, 21 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/21/the-photographs/ Those Craig McDean photographs from Vanity Fair hit me when I came across them. Scarlett Johansson. I have no idea what she’s wearing or what the article says. Never read the interview. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/21/the-photographs/ Wed, 21 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/20/non-non-biyori-and-going-home/ You grow up in a small town or the countryside and all you want is out. Get away, hit the city with its tall buildings and loud nights and chaos. Anything but here. That’s the only thought that matters at seventeen—escape into something bigger, something real. I felt it in my bones. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/20/non-non-biyori-and-going-home/ Tue, 20 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/20/the-food-the-hunter/ The English dub of Attack on Titan landed at some point and I watched it again just to check how it translated. I’d already seen the anime, knew where it was heading, understood the whole apparatus. But sitting with a few teenagers watching it cold was its own thing. They had no idea what was coming. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/20/the-food-the-hunter/ Tue, 20 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/20/signs-from-the-near-future/ Fernando Barbella created a Tumblr of signs from the near future—photographs of billboards and warnings that don’t exist yet, but feel like they absolutely should. Driverless taxi lanes. Synthetic burger restaurants. Addiction support hotlines for social media. The future according to these signs isn’t nuclear wars or robot uprisings. It’s just… normal, but slightly wrong. Exhausted. A little sad. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/20/signs-from-the-near-future/ Tue, 20 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/20/metrognome-stretches-the-ringtone/ That sound—the default iPhone ringtone. It’s everywhere. Buses, cafes, random moments where someone’s phone cuts through the quiet and everyone tenses for half a second. MetroGnome took those few notes and built them into an actual electronic track, which sounds like a joke premise until you hear it. The ringtone was designed to interrupt, to be impossible to ignore. Stretched across a full remix, that urgency becomes something else. Hypnotic, almost. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/20/metrognome-stretches-the-ringtone/ Tue, 20 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/20/pitbull-terrier/ Die Antwoord released a video for “Pitbull Terrier” where they dress as bloodthirsty dogs tearing through the streets, which is basically just them being themselves. The South African group—Ninja, Yo-Landi Vi$$er, and DJ Hi-Tek—have been building this world of deliberate ugliness for over a decade now, refusing every basic aesthetic rule. Be attractive. Be likable. Be accessible. They don’t do any of that. Their whole project is making something intentionally uncomfortable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/20/pitbull-terrier/ Tue, 20 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/20/fuwako/ I’ve never understood the Berlin street style thing. Everyone dresses the same—the bun, the tote bag, the pants, all of it—like they’re working from a manual. It’s suffocating. Tokyo’s different. People actually take risks there, or at least they don’t seem to be asking permission first. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/20/fuwako/ Tue, 20 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/19/last-night-good-night/ Pharrell making a track with Miku Hatsune. Takashi Murakami’s “Jellyfish Eyes” is in there somewhere. This shouldn’t work but it absolutely does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/19/last-night-good-night/ Mon, 19 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/19/japan-syndrome/ A festival called Japan Syndrome opened at Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin three years after Fukushima—Japanese artists, theatre makers, visual artists, musicians, documentarians gathering to make sense of what the disaster had done to the country’s story. The postwar mythology about infinite growth on cheap energy and technology that could be controlled. All of it shattered when the reactors failed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/19/japan-syndrome/ Mon, 19 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/17/the-kaleesi/ Somewhere along the way, pop culture stopped being something you just watched and became something you ate. Mathew Ramsey at PornBurger made a Game of Thrones burger called the Kaleesi, and it’s built with Welsh cheddar studded with mustard seeds and shiitake bacon. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/17/the-kaleesi/ Sat, 17 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/17/what-photo/ Adidas relaunched miadidas with an app that lets you print custom photos on the new ZX FLUX sneakers. It’s not exactly complicated technology, but it does make you answer a surprisingly specific question: what photo do you want staring up at you from your feet for the next six months? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/17/what-photo/ Sat, 17 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/16/concrete-summer/ The second issue of the adidas Originals Series showed up, and it was actually well-designed, which isn’t something you’d normally say about a brand publication. Someone spent real time on it, made choices about materials and images because they mattered, not because they fit the brand guidelines. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/16/concrete-summer/ Fri, 16 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/16/hidden-in-plain-sight/ Ray-Ban’s marketing team has built a whole mythology around the idea of never hiding. A secret order of individualists stretching back through history—punks, pointillists, leather daddies, everyone who refused to conform. The campaign wants you to join by taking challenges, picking your aesthetic type (“cuts like steel,” “smooth as velvet”), and hashtagging yourself into visibility. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/16/hidden-in-plain-sight/ Fri, 16 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/16/of-course-its-tokyo/ You could feel it before the index confirmed it. Walking through Shibuya at 2 AM, neon still bleeding into your vision, vending machines humming their small electric song—there’s something about Tokyo that other cities just don’t have. A density of care, maybe. Every block looks considered, even the alleys between the alleys. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/16/of-course-its-tokyo/ Fri, 16 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/16/glorious-leader/ I found out someone made a video game called Glorious Leader where you play as Kim Jong-Un riding a unicorn. It’s real. You can download it for PC or mobile right now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/16/glorious-leader/ Fri, 16 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/10/the-agony-of-community/ NBC canceled Community. Five seasons and they’re pulling the plug. I had to sit with that for a minute before I could even process it. A lot of people never got what was so great about it—the humor felt random, stupid, impossible to predict. They’re wrong. They missed it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/10/the-agony-of-community/ Sat, 10 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/9/when-ford-wanted-to-be-cool/ Back when car brands figured out YouTube was where their audience had moved, they’d do things like this—Ford in Düsseldorf, web personalities competing for cars, internet voting on winners. Judges were Alina Süggeler and a TV host, people the creators’ audiences actually knew. Everyone filmed it on their phones. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/9/when-ford-wanted-to-be-cool/ Fri, 09 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/8/west-coast/ That sparse, echoing production opens onto an aching romanticism, a tragic Hollywood glamour that became synonymous with Lana’s entire aesthetic. I’ve probably listened to it a hundred times and it never stops sounding like the saddest, most beautiful description of longing—her voice like some old starlet whispering from a past that was always more myth than reality. It’s the kind of song that makes a memory of somewhere you’ve never been feel more real than your actual life. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/8/west-coast/ Thu, 08 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/7/look-up/ There’s a moment in Gary Turk’s viral video where a girl smiles at him on the street and he doesn’t see her because he’s looking at his phone. He’s missing everything—the sunsets, the conversations, the chance at something real—because his eyes are down. The video’s message is blunt: your friends matter more than Snapchat. The person in front of you matters more than Instagram. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/7/look-up/ Wed, 07 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/7/what-lobo-got-right/ Sascha Lobo’s the kind of guy you either get or you don’t. The mohawk, the positioning, the whole thing where he’s decided he’s the internet’s conscience—yeah, it’s a lot. But people listen to him, actually listen. And when he got up at re:publica and started talking, I understood why. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/7/what-lobo-got-right/ Wed, 07 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/7/om-nom-nom/ Every time I walk into an Asian market I think about just moving in. The frozen animals, the vegetables that mean nothing to anyone here, drinks at the checkout from some completely other world—I’m genuinely obsessed. I don’t know why I haven’t done it. Why don’t I just live in one? Spend my whole life working through whatever’s in the next aisle, buying things I don’t recognize and will probably regret? Some better version of me did. Some worse version of me will. Anyway, I cleared out the shop at Alexanderplatz the other day and me and Len are about to destroy the entire haul. Om nom nom. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/7/om-nom-nom/ Wed, 07 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/5/zippora-seven-at-night-ii/ Zippora Seven at night, shot by Jason Lee Parry for Mirage Magazine. The thing that works is the light—that barely-there illumination that makes skin seem to glow from underneath. She’s Australian, surfer, model, blonde. Parry catches her in that space where the darkness withholds just enough, which is probably the whole idea. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/5/zippora-seven-at-night-ii/ Mon, 05 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/5/space-dandy/ Three idiots in a spaceship: a vain asshole, a horny cat, and a depressed vacuum cleaner hunting aliens for money. Space Dandy shouldn’t work. The premise sounds like every mediocre anime I’ve given up on—bouncing tits, dumb jokes, the whole exhausted formula. But it’s something else. Every episode is made with obsession, not obligation. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/5/space-dandy/ Mon, 05 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/2/nipple-makeup/ Japan makes nipple makeup. Legitimately. Different colors, sits next to all the other cosmetics, costs about ten euros. No marketing campaign, no joke, no elaborate framing—just a product that exists because somebody wanted it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/5/2/nipple-makeup/ Fri, 02 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/30/japanese-mixtape-idiosyncratic-nostalgia/ Softhold put together a Japanese indie mixtape with indigo la End, KANA-BOON, Creephyp. The thing about these compilations is you can tell someone actually cared about what they were sharing, not just padding a playlist. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/30/japanese-mixtape-idiosyncratic-nostalgia/ Wed, 30 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/30/out-of-sync/ Everywhere else is moving forward. The US is deregulating incrementally, Germany’s reconsidering prohibition, but Japan’s still treating cannabis as a hard drug with zero medical applications. Yuka Uchida went to find the people who’d decided that gap between policy and reality wasn’t their problem anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/30/out-of-sync/ Wed, 30 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/30/what-aryan-actually-means/ Everyone has a picture in their head when they hear “Aryan.” Blonde hair. Blue eyes. White skin. Certainty. The propaganda worked so thoroughly that the myth calcified into something that feels like historical fact, like an actual truth about the world. And because people believed in this fantasy—because it was powerful enough to stake your identity on—millions of people were murdered. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/30/what-aryan-actually-means/ Wed, 30 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/29/lui-and-rihanna/ Mario Sorrenti shot Rihanna topless for Lui Magazine. He’s spent decades photographing bodies with this particular kind of clarity—no softening, no conceptual dressing it up, just form and light. When you put Sorrenti and Rihanna in the same room, the work is going to be direct. The photos came out clean and bright, her against colored backgrounds. There’s a confidence to how she carries it, this sense of complete comfort with being completely exposed. Not defiant about it. Just matter-of-fact. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/29/lui-and-rihanna/ Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/29/natalie-westling/ Natalie Westling is from Arizona, seventeen when Marc Jacobs and Elite started calling. The usual story would have her leave skateboarding behind—fashion money does that, pulls people away from whatever came before. She didn’t. She still rides. That’s what registers. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/29/natalie-westling/ Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/29/what-you-cant-buy/ The internet is mean about this. It shows you something beautiful and then makes sure you understand you can’t have it. You can buy the lingerie. You can own the object. But the person, the actual presence that makes the image worth looking at, that’s not in the package. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/29/what-you-cant-buy/ Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/29/japanese-arcades/ Walk into Club Sega in Tokyo and the brightness hits first. Everything’s designed to scream—screens flashing, games screaming, kids screaming louder. You walk in and immediately you’re inside something too colorful and too loud to be anything but pure fun. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/29/japanese-arcades/ Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/29/godzilla/ The trailer for the new Godzilla hit different. There was something about how they shot it—not chasing destruction for its own sake, but treating the creature itself as genuinely horrifying. And the cast: Cranston right after Breaking Bad, Olsen, Taylor-Johnson, Watanabe. That’s not typical for monster movies. They’d hired serious actors, which meant they were trying to do something with the weight of it, the actual terror, not just the spectacle. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/29/godzilla/ Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/28/simon-ostrovsky/ Simon Ostrovsky was in Eastern Ukraine covering the conflict for VICE NEWS when pro-Russian separatists grabbed him in 2014. I followed the story online like everyone else does—with that strange mix of concern and distance that happens when something major is unfolding somewhere you’ll never go. When he got out a few days later mostly in one piece, he’d become the kind of journalist who didn’t just report on the story anymore. He was the story. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/28/simon-ostrovsky/ Mon, 28 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/28/zippora-seven-at-night/ Zippora Seven shoots Australian coastline at night. Dark water, light, that particular edge. Found her on Instagram a while back. There’s precision in the composition but nothing precious about it—the frame serves the moment. Jason Lee Parry appears in some of these sequences and the whole thing has this intimate documentary quality. Nobody’s trying to prove anything. Just what the coast actually looks like when someone’s paying attention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/28/zippora-seven-at-night/ Mon, 28 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/28/sailor-moon-again/ Sailor Moon Crystal came back. The remake that wanted to tell the manga’s story straight, without the filler and production chaos of the original. I never felt like one version was better than the other. Different voice actors. Different aesthetic. The character designs hit that balance between manga line work and animation that could actually move. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/28/sailor-moon-again/ Mon, 28 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/28/tokyo-top-tracks/ Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s touring Europe, ’Family Party’ charted at number two in Japan—sitting between ClariS and Morning Musume. Sekai no Owari’s there dressed as clowns, Namie Amuro still holding down elder J-pop space, Ken Hirai in the mix. Following these charts doesn’t feel like tracking music so much as watching a whole aesthetic system work itself out—all these eras existing at once, and it works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/28/tokyo-top-tracks/ Mon, 28 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/28/brooklyn-in-paris/ You see it immediately in certain parts of Paris: the American aesthetic has moved in. Vintage denim, those carefully casual hot dog carts, American Apparel stores, coffee shops with the right kind of neglected brick. It’s Brooklyn, more or less, except with better pastries and people who don’t apologize for smoking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/28/brooklyn-in-paris/ Mon, 28 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/28/when-burgers-won/ Berlin spent a few years pretending burgers were basically dead weight, something you ate secretly and never admitted to serious people. Everything was about the biorestaurants, the heirloom vegetables, the place that sourced its grains from some monastery in the countryside. Then the pendulum swung and nobody was pretending anymore. Now it’s just more—more sauce, more meat, more cheese. Burgermeister, The Bird, all these places have lines out the door. Calorie counting became somebody else’s problem. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/28/when-burgers-won/ Mon, 28 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/27/another-closing/ DragstripGirl is gone. Or closing, anyway. I don’t follow the details closely enough to know if there’s a difference. I just know that a space I used to visit—not often, but consistently, the way you check on something that matters—is disappearing into the internet’s graveyard. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/27/another-closing/ Sun, 27 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/26/japanese-magazine-stores/ Walk into a magazine store in Japan and you hit this wall of overwhelming abundance. Every microculture, every hobby, every interest gets a magazine. Fashion, design, pop culture, niche things you didn’t know people were passionate enough about to print. It’s genuinely disorienting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/26/japanese-magazine-stores/ Sat, 26 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/22/adidas-hamburg/ Adidas did something right with the Hamburg edition. White leather, red stripes, gold lettering spelling out where you’re from—just the essentials. The color balance is what makes it work. White gives it room to breathe, the red stripe commands attention without screaming, and the gold’s just there as a detail. There’s a brown and orange version that exists, but the white one’s what you actually want. That restraint is everything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/22/adidas-hamburg/ Tue, 22 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/22/8-bit-ghibli/ British artist Richard Evans took the Ghibli catalog—Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, the whole lineage—and converted them into 8-bit pixel art. NES resolution, that flat palette, the way sprites move. It shouldn’t work, but it does, and immediately. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/22/8-bit-ghibli/ Tue, 22 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/22/tomato-cherry/ Häagen-Dazs is selling vegetable ice cream in Japan now. The “Spoon Vege” series comes in tomato cherry and carrot orange, hitting shelves in May, and I’ve been trying to imagine what either one tastes like and I just can’t make it work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/22/tomato-cherry/ Tue, 22 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/22/adventure-time-food-chain/ Masaaki Yuasa makes animation that feels like it shouldn’t work—chaotic frame-by-frame drawings, characters stretching and fracturing, entire worlds that move like no other studio touches. “Mind Game,” “Ping Pong,” everything he does has this urgent, almost violent energy. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/22/adventure-time-food-chain/ Tue, 22 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/21/the-westeros-map/ I got pulled into an interactive map of Westeros last night. There’s something about seeing a fictional world laid out geographically—the kind of thing that takes five minutes and turns into an hour. You understand distances and trade routes in a way reading about them doesn’t quite land. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/21/the-westeros-map/ Mon, 21 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/21/super-potato/ When Christine and I went through Super Potato in Akihabara, we were in there for hours. The store sprawls across several floors—row after row of SNES games, Dreamcast consoles, strategy guides yellowed from age, Final Fantasy soundtracks. Prices are reasonable, five to twenty euros for most things, though the rare stuff costs more. The upper floors have an arcade and a shop for snacks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/21/super-potato/ Mon, 21 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/21/you-dont-have-to-understand/ Finding good Japanese music is harder than it should be. You search and you get walls of idol groups—so many they blur together into one gloss-eyed collective—or boy bands crooning “I Love You” with all the personality of a vending machine, or anime soundtrack stuff with ridiculous character designs. The surface of Japanese music looks completely manufactured. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/21/you-dont-have-to-understand/ Mon, 21 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/21/cannabiotics/ Marijuana’s creeping into legality across the US, which means someone had to figure out what to do about all those decades-old leaf logos and stoner clichés. Studio 360 and Original Champions of Design took the project seriously with “Cannabiotics”—a rebranded purple cannabis leaf, plus cookbooks, merch, something called Cannabamoji, and for completely unclear reasons, skulls scattered throughout the design. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/21/cannabiotics/ Mon, 21 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/20/virtuous-for-thirty-seconds/ Thought I had it figured out for a second. Steamed salmon, green beans, a touch of soy sauce—the whole thing felt virtuous, like maybe I was becoming someone who actually kept at this. Then Boston Pizza released their six-layer pizza cake and I spent thirty seconds remembering exactly who I am. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/20/virtuous-for-thirty-seconds/ Sun, 20 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/20/hasselhoff-and-the-wall/ Leather jacket, sunglasses, 1989, Brandenburg Gate. That image is how David Hasselhoff locked himself into Berlin’s cultural memory as the embodiment of freedom. Not through political action or artistic intention, just by being the right celebrity at the right moment when the Wall came down. The moment became the proof that freedom is real, that it can be sung into existence by a guy whose actual fame came from eight seasons of sitting in a car that talked back to him. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/20/hasselhoff-and-the-wall/ Sun, 20 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/20/babymetal-at-sonisphere/ Babymetal showed up at Sonisphere one summer—the festival that booked Metallica, Slayer, and Iron Maiden alongside three Japanese teenage girls doing heavy metal in what amounted to school-uniform staging. It shouldn’t have worked. It did. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/20/babymetal-at-sonisphere/ Sun, 20 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/18/the-rotation/ AKB48 works on rotation, which sounds cynical until you realize everyone’s in on it. You pick a girl when she joins, support her for however many years she’s in the group, and when she graduates, you move on to the next one. The mechanism is visible. No pretense of forever. You know what you’re signing up for from the start. Most idol acts bury that machinery under sentiment and branding. AKB48 just… doesn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/18/the-rotation/ Fri, 18 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/17/looking-into-black-boxes/ Most of us spend our whole day on phones and computers without having any idea how they actually work. We’re on Instagram, downloading episodes we’re not supposed to watch, messaging strangers with photos that probably shouldn’t exist. We do it all automatically, without thinking. And if you actually stop and think about how little you understand the thing you’ve been staring at for the past six hours, it’s kind of unsettling. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/17/looking-into-black-boxes/ Thu, 17 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/17/the-warp-zone-nailed-it/ I’ve had this Game of Thrones medley by The Warp Zone stuck in rotation for days. Each character gets their own verse—the Starks and Lannisters getting a turn to sing about their house burning down. The concept is stupid, which is exactly the point. But it works because they execute it without apology, clean and tight and perfectly timed. There’s no winking, no desperate reach for laughs, just complete commitment to the bit. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/17/the-warp-zone-nailed-it/ Thu, 17 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/16/just-stay-in-bed/ Every morning the same routine: drag yourself out, shower, coffee, get dressed, look presentable, then spend eight hours in some fluorescent box—office, classroom, wherever—until the clock says you can leave. Then you do it again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/16/just-stay-in-bed/ Wed, 16 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/16/this-curry-rice-proves-it/ I spend my whole life being hit with Japanese commercials from every angle. The sky, other people’s screens, my own phone at 2 AM. None of it matters because they’re loud and they’re off in ways that somehow work, and this new Nissin curry rice commercial called Kare Meshi is so completely, unapologetically Japanese that it makes every other ad I’ve ever seen feel like a lie. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/16/this-curry-rice-proves-it/ Wed, 16 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/16/a-brony-tale/ There’s a documentary about adult men who dress as My Little Pony characters, and it follows Ashleigh Ball, who voices two of the characters, through their world. If you somehow missed the decade-long internet phenomenon where a show made for little girls got adopted by a specific demographic of grown men in elaborate costumes, here’s everything you need to know about bronies: it’s real, it’s organized, and it goes way deeper than anyone wants it to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/16/a-brony-tale/ Wed, 16 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/15/two-days-straight/ Berlin’s Festival ran 48 hours straight, Friday night through Sunday. Full stop. No scheduled end time, no returning to your hotel to reset. You were either there for the duration or you were missing something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/15/two-days-straight/ Tue, 15 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/15/the-sausage-king/ This is an era where excess isn’t hidden anymore—it’s just what people do. Even the ones with taste will eat a greasy burger from a place named after a bird, grab ten-cheese pizza outside a club at midnight, swallow meat from animals they’ll never think about again. Nobody’s shocked. Nobody’s pretending to be shocked. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/15/the-sausage-king/ Tue, 15 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/15/when-pharrell-cried/ I hate “Happy.” I hate it with an intensity that feels unbalanced for a pop song. If I have to hear it one more time, I might start reenacting Game of Thrones violence in earnest. But apparently everyone else on earth made peace with it in a way I never will, and they started uploading videos of themselves being happy because of Pharrell’s song. That’s the part I’m not equipped to understand. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/15/when-pharrell-cried/ Tue, 15 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/15/goodbye-earth/ Civilization: Beyond Earth is coming this fall, and yeah, this announcement made the rounds online last weekend already, but I’m writing about it anyway because Civilization matters to me in a way that’s probably embarrassing. I’ve spent thousands of hours destroying cities, crushing armies, watching entire civilizations burn just so I could win one more time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/15/goodbye-earth/ Tue, 15 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/15/matatabistep/ Passepied took their name from a baroque dance form, which is pretty funny for a Tokyo band making club music. Their track ’MATATABISTEP’ captures that hour when thinking stops and you’re just moving—the alcohol, the rhythm, everything loose and committed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/15/matatabistep/ Tue, 15 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/15/nipple/ I had a notebook in my twenties where I’d write down what happened. Specific girls, specific acts—at thirteen under Maria’s shirt, at sixteen in Steffi’s underwear, at nineteen both Berg sisters at once. I couldn’t stand forgetting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/15/nipple/ Tue, 15 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/14/built-on-it/ There’s something about celebrity complaints that hits different when it’s about the very thing that made them a celebrity in the first place. Kate Upton hates her breasts. That’s the news. Every day she wishes they were smaller. She can’t wear the clothes she wants. Can’t go outside without people staring, talking about them, reducing her to this one physical fact. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/14/built-on-it/ Mon, 14 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/14/when-everything-becomes-vintage/ I owned three Walkmans. White one, gray one, and some kind of clip-on model that never worked right. This was just what you carried—your music, limited to whatever cassette you could fit. No wireless, no batteries that lasted more than four hours if you were lucky, no way to carry more than one album at a time. Completely normal. Now there’s a YouTube series where they hand kids Walkmans and film the moment their brains short-circuit trying to understand what the thing even is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/14/when-everything-becomes-vintage/ Mon, 14 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/14/tokyo-drowning/ Tokyo’s drowning in Frozen right now. Every version—Japanese, English, remixes with bass that absolutely shouldn’t be there. One Direction scattered underneath like they’re trying to hide. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/14/tokyo-drowning/ Mon, 14 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/14/west-coast/ After months of the leaked version circulating, Lana put out the real one. “West Coast” doesn’t announce itself. It barely announces anything—just her voice and space around it, the kind of ballad that knows its own power and doesn’t need to prove it. I went in expecting something bigger, something that would give her critics an easier target, but this isn’t that song. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/14/west-coast/ Mon, 14 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/14/pocket-tenga-wave-line/ You find yourself somewhere alone, far from home, suddenly dealing with that specific urgency—the kind of need that doesn’t negotiate and won’t wait. Japan looked at this situation and created the Pocket Tenga Wave Line, which is basically a disposable masturbation kit with lube already mixed in. Use it, throw it away with whatever embarrassment you’re carrying, go about your day. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/14/pocket-tenga-wave-line/ Mon, 14 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/10/playing-with-space/ The walls aren’t where they’re supposed to be. Three steps into the first installation at Berlin’s Opernwerkstätten and the geometry stops making sense. This is the OM-D Photography Playground in Mitte, seven thousand square meters of work designed specifically to do this—to make space fold, perspective shift, your sense of where you’re standing completely collapse. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/10/playing-with-space/ Thu, 10 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/9/where-have-all-the-wildlings-gone/ Game of Thrones gets harder to follow the longer it runs. You lose track of who’s related to whom, who’s dead, who’s supposed to be an enemy but might become an ally. The show doesn’t make it easy—too many characters, too many kingdoms, too much time between seasons for your memory to hold everything straight. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/9/where-have-all-the-wildlings-gone/ Wed, 09 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/9/kyarys-candy-nightmare/ When the dope’s gone and reality starts that slow suffocation—when you realize everything’s temporary and pointless and you’re just rotting through the days—you need what Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s doing. “Family Party” is a descent into impossible colors and surreal costumes, visual chaos that makes your brain feel less dead for a while. She’s built this world out of pure wrongness, where being confused and being delighted feel like the same thing. It’s not escape. It’s just proof that someone sees the void the same way you do and decided to paint it neon instead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/9/kyarys-candy-nightmare/ Wed, 09 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/8/lego-models/ Adly Syairi Ramly dressed up a few LEGO figures and the photographs work. Placed them in pieces from Supreme, A Bathing Ape, Stussy, Raised by Wolves—brands that mean something if you pay attention to how clothes are cut and what a logo actually costs. The thing about LEGO minifigures is that they’re a perfect blank, yellow plastic with no opinions. You dress them and you see exactly what you put on them. Nothing else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/8/lego-models/ Tue, 08 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/8/tokyo-on-nothing/ The first time I looked at Tokyo restaurant menus, I was convinced I’d come with the wrong amount of money. Everything looked expensive until I realized I was reading it wrong—or maybe I just needed to know where to look. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/8/tokyo-on-nothing/ Tue, 08 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/8/peter-griffins-instagram/ Peter Griffin in a bikini. Posed, filtered, like any other thirst trap on Instagram. Someone made an account for him and styled him like an influencer—close-ups, posed shots, the whole way everyone performs themselves on there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/8/peter-griffins-instagram/ Tue, 08 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/8/betas/ I’d just written about Silicon Valley’s first episode when I found Betas on Amazon Prime—same subject, same world. Startups, San Francisco, all of it. Watched the whole first season straight through. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/8/betas/ Tue, 08 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/8/four-bands/ Four bands, none yet famous, competing for a phone company jingle in 2014. Kuult had just formed and was somehow already playing packed rooms. Ocean Stereo from Hamburg mixed piano-pop with something heavier. Getting Private in Public—four childhood friends from Munich doing indie folk. Pari San was the strange one, a dreampop duo from Freiburg where the singer’s voice went through samplers and loops until it became something else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/8/four-bands/ Tue, 08 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/8/years-of-blood/ When HBO locked in seasons five and six of Game of Thrones, I felt something I don’t often feel about television: certainty that the thing I cared about would keep being made. The show had been genuinely great up to that point. It had taken George R.R. Martin’s books and somehow improved certain elements while preserving the whole architecture of violence and desire and political chaos that made them worth reading. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/8/years-of-blood/ Tue, 08 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/8/the-alphabet-sandwich/ Nick Chipman built a sandwich that hits every letter of the English alphabet, which is the kind of specific, pointless constraint that of course someone felt compelled to hit. Avocado, bacon, cheese, Doritos, egg, fish sticks, garlic bread, ham, Italian sausage, jalapeños, Krispy Kreme doughnut, lettuce, macaroni and cheese, noodles, onion rings, pepperoni, ramen noodles, spinach, turkey burger, and so on through yams and zucchini. By the time you’re stacking that thing together, it’s stopped being food and become something closer to a diagram. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/8/the-alphabet-sandwich/ Tue, 08 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/7/silicon-valley-eats-itself/ There’s a mythology around startups that I find genuinely appealing—the idea that you can write some code and change the world, that the right algorithm in the right garage matters. But there’s also the other side, which is mostly just money and ego dressing itself up in innovation language. Mike Judge made a show about that collision, and it’s funny because he’s not exaggerating much. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/7/silicon-valley-eats-itself/ Mon, 07 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/7/not-a-bug-splat/ Artists in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, one of the most bombed regions in the world, painted an installation on the ground big enough to see from above. Just faces. #NotABugSplat was the hashtag, because that’s apparently what people look like to drone operators watching screens thousands of miles away. A bug. A pixel. Nothing worth a second thought. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/7/not-a-bug-splat/ Mon, 07 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/7/all-in/ Friday at an adidas presentation in some massive apartment. Fall/winter collection—standard seasonal stuff, mostly forgettable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/7/all-in/ Mon, 07 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/7/showing-the-work/ I keep running into pocket watches online, mostly in design circles and watch forums where people take mechanism visibility very seriously. DETOMASO’s Tasca XXL is the aggressive version—53 millimeters across, transparent casing front and back, glass bottom so you see the movement the entire time it’s running. No pretense, no “we hide the ugly parts.” The mechanism is the whole design. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/7/showing-the-work/ Mon, 07 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/7/dragon-sword-fighter-force/ Unlicensed Game of Thrones minifigures exist and they’re actually good. Citizen Brick makes them, calls them the ’Dragon Sword Fighter Force’ to stay off HBO’s radar, but you know exactly who they’re supposed to be. Daenerys, Jon, Arya—the paint work is clean, they integrate with standard Lego, and they have that bootleg toy energy that somehow just works when the quality is there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/7/dragon-sword-fighter-force/ Mon, 07 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/7/pizza-is-art/ Jonpaul Douglass photographs pizza. Finally, some art I can actually understand. Not restaurant shots, not styled for a magazine—he finds pizza in the world, against puddles, next to fences, with a pug, and he shoots it like landscape photography. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/7/pizza-is-art/ Mon, 07 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/7/moe-as-a-creeper/ The couch gag hits and the whole world pixelates. The yellow house in stone blocks, Moe as a Creeper, that moment before detonation. It’s stupid and it works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/7/moe-as-a-creeper/ Mon, 07 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/6/the-weight/ You watch survivors of North Korean camps describe what happened to them and it stops being abstract. The woman remembering someone’s face. The man describing what it meant to be hungry like that. The specificity is what matters—not the concept of torture, but the weight of it on their bodies and voices. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/6/the-weight/ Sun, 06 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/6/actually-works/ SHUT and Matthew Willet made a skateboard out of gold. Real gold. Eighty centimeters long, twenty wide, four kilos, and it works—you can actually ride it. It comes with cotton gloves to keep it pristine, at least until you inevitably drag it down some concrete. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/6/actually-works/ Sun, 06 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/6/fuzzy-on-game-of-thrones/ I can’t remember what happened in the last season and the new one starts tonight. Bloodshed, dragons, endless betrayal—the shape of it is there but the details have gone misty. This is what happens when your attention moves on to the next thing and there’s always a next thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/6/fuzzy-on-game-of-thrones/ Sun, 06 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/6/bottled/ There’s a product for sale on Japanese online shops—bottles of liquid claiming to be actual schoolgirl urine. Ten euros, give or take. I stumbled across it the way you stumble across anything truly fucked up online: unable to look away, unable to stop wondering if it’s real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/6/bottled/ Sun, 06 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/6/running-backwards-in-tokyo/ A 28-year-old named Ludovic Zuili ran backwards through Tokyo for nine hours and filmed the whole thing. Then it aired on French television, but they played the footage in reverse so it looked like the city was moving backwards around him and everyone else was just going about their day normally. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/6/running-backwards-in-tokyo/ Sun, 06 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/6/leaving-it-behind/ This is mostly a note to myself: don’t leave your MacBook unattended in a café. It’s rule number one. You buy an overpriced Apple product instead of giving that money to people who actually need it, the least you can do is keep track of it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/6/leaving-it-behind/ Sun, 06 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/6/testinos-moss/ Mario Testino photographed Kate Moss for years and turned it into a book. First edition was expensive; they printed a cheaper one because people wanted it. That’s the announcement, more or less. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/6/testinos-moss/ Sun, 06 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/6/stupid-pokémon/ Aniforce, a Dutch artist, decided that Pokémon designs—already plenty ridiculous if you actually look at them—could be improved by one simple change: make them look profoundly stupid. Not mocking stupid, just vacant. Derpy. Brain completely missing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/6/stupid-pokémon/ Sun, 06 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/5/and-her-socks-are-white-and-i-love-her-so/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/5/and-her-socks-are-white-and-i-love-her-so/ Sat, 05 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/5/the-death-count/ Someone made a video that lists every death in Game of Thrones. All of them, end to end. The count came to five thousand one hundred and seventy-nine people, compressed into three minutes of footage. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/5/the-death-count/ Sat, 05 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/5/happy-birthday-grumpy-cat/ The cat’s face never changed. That permanent scowl, eyes already tired before the internet even found it, the whole thing that somehow made you feel less alone. Grumpy Cat became the visual shorthand for an entire generation’s exhaustion—the face for people done with everything but unable to stop watching anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/5/happy-birthday-grumpy-cat/ Sat, 05 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/5/finns-father/ Adventure Time kept Finn’s father as a mystery for years, and I spent a good stretch of episodes wondering about it alongside everyone else. When the reveal finally came, it wasn’t some huge shock—it was the kind of answer that made sense once you saw it, connected back to all these threads the show had been quietly building the whole time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/5/finns-father/ Sat, 05 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/4/girls-love-mode/ A Sailor Moon pop-up opened in Tokyo for a week in April—”Girls Love Mode: Let’s Prism Power Make Up,” which is either perfectly Japanese or perfectly terrible. Just hoodies and t-shirts and one of those white dresses that somehow costs way too much money, all in Shinjuku. By the time I thought about actually going, most of it was already gone. That’s pop-ups: you’re not really supposed to own the thing, just know it existed and that you weren’t fast enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/4/girls-love-mode/ Fri, 04 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/3/the-last-trailer/ Game of Thrones season four was coming and I was completely bought in. For months I’d been fed trailer after trailer, each one engineered to make you think about nothing else. Another landed that week—supposedly the last one before the premiere. That felt like both relief and letdown at the same time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/3/the-last-trailer/ Thu, 03 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/3/pale-moonlight/ The voice that barely moves across the mix, cigarette smoke at three in the morning, a sadness that feels cinematic. That’s always been the Lana Del Rey thing, and somehow it still works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/3/pale-moonlight/ Thu, 03 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/3/photo-clash/ Converse did this thing in Berlin a while back where artists painted a wall and then, as a follow-up, they invited people to bring photos and have them remixed in real time. An artist would take your picture—just a straight photograph—and cover it with paint and drawing, turning it into something neither you nor they would have made alone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/3/photo-clash/ Thu, 03 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/3/harajuku-in-spring/ There’s something almost obscene about the visual density of Harajuku in spring. Every storefront is screaming color at you, every person on the street is wearing something that would make sense nowhere else on earth, and the whole neighborhood feels like someone turned saturation up to eleven and left it there. It’s the kind of place where you want to photograph everything, which is also the place’s biggest lie—because once you start documenting it, you’ve already lost what made it worth seeing in the first place. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/3/harajuku-in-spring/ Thu, 03 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/3/the-other-uniform/ Pharrell was running around closing deals everywhere. First adidas got announced, then UNIQLO wanted him for a collection just as they were opening their first store in Berlin. The collection was called “i am OTHER” and it was supposed to be the death of normcore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/3/the-other-uniform/ Thu, 03 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/2/hattie-stewarts-covers/ There’s something pure about the defiance. You take a Playboy or Rolling Stone—these machines built to sell you an image—and hand it to Hattie Stewart, and she rewrites it. Out comes something colorful and intricate and completely, unmistakably hers. The magazines become something else: wilder, less slick, less interested in selling you a version of cool and more interested in just being genuinely weird. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/2/hattie-stewarts-covers/ Wed, 02 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/2/sushi-sticky-notes/ Kenjiro Sano made sushi-shaped sticky notes. They look like pieces of nigiri—little notepads that look like something you’d actually eat. The idea shouldn’t work as well as it does, but he bothered to actually execute it instead of just leaving it as a joke. He calls himself Mr. Design, which is either totally serious or completely ironic, probably both. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/2/sushi-sticky-notes/ Wed, 02 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/2/vader-toast/ You put bread in the toaster and Darth Vader’s face comes out. That’s the product. That’s the whole thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/2/vader-toast/ Wed, 02 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/2/tick-trick-and-track/ I spent years pretending I’d outgrown Donald Duck’s nephews—Huey, Dewey, and Louie, or Tick, Trick, and Track if you grew up with the European names. My subscription to the Lustigen Taschenbücher felt like something to hide, like guilty pleasure rather than actual taste. Turns out I was wrong. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/2/tick-trick-and-track/ Wed, 02 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/2/quiet-marks/ You see them everywhere once you start looking—a dot on a collarbone, a line on a rib, something small enough that most people miss. Small tattoos hold a kind of honesty that the bigger ones don’t. You got it because something meant enough to mark your skin permanently, but you didn’t need the world to notice. Just you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/2/quiet-marks/ Wed, 02 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/2/kit-kat-pizza/ Japan’s doing that thing again. Some pizza chain called Napoli—naturally—is selling Kit-Kat pizza now. Actual chocolate bars baked on top, with mango, nuts, gorgonzola, honey-maple sauce. Ten euros or so. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/2/kit-kat-pizza/ Wed, 02 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/2/every-brand-wants-spider-man/ Evian made a Spider-Man commercial where Andrew Garfield chased a tiny Spider-Man through the city. This was the marketing moment—every brand wanted a piece, everything a tie-in designed to be shared and remembered. The Spider-Man films weren’t bad. Garfield had chemistry with Emma Stone. But everything around them was marketing, and at some point you just accepted it. Water selling Spider-Man. That was the era. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/2/every-brand-wants-spider-man/ Wed, 02 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/2/kana-boon/ Japanese rock band that makes the kind of songs that burrow into your skull and never leave. High-energy, propulsive, genuinely fun in a way that doesn’t feel calculated. They’ve done anime openings, which is how a lot of people discover them, but that’s not why they stick around—it’s the songs themselves. There’s no pretense here, no trying to be art-rock or experimental. Just straightforward, anthemic rock that sounds like a band that knows exactly what they’re good at and isn’t interested in doing anything else. The kind of music you find yourself humming without realizing it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/2/kana-boon/ Wed, 02 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/2/one-hundred-percent/ Scarlett Johansson gets implanted with this experimental drug in Lucy and instead of overdosing she just starts using her entire brain. One hundred percent instead of the ten we’re all walking around with. She becomes sharp and strange and stops being a person you’d recognize. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/2/one-hundred-percent/ Wed, 02 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/1/ryogoku-on-an-empty-stomach/ There’s a VICE video where Yuka Uchida and sumo champion Konishiki Yasokichi eat through Ryogoku in Tokyo. Marinated squid, fried chicken wings, raw fatty tuna, cold beer. Good stuff, eaten casual and right. That’s the sumo wrestler thing—you grow up knowing where the food is because your body needs it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/1/ryogoku-on-an-empty-stomach/ Tue, 01 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/1/berlin/ I spent a week there in the early 2000s, crashing in a squat in Wedding, hitting galleries that were just someone’s apartment, basement bars, clubs that didn’t open until 3 AM. Everyone was young and making something. Everyone was broke. The city still felt half-rebuilt, figuring itself out—you could feel the weight of the 90s split, but also this weird freedom because nothing had solidified yet. Room to move. Room to fail. That’s what I remember most. Haven’t been back since. I don’t want to see what it’s like now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/1/berlin/ Tue, 01 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/1/originals-series/ adidas made a fanzine with ArtSchoolVets about street fashion and urban culture, pulling interviews with people who actually write about how people dress—David Fischer, that level of person. The format is what caught me: print and digital, collaborative instead of a top-down brand exercise. Most fashion companies treat street culture like unpaid R&D. This reads like someone at adidas figured out that you’re better off stepping back and making space than trying to own it. Whether the actual magazine is any good, I have no idea, but the move itself isn’t bad. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/4/1/originals-series/ Tue, 01 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/31/everywhere/ Kerr showed up constantly after the Bloom split—she was one of those celebrities who saturate the magazines after a breakup. British GQ’s cover had her discussing how her sex life affected her body, the basic observation that more sex meant tighter muscles, less meant softer. It’s something you’d say to friends over drinks, not something you’d volunteer to a magazine, but there it was. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/31/everywhere/ Mon, 31 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/31/kiko-in-reebok/ Everyone has their person. Mine’s Kiko Mizuhara—you probably know her from Naoko’s Smile, or from the fact that she’s in basically every Japanese fashion magazine worth reading. There’s something about her that makes anything look effortless. Even a straightforward commercial like this Reebok campaign for spring and summer becomes a thing worth actually looking at. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/31/kiko-in-reebok/ Mon, 31 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/31/what-prime-sold-me/ The internet has made me into someone who can’t do one thing without running a show in the background. Work, games, just sitting around—something always has to be playing or I feel like I’m wasting whatever time’s left. It’s ridiculous but that’s how it is now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/31/what-prime-sold-me/ Mon, 31 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/31/pokémon-master/ I’ve been waiting for this since I was nine years old. Not in some theoretical, wouldn’t-it-be-cool way—in a bone-deep, absolutely serious way. I was going to be a Pokémon Master. The real kind. I would go outside, find them living in the grass and the water, and catch them with my own hands. That was the deal. That was what Pokémon promised. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/31/pokémon-master/ Mon, 31 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/31/everywhere-the-same/ Years in Berlin taught me a specific feeling—that moment when a city stops being yours. It’s not one thing. The creativity that pulled me there starts consuming me instead. The changes pile up and the place I fell for keeps disappearing. The people, the streets, the late nights that mattered become someone else’s memory. I’m still there but I’m lingering at a funeral. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/31/everywhere-the-same/ Mon, 31 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/29/shané-van-der-westhuizen/ I have no idea who she is, but I like the name. The setup is the whole thing: yellow bikini, golden afternoon, standing there wet with a drink in hand and a photographer who gets it. That’s the Saturday I want. That’s it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/29/shané-van-der-westhuizen/ Sat, 29 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/28/the-china-copy/ Böhmermann, fresh from winning a Grimme Prize, fed Raab a story about Chinese file-sharing sites pirating TV Total and him missing licensing fees. Raab bought it completely and got genuinely angry. The prank was simple—just a plausible scenario designed to trigger outrage, no elaborate setup needed. It worked because that’s how it goes: you hear someone’s stealing from you and you react before you think. Böhmermann was riding high and testing his power, essentially. Raab fell for it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/28/the-china-copy/ Fri, 28 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/28/fast-lanes/ The pitch was always transparent: ISPs wanted money from big corporations in exchange for faster speeds. Everyone else got throttled. Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google—they’d pay, and the internet would become two-tiered. It was a naked money grab dressed up as technology. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/28/fast-lanes/ Fri, 28 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/28/back-at-the-store/ I went to the adidas flagship reopening in Berlin-Mitte. They’d gutted the place, renovated it completely, and the blue store was back in circulation. There were drinks, catering, the opening-event machinery that tries to convince you the location itself has become a destination. The new ZX FLUXes were hanging around everywhere, still pristine and unblemished, that gloss you only get before anyone actually walks in them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/28/back-at-the-store/ Fri, 28 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/27/homesick-for-akihabara/ World Order’s “Have A Nice Day” video is just Akihabara—robotlike precision cutting through all that tangled chaos, Genki Sudo moving through the district like it’s written into his code. Watching it made me realize I’m nostalgic for a place I don’t actually live, which is the weirdest, best kind of homesickness. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/27/homesick-for-akihabara/ Thu, 27 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/27/adidas-pharrell/ I need to be clear: if I hear “Happy” one more time, I might actually lose my mind. The song’s inescapable, the kind of thing that burrows in and doesn’t come out. So when I heard Pharrell was collaborating with adidas, my first instinct was annoyance. But then I read what he’s actually doing, and it made sense. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/27/adidas-pharrell/ Thu, 27 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/27/delete-the-favorite-button/ You write something good. Actually good, the kind that doesn’t happen often, and you post it on Twitter hoping it reaches people. Then the favorites start rolling in. Nicole stars it. Flo stars it. Sandra stars it. A handful of yellow stars, and then what? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/27/delete-the-favorite-button/ Thu, 27 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/27/last-rations/ Assume the zombie apocalypse is coming—most of us are already. When it happens, what will we actually miss? Not families, not electricity, not the internet. Bacon. We’re going to lose sleep over bacon. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/27/last-rations/ Thu, 27 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/26/small-yellow-people/ LEGO’s doing Simpsons minifigures now. Ralph and Flanders and whoever else, three euros each, which is cheap enough you don’t have to think hard about buying them. Minifigures work perfectly for this show anyway—reduce these characters to their basic shapes and they’re instantly there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/26/small-yellow-people/ Wed, 26 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/26/theyll-figure-it-out/ You notice it gradually. A creator you follow starts mentioning products—a phone here, some skincare there—and at first it feels natural. Then the pattern emerges: everything gets mentioned. The headphones, the coffee, the supplement brand. Never marked as paid. Maybe they got money, maybe they didn’t. You can’t tell anymore, and that’s where trust goes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/26/theyll-figure-it-out/ Wed, 26 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/26/tinkers-window/ Tinker Hatfield’s idea was to show the thing that makes it work. Put the air unit where you can see it. Seems obvious now, but that was the whole move—everything else was hiding what kept you comfortable. He said no, let’s make the cushioning the design. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/26/tinkers-window/ Wed, 26 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/26/proximity/ Okay so FireChat is this app that lets you message people near you—like within ten meters—without needing internet. It works through Bluetooth, using iOS 7’s peer-to-peer stuff. You’re at a festival, a concert, the beach, and suddenly you can text strangers around you. Or your friends if you got separated in the crowd. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/26/proximity/ Wed, 26 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/26/oculus-and-facebook/ Notch pulled the plug on Oculus VR support the second he heard Facebook bought it. Two billion dollars, done, and the creator of Minecraft just walked away. That tells you something about what everyone expected from Oculus before Zuckerberg showed up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/26/oculus-and-facebook/ Wed, 26 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/26/this-weeks-tokyo-charts/ I started paying real attention to Japanese charts after realizing I was missing almost everything that actually mattered there. What strikes me is how unsegregated it is—idol groups and punk bands sharing the same chart space with no weird hierarchy about credibility. This week: Atsuko Maeda with her sharper post-AKB48 career, Dempagumi.inc chaotically refusing seriousness, and Mongol 800, an Okinawan punk band that’s been somehow mattering for decades. There’s something freeing about following charts from a place where you have zero cultural investment in any of it. You’re just listening to what caught people’s ears. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/26/this-weeks-tokyo-charts/ Wed, 26 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/25/the-saddest-melody-in-the-world/ I’ve gotten into this habit with my roommates—we watch Hey Arnold over dinner, usually a couple episodes at a time. Rewatching as an adult, though, the whole thing feels different. The show is quietly devastating in a way I completely missed as a kid. There’s this bittersweet melancholy woven through it, hanging over the boarding house, over Phil and Gertrude, over all these children moving through a world they don’t fully understand. You don’t feel it when you’re young, but now the innocence in it feels fragile, weighted with impermanence. There’s a song by Jim Lang from one of the episodes, ’The Best Parents,’ that barely registered the first time through. Now it’s the saddest melody in the world. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/25/the-saddest-melody-in-the-world/ Tue, 25 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/25/scarlett-everywhere/ In 2014, Scarlett Johansson was inescapable. She was the voice in Her, the spy in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the phantom in Under the Skin—three completely different versions of her, flickering through the world at the same time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/25/scarlett-everywhere/ Tue, 25 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/25/dattch/ Robyn Exton made an app for women who want to date women. Dattch. British, swipe-based like Tinder, but designed specifically for lesbians and bisexual women instead of being an afterthought on someone else’s platform. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/25/dattch/ Tue, 25 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/25/kareems-spring/ I don’t know anything about basketball, which is maybe the wrong starting point for caring about a Kareem Abdul-Jabbar sneaker. But the adidas Jabbar Low showed up in white and blue for spring 2014, and it’s just a good shoe. Clean leather, minimal branding, the kind of design that works on its own merits. Most celebrity shoes feel like you’re buying the name—you wear them because someone legendary did. This one almost doesn’t care if you know who Kareem is. I couldn’t make a basketball shot if my life depended on it, but I could wear these without feeling like I’m borrowing someone else’s credibility. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/25/kareems-spring/ Tue, 25 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/24/the-smallest-sushi/ There’s a point where perfecting something means you have to start deconstructing it. In Tokyo, sushi has been done to death—every technique mastered, every variation tried. So Hironori Ikeda makes the world’s smallest sushi: a single grain of rice with a paper-thin slice of fish. Not a meal. Just the idea of sushi, reduced to almost nothing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/24/the-smallest-sushi/ Mon, 24 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/24/keep-them-pristine/ You unbox new sneakers and something primal happens. You smell them. You run your hands over them. If no one’s watching you might even taste them, just a little, because they’re so perfectly made and still carry that factory newness and possibility. Then you wear them one time—literally one time—through rain or mud or just regular streets, and they’re finished. That fresh-out-of-the-box glow is gone. They’re just shoes now. Old shoes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/24/keep-them-pristine/ Mon, 24 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/23/your-kickstarter-sucks/ Found this Tumblr that catalogs the worst Kickstarters ever posted. The pitch is the entire joke—no commentary needed. Chris is asking for fifteen grand to expose his ass on mountains. Holly needs eleven thousand to lay her metal penis on tables. Eric wants seventeen to make Monopoly badly, intentionally, with no other purpose. They’re all sincere. The Tumblr just presents them straight. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/23/your-kickstarter-sucks/ Sun, 23 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/23/terror-in-tokyo/ Sword Art Online and Attack on Titan have been fucking with me hard. That feeling they create—the constant “what the fuck happens next,” the way they dig into your brain for days, the way they make everything else seem dull by comparison. I’ve been chasing that hit ever since, wading through trailer announcements and reviews looking for the next thing that lands the same way. Nothing’s come close yet. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/23/terror-in-tokyo/ Sun, 23 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/23/j-and-k/ This feature cost me an unreasonable amount of time—weeks and months and years of my young life, I’m hardly exaggerating. Just keyboard navigation for the homepage: J to jump to the next post, K to go back. A WordPress plugin handles the heavy lifting, but I still managed to make it take forever. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/23/j-and-k/ Sun, 23 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/23/a-walks-into-walls/ Thousands of people were controlling a single Pokémon game through Twitch chat, voting on every button press, and watching a character named A slowly shuffle through Pokémon Emerald. By hour five they’d barely left the starting town, which is the whole point. Chat is split between “left,” “down,” and random noise, so the character wanders in circles, gets turned around in doorways, sometimes by accident gets closer to where they need to go. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/23/a-walks-into-walls/ Sun, 23 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/22/the-tokyo-charts/ I used to check the Japanese pop charts every week like clockwork. Just the top 30 from Tokyo, songs I couldn’t always understand, artists I’d have to research, but something about the ritual felt important. Nobody else who read this paid attention, but I did. It was pure data—what people three thousand miles away actually wanted to listen to, no algorithm, no curation, just the honest count of what was playing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/22/the-tokyo-charts/ Sat, 22 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/21/the-act-of-killing/ I watched The Act of Killing in a couple sittings and couldn’t shake one thought Oppenheimer keeps returning to: imagine if the Nazis had won, and were still alive, still killing, and nobody cared. They’d be on television laughing about it. That’s what happened in Indonesia after the 1965 coup. The men who did the killing are still alive. They’re celebrated. Nobody made them stop. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/21/the-act-of-killing/ Fri, 21 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/21/adventure-time-minis/ Funko’s releasing Adventure Time Mystery Minis soon - little vinyl figures of the full cast. Finn, Jake, Marceline, the Ice King, LSP, all of them. And honestly, it’s Lumpy Space Princess that makes this worth wanting. She started as a one-off joke in early seasons and somehow became the only character in the show with genuine comedic range, maybe the only one with actual depth. There’s a Zombie Finn variant too, which tracks for a show that got progressively darker as it went on. I’m not usually into blind-box collecting - that whole chase mechanic feels a bit desperate - but these would be nice to have around. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/21/adventure-time-minis/ Fri, 21 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/21/faces-from-twitter/ Re:publica had become the thing I looked forward to every spring. Once a year, Berlin filled up with people you’d been reading for years, faces you knew only from avatars suddenly real in the same room, drinking beer in the sun. The old bloggers were there, the ones who’d been at it since the early days, and you’d spend hours talking the way you can only do in person. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/21/faces-from-twitter/ Fri, 21 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/21/hand-it-over/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/21/hand-it-over/ Fri, 21 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/21/jeremy-scotts-tails/ Jeremy Scott makes sneakers that actually offend some people, which is probably the highest compliment you can pay a designer. The tail thing—these weird appendages hanging off the heel or the side of the shoe—is his move. It’s dumb and bold and completely uninterested in making sense to anyone but him. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/21/jeremy-scotts-tails/ Fri, 21 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/21/selena/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/21/selena/ Fri, 21 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/21/when-turkey-blocked-twitter/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/21/when-turkey-blocked-twitter/ Fri, 21 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/20/the-beastie-boys-are-actually-a-japanese-girl-group/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/20/the-beastie-boys-are-actually-a-japanese-girl-group/ Thu, 20 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/20/devil-inside/ Game of Thrones does something weird to you. You start with these characters who have reasons, and the show just keeps validating them. Tyrion’s funny, Cersei’s protective, Daenerys is liberating people—and somewhere in the middle of all that, you’re rooting for increasingly terrible things. Not because you’re fooled, but because the show keeps handing you reasons that actually make sense. By the time you’re hoping for mass violence or betrayal, you’ve rationalized it so thoroughly that it feels justified. That’s the real horror—watching yourself become complicit, seeing how easily you can justify darkness if someone just explains it well enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/20/devil-inside/ Thu, 20 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/20/after-the-lolita-burger/ I had a Lolita Burger and it destroyed every meal that came before it. Crispy potato chips baked into the patty, sweet onion jam, peanut butter and bacon working in concert, seared foie gras, grass-fed beef charred to the edge of black. I’d eat that thing every day for the rest of my life if I could. That’s not even gluttony—that’s just knowing what you want. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/20/after-the-lolita-burger/ Thu, 20 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/20/democracy-in-spray-paint/ There’s something both generous and strange about artists agreeing to paint what strangers tell them to paint. You’d think creative work means doing what you want, protecting your vision from interference. But Wurstbande, Gogoplata, and Rylsee—Berlin street artists who actually have something to say—took it the other way: they opened up a wall and asked the public what should go on it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/20/democracy-in-spray-paint/ Thu, 20 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/20/free-to-play/ I would’ve been a professional League of Legends player, probably, if I’d pushed past the twelfth match. That’s what I tell myself anyway—that there was a version of me who didn’t quit, who kept grinding, who made the leap. Valve’s documentary Free To Play follows the actual path that version of me didn’t take, shadowing professional Dota 2 players through their climb and the tournaments where the real money lives. It’s not a celebration of esports stardom so much as a document of what it costs to get there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/20/free-to-play/ Thu, 20 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/19/lykke-li-no-rest-for-the-wicked/ There’s something about Lykke Li’s work that refuses to let you settle. Every song seems to be in motion, like she’s always pushing toward something—musically, lyrically, in the sheer restlessness of her voice. The textures are sleek but never comfortable. You can hear the weariness in there too, the exhaustion of constant motion, but also maybe that’s the point. Maybe there is no rest, not for her anyway, not for someone making work that needs to constantly evolve and shift. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/19/lykke-li-no-rest-for-the-wicked/ Wed, 19 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/19/centered/ I’m rewatching The Life Aquatic right now—Bill Murray doing his thing, Owen Wilson doing his thing, Robyn Cohen always half-naked in the scenes she’s in. I never get tired of Wes Anderson. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/19/centered/ Wed, 19 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/19/alejandra-guilmant/ There’s a face that stops you. Alejandra Guilmant turned up somewhere—a shoot, a magazine, I forget the context—and she’s just clearly there, visually present in a way that reads as honest. Not performing, not manufactured. Just effortless geometry. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/19/alejandra-guilmant/ Wed, 19 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/19/catching-the-multi/ You spot a shoe that works and by the time you look it up, it’s already gone. That was the adidas Originals ZX FLUX Multi. It’s exactly what it sounds like—a ZX FLUX covered in a multicolor pattern, the three black stripes still managing to hold the whole thing together. Shouldn’t work but it does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/19/catching-the-multi/ Wed, 19 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/19/off-the-map/ You’re walking down the street and someone approaches. Someone you know but don’t really want to talk to. Your stomach drops. You pick up your pace, maybe turn down a different block. You’ve done this a thousand times. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/19/off-the-map/ Wed, 19 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/19/i-killed-the-like-button/ A blog post about reclaiming the web from Facebook and Twitter lived in my head for years. The guy who wrote it was arguing that we’d basically handed our conversations over to a handful of corporations, that everything we said disappeared into an endless feed, that we’d lost any real power over our own expression. It was obviously true and I could feel it happening to me in real time, which made it worse. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/19/i-killed-the-like-button/ Wed, 19 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/19/rearranging/ I sometimes wonder if I’m unstable when I catch myself thinking that tweaks to my website or shifts in how I present myself online actually affect my mood, my plans, my relationships. Like I’m giving too much power to pixels and domain names. But then I notice other people doing the exact same thing—making these deliberate adjustments, waiting to feel different—and it makes me oddly happy, especially when it’s people whose work and history I follow. You realize it’s not just you. It happens. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/19/rearranging/ Wed, 19 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/18/giant-cats-over-tokyo/ Japanese commercials hit different. This one’s got a guy heading to work when a giant cat shows up to carry him across the city—rooftops, streets, all the way to his office door. It’s the kind of surreal, impeccably shot bit that only Japan’s ad industry seems capable of. I love the commitment—the production value, the straight-faced logic, the complete embrace of absurdity. Makes you wish your commute actually worked that way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/18/giant-cats-over-tokyo/ Tue, 18 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/18/the-trademark-hustle/ Some company bought the trademark to “BlogFashion Kitchen” and is now suing Ann-Christin, who’s been running the actual blog for three years. They want 600 euros every six months, retroactive, plus penalties up to a quarter-million if she doesn’t comply. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/18/the-trademark-hustle/ Tue, 18 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/15/just-berghain-things/ There’s a Tumblr blog dedicated to documenting the psychological states of waiting outside Berghain. Hours in line, the bouncer silent, the judgment made in a glance—in or out, dancefloor or street at 4 AM. Inside it’s dark and impossibly loud, everyone trying to dissolve into the strobes and the bassline, half the floor on ketamine. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/15/just-berghain-things/ Sat, 15 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/15/the-parrot-that-isnt/ Johannes Stötter’s parrot isn’t a parrot. He spent four weeks setting it up—planning the pose, the paint, the angle—so that when you look at the photograph, your brain immediately sees feathers and color and the specific geometry of a bird’s head. The illusion is nearly perfect, which means it has to break. And when it does, you’re looking at a woman painted so thoroughly that she became something else first. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/15/the-parrot-that-isnt/ Sat, 15 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/15/japanese-commercials/ I’ve made it a routine to watch compilations of strange Japanese commercials first thing in the morning. It’s become a better way to wake up than coffee—just pure unfiltered chaos that hits you before you’re even thinking straight. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/15/japanese-commercials/ Sat, 15 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/14/bunnys-back/ I looked at the leaked character sheets for Sailor Moon Crystal and something clicked in my head that I’d honestly forgotten about. The original ’90s anime—the one I grew up on—was sloppy in the best way. Inconsistent animation, weird pacing, filler that somehow worked. But underneath all that was Naoko Takeuchi’s manga, tighter and meaner and weirder than what made it to the screen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/14/bunnys-back/ Fri, 14 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/14/lady-gagas-limit/ Lady Gaga got vomited on in Texas. Artist Millie Brown ate a bunch of meat beforehand, then threw up directly into Gaga’s face during her set. And it worked. That got to her. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/14/lady-gagas-limit/ Fri, 14 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/13/the-underwear-solution/ You know that feeling—standing in your underwear staring at your closet, overwhelmed by options. Most people just work through it. Spend the time, find something, move on. Miley Cyrus was in Milwaukee and decided against that whole process. She performed in her underwear instead. No outfit, no decision, no problem. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/13/the-underwear-solution/ Thu, 13 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/13/water-ramp/ Bob Burnquist built a ramp in Lake Tahoe, right there in the water between Nevada and California. The video shows what it must feel like—launching off those transitions in the sun, the water right there if you need to cool off or just want it. It’s designed perfectly for something nobody needs. The kind of dream you indulge when you’re sure the money will never show up. If it ever did though, you’d know what to build. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/13/water-ramp/ Thu, 13 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/13/first-handjob/ The “First Kiss” video was viral, supposedly authentic, turned out to be advertising. Which kind of killed it, even though that was probably obvious from the start. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/13/first-handjob/ Thu, 13 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/13/the-crying-face/ Your pencil breaks. Your teacher is mean. You realize people could see you in the window reflection all along. You drink orange juice right after brushing your teeth. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/13/the-crying-face/ Thu, 13 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/13/memes-stopped-being-funny/ I remember when memes were actually funny. Bad Luck Brian felt fresh. Overly Attached Girlfriend was weird enough to land. Doge had that untranslatable absurdist charm—the terrible Comic Sans, the fractured English (“such amaze”), something about it that just worked. But somewhere between then and now, memes became what everyone does, which is the exact moment they stopped being what anyone wanted to see. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/13/memes-stopped-being-funny/ Thu, 13 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/12/cool-cooler-scarlett-johansson/ She’s pregnant right now—not by me, obviously—but that doesn’t change anything. Scarlett Johansson is still the coolest person alive. There she is on the cover of Dazed & Confused in Wolford, Saint Laurent, and Levi’s 501. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/12/cool-cooler-scarlett-johansson/ Wed, 12 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/12/all-those-sausages/ Uli Hoeneß owes Germany 27 million euros, a number so abstract that someone built a website to translate it into actual things: 9 million stadium sausages, 39,000 season tickets on the Dortmund south stand, 11,000 daycare slots. The further down the list you go the more surreal it becomes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/12/all-those-sausages/ Wed, 12 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/12/yoshis-new-island/ I’ve been thinking about Yoshi’s Island lately - the SNES one, I mean. Not the actual game so much as what it looked like. It had this hand-drawn quality even with the Super Nintendo’s limitations, like someone was illustrating as you played. Never forgotten that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/12/yoshis-new-island/ Wed, 12 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/12/small-dogs-shorter-skirts/ Mayama_ya on Instagram dresses Chihuahuas in Sailor Moon costumes, documents them, and that’s the post. Tiny dogs, tailored miniskirts, exact character recreations. Each photo is the same joke—here is a trembling three-pound creature in a sailor suit, and yes, it’s detailed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/12/small-dogs-shorter-skirts/ Wed, 12 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/11/between-two-ferns/ Obama went on Between Two Ferns to talk about Healthcare.gov. It’s Zach Galifianakis’s web series—the host’s whole job is to be rude and dismissive, asking stupid questions, barely letting guests finish. The theory was sound: reach younger voters in a space they actually inhabited, make policy accessible, get some traction. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/11/between-two-ferns/ Tue, 11 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/11/appetite/ Scroll far enough online and you’ll find burger photography that’s designed to hurt. Matthew Ramsey’s work is like that—stacked patties, cheese bleeding, sauce that looks like it has a life expectancy measured in seconds. The names are part of the seduction: The Dirty Birdy, The Mac Daddy, The Merman. Not trying to sound refined. Just trying to make you want something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/11/appetite/ Tue, 11 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/11/something-shifts/ They smile nervously at first. Eyes darting. Two people meeting on camera, suddenly aware of how close they are. Then something shifts. The awkwardness stops being uncomfortable to watch and becomes the only honest thing on screen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/11/something-shifts/ Tue, 11 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/11/flappy-bird-comes-home/ The Flappy Bird clones infesting your app store are terrible—a thousand variations that prove how much worse everything else is compared to the original. Dong Nguyen, who made it, pulled the game offline in 2014 when he realized how compulsive it was. He said he didn’t want that responsibility. But Rolling Stone got him talking recently, and he’s had a change of heart. Wants to bring Flappy Bird back. He’s even planning a warning label about taking breaks, which is a touching gesture if you believe that’s the main reason behind his sudden nostalgia. Making fifty grand a day does things to your conscience. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/11/flappy-bird-comes-home/ Tue, 11 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/11/debug/ De:Bug is done. The German music and culture title I read for years just closed. I knew it was coming—everyone knew. Print’s been circling the drain so long that each death barely registers anymore. But this one landed different. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/11/debug/ Tue, 11 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/10/scandal-works/ American Apparel’s whole thing was knowing how to piss people off. Dov Charney had it down to a science: push until someone screams, apologize just enough to avoid consequences, then push again. Every few months another ad campaign banned somewhere, another lawsuit, another “misunderstanding.” The company ran on scandal the way other brands run on quarterly earnings. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/10/scandal-works/ Mon, 10 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/10/ryan-gosling-forever/ I tell myself I’m happy. I have enough to eat, I live somewhere safe, I have people who care about me. It’s more than a lot of people get. But then I wake up at three in the morning thinking about Ryan Gosling and suddenly none of it matters. Why doesn’t he want me? Why isn’t he here? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/10/ryan-gosling-forever/ Mon, 10 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/10/invisible/ The thing about radiation is how much it doesn’t announce itself. Three years after Fukushima—March 11, 2011, the earthquake and tsunami that broke the reactor on Japan’s east coast—people were still living in contaminated places. Food was a question. Water was a risk. Kids were breathing something that wouldn’t show up in their bodies for years. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/10/invisible/ Mon, 10 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/10/game-of-thrones-returns/ I remember that waiting. Popcorn, cold beer, the whole ritual of it. Season 4 was coming and you could feel the shift—this wasn’t the show anymore that people were still figuring out. By then everyone knew what it could do, and they were hungry to see what came next. The trailer promised secrets, violence, the kind of reckoning that kept us coming back. You don’t feel that kind of anticipation for television the same way anymore, at least I don’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/10/game-of-thrones-returns/ Mon, 10 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/8/days-outside-of-time/ A sunny Saturday and I’m watching ninety-seven minutes of footage from a Berlin nightclub that closed long enough ago to become a myth. Bar 25. Tage Außerhalb der Zeit, Days Outside of Time—the title alone explains what people came for. Hours without edges. Music loud enough to think inside of. The river at dusk. The freedom to just move. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/8/days-outside-of-time/ Sat, 08 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/7/the-yourfone-songcontest/ Four bands are competing to write a jingle for a German phone company. Not as a punchline or a viral moment—there’s an actual process. A tour bus with custom art by Berlin street artists. A web series. A final live event in Hamburg where the winner gets their song turned into a commercial. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/7/the-yourfone-songcontest/ Fri, 07 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/7/high-at-the-end/ I’m not sure when we stopped researching LSD. Forty years ago, apparently. A Swiss psychiatrist named Peter Gasser decided to change that. He gave high doses to twelve terminal cancer patients—most of them had never taken acid—and watched what happened. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/7/high-at-the-end/ Fri, 07 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/7/chomets-yellow/ The Simpsons had been coasting for years by then, but the couch gags had become the show’s only redeeming quality. Bill Plympton, John Kricfalusi, Robot Chicken—they all got their chance to reimagine the family in those few seconds before the title card. So when Sylvain Chomet, the director of Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist, got his turn, I knew something unsettling was coming. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/7/chomets-yellow/ Fri, 07 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/6/back-to-sin-city/ Ten years since the first one, and I still remember that theater feeling—all that black and white with blood red and electric yellow punching through, everything designed to look like a comic panel. Jessica Alba in the red dress. Bruce Willis doing his worn-down thing. Mickey Rourke as this broken giant. The whole movie felt like it had permission to be exactly what it wanted to be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/6/back-to-sin-city/ Thu, 06 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/6/bothering-people-in-japanese/ I’ve watched Lost in Translation way too many times to keep count. There’s something about that film that never gets old—Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Tokyo at night, the feeling of being alone in a crowd. I watched it three times back-to-back on a train once and would happily do it again. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/6/bothering-people-in-japanese/ Thu, 06 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/5/the-spectacle-never-ends/ You sit in a theater and a giant robot crushes a building. That’s the whole thing. Dinobots wrecking everything. The plot is garbage and you know it, but who cares. Michael Bay made another Transformers movie because he figured out exactly what we actually want, and it sure as hell isn’t a good story. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/5/the-spectacle-never-ends/ Wed, 05 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/5/eighteen-cats-one-house/ Some guy in California built his entire house around cats. Four bedrooms, converted into an endless playground of platforms and poles and perches—the whole place engineered for eighteen animals. I found pictures of it once and couldn’t stop looking. That’s not pet ownership. That’s devotion that’s crossed into architecture. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/5/eighteen-cats-one-house/ Wed, 05 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/5/kate-upton/ Kate Upton in Sports Illustrated. Sun, sand, skin. No narrative, no pretense—just what it looks like. She commits completely to the image without apology, and that directness works better than all the overproduced stuff that tries to turn desire into concept. Sometimes you just want to look at something that doesn’t explain itself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/5/kate-upton/ Wed, 05 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/5/hoverboard-december/ The hoverboard is happening. The Back to the Future hoverboard, December, this year. Tony Hawk and Moby and Terrell Owens are out there saying it exists, showing videos, acting like this is just a normal product release instead of something we’ve been waiting for since 1985. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/5/hoverboard-december/ Wed, 05 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/5/drunk-in-emojis/ Jesse Hill made a music video for Drunk In Love using nothing but emojis. On paper that sounds terrible—the kind of thing you’d close out of immediately. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/5/drunk-in-emojis/ Wed, 05 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/5/ellens-echo/ Ellen shot that Oscar selfie and it broke Twitter for a day—everyone needed in on it, servers choking on retweets. The Simpsons saw it coming and did what The Simpsons did: Matt Groening had the writers build an episode around it, stuck the same Hollywood names in frame (Lawrence, Cooper, Pitt), made it a thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/5/ellens-echo/ Wed, 05 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/5/war-somewhere-else/ There’s a war happening, but not here. Not yet, not where I am. I can walk outside whenever I want. I have enough food, water, electricity. I’m safe—as safe as anyone gets in whatever this time is. But somewhere else, people are living in something I can barely imagine. Especially the kids. I’ve seen the images enough times to know I don’t actually want to know what they see every day. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/5/war-somewhere-else/ Wed, 05 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/5/love-me-like-im-not-made-of-stone/ Lykke Li’s new video is a dark, beautiful thing—low light, her voice, and this feeling like you’re inside someone else’s consciousness and you don’t want to leave. I’ve watched it a lot in the last few days, more than I’d admit to most people. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/5/love-me-like-im-not-made-of-stone/ Wed, 05 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/4/the-horses/ I’m already halfway there by the time you read this. Assateague Island sits between Maryland and Virginia with these wild horses that have just been living there, untamed, for centuries. Nobody owns them. They just run. That’s it. That’s the whole appeal. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/4/the-horses/ Tue, 04 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/4/owning-the-map/ I’d stopped checking in somewhere around the hundredth time I was about to mark my location at the same coffee shop. Foursquare had felt interesting for about two weeks—the idea that your location mattered, that you could own a space digitally—but it quickly became obvious that all it did was document everywhere you actually go, which is depressing. The same three blocks, the same stores, the same predictable routine mapped out in check-ins. Placescore inverted the whole thing. Instead of collecting locations, you compete for them. Show up somewhere, win a quick puzzle game against whoever claimed it last, and it’s yours. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/4/owning-the-map/ Tue, 04 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/4/shigeki-fujishiros-stan-smith/ Shigeki Fujishiro’s Stan Smiths for adidas Consortium are almost too clean to touch. The collaboration is called “Play,” and everything about the execution suggests someone who understands that the best design work happens in the negative space, in what you don’t add. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/4/shigeki-fujishiros-stan-smith/ Tue, 04 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/4/too-late/ There was this moment in Ghost in the Shell—Scarlett Johansson at a high window in Tokyo, nothing underneath but underwear and the glittering city far below. Squarepusher’s “Tommib” playing, which made the whole scene feel less like cinema and more like stepping into someone else’s fever dream, the kind that sticks to you long after you wake up. All I wanted was to sit there beside her. Not say anything. Just watch. Hold her hand. That was the entire thought. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/4/too-late/ Tue, 04 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/4/abby-martin-refused/ Abby Martin, a host at RT, went on air yesterday and criticized everything the network is built to promote. The military moves. Ukraine. The annexation talk. Just said it outright. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/4/abby-martin-refused/ Tue, 04 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/4/that-spring/ I remember that March when Putin moved troops into Crimea and everyone online felt the weight suddenly shift. The debates started immediately—sovereignty, international law, what the US would actually do about it. VICE had cameras on the ground at the Black Sea, showing actual soldiers and checkpoints instead of just anchors narrating their panic. For a few days it seemed like we were standing at the edge of something genuinely catastrophic. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/4/that-spring/ Tue, 04 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/3/the-selfie-that-mattered/ Ellen pointed her phone at the people sitting near her during an Oscars commercial break. Jennifer Lawrence, Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep, Bradley Cooper—just a quick selfie, everyone grinning. The kind of thing that takes three seconds. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/3/the-selfie-that-mattered/ Mon, 03 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/3/when-leo-couldnt-win/ There was this stretch where Leonardo DiCaprio seemed to get nominated for an Oscar every other year, and never once went home with one. Five nominations, nothing to show for it, which sounds like hyperbole until you actually sit with it. And the weird part wasn’t that he was undeserving—he was doing real work, film after film. Titanic, Inception, Wolf of Wall Street. Whether it was the romantic earnestness or the paranoid obsession or the pure sleaze, there was always something underneath. But the Academy kept passing on him. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/3/when-leo-couldnt-win/ Mon, 03 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/3/kate-does-it-again/ Kate Moss did another naked shoot with Terry Richardson for Lui Magazine. How many times is that now? You stop counting after a while, honestly. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/3/kate-does-it-again/ Mon, 03 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/3/why-the-oscars-dont-understand-animation/ Frozen won Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, which pretty much confirmed what I already knew—the Academy doesn’t actually know anything about animation. The Hollywood Reporter got interviews with seven jury members, and reading them was like watching someone confidently describe a painting they’d never actually looked at. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/3/why-the-oscars-dont-understand-animation/ Mon, 03 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/3/2ne1s-back/ I don’t speak Korean and I have no idea what 2NE1 are singing about, but their new tracks—Happy and Come Back Home—land anyway. The production, the approach, the whole aesthetic is foreign to me, and I’m not fluent enough in the language or the culture to pretend otherwise. But something about them cuts through that distance. Pure otherness, and it works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/3/2ne1s-back/ Mon, 03 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/2/babymetal/ I’d declared myself done with the internet for the day. Closed the laptop, walked away. Then someone sent me a video and I had to take the whole thing back. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/3/2/babymetal/ Sun, 02 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/28/lykke-li-again/ 2008 and 2009 were the years I paid attention to music that supposedly mattered. Lykke Li released Youth Novels—perfect and aching, the kind of sound that made you feel less alone without being pathetic about it. Around the same time, M83 made Saturdays = Youth (nobody noticed but they should have) and Natasha Khan gave us Two Suns. That was the soundtrack to those years. That was what heartbreak sounded like when you were certain it was changing you permanently. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/28/lykke-li-again/ Fri, 28 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/28/marking-the-map/ You travel somewhere and you want to remember it. So you take photos, collect junk, write things down—all these ways of trying to hold onto places you’ve already left. It never works. You end up with a box of stuff you never look at. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/28/marking-the-map/ Fri, 28 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/28/a-third-are-still-in-school/ Found out a third of British strippers are still in school. The research showed 29 percent of dancers working in UK clubs are students or high school kids, funding their education the way previous generations might’ve worked retail or flipped burgers. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/28/a-third-are-still-in-school/ Fri, 28 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/28/silver-knows/ I watched a husky named Silver learn what happens when someone just touches your head the right way. He pulls back at first, skeptical, ears folded. Then his whole body goes soft. Eyes close. He’s not thinking about anything—not his day, not yesterday, just the weight of a hand and the release of whatever was holding him tight. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/28/silver-knows/ Fri, 28 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/28/the-footage/ If you ever got naked on Yahoo video chat and showed yourself to someone across the internet, the British government was watching. The GCHQ had direct access to the feeds. They took screenshots, ran facial recognition, archived your face under counterterrorism. This is how you find out: documents leak years later and you read about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/28/the-footage/ Fri, 28 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/27/the-cost-of-certainty/ Thousands of euros a month for a girlfriend that will never leave. Japanese otaku building their entire emotional lives around Miku, Yuno, Shiina Mashiro—not as a phase but as the relationship, the one thing that actually works. Girlfriend, daughter, wife, all in plastic and pixels and perfectly arranged desire. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/27/the-cost-of-certainty/ Thu, 27 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/27/rise-of-mana/ If you didn’t love Secret of Mana on the Super Nintendo, I don’t know what to tell you. The Boy, the Girl, the sprite, the dragon, the tree, that weird fluffy thing—all those secrets waiting to be found, wonders tucked into every corner, the golden city somewhere beyond the horizon. It was the kind of game you don’t forget. The sequel never officially came out in Germany, which never particularly bothered me until now, because there’s a new Secret of Mana game sitting there for free, and I’m suddenly paying attention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/27/rise-of-mana/ Thu, 27 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/26/small-potatoes/ There was a Nazi rally in Neukölln—this is Berlin, which means there’s always some kind of Nazi thing happening. They were targeting a Pirate Party member of the city council, someone they’d been harassing for months, and the harassment had escalated into the kind of ugliness that becomes normal if you’re not careful. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/26/small-potatoes/ Wed, 26 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/26/the-5000-beard/ Five thousand dollars for a beard you could grow yourself in a few months. That’s what a dermatologist in New York is selling, and the demand is insane. Hipsters between twenty and forty—guys with money and no patience—are paying to have hair grafted directly onto their faces. The shortcut costs more than the actual timeline. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/26/the-5000-beard/ Wed, 26 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/26/yakety-sax-at-four-am/ There’s a video of ravers at some festival dancing to Yakety Sax, and watching it is like looking at a mirror from when I was 22. The way they’re moving, the genuine joy on their faces even though the song is objectively ridiculous, the commitment to the bit even when there is no bit—that was me. That was everyone I knew. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/26/yakety-sax-at-four-am/ Wed, 26 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/26/what-shows/ Daan Roosegaarde is a Dutch designer who made a dress that turns transparent when you’re aroused. It reads your heart rate and calls you out the second your pulse jumps. There’s no hiding it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/26/what-shows/ Wed, 26 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/26/3nder/ I watch people still swipe-swipe-swiping on Tinder like the app’s going to suddenly deliver. They get a match and immediately blow it—some copied line, a picture of their cock, immediate self-sabotage. Then they’re refreshing, waiting for someone else to be drunk or lonely enough to not notice what they just did. The whole machine is rotten, or they are, or both. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/26/3nder/ Wed, 26 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/26/raccoon-city/ I spend too much time thinking about what I’d do if the apocalypse started. Would I actually be smart about it? Just panic like everyone else? Probably some embarrassing mix of both. The calculus gets familiar in the quiet hours—raid the pharmacy, find people to trust, keep moving. It’s usually three in the morning with zero intention of actual preparation, just white noise in my head until sleep comes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/26/raccoon-city/ Wed, 26 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/25/cracked-open/ Lea Michele doing a Terry Richardson shoot for V Magazine was surprising. She was always the careful one on Glee—actually careful, not just playing cautious. The kind of actress who seemed genuinely aware of how she was perceived and invested in maintaining a certain image. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/25/cracked-open/ Tue, 25 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/25/koisuru-fortune-cookie/ AKB48’s ’Koisuru Fortune Cookie’ has been stuck in my head for days. The concept’s simple enough - Japanese schoolgirls in uniforms hopping down a Tokyo street, singing about fortune cookies and love and the future. You can see the machinery in every shot, the marketing strategy, the calculation. The group’s had its share of scandals, the idol system itself is this contradiction between scandal and wholesomeness, everything is product. Yet it works. Actually works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/25/koisuru-fortune-cookie/ Tue, 25 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/25/just-destruction/ That new Godzilla trailer is a monster tearing through everything, no apology, no irony—just the massive spectacle you came for. Cranston and Elizabeth Olsen are there to ground the story, but the real draw is obvious. A blockbuster that knows exactly what it is and commits completely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/25/just-destruction/ Tue, 25 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/25/when-mt-gox-blew-up/ I don’t understand Bitcoin. Never have, never tried too hard to either. The whole thing lives in some abstraction layer between code and faith that I couldn’t quite grab. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/25/when-mt-gox-blew-up/ Tue, 25 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/25/still-right/ Mario Kart does something to you. You play it once as a kid and the feeling gets baked in—the engine sound, the specific satisfaction of a drift, the way a banana peel sounds when it connects. It was never realistic. Just right. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/25/still-right/ Tue, 25 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/25/if-i-could-change-your-mind/ Haim opens “If I Could Change Your Mind” quietly, just voices and the ghost of a beat. By the second verse it’s clear the song knows exactly what it wants to be—measured, careful, built from the kind of arrangements that sound simple until you pay attention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/25/if-i-could-change-your-mind/ Tue, 25 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/24/silicon-valley/ Every startup party in Berlin, someone’s pitching the same stupid app with other people’s money. Mike Judge made a show about this world—Silicon Valley, premiering in April. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/24/silicon-valley/ Mon, 24 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/24/when-berlin-became-popular/ I remember Berlin being inevitable. Everyone was going. If you weren’t there yet, you were supposed to be. Then Rolling Stone showed up to write the autopsy, the Times called it Brooklyn’s cheaper clone, and Gawker just asked “what’s next?” Within a few days the entire narrative flipped from “you must go” to “it’s already dead,” which shouldn’t matter except that the whole city had built its identity on being culturally untouchable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/24/when-berlin-became-popular/ Mon, 24 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/24/the-darkest-country/ You can see North Korea from space at night because there are no lights. That’s not metaphorical—it’s literal. Satellite photos show a void where the country is, a black hole between South Korea and China where 25 million people live without electricity once the sun sets. Only Pyongyang gets bulbs, scattered enough to look like a faint smudge against the surrounding nothing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/24/the-darkest-country/ Mon, 24 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/24/cannadoms/ I’ve always found flavored condoms kind of suspect, but you do you—at least people are wrapping it up. And because strawberry and cinnamon apparently weren’t cutting it, some Dutch company started selling cannabis-flavored condoms. A fifty-pack is about forty euros, which is genuinely ridiculous until you realize the whole thing is basically one pickup line: “Want to try my weed condom?” It’s so dumb it might actually work. Honestly, people are probably just buying them to own the fact that they exist. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/24/cannadoms/ Mon, 24 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/23/spongebob-in-couture/ Jeremy Scott was always going to do this. He’s the kind of designer who looks at a cartoon character and thinks: that should be haute couture. So he showed up at Moschino with SpongeBob SquarePants on the runway—yellow, porous, the whole ridiculous creature rendered in fabric. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/23/spongebob-in-couture/ Sun, 23 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/22/kate-upton-got-it-first/ Kate Upton joined Instagram before there was much to look at. The app was just filtered pictures of breakfast and people’s feet and everyone pretending their lives were beautiful and composed. Then she posted a photo and something clicked. What Instagram needed was simpler than everyone thought—just a straightforward exchange: she posts, you look. No personal brand, no emotional captions about your morning. Just something beautiful to look at. Kate Upton got that immediately. Everyone else was still performing, still curating their lifestyle aesthetic for strangers, but she saw what the platform actually was from the beginning. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/22/kate-upton-got-it-first/ Sat, 22 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/22/okunoshima/ The rabbits don’t care what happened here. They swarm toward you on the paths, soft and reaching, dozens of them at once surging against your legs. You stand with a handful of feed and they’re warm and urgent, their mouths open. For a moment there’s nothing but the sound of them breathing and the weight of it against your skin. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/22/okunoshima/ Sat, 22 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/21/buzzfeed-lands/ By 2013, BuzzFeed was impossible to ignore. The numbers were obscene—130 million monthly visitors, venture capitalists pouring money in like it was the future. You could hate it, you could dismiss it, but the thing was real and it was everywhere. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/21/buzzfeed-lands/ Fri, 21 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/21/kyary-pamyu-pamyu-still-completely-unhinged/ I first encountered Kyary Pamyu Pamyu the way most people do—some algorithm threw a music video at me and I spent the next three minutes trying to decide if I was having a stroke or just watching Japan happen in real time. Everything about her is aggressively, deliberately, almost offensively weird. Not in an ironic way. There’s nothing ironic about it. The sweetness of the production, the bubblegum synths, the perfectly clear vocals—all of it wraps around this core of pure, unfiltered strangeness that somehow just works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/21/kyary-pamyu-pamyu-still-completely-unhinged/ Fri, 21 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/20/supergeil/ You move somewhere and your food options collapse into one supermarket. Edeka becomes part of your life before you even notice. Then they release a commercial good enough to make you hungry just thinking about it. That’s the whole point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/20/supergeil/ Thu, 20 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/20/no-clear-winner/ Sometimes I’m just staring at two photos and I can’t make up my mind. Emily Ratajkowski or Kate Upton. Emily Ratajkowski or Kate Upton. Emily Ratajkowski or Kate Upton. I compare everything—the face, the eyes, the hair, the skin, the body. And I can’t come to a decision. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/20/no-clear-winner/ Thu, 20 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/20/three-men-on-a-roof/ I keep coming back to Golineh Atai’s tweets from Kyiv in 2014 the way you circle back to anything unfolding in real-time—that horrible knowledge that something bad is happening and someone you can follow is in the building where it’s happening. “Bullet holes in the hotel. Gunfire in the stairwell. Many demonstrators on the ground.” She was updating from her room between ducking away from windows, thinking about walls and angles and whether the next sound would be outside or inside. The weird intimacy of watching someone figure out how not to get shot in real-time, 140 characters at a time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/20/three-men-on-a-roof/ Thu, 20 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/20/dressed-to-win/ There’s a Japanese subculture I keep thinking about. Survival games—Battle Royale tournaments, Hunger Games in the woods—where people compete seriously and equally care about how they look doing it. Not ironic. Just fully committed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/20/dressed-to-win/ Thu, 20 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/20/looking-away/ You get good at not seeing people. Earbuds in, eyes down, moving through the city with a practiced invisibility that works both ways—you don’t see them, they don’t see you. It’s the default mode. Cleaner that way. No demands, no complications. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/20/looking-away/ Thu, 20 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/20/im-dying/ A paramedic named Olesia Zhukovskaia was working the Maidan in Kyiv when the snipers started. This was 2014, during the Euromaidan protests—the square was full of people, and the government had positioned sharpshooters on rooftops around the city. They were shooting whoever they could: demonstrators, journalists, first responders. Just shooting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/20/im-dying/ Thu, 20 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/19/ordinariness/ I don’t usually care about celebrity gossip—it’s background noise. But Michelle Rodriguez and Cara Delevingne being together actually got to me. I found myself genuinely pleased about it, which isn’t my typical register. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/19/ordinariness/ Wed, 19 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/19/they-werent-leaving/ Twenty-five dead in Kyiv that night. Hundreds wounded in the streets. The opposition was calling for blood donors. Yanukovych was still in power, and the city wasn’t emptying. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/19/they-werent-leaving/ Wed, 19 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/19/guardians-of-the-galaxy/ The Guardians of the Galaxy trailer came out and I expected nothing. Marvel running its algorithm: big cast, simple premise, summer release date, another franchise. The pitch though is almost strange enough to work: criminals and misfits trying to save the universe, which is at least a break from the billionaire-with-issues template. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/19/guardians-of-the-galaxy/ Wed, 19 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/19/like-after-war/ The photos from Kyiv are unreal - fire, smoke, the city center looking like it got bombed. The Maidan, which had been crowded with tents and people and speeches, is now just charred pavement and rubble. Burning tires, police in full riot gear, people throwing whatever they can find. You’re watching it in real time on your screen and suddenly the whole diplomatic machinery of sanctions and threats makes immediate sense. Governments don’t respond like that unless something fundamental has already broken. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/19/like-after-war/ Wed, 19 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/19/weightless/ Sports Illustrated put Kate Upton in a zero-gravity plane and shot her floating around. Gravity does constant work holding bodies down, and the moment it stops, everything you never see becomes visible. That’s the entire point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/19/weightless/ Wed, 19 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/19/twelve-billion-dollars/ Facebook bought WhatsApp for nineteen billion dollars. The actual transaction involved some cash and some stock, but the number was less important than the fact of it: billions for a messaging app with no ads, no real business model, just a product that worked quietly without selling your data to advertisers. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/19/twelve-billion-dollars/ Wed, 19 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/19/a-cat-that-wouldnt-fake-it/ Grumpy Cat was perfect for its moment—a meme that reflected something real about how exhausting it all was. Everything on the internet demanded your enthusiasm, your performance, your engagement, and here was this cat that absolutely refused. That refusal meant something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/19/a-cat-that-wouldnt-fake-it/ Wed, 19 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/18/independence-square-burning/ Late evening and the news from Kyiv shifts tone completely. The police have moved against the camps at Independence Square. The reports stop discussing politics and suddenly become immediate—tents burning, people dead, gunshots confirmed. Nine so far. Bullet wounds on both sides. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/18/independence-square-burning/ Tue, 18 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/18/sailor-moon-again/ I didn’t expect to find myself rewatching Sailor Moon. It’s one of those things you assume stays in childhood - something you wore out on old tapes, loved completely, and then moved past. But then it shows up again and you realize you actually still want to watch it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/18/sailor-moon-again/ Tue, 18 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/18/the-dance-moves/ I watched Fallon and Smith run through hip-hop dances the other night—Running Man, Dougie, Twerk, the ones you half-remember from 2 AM YouTube holes. Two middle-aged guys in suits doing nostalgia that’s not even old yet. Late night has gotten good at this: find something recognizable, stick celebrities in it, film it, done. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/18/the-dance-moves/ Tue, 18 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/18/eating-insects/ There’s this Irish designer, Lara Hanlon, who started a food blog about insects. Cricket protein bars, ant-flour cupcakes, grasshopper stews. It sounds like a stunt until you think about the actual numbers: a couple billion people already eat insects without much fuss. The UN has been making noises about this for years—eat bugs, they say, it’s efficient. They’re right. Crickets use a fraction of the feed and space that cattle need for the same protein. One breed of cricket produces as much protein as a cow but needs maybe a tenth of the resources. We in Europe just decided that insects were disgusting, so we built our entire food system around that single cultural revulsion. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/18/eating-insects/ Tue, 18 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/18/flappy-birds-ceiling/ I crash in Flappy Bird in thirty seconds. The game is built to destroy you. But somewhere out there are people who’ve reached 999 points. Nine hundred and ninety-nine. That’s not talent. That’s obsession. That’s sitting alone with your phone for hours, grinding the same impossible loop until your reflexes work on autopilot. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/18/flappy-birds-ceiling/ Tue, 18 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/17/bloody-revenge/ HBO wouldn’t stop dropping season four trailers, and I genuinely couldn’t tell if they were building hype or just enjoying the torture. Months until April, and they kept releasing new footage like I didn’t already have enough to obsess over. But in this one, the whole thing distilled down to a single thing: revenge. Bloody, pointless, obsessive revenge. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/17/bloody-revenge/ Mon, 17 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/17/power-laces/ Nike actually built Marty McFly’s shoes. Not approximations, not knockoffs—the real Air Mag with the motorized laces from Back to the Future Part II, the ones that seemed like they belonged in the realm of movie magic and nothing else. Tinker Hatfield, who’d already transformed sneaker design with the Air Jordan XI, engineered them into something you could actually wear. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/17/power-laces/ Mon, 17 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/17/the-year-of-the-superstar/ I don’t care about brands. Store-brand groceries, Ikea everything, clothes that fit. But Superstars—I’m particular about Superstars. Adidas, only Adidas, white leather with the black stripe. If I could I’d fill an entire closet with them, nothing else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/17/the-year-of-the-superstar/ Mon, 17 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/15/ellen-page/ Ellen Page stood at the podium and said it: “I am here because I am a lesbian!” This was at the Human Rights Campaign conference, she was 26, and she’d basically just become famous doing Juno. The whole thing was extraordinarily straightforward. She wanted to help other people have an easier time. She was tired of lying. She didn’t want to hide anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/15/ellen-page/ Sat, 15 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/10/waiting-for-nothing/ The thing about trailers is they’re supposed to make you want something you can’t have yet. HBO would cut these ten-second clips—a sword glint, Lena Headey’s face, a raven screaming—and I’d watch them obsessively like they contained actual information. They never did, of course. They were just advertisements wrapped in mystery, and I fell for it every time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/10/waiting-for-nothing/ Mon, 10 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/9/flappy-bird/ That stupid bird. Everyone was playing it, everyone was frustrated by it, everyone swore they were done with it and then picked their phone back up an hour later. Streets weren’t quite empty, but it felt close. Coffee shops looked the same but everyone’s thumbs were twitching in that same spot, over and over, same failed attempt. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/9/flappy-bird/ Sun, 09 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/6/the-pseudo-lesbians-are-back/ I’d rejected the Sochi Olympics invitation, figured it was the right protest. But then I found out t.A.T.u. was performing there exclusively, and suddenly I was reconsidering. Jelena Katina and Julija Wolkowa—the Russian duo that made “All the Things She Said” feel essential in 2002. They were marketed as pseudo-lesbians, technically, though that was the entire appeal. I was massively into them. Still am, honestly. Once you’re committed to t.A.T.u., that’s just your lane. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/6/the-pseudo-lesbians-are-back/ Thu, 06 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/6/five-hundred-thousand/ While reporters were making jokes about unfinished hotels in Sochi, gay people in the rest of Russia were getting beaten in the street. It was filmed. It was posted. The world kept scrolling. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/6/five-hundred-thousand/ Thu, 06 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/6/pussy-riots-reckoning/ There’s something tragicomic about what just happened. Pussy Riot, the Russian collective built on saying no to everything—Putin, the state, commercialism, selling out—just fired two of its most visible members for doing the exact thing the collective claims to stand for. Nadia Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina were canned while they’re out touring the US, speaking against Russian homophobia and documenting what happens in the country’s prisons. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/6/pussy-riots-reckoning/ Thu, 06 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/5/gema-wants-rent-on-your-blog-now/ You’d think you couldn’t possibly hate GEMA any more than you already do. GEMA’s Germany’s copyright collection society—basically an organization whose entire job is finding new ways to make everyone miserable—and they just proved you could hate them more. Now they want bloggers to pay them money every time they embed a YouTube video. Not YouTube itself, mind you. The blogger. You, for putting the video on your site. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/5/gema-wants-rent-on-your-blog-now/ Wed, 05 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/5/chubbiness/ Avex just launched a girl group called Chubbiness built around the “Marshmallow Girls” market - guys in Japan who want women with actual body mass. That a major record label invested in a full group around this demographic tells you something about how granular markets get when there’s money in them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/5/chubbiness/ Wed, 05 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/5/uncompromised/ Pussy Riot didn’t soften themselves for American television. Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, the Russian punk band that’s made their work out of defiance and paid for it with prison, appeared on Stephen Colbert and spoke plainly about Putin, the Sochi Olympics as propaganda, violence against queer people in Russia. No softening the message, no performed warmth to ease the audience in. Just two women saying what had to be said on a format that usually demands entertainment. That’s always been the point with Pussy Riot—they refuse to make you comfortable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/5/uncompromised/ Wed, 05 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/5/miley-topless/ Been seeing less of Miley’s clothes lately, and I’m not going to complain about that. W Magazine has her topless for a recent shoot—black and white outtakes where artistry and straightforward sexuality don’t cancel each other out. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/5/miley-topless/ Wed, 05 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/5/berghain-at-six/ Six on a Monday morning and the strobes look harsh in the gray light. Everyone’s thoroughly destroyed at this point, the kind of wrecked that made sense at midnight but now just reads as routine. The air’s thick with things I gave up identifying around four. This is what the Berghain looks like when the party crashes into Monday: bodies moving through habit, everyone already wondering when they can do it again, knowing they will, knowing it’s bleak. They come back anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/5/berghain-at-six/ Wed, 05 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/4/while-the-games-happened/ The Sochi Olympics were starting in a matter of days when Human Rights Watch released footage of teenagers beating gay people in the street. They’d filmed it themselves. The kids doing it didn’t see anything wrong—they were just fixing sick people, healing them with their fists, doing what they thought was right. Casual. Methodical. On camera. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/4/while-the-games-happened/ Tue, 04 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/4/mileys-wardrobe/ I’ve probably seen Miley Cyrus’s breasts more this year than my own. She’s 21, has bleached eyebrows, and seems to have concluded that bras are unnecessary. Magazine shoots, award shows, paparazzi moments—there’s always that chance she’ll just be completely bare-chested, totally comfortable with it. At first it seems like a series of accidents, these perpetual wardrobe malfunctions. But it happens too often. It’s just what Miley does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/4/mileys-wardrobe/ Tue, 04 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/4/on-swans-and-doves/ I’ve sat through enough wedding albums to spot the pattern: white doves, someone in a carriage, the cake-cutting moment. The same three shots, different faces. There’s a reason people don’t pull out wedding photos at parties anymore—they’re all the same, and they’re boring as hell. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/4/on-swans-and-doves/ Tue, 04 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/3/a-bit-from-shibuya/ I went to the Yami-ichi—the Internet Black Market—when it popped up in Berlin during Transmediale. First of all, the name alone gets you: a black market for the internet. Not the dark web stuff, but a literal offline marketplace where people were pulling the digital world into physical space. There were printed glitches hanging on walls. Stickers expressing everyone’s mutual rage about GEMA blocking half the songs on the country’s websites. Weird shapes, colors, memes in physical form. The whole thing felt like watching someone try to bottle something that was never meant to be contained. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/3/a-bit-from-shibuya/ Mon, 03 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/3/the-basement-tape/ The Guardian filmed it: journalists in a basement with angle grinders and power drills, destroying hard drives and USB sticks containing Edward Snowden’s files. This was July 2013. British intelligence, on behalf of the NSA, had forced the newspaper to physically eliminate the evidence of mass surveillance before the story could be fully reported. So they smashed it. On video. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/3/the-basement-tape/ Mon, 03 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/3/one-rule/ Game of Thrones comes back in a few weeks and I’m already in that space where I’m half-thinking about what’s coming. The show gets its hooks in with the obvious stuff—bodies, violence, the scheming—but what keeps me is that it actually means something when people die. You invest in a character and the show just ends them. It shouldn’t work but it does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/3/one-rule/ Mon, 03 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/3/the-ccc-takes-on-merkel/ The Chaos Computer Club filed criminal charges against Angela Merkel’s government. Against Merkel herself, the interior minister, the heads of the intelligence agencies—BND, MAD, Verfassungsschutz. The charge: they’d been collaborating with the NSA on mass surveillance, violating citizens’ constitutional right to privacy, obstructing justice. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/3/the-ccc-takes-on-merkel/ Mon, 03 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/2/28-reasons/ Twenty-eight. That’s how many reasons SNL found to hug a Black person during Black History Month, and the specificity somehow works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/2/28-reasons/ Sun, 02 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/2/hermione-should-have-married-harry/ Rowling finally admitted she got it wrong. Hermione should’ve married Harry, not Ron. She said this in an interview with Emma Watson for Wonderland Magazine, and now everyone’s talking about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/2/hermione-should-have-married-harry/ Sun, 02 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/1/your-neighborhood/ There’s always that moment when you stop being a tourist somewhere and start being someone who knows the place. You walk past the same record shop twice a week, nod at the guy behind the counter, know which record he’s been spinning. You know the basement bar that gets crowded at midnight, the pizzeria that gets the crust exactly right. It stops being something you’re visiting and starts being something you inhabit, even if just for a few months. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/2/1/your-neighborhood/ Sat, 01 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/30/the-obscurity-trap/ The problem with music taste is that the moment you discover something good, you’re already watching it die. Every band you loved yesterday is playing on some mainstream radio station today, and suddenly they’re worthless to you. Not because they changed, but because they’re not secret anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/30/the-obscurity-trap/ Thu, 30 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/30/breakfast-in-a-can/ Some mornings I think about just skipping breakfast and heading straight to beer. The Funky Buddha Brewery in Florida apparently thought the same thing and made a beer with bacon, maple syrup, and coffee in it. 6.4 percent alcohol. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/30/breakfast-in-a-can/ Thu, 30 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/30/the-system-works/ There’s this long-running joke about McDonald’s where you can order drugs the same way you order a Happy Meal toy. Walk up, say the right things, pull to the next window, and there it all is in the bag. The joke almost feels plausible because the whole operation is built on accommodating any request without judgment. That’s probably why it never gets old. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/30/the-system-works/ Thu, 30 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/30/australian-school-scare/ Australian PSAs don’t do soft warnings. Whatever this ad shows, it apparently took that approach and ran far enough to become internet weird. The kind of thing you watch and wonder if it was actually allowed to air. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/30/australian-school-scare/ Thu, 30 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/29/that-stupid-sneeze/ Your face just gives up. The sneeze hits and there’s no controlling it—eyes cross, mouth slack, everything collapses for a second. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/29/that-stupid-sneeze/ Wed, 29 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/29/fed/ You sit in front of a camera and eat. Every night. Seven thousand euros a month for it. That was the calculation Park Seo-yeon made at 34 when she quit her job to stream full-time—uploading herself eating to viewers who tune in for the company, for the sense of sitting with someone while they consume. Mukbang, they call it: Korean streaming where watching someone eat is enough. Sometimes it’s normal amounts of food. Sometimes it’s grotesque amounts. The viewers don’t really care about the food. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/29/fed/ Wed, 29 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/29/bastille/ A Saturday in Paris, Place de la Bastille. Seventeen thousand people marched—that’s the police count, probably closer to the truth than the march organizers’ claim of a hundred and fifty thousand. Everyone showed up with something they wanted to hate. Catholics against abortion. People who wanted immigrants gone. People who wanted gay people to disappear. And Jews, like always, blamed for whatever feels broken when nothing else makes sense anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/29/bastille/ Wed, 29 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/29/sodastreams-sexy-miscalculation/ SodaStream, some Israeli water-carbonation company, decided to take on Pepsi and Coca-Cola by running a Super Bowl commercial featuring Scarlett Johansson. The ad was explicitly framed as too scandalous for American television—which is always funny because the thing they’re selling is a kitchen appliance that makes fizzy water. But apparently having Johansson there was enough to make CBS nervous. They rejected it before it could air. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/29/sodastreams-sexy-miscalculation/ Wed, 29 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/29/like-an-lsd-dream-in-an-office/ There’s a desk that runs for 250 meters through an office in Tokyo. It winds through the space like something alive, and scattered around it on the floor are LEGO-colored seats that feel like they fell out of someone’s dream. Manga on the walls. Flowers everywhere. The whole thing looks like it was designed during an acid trip, which I mean as a compliment. This is where Teamlab works—a Tokyo-based community of artists and illustrators, and the office is the kind of place that makes every other startup look like it was designed by algorithms and fear. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/29/like-an-lsd-dream-in-an-office/ Wed, 29 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/29/chocolate-hamburgers/ Lotteria’s selling hamburgers with chocolate sauce now. Japan does this thing where they just try stuff without asking permission first. No market research, no focus group—just someone in an office deciding on a Thursday: “What if chocolate? On a burger?” and apparently the answer is yes, here you go, four euros. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/29/chocolate-hamburgers/ Wed, 29 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/29/ryu-at-the-grammys/ There’s that moment at the Grammys where Taylor Swift is performing and her head is jerking around like something’s seriously wrong. Not choreography—just genuinely unsettling to watch. Everyone saw it. And then the internet, being what it is, decided what had really happened: Ryu from Street Fighter was offscreen beating the shit out of her. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/29/ryu-at-the-grammys/ Wed, 29 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/29/the-formula/ These game streamers and comedians—the German ones especially—try to systematize YouTube success the way you’d systematize anything else. Good thumbnails, smart tags, the right posting time, the right voice. Master the techniques, optimize everything, and you should win. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/29/the-formula/ Wed, 29 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/28/mø/ Somewhere around 2013-2014 I got caught in MØ’s songs—Danish artist Karen Marie Ørsted, who makes electronic pop that hits different when you’re alone in a room late at night. “Don’t Wanna Dance” and “Waste of Time” have this urgent, propulsive energy, like she’s trying to outrun something in the production, all glitchy synths and her voice sitting right on top of it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/28/mø/ Tue, 28 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/28/quiet-work/ I bookmarked a bunch of Heng Swee Lim’s illustrations the other day. She’s from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and draws these small, careful things—planets with expressions, a cloud holding a rainbow pencil, a remote control drawn like it deserves a portrait. Nothing loud. Nothing straining for your attention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/28/quiet-work/ Tue, 28 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/28/hipster-nazis/ Jesko Wrede photographed a Nazi march in Magdeburg a few days back, and the pictures won’t leave my head. Around 700 men marching to commemorate the 1945 bombing of the city, except they looked like they’d emerged from a Berlin thrift store—ear gauges, vintage sunglasses, studied beards, ironic tote bags with printed jokes. One said something about carrying yogurt. That detail sits with me. About 1,500 antifascists showed up to oppose them, so the whole thing unfolded as simultaneously horrifying and absurd in a way I still don’t know how to process. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/28/hipster-nazis/ Tue, 28 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/28/nintendos-mobile-gambit/ Nintendo finally said yes to mobile. For years, Satoru Iwata was clear: Nintendo games on Nintendo hardware only. But they announced a loss, and suddenly the company was open to phones. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/28/nintendos-mobile-gambit/ Tue, 28 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/28/whitey/ I found her old teddy bear in a box at her parents’ place. It was called Whitey, and it had been torn apart by a dog when she was a kid—still had the tooth marks and split seams. She’d mentioned it once in that casual way people do when they’re being nostalgic, so I knew it mattered. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/28/whitey/ Tue, 28 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/27/toward-the-border/ I read about Kurt J. Mac in the New Yorker—this guy who decided three years ago to walk in a straight line through Minecraft until he reached the world’s edge. That’s it. Just keeps moving in one direction, no cheating, no flying, just walking. When the procedural landscape finally glitches out and collapses into colors and errors, that’s where it ends. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/27/toward-the-border/ Mon, 27 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/27/tokyo-cat-cafes/ You walk into one of these places and immediately understand why they exist. There’s something about a room full of cats that doesn’t require conversation or effort. You sit there. The cats do their thing. The world outside is irrelevant. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/27/tokyo-cat-cafes/ Mon, 27 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/27/making-porn-looks-easy/ You think about it at some point. Most people probably do, at least in passing. The money’s quick, you strip, you fuck on camera, you’re finished. How hard could it actually be? The work itself is probably straightforward enough, but here’s the thing: it completely rewrites your life, and not in the way you’re imagining when you’re just thinking about the money. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/27/making-porn-looks-easy/ Mon, 27 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/27/the-ninth-floor/ A millionaire rents out a spare room to make ends meet. Years later he’s one of fifteen addicts sharing a three-room apartment in Manhattan, the utilities barely working, everything sold for drugs. Photographer Jessica Dimmock documented it in a series called The Ninth Floor. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/27/the-ninth-floor/ Mon, 27 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/27/all-i-could-think-about/ I was waiting for Game of Thrones season 4 with the kind of focus that makes everything else blur out. April 6th couldn’t come fast enough. They put out a behind-the-scenes trailer but it only made it worse—you don’t want to see how they filmed it, you want to actually watch it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/27/all-i-could-think-about/ Mon, 27 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/27/a-whole-film-in-one-second/ South Korea’s building a 5G network a thousand times faster than what we’ve got. Download a whole film in one second. Ultra-HD streaming, holograms—the full future—supposedly by 2017. Meanwhile my Telekom router’s green light is blinking like it’s having some kind of existential crisis, and I’m waiting for one episode of something to load. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/27/a-whole-film-in-one-second/ Mon, 27 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/26/the-flip/ Twenty years ago, being a nerd meant being invisible. Now it means having money and power. The kids who got tormented for their comic books and D&D sessions are the ones setting culture. It’s a shift that happened so gradually I’m not sure when it happened. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/26/the-flip/ Sun, 26 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/26/marked/ Snowden was in Moscow when he told a German broadcaster that people in Washington wanted him dead. Not arrested, not returned for trial—dead. He said it plainly, the way you’d mention that it was raining. The interview was with Hubert Seipel from NDR, and Snowden had already spent years doing this: speaking truth from exile, knowing it wouldn’t matter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/26/marked/ Sun, 26 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/26/when-titans-sell-sedans/ I caught the Subaru commercial with Attack on Titan’s titans and it might be the best car ad I’ve ever seen. I don’t particularly care about cars, but this works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/26/when-titans-sell-sedans/ Sun, 26 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/26/kyiv-burning/ Black smoke hanging over the Maidan. Burning barricades scattered across the city center. Every few seconds another explosion, then gunfire, another explosion. Cars burned down to their frames. Buildings gutted. Five people already dead, and no sign it was stopping. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/26/kyiv-burning/ Sun, 26 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/25/the-love-bra/ Japanese lingerie brand Ravijour sold a bra called Mood Up for their 10-year anniversary. The premise is that it opens itself when you’re actually in love, or at least when their app detects genuine affection instead of just desire. I can’t picture a real use case for this, until you’re drunk at 4am at some party, desperate and high, wishing something—anything—would just work without you having to convince it. That’s the moment this bra starts making sense. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/25/the-love-bra/ Sat, 25 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/24/getting-into-heaven/ Marteria’s video for OMG just dumps every religious image it can find into the frame and lets them pile up. Saints, crucifixes, prayer hands, the whole sacred imagery buffet. It’s built around a song asking the kind of question I’ve been half-serious about since I was a kid: how do you actually get into heaven? Pray every day? Show up to church on Sundays? Watch the unsuitable couples making out in the pews? The honest answer is nobody knows. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/24/getting-into-heaven/ Fri, 24 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/24/tokyo-winter/ Winter in Germany is all black. Black coats, black scarves, black shoes, the whole visual landscape just flattens. It’s practical, or it feels that way. You dress for the season and disappear into it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/24/tokyo-winter/ Fri, 24 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/24/the-nintendo-pill/ There’s this MDMA pill going around Belgium called Nintendo and the joke writes itself but apparently it’s actually there, making the rounds, people are taking it. Some guy from a club said it came on at midnight like a hammer, the whole place started looking beautiful, his friends got sentimental and kept telling each other how much they love each other, that moment about an hour in where you think you’ve figured out something crucial about what matters, and he got worried his friend was too far gone so he ditched his second dose, which obviously doesn’t help because now he’s just alone at the peak convinced he’s become the god of everything. That’s the thing about rolling—you get that certainty, that absolute conviction that everything makes sense, and you’ll never feel it again quite the same way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/24/the-nintendo-pill/ Fri, 24 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/23/a-network-of-people/ Pope Francis blessed the internet. It’s a gift from God, he said—not cables, but people. A network of people. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/23/a-network-of-people/ Thu, 23 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/23/everything-upside-down/ There’s a photo from Kiev that makes everything clear. A riot cop throwing a Molotov cocktail at the crowd below. Same weapon as the street. That’s when you know something has crossed into territory that doesn’t come back. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/23/everything-upside-down/ Thu, 23 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/23/indifference/ Someone sends you a selfie and you can feel the work in it—the angle, the light, the smile that was tested in a mirror first. Then you see a cat and there’s none of that effort. The cat wasn’t trying. It was scratching its ear or staring at nothing when someone aimed the camera and caught something true. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/23/indifference/ Thu, 23 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/23/the-monsoon-returns/ The news hit me the way these things do: all at once, totally unavoidable. Tokio Hotel are coming back this year. New album, apparently finished, tracks being selected right now. Their producer just confirmed it like we weren’t all collectively trying to forget they existed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/23/the-monsoon-returns/ Thu, 23 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/22/wrong-side-of-the-camera/ I don’t get paid to do what I’d actually want to do all day. I’d be happy half-clothed, hanging around looking dumb, pushing a bike sometimes, pulling off my shirt when photographers like Joe Villanueva and Katie Stone tell me to. Kayslee Collins is 22 and that’s her literal job. And she gets paid for it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/22/wrong-side-of-the-camera/ Wed, 22 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/22/pretty-good-for-the-park/ Friday comes and you’re ready for it, even though Tuesday wasn’t that long ago. The ritual never changes—swing by Görlitzer Park before dark, before the evening turns into something you don’t want to be part of. Usually you get what you deserve: something that’s been sitting in a pocket, something that smells like it’s making excuses for itself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/22/pretty-good-for-the-park/ Wed, 22 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/22/let-it-go/ By the time Frozen came out, I’d decided I was too old for Disney animated musicals, but Idina Menzel’s voice on this song pulled me in anyway. The arrangement builds and the chorus opens up completely—it’s not subtle, but it’s solid enough to stick. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/22/let-it-go/ Wed, 22 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/22/hamster-asses/ You know what’s hot? A genuinely good ass—the curve, the weight, the way it commands your attention. I’m apparently not the only person who thinks this way, because someone on the internet decided to document hamster butts. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/22/hamster-asses/ Wed, 22 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/22/miku-forever/ There’s a Miku Hatsune figure on my desk that’s been staring at me with this blank expression for years. I grabbed it as a joke at some point—a piece of anime merchandise to take up space—but I didn’t really understand the appeal until I spent time in Akihabara with Gonta, this guy from Tokyo who’s deep enough into Miku fandom that his apartment might actually be a shrine. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/22/miku-forever/ Wed, 22 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/22/kyiv-burning/ I watched Kyiv burn on my phone in real time, sometime in 2013. The government didn’t like what was happening in the streets, so they sent in police. The protesters had Molotov cocktails. People died—at least two that first night, more as it went on. The Prime Minister said it was their fault for being criminals. It wasn’t an unusual response, which maybe is the worst part. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/22/kyiv-burning/ Wed, 22 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/22/we-got-used-to-it/ The question of whether Edward Snowden was a hero or a traitor couldn’t get settled in early 2014, and by that point it didn’t matter anymore. The information was already out. Governments had already seen it. The NSA was what it was. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/22/we-got-used-to-it/ Wed, 22 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/22/the-military-cure/ You lose track of time online without really noticing. A few hours gone and you don’t have anything to show for it, but you also don’t particularly regret it. In China they decided this was a disease. Serious enough that by 2008 it became state policy—internet addiction in teenagers required actual intervention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/22/the-military-cure/ Wed, 22 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/21/why-rihanna/ I’m not going to pretend I’m above this. Rihanna’s Instagram is the only thing worth actually paying attention to on that entire app. Every photo is some kind of calculated assault on your focus—the angles, the looks, the way she stares at the camera like she’s doing you a personal favor by existing. She knows exactly what she’s doing and exactly what we’re all thinking, and she doesn’t care. That kind of power in how you hold yourself, the sheer confidence—most people spend a lifetime trying to cultivate it and never get close. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/21/why-rihanna/ Tue, 21 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/21/melt/ Melt comes back around in July and it’s one of those festivals I actually clear the calendar for. Portishead’s on the lineup, which is worth the trip alone. Recondite and Chromeo too. It’s one of the few that still feels like it’s curated by people who give a shit about the music instead of just the brand. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/21/melt/ Tue, 21 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/21/watching-the-sun/ Beijing’s air got so bad they put the sun on screens. Residents watched daylight through digital billboards because the smog was thick enough to block it out. The kind of thing you’d see in a dystopian film, except it was real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/21/watching-the-sun/ Tue, 21 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/21/already-written/ I remember watching the footage from Kyiv, probably 2013 or early 2014, hard to place exactly. The Berkut riot police in their gas masks, the crowds not backing down, the fires at night and the chemical smoke during the day. Vitali Klitschko, the boxer, suddenly on the opposition side recording videos about peaceful resistance while his country came apart. Yanukovych making official statements about ruin and danger, the way leaders always do when their people are telling them to fuck off. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/21/already-written/ Tue, 21 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/21/sailor-moon-still-works/ Sailor Moon keeps showing up. Not trending, not in the news, just in what people actually watch at three in the morning when they can’t sleep. Someone finds the German dub on YouTube. Someone else buys the vinyl. It circulates quietly. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/21/sailor-moon-still-works/ Tue, 21 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/21/american-apparel-gets-hairy/ American Apparel put mannequins with visible pubic hair in store windows last week, which is their latest attempt at scandal. Just hairy crotches displayed for all the passersby to see. Bare breasts stopped working, so they’re testing the next boundary—whether we’ve actually moved past the idea that female pubic hair is something that needs to be hidden. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/21/american-apparel-gets-hairy/ Tue, 21 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/20/amou-haji/ Amou Haji hasn’t bathed in sixty years. He’s eighty now, lives in southern Iran, and by every measure he should be the cautionary tale that proves hygiene exists for a reason. But looking at the photographs, there’s something else going on. He doesn’t look broken. He looks like someone who made a choice and kept making it until it wasn’t a choice anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/20/amou-haji/ Mon, 20 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/20/wrecking-ball/ Ron Jeremy filmed himself doing “Wrecking Ball.” I mean, what else is he going to do? Porn guy, Miley Cyrus, the setup writes itself. And naturally it’s exactly as explicit as the premise promises—him doing his thing to that song, on a wrecking ball, no apologies. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/20/wrecking-ball/ Mon, 20 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/17/more-important-things/ Hans-Peter Friedrich was Germany’s interior minister, and when the NSA scandal broke, he basically said he had more important things to deal with. That was his actual response. I remember reading it and just sitting there, thinking: what could possibly be more important? And his answer, implicit in everything that followed, was cheese and folk music and whatever else. People found a Tumblr with screenshots of him eating, playing, living his life completely normally while the world’s entire communications system was being monitored. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/17/more-important-things/ Fri, 17 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/17/the-brave/ It’s easy to mock everyone with a phone these days. Snapchatting their food, filming themselves on trains, documenting stuff nobody asked to see. And fine, most of it is genuinely pointless. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/17/the-brave/ Fri, 17 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/17/lykke-li-again/ Lykke Li has a new album coming in May. No name, no specific date, just May. That’s enough to know about, anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/17/lykke-li-again/ Fri, 17 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/17/jen-selter/ Around 2013 or so, Instagram figured out that fitness content could drive attention like almost nothing else. Jen Selter was the person everyone noticed first—just a young woman posting workout videos, nothing revolutionary, but then Rihanna followed her account and suddenly she was a moment. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/17/jen-selter/ Fri, 17 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/17/strange-shelf/ Browsing Urban Outfitters and found this book: And Every Day Was Overcast by Paul Kwiatkowski. Nothing special about the cover. The content is mostly explicit scenes involving animals and women—graphic, no pretense. Just sitting there among the design books, priced and shelved like anything else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/17/strange-shelf/ Fri, 17 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/17/one-day-baby/ Julia Engelmann recited something at a slam in Bielefeld that hit harder than expected. She studies psychology, which maybe explains the precision—the way she could name what everyone in the room was already thinking but hadn’t quite said out loud. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/17/one-day-baby/ Fri, 17 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/17/sailor-moon-at-twenty/ There’s a particular kind of aging-feeling that comes from realizing Sailor Moon turned twenty this year. The series, I mean—not Usagi herself. Though if she’d actually aged alongside the show instead of staying forever fourteen, she’d be thirty-four now. Thirty-four. That math sits differently depending on when you think about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/17/sailor-moon-at-twenty/ Fri, 17 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/17/what-200-looks-like/ I’ve noticed that 200 calories in a doughnut looks like nothing—like one bite of food. But 200 calories in pasta is somehow a full meal’s worth. The cruel joke is that your body doesn’t care about calories on a label. It cares about what hits your tongue and how empty your stomach still feels five minutes later. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/17/what-200-looks-like/ Fri, 17 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/16/these-outfits/ White pants, confident face, fistful of cash. I want this entire life. The outfit, the attitude, the casual way she’s holding money like it’s nothing—that’s a whole vibe. Pure confidence. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/16/these-outfits/ Thu, 16 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/16/all-pink-and-gold/ Wes Anderson arranges people like he’s setting up a still life photograph. In The Grand Budapest Hotel, Ralph Fiennes plays M. Gustave, a concierge so committed to precision that his entire life is basically a long ritual of caring about things that don’t matter to anyone else. Color-coordinated suits, perfectly plated desserts, flowers arranged in exact positions. He’s funny, but underneath it there’s something sincere about the commitment—the belief that beauty is worth maintaining even when everything around you is falling apart. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/16/all-pink-and-gold/ Thu, 16 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/16/tokyo-speed/ Tokyo hits you all at once. Walk out of the airport and every sensory receptor is firing—the lights, the people, the scale of what’s happening at any given moment. Shibuya, Harajuku, Shimokitazawa all feel like separate cities stacked into the same coordinates, each with its own gravity. You feel like you’ve discovered something no one else knows, which you haven’t, but that doesn’t matter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/16/tokyo-speed/ Thu, 16 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/16/what-diddo-made/ Dutch artist Diddo found a bag of cocaine on the street and pressed it into a skull. Twelve by eighteen by twenty-two centimeters—a solid chunk of shaped powder. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/16/what-diddo-made/ Thu, 16 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/15/starlight-avatar/ I had glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to my ceiling as a kid—the cheap plastic kind that absorbed sunlight and gave off a faint blue-green luminescence in the dark. Nothing special. Every kid had them. But there was something about lying in bed watching them fade that made the whole experience feel less like surrendering to sleep and more like floating off into space. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/15/starlight-avatar/ Wed, 15 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/15/fashion-week-nights/ The thing about Fashion Week parties is that everyone’s hollowed out by evening. All day you’re moving between shows and meetings, holding your stomach in, shaking hands with people who don’t remember you, and by eight o’clock all you want is to move and sweat and stop being examined. The Hamburger Hof was where the crowd had congregated—the models from the circuit, the photographers, the designers still making the rounds, the people who’d somehow got the link and weren’t about to waste it. Eva Padberg was there. Bonnie Strange. Brooke Candy. You see the same faces all week under different light and they’re just people dancing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/15/fashion-week-nights/ Wed, 15 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/15/twenty-in-ginza/ I like those A Day With shorts that VICE does—short enough to actually finish, long enough that you feel like you’ve seen something real. They don’t try to explain anything. Just here’s someone, here’s how they live. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/15/twenty-in-ginza/ Wed, 15 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/15/someones-hell-baby/ Picture yourself on a New York sidewalk. There’s a carriage parked in front of you, and from inside you hear crying—small, distressed sounds. Your instinct is to check on it. You bend down to look and whatever’s in there suddenly lurches upward and screams at you. Heart rate spikes. Adrenaline. That moment where you realize something’s very wrong but your brain is already three steps behind. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/15/someones-hell-baby/ Wed, 15 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/14/breaking-mario-world/ This is what happens when a speedrunner stops running and starts breaking. Masterjun takes Super Mario World—the SNES classic that worked fine, thank you—and glitches it so completely that it stops being a platformer. He uses a TAS, a tool-assisted speedrun built frame by frame with surgical precision, to manipulate the game’s memory into executing his own code. Suddenly Mario World is running Pong and Snake, fed through the console’s controller ports. The game’s not playing itself anymore. It’s just hosting whatever Masterjun puts inside it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/14/breaking-mario-world/ Tue, 14 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/14/hair-selfies/ There’s this trend out of Tokyo where people post photos of just their hair. That’s the entire concept. You point your phone downward and photograph whatever’s on your head. No face, no clever framing, just hair. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/14/hair-selfies/ Tue, 14 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/14/the-newsrooms-last-season/ I love The Newsroom. I’m basically alone in this—everyone else seems to hate it—but Aaron Sorkin’s show about the people running a cable news network is better television than whatever everyone’s watching. Better than the shows people pretend to care about. Better than the ones people say you have to see. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/14/the-newsrooms-last-season/ Tue, 14 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/13/the-internets-broken-promise/ Around the time the Snowden leaks were everywhere, Sascha Lobo wrote something that crystallized what a lot of people were feeling but couldn’t quite articulate. He called it “Abschied von der Utopie”—a farewell to what the internet was supposed to become. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/13/the-internets-broken-promise/ Mon, 13 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/13/long-enough/ I remember refreshing for this trailer. The fourth season was coming in a few weeks, and HBO had finally dropped the first real one. Game of Thrones had everyone gripped by then—the show where nobody was safe, where power shifted like sand, where you couldn’t predict who’d make it to the next episode. We’d all been waiting through an endless off-season. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/13/long-enough/ Mon, 13 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/11/that-shoot/ Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin shot Kate Upton for V Magazine, and the photos come out the way you’d expect from those two—precise, clean, nothing wasted. Upton’s always understood exactly what she is and what people want from her, and she doesn’t feel the need to dress that up in irony or defensiveness. In the interview she talks about using her visibility to be a good example, which is the standard line anyone beautiful has to deliver, but it seems like she’s actually thought about it instead of just reading from a script. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/11/that-shoot/ Sat, 11 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/11/servants-of-the-dark-lord/ DayZ advertises itself as a zombie survival game, but any time you’ve actually played it, you know the real horror is other people. Somewhere in that world there’s a group that calls themselves Servants of the Dark Lord, and if the name doesn’t clue you in, their methods will. They run around half-naked with axes and if they catch you, they’re either hacking you apart while lecturing you about their dark lord, or leaving you bound and stripped down—a message for the next player who spots your corpse. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/11/servants-of-the-dark-lord/ Sat, 11 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/11/back-into-memory/ Chino Otsuka photographed her childhood in 1970s Tokyo and Photoshopped herself back into the images as an adult. It’s one of those ideas that feels obvious the moment you see it, the kind of thing you wonder why it took someone until now to think of. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/11/back-into-memory/ Sat, 11 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/10/simpsons-go-ghibli/ Studio Ghibli films—Spirited Away, Ponyo, My Neighbor Totoro—they work on you differently. There’s a patience to them, a way of sitting with moments that don’t serve the plot but somehow serve everything else. Time, detail, pacing. The opposite of how most animation operates. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/10/simpsons-go-ghibli/ Fri, 10 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/10/finally-sailor-moon/ Fifteen years. That’s how long I’d been waiting for new Sailor Moon episodes, and I didn’t realize how much it had bothered me until the announcement came. The original series just ended one day in the late nineties—stopped without warning, like someone had flipped a switch mid-scene. Most people moved on. I never quite did. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/10/finally-sailor-moon/ Fri, 10 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/10/white-suit-at-wacken/ There’s something perfect about Jan Delay showing up to Wacken in a white suit. This is Germany’s biggest rock and metal festival—mud, rain, thousands of people losing their minds for four days—and he’s walking through it dressed like he just left a yacht, completely unfazed. The video’s just him moving through the crowd with this blank expression, and that’s the whole point. Not trying to fit in, not performing, just existing in the wrong outfit at the worst place and not caring. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/10/white-suit-at-wacken/ Fri, 10 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/10/weekend-missions/ Friday afternoon and I’m dead in the water—two days off with zero plans. So I make a list. Buy a pony. Have sex with someone who shares your name, bonus points if the last name matches too. Tell all your friends they suck and find completely new people. The absurdity is the whole point. Not because this is real advice, but because weekend listicles are broken on principle. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/10/weekend-missions/ Fri, 10 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/10/game-of-thrones-season-four/ Season three had ended with the Red Wedding still burning in my head—that casual, sudden violence that made clear George R.R. Martin and HBO had no interest in comforting you. When they announced season four would start April 6, there was a real pull to it. Not because I needed the plot (the books existed), but because television is its own thing, and by then this show had become the show, the one everyone was watching, the cultural weight of it impossible to ignore. You’d wake up thinking about what might happen next. You’d text friends theories. Game of Thrones had become essential viewing, and of course I was going to be there when it aired. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/10/game-of-thrones-season-four/ Fri, 10 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/10/the-study-grind/ Hair tied to a clothes dryer so you jerk awake if you start nodding off during study hours. Dirty gym shoes to sniff and stay alert. Rope. These are study techniques that Chinese students use, because passing the exam matters more than your physical safety. I read about how they prepare and some of it is properly deranged. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/10/the-study-grind/ Fri, 10 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/9/brick-by-brick/ Someone on Tumblr’s been rebuilding album covers out of LEGO. Nirvana. Pink Floyd. The Beatles. Daft Punk. Kanye. MF Doom. All of them in plastic bricks. Sounds dumb until you see it—album covers are already built in layers and blocks and flat color. LEGO just translates the same thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/9/brick-by-brick/ Thu, 09 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/9/transparent/ V Magazine’s spring issue came with a transparent plastic cover—tilt it one way and Kate Upton’s wearing something, tilt it the other and she isn’t. That’s the whole concept. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/9/transparent/ Thu, 09 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/9/shane-smiths-news-gamble/ Shane Smith got bored with CNN and thought VICE could fix it. The pitch made sense—VICE had actually earned the credibility. They’d done the unfiltered reporting, the warlords and drug routes, the stories that made network television look domesticated. If anyone could make news rebellious again, it would be them. VICE NEWS was launching online with a newsroom in Berlin, ready to cover Syria and North Korea and whatever else actually mattered. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/9/shane-smiths-news-gamble/ Thu, 09 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/9/thomas-hitzlsperger-is-gay/ A German footballer named Thomas Hitzlsperger came out as gay in 2014. The internet did what it does—BILD’s comments filled with predictable hatred, politicians gave speeches about acceptance, the whole machine of public sentiment moved forward. I remember thinking: is this even news anymore? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/9/thomas-hitzlsperger-is-gay/ Thu, 09 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/9/after-the-cats/ Ohisama doesn’t look like much—small space, a few tables, shakes and ice cream on the menu. The rabbits are just moving around the floor the way rabbits do, unhurried and completely indifferent to the fact that you paid 1000 yen to sit with them for half an hour. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/9/after-the-cats/ Thu, 09 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/8/how-dolphins-get-high/ Dolphins hunt pufferfish specifically to get high. They position themselves carefully to get sprayed with toxin in the face—the dose has to be perfect, just enough to send you floating without killing you. Then they swim around completely blissed out, grinning like they’ve cracked the code of existence. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/8/how-dolphins-get-high/ Wed, 08 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/8/beth-and-kat-on-conan/ Beth Behrs grabbed Kat Dennings’ breasts on Conan. Just reached over and did it. Not as part of some bit, not ironic, not as a setup for a laugh—just grabbed them on network television. It was crude and perfect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/8/beth-and-kat-on-conan/ Wed, 08 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/8/xbox-sign-out/ Someone made the gamertag “Xbox Sign Out” in Call of Duty: Ghosts and just waited for angry kids to yell his name into their mics. Voice command triggers, logs them out—that’s it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/8/xbox-sign-out/ Wed, 08 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/8/emily-and-the-stickers/ You know the face. The lips, dark eyes, the styled hair that looks impossible. One of those faces where you stop thinking for a second and just want something ridiculous—like, what if she printed my face on a sticker and wore it on her nipples. What if. I’d give everything. I’m serious about this. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/8/emily-and-the-stickers/ Wed, 08 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/8/rodman-in-pyongyang/ Dennis Rodman sang Happy Birthday to Kim Jong-un, and if you haven’t seen the video, it’s worse than you’re imagining. The singing is bad. Kim’s grinning through the whole thing. It doesn’t work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/8/rodman-in-pyongyang/ Wed, 08 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/8/hisaos-apartment/ I spent a lot of time in Yoyogi Park in Tokyo but somehow never noticed Hisao, which basically means I was an oblivious asshole. He was the guy everyone said was the happiest homeless man in the park—always smiling, always had some story about his luxury apartment. In his head that place was real. In reality he was getting drunk on Sake and selling tourist junk at the flea market next door, but he never lost that smile. Old guy with actual style, even with nothing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/8/hisaos-apartment/ Wed, 08 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/8/welcome-to-the-danger-zone/ Hamburg was being called Germany’s most dangerous city at the time. That’s what people kept saying. If you believed it, the place sounded like a war zone—chaos, vicious cops, danger at every corner. Tourists got nervous about visiting. The horror stories kept piling up, each one more terrible than the last. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/8/welcome-to-the-danger-zone/ Wed, 08 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/7/bananas/ Tuesday morning at Aldi. Someone’s picking through bananas to find a decent bunch. Underneath all that fruit: 140 kilos of cocaine. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/7/bananas/ Tue, 07 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/7/lizzie-velasquez/ I stumbled across Lizzie Velasquez through the worst of the internet. Someone had filmed her in high school and uploaded it with the title “The Ugliest Woman in the World.” It got millions of views. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/7/lizzie-velasquez/ Tue, 07 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/7/disney-underwear-but-make-it-anime/ Sailor Moon lingerie already happened. Some Japanese company realized that combining a beloved anime with underwear created an obvious market—there are enough horny nerds with disposable income to make it worthwhile. Now Disney’s gotten the same treatment. Bellemaison did a whole line for the Disney Fantasy Shop’s twentieth anniversary, each around forty euros. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/7/disney-underwear-but-make-it-anime/ Tue, 07 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/6/geekography/ Exey Panteleev’s Geekography series is exactly what the title suggests: models with code written across their bodies, photographed in studio light. CSS, Python, database queries—actual working code inked on skin. The first time I saw one, it registered as texture and pattern before it registered as code at all. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/6/geekography/ Mon, 06 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/6/landscape-rings/ Clive Roddy makes wooden rings with landscapes carved into them. Forests, mountains, little houses by the sea. You can buy them on Etsy for around 20 euros, which is the kind of price that doesn’t require you to overthink it. He does other work too—door hangers, wooden stag heads, some waves he apparently wants 200,000 euros for—but the rings are where the idea actually lands. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/6/landscape-rings/ Mon, 06 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/6/gifs-that-talk-back/ I remember when GIFs were internet garbage—the blinking text and rotating logos that made early websites unbearable. Then somewhere along the way they became the actual language of the web. A reaction captured in two seconds. A pop culture moment boiled down to its essential absurdity. The exact feeling you couldn’t articulate, transmitted without words. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/6/gifs-that-talk-back/ Mon, 06 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/6/big-city-rooftops/ I found this mixtape called Big City Rooftops and the title alone grabbed me—that specific quiet of a rooftop in a city at night, surrounded by millions of people but completely isolated. The songs fit that mood exactly. Electronic, nocturnal, slightly sad. Jamie xx, DENA, Boat Club—they make music that sounds like thinking by yourself in a tall building at three in the morning, staring at lights and working through thoughts you can’t name. Not club music. Just loneliness with a soundtrack. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/6/big-city-rooftops/ Mon, 06 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/5/that-yellow-house/ I’m drawn to LEGO sets based on actual franchises. Minecraft has its charm—infinite worlds, weird communities, those blocky clouds. But you can’t hold anything in Minecraft, and that matters. LEGO is different. You’re building something with your hands, and when they license something you care about, it stops being a toy and turns into a really satisfying puzzle. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/5/that-yellow-house/ Sun, 05 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/4/yami-ichi/ The internet’s strangled now. Corporations and governments hedge it in with regulations, borders, restrictions—always calling it safety while everything gets worse. YouTube blocks something. A network closes itself off. Your data gets monetized while you’re told it’s protected. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2014/1/4/yami-ichi/ Sat, 04 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/21/holding-the-line/ There was supposed to be a march for the Rote Flora. Thirty minutes in, they shut it down. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/21/holding-the-line/ Sat, 21 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/21/octopus-backpack/ Jennifer Mones is a California illustrator who makes and sells octopus backpacks on Etsy. They’re hand-stitched, made to your specifications—whatever colors, whatever materials you want—and she ships them to you. Around thirty bucks each. There’s something about discovering a genuinely well-designed object made by an actual person that makes you want to own it immediately. Not because you need one, but because someone looked at an octopus and a blank canvas of fabric and decided they belonged together. I keep thinking about ordering one. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/21/octopus-backpack/ Sat, 21 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/21/2013-in-the-distance/ 2013 sits in that weird zone where it feels both recent and ancient. Snowden’s leak, Boston, marriage equality suddenly looking inevitable instead of hypothetical. I was following the news but felt pretty detached from it all, like I was watching other people’s history reshuffle while I dealt with my own small chaos. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/21/2013-in-the-distance/ Sat, 21 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/21/she-photographs/ Lady Rose in Downton Abbey is what makes the show actually work for most people. Lily James plays her with such ease that you end up caring about completely invented conflicts. That’s the whole trick. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/21/she-photographs/ Sat, 21 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/21/offline/ Justine Sacco was a PR executive at InterActiveCorp. Before boarding a flight to South Africa, she tweeted a joke that wasn’t funny, the kind of edgy riff on racist stereotypes that feels clever for about five seconds. “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” Then she was offline for eight hours. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/21/offline/ Sat, 21 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/21/as-sexy-as-ever/ Miranda Kerr’s marriage to Orlando Bloom fell apart, and she responded by appearing in a Harper’s Bazaar photoshoot with Terry Richardson looking like she’d never had a bad day in her life. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/21/as-sexy-as-ever/ Sat, 21 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/20/lil-bub-by-the-fire/ Lil Bub by a fireplace. An hour of her just sitting there. She’s the cat who became famous years ago just by having an unusual face and existing on the internet. The attention never stopped, and eventually it became her whole thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/20/lil-bub-by-the-fire/ Fri, 20 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/20/the-bikini-was-the-point/ One more romantic comedy and I’m done. I actually mean it this time. Sit through another two hours of this stuff and I’m quitting films entirely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/20/the-bikini-was-the-point/ Fri, 20 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/17/when-everything-sucks/ When I’m really down—like genuinely bad, nothing-helps down—I watch videos of broken animals getting fixed. There’s something about it that works. An animal that was suffering, abandoned, hurt, and then someone shows up and gives a shit. They do the work. They stay with it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/17/when-everything-sucks/ Tue, 17 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/17/still-looking/ Nothing’s happening online today. I’m clicking through whatever, Star Trek playing in the background, and I realize I’m not finding anything worth my time. One video is fine. Some GIF is fine. An article with too much text. Nothing that makes you want to stay. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/17/still-looking/ Tue, 17 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/17/waffles-cant-jump/ Waffles on the frozen car. He’s got all the bravery in theory, but when it came time to jump, his body had other plans. Cold paws. Slick metal. The house looked warm and safe and not that far away. He’d crouch, gather himself, launch into it yelling what might have been Geronimo in cat, and something would fail. His nerve, his legs, his judgment. He’d slink back to the beginning and do it all over again. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/17/waffles-cant-jump/ Tue, 17 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/17/mario-again/ What I remember is Saturday mornings in pajamas, playing Super Mario World before everyone else woke up, cookies getting eaten, hot chocolate going cold on the side table. That’s the specific thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/17/mario-again/ Tue, 17 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/17/monster/ Eminem’s in an elevator, descending through the floors of his own damage. Each level is another ghost—another era, another thought he shouldn’t have had or said but couldn’t stop. The song’s called “Monster” and it’s about exactly that, the noise in the head that won’t quiet down. Rihanna’s there in the video, singing like she understands the specific shape of that kind of darkness. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/17/monster/ Tue, 17 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/mirroring-the-noise/ Airport terminals are where people forget they’re not alone. You’ve got someone three seats over screaming about quarterly reports into a phone, another guy FaceTiming his family at full volume, a woman having what sounds like a genuine crisis on a call, and everyone else just sitting there absorbing it like it’s part of the atmosphere. You can read your magazine or eat whatever overpriced thing you’ve decided is airport food, but the sound is there, unavoidable, inexplicable. Why does getting on a plane make people think they own the room? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/mirroring-the-noise/ Mon, 16 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/dream-detail/ Vivienne Mok’s photographs sit in that space where everything is sharp and nothing quite adds up. Clear detail but dreamlike. Real but unreachable. It’s the logic of memory—specific about some things, blurred about others, the way you remember faces you’ve never actually seen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/dream-detail/ Mon, 16 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/kate-moss-obviously/ Playboy dropped a behind-the-scenes video from their 60th anniversary shoot with Kate Moss. Obviously I watched it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/kate-moss-obviously/ Mon, 16 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/living-doll/ Elise Bahía calls her Norwegian fashion blog Living Doll. The name isn’t metaphorical—she’s built herself to look like one, completely committed to the aesthetic. Spray tan, makeup, the works. Everything locked in. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/living-doll/ Mon, 16 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/blogging-under-glass/ Kevin Rose built Digg—the site that was going to be bigger than Reddit—and then it wasn’t. Now he’s working on Tiny, which is his theory about making blogging feel more real. The idea is that you blur a webcam photo of yourself and your room, then use it as the background for every post you publish. So people reading what you wrote also see where you were sitting, what time of day it was, what the light and mood of the space suggests. Context as visual design. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/blogging-under-glass/ Mon, 16 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/eight-seconds/ I spent months thinking about Game of Thrones. Not reading the books—who has time—just wondering what would happen next, spinning out theories nobody asked for, checking my phone to see if anything had leaked. Then HBO dropped the season four trailer, and it was eight seconds long. Eight seconds. Long enough to maybe see a face, hear a line of dialogue, get the faintest suggestion of what the next hours might feel like. And then nothing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/eight-seconds/ Mon, 16 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/the-third-world-war/ During protests in Turin last November against a high-speed rail project, a woman kissed a cop’s helmet. Franco Maccari, head of Italy’s police union, filed a sexual harassment complaint. His defense was elegant in its absurdity: if a cop had kissed a female protester, the world would end. But a woman kissing a helmet? That required legal intervention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/the-third-world-war/ Mon, 16 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/hill-and-tatum-again/ Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are back for 22 Jump Street, which sends them undercover at a college this time instead of a high school. As if changing the setting is the only innovation required. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/hill-and-tatum-again/ Mon, 16 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/broadcast-hunger/ The Diva broadcasts at 8 PM every night on Afreeca and people pay to watch her eat. That’s all it is. She sits in front of a camera shoving food in her mouth—pizza, steak, pasta, whatever—talks about what she made while she’s eating, and viewers send her Star Balloons (digital tips, a few euros to fifty) to keep her going. She makes around a thousand euros a night. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/broadcast-hunger/ Mon, 16 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/rumour/ “Rumour” gets stuck in your head in a way that matters. Chlöe Howl, eighteen years old from the UK, apparently made waves with “No Strings” but this new track is the one that works for me. The whole thing’s built clean—there’s actual space in the mix, which seems small until you realize how much of what passes for pop just collapses into itself. Her voice is control without effort. No affected breathy thing, no overselling. Just there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/rumour/ Mon, 16 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/the-portable-life/ The 3DS and Vita sit in my bag like backup brains while everyone else decides which home console to mortgage their living room for. I’ve played hundreds of hours of Persona 4: Golden, Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, Animal Crossing—all on a screen the size of my palm, all portable, all mine. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/the-portable-life/ Mon, 16 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/nothing-looks-dumber-than-diving/ High divers are up there making the dumbest faces. They’re supposed to be graceful athletes, all control and precision, and the moment they commit, their face falls apart. Mouth hanging open, eyes panicked and distant. They look like your little brother on his first attempt at anything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/nothing-looks-dumber-than-diving/ Mon, 16 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/ålesund/ The wind in Ålesund during Christmas shopping season doesn’t care about your errands. I watched people get physically blown sideways down the street, bags flapping, and most of them were just laughing about it. They’d accepted defeat before they even left the house. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/ålesund/ Mon, 16 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/the-world-order-solution/ WORLD ORDER is a Japanese performance group that dances in flawlessly synchronized robot formations. They’ve been doing this for years—slick, mechanical, almost inhuman in their precision. I’ve seen videos of them in subway stations, hotel lobbies, atriums. Eerie and hypnotic. Someone described them once as “what the future looks like if it’s very depressed,” and that stuck. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/16/the-world-order-solution/ Mon, 16 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/15/friends-coming-back/ You see the headline and already know it won’t happen. Someone’s quoted a source. HBO Max is bringing it back. The cast is ready. Then by evening an actor’s denied it, the story collapses, and people move on. But a few months later the rumor surfaces again and people believe it again, and the cycle repeats. There’s something comfortable in it—the fantasy of return, going back to something you already know instead of taking a risk on anything new. We know exactly what Friends is. Why would we want uncertainty instead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/15/friends-coming-back/ Sun, 15 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/15/no-better/ Saturday morning and Lorde dropped something new. ’No Better’—I had it on before I was actually awake, kept it on through coffee and the rest of the morning. That’s the whole thing, really. One listen and it pulls you back. It’s the kind of song that makes a Saturday feel shaped, purposeful, even if you’re not doing anything special. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/15/no-better/ Sun, 15 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/15/what-moana-did/ I wore out the VHS of The Lion King as a kid. Watched it until the tape got grainy. Nothing Disney made after that ever came close—Pocahontas was fine, The Hunchback of Notre Dame had its moments, but there was this gap that just never filled. By the time I was a teenager they’d basically given up on animation anyway. The 3D films, the franchises, everything started looking like it was made by a committee, like the artistry wasn’t the point anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/15/what-moana-did/ Sun, 15 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/15/the-gap/ Jennifer Lawrence was on the cover of Flair magazine, except they’d photoshopped her down a dress size or more, smoothed her into something untrue. The before-and-afters circulated online, original next to the edit job. It was aggressive work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/15/the-gap/ Sun, 15 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/15/drunk-in-love/ Beyoncé’s got a new video for “Drunk in Love” and it’s exactly as sexual as you’d hope. She and Jay-Z on a beach, both of them soaking wet, not pretending to be anything other than hot and confident. Black and white. No metaphor, no distance. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/15/drunk-in-love/ Sun, 15 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/14/2013/ That year I watched Spring Breakers and didn’t know what I’d just seen—Korine doing his full fever-dream thing with pink and excess and violence, the kind of film that stays unresolved in your head for weeks. Then Star Trek Into Darkness, which at least tried to reach for something underneath the action. And Despicable Me 2, which just worked because it understood what made the first one stick. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/14/2013/ Sat, 14 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/14/heat/ Sure, I watch TV purely for the compelling characters, the intricate storytelling, the killer soundtracks. Definitely not because I’m anticipating nudity I can discuss in uncomfortable detail with everyone I see the next day. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/14/heat/ Sat, 14 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/14/nirvana-unplugged/ MTV Unplugged in New York, December 14, 1993. Kurt in a cardigan, the band acoustic, nothing between the songs and the listener. They played “About a Girl,” “Come as You Are,” “Pennyroyal Tea.” They covered Leadbelly, The Vaselines, Bowie. They didn’t play “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/14/nirvana-unplugged/ Sat, 14 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/14/this-remix-destroys/ The Social Experiment remix of M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls” is just bass and distortion the whole way through. No buildup, no mercy. You put it on and it’s destroying everything from the first second. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/14/this-remix-destroys/ Sat, 14 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/14/the-japan-episode/ I’m always late to things. Genuinely, perpetually late. So I didn’t discover Die Pixelmacher until long after their show had been cancelled, and not just the show—the entire network, ZDFkultur, basically got liquidated. By the time I found it, it was already gone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/14/the-japan-episode/ Sat, 14 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/13/whats-a-porn-bitch/ BRAVO ran a headline that week about Justin Bieber catching an STD from what they called a “porn bitch”—and they meant it straightforwardly, not as buried copy but their actual framing for teenagers. The article itself was exactly what you’d expect: tabloid garbage, medically nonsensical, using casual slurs about sex workers like that was just normal magazine language. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/13/whats-a-porn-bitch/ Fri, 13 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/13/the-victorias-secret-machine/ So I watched the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show highlights—the usual suspects parading in impossible heels while Taylor Swift and Fall Out Boy played in the background. It’s this peculiar machine they’ve built, very expensive, very deliberate. Models like Karlie Kloss and Cara Delevinne floating past in the kind of light that makes everything look better than it should. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/13/the-victorias-secret-machine/ Fri, 13 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/13/twelve-in-a-tin/ Christmas Dinner now comes in a tin—12 courses stacked in aluminum like some kind of holiday ration pack. Eggs and bacon, turkey, potatoes, everything else squeezed in, all the way down to pudding. Heat it up, eat it straight from the can if you want. You’re done in ten minutes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/13/twelve-in-a-tin/ Fri, 13 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/13/jukujo/ The Japanese have a specific word for older women in their adult industry: jukujo. There’s an entire category built around them, and it’s not failing. The industry gets fresh twenty-year-olds every year in bad schoolgirl costumes, and the jukujo women just keep working. They’re not marginalized, not treated as a novelty. They’re just there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/13/jukujo/ Fri, 13 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/13/when-it-gets-cold/ Winter hits different when you’re not sure where you’re sleeping. I notice it inside—the way the air gets dry, the light changes, everything feels more settled. But there’s another winter happening outside, and it’s not the same one. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/13/when-it-gets-cold/ Fri, 13 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/13/a-week-offline/ First thing every morning—before my eyes are even open—I’m reaching for the phone. Last thing at night, same thing. The screen glows in the dark and I’m scrolling through notifications like they’re oxygen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/13/a-week-offline/ Fri, 13 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/12/shells-science-fair/ Shell decided to throw a Science Slam in Berlin—one of those events where young researchers stand up and explain their work on energy and mobility to a general audience, all very forward-thinking and responsible. Perfect cover for a major oil company trying to convince two hundred people that they care about the planet. A guy showed up with a pseudonym, Paul von Ribbeck, and presented a machine he claimed would turn car exhaust into ingredients for beverages. When he activated it, the machine sprayed black liquid everywhere. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/12/shells-science-fair/ Thu, 12 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/12/stickers-against-the-right/ The Amadeu Antonio Foundation ran a sticker design competition called “Stickers Against the Right.” One of the winning designs comes available in fifty-packs, with proceeds funding their work against right-extremism, racism, and antisemitism in Germany. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/12/stickers-against-the-right/ Thu, 12 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/12/superstar/ Everyone’s wearing these chunky Nike Air Max in every color now, even guys in business suits. I get it. But my favorite shoe has always been the Adidas Superstar, and I’ve never needed to question that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/12/superstar/ Thu, 12 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/12/still-amy/ I was always Amy. Not Serena. The chaotic chosen one never made sense to me - I needed the smart girl with glasses, the one who actually read, who thought her way through things before she’d fight anything. It took years to stop being weird about identifying with her, or maybe to stop caring that it was weird. Sailor Moon was just comfort - the strange relief of characters as confused as you are, doing what had to be done. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/12/still-amy/ Thu, 12 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/12/second-screen/ New Year’s Eve felt like it needed something, some gathering point. That was the whole idea behind the Wii—make gaming a thing you did with other people in the room. The Wii U kept that dream but complicated it with the GamePad, a screen right there in your hands while everyone else stared at the TV. You could be looking at something nobody else could see. Hidden information. A separate world. For a designer, that’s genuinely interesting—asymmetrical play, where the rules shift depending on who you are and what you’re holding. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/12/second-screen/ Thu, 12 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/12/miranda-bare/ I’d probably seen Miranda Kerr naked more times than clothed by that point. After the Orlando Bloom split and that Justin Bieber thing, she seemed to be in a different place—less guarded, more just living in her skin. Harper’s Bazaar shot her, naturally with Terry Richardson, naturally with his white wall and that blank stare he specializes in. Nothing dramatic about any of it. Just straightforward, unguarded, moving on. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/12/miranda-bare/ Thu, 12 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/12/apartment-covers/ I’ve fallen down this thing with a group called Goose house—Japanese musicians who record covers in a Tokyo apartment. The setup is what it sounds like: friends, instruments, a camera, and they go through whatever pop songs they feel like. Perfume, AKB48, Utada Hikaru. Living room recordings, nothing precious about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/12/apartment-covers/ Thu, 12 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/11/britneys-back/ I watched the Perfume video knowing what it meant. After the conservatorship years, the court battles, the awful spectacle of her life becoming public trial, she was just making something on her own terms. Not performing recovery or justifying herself, not explaining to anyone—just choosing to make a video. The video itself is fine. It doesn’t matter. What mattered was the simple fact that she could do this now without it being examined for signs of distress or health, without needing to be defended or explained. Just work. That quiet kind of power. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/11/britneys-back/ Wed, 11 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/11/the-safer-story/ Pope Francis became TIME’s Person of the Year instead of Miley Cyrus, who was leading the online poll. Editors one, internet zero. He’d been Pope for nine months—came from Argentina in February when Benedict XVI stepped down—and he was already doing something different. Talking about the poor, saying he wouldn’t judge people for their sexuality. That wasn’t typical for the Vatican. People who’d written off institutional religion were paying attention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/11/the-safer-story/ Wed, 11 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/11/the-watched-road/ Joanne and Gareth Morgan from New Zealand actually rode motorcycles through North Korea. Not “wanted to,” actually did it. Somehow they arranged a tour, brought friends, and made it happen. There’s a VICE documentary from the trip—twenty minutes of footage showing exactly what you’d expect. Roads and buildings and people performing their assigned roles very convincingly. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/11/the-watched-road/ Wed, 11 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/11/winter-library/ I heard about some girls from New York who showed up half-naked at a university library one winter. They were sitting surrounded by economics textbooks while elderly people made shushing sounds. The whole thing was probably profound and completely stupid at once. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/11/winter-library/ Wed, 11 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/11/illegal-again/ India’s Supreme Court overturned a decade of decriminalization this week. Same-sex acts are illegal again. Fourteen years of something like freedom, gone. I spent the day checking the dates. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/11/illegal-again/ Wed, 11 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/11/the-asos-all-nighter/ ASOS threw an online house party in 2012. Jessie Ware headlining, Mount Kimbie, Is Tropical. They split it into virtual rooms—living room for the sets, kitchen for interviews, bathroom for a selfie competition—so you could feel like you were moving through an actual house while sitting alone at your computer, refreshing your browser. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/11/the-asos-all-nighter/ Wed, 11 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/11/hms-nipple-beads/ H&M’s selling a shirt with pearl beads right over the nipples. The listing calls it embroidery, which is true in the way that any euphemism is technically accurate. Twist the beads and they do exactly what they look like they’d do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/11/hms-nipple-beads/ Wed, 11 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/11/the-yoga-8/ The cylinder battery on the Yoga 8 was the thing that actually caught my attention. Moving it to a side module instead of spreading it through the chassis shifts where the weight sits—into your palm instead of across your fingers. That’s not huge until you hold the thing, and then it clicks. The folding stand does the same work, solving the problem of how your hands actually want to move instead of assuming one correct way to hold a tablet. Thin edges, laser-etched back to prevent scratches. It’s competent design—nothing flashy, just someone thinking hard about how your body and the object meet. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/11/the-yoga-8/ Wed, 11 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/11/behind-the-face/ Cara Delevingne was on the Vogue UK cover at twenty-one, shot by Alasdair McLellan for something called “The Face.” In the interview with Violet Henderson, she said she wanted to act. Even then you could see it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/11/behind-the-face/ Wed, 11 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/11/youtube-2013/ YouTube was starting to own culture in 2013. Not metaphorically—I mean it was genuinely forming what people thought was funny, what they watched late at night. PewDiePie screaming at video games, Jenna Marbles being unbearably charming, Epic Meal Time with their grotesque calorie counts. These weren’t side channels anymore. They were the thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/11/youtube-2013/ Wed, 11 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/10/nothing-escapes-us/ “Nothing Escapes Us”—that’s the actual motto the NSA printed on their spy satellite. An octopus wrapping around the Earth. They really did that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/10/nothing-escapes-us/ Tue, 10 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/10/cookie-monster-is-the-better-hobbit/ Somewhere online there’s a Sesame Street parody of The Hobbit where Cookie Monster plays the lead, and it’s genuinely better than the Peter Jackson film. Not in any technical sense—it’s obviously worse. But better in the only way that counts. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/10/cookie-monster-is-the-better-hobbit/ Tue, 10 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/10/hundred-euro-chocolate-dick/ A hundred euros for a chocolate penis from Spain. United Indecent Pleasures makes them—banana or strawberry filling, shrink-wrapped and ready to ship. That’s the actual asking price for this thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/10/hundred-euro-chocolate-dick/ Tue, 10 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/10/trying-anyway/ Catherine Polyanskaya’s answer to Russia’s state-sanctioned homophobia was a soap opera. Moonlight People is the first gay soap opera in Russia, based on real events, aimed at young people in a country where being queer gets you hated, avoided, and in the worst cases killed by authorities or hired thugs. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/10/trying-anyway/ Tue, 10 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/10/k-pops-year/ I found this list from Dazed & Confused ranking the year’s best Korean pop songs, and it was a wake-up call about how thoroughly I’d missed everything that was happening. T.O.P, EXO, G-Dragon, B.A.P—names that circulated with genuine reverence in comment sections I’d never scrolled through. The gap between this world and the one I lived in was staggering. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/10/k-pops-year/ Tue, 10 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/10/sunburned/ Australian television decided that a sun-tanned surfer selling brightly colored condoms was too much, so they banned the Four Seasons Condoms ad almost as soon as it aired. Too crude. Too forward. The regulatory board indexed it, which in Australia apparently means that’s it—no TV ever again. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/10/sunburned/ Tue, 10 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/10/krokodil/ I watched a TIME video about krokodil that looked like it was filmed in hell. Emanuele Satoli is the one who made it, which means he spent time in Russia actually filming people using the drug—documenting something you can’t really un-see. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/10/krokodil/ Tue, 10 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/10/the-spectacle/ You can feel something’s off with the 1998 Godzilla about ten minutes in. You don’t need to see the whole thing to know Roland Emmerich misunderstood the assignment. He turned the most iconic monster ever into a bloated lizard that moves like a guy in a suit—which it was, but somehow less convincing. The film arrived like a massive shrug. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/10/the-spectacle/ Tue, 10 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/9/what-perfume-knew/ I spent a summer in Tokyo and came back convinced everyone else was listening to the wrong music. Not wrong—late. Three steps behind Perfume. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/9/what-perfume-knew/ Mon, 09 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/9/bad-timing/ D E N A released “Bad Timing” recently and it’s been stuck in the rotation. Bulgarian artist, 29, signed to K7—one of those labels worth paying attention to. For the last couple years she’s been putting out these lean electronic tracks that don’t try very hard to win you over. Cash, Diamond Rings, Swimming Pools, Games, Thin Rope. Songs that work best when you’re not paying full attention, when they can just sit in your space and do their thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/9/bad-timing/ Mon, 09 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/9/matter-of-fact/ Davey Wavey has this video where he explains how gay people have sex, and what gets you is how unstriking it all is. No shame, no mystery, no performance. Just straightforward description of what bodies do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/9/matter-of-fact/ Mon, 09 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/9/face-swaps/ The internet and a cracked copy of Photoshop are a dangerous combination, and not in a good way. For years amateur manipulators have been flooding websites with the worst possible content: fake celebrity nudes, shitty text overlays ruining perfectly decent photographs, absurdly inflated muscles, vanished waists, bigger chests, clearer skin, longer legs—all of it executed with the sensitivity of a sledgehammer. It’s almost universally terrible. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/9/face-swaps/ Mon, 09 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/9/cops-off-campus/ Students at the University of London occupied a building to stop the university from taking private investment money and closing the student union. Police cleared them out. Some students got hit. Some got arrested. More action’s planned. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/9/cops-off-campus/ Mon, 09 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/9/once-you-know/ In Berlin, there’s talk of opening the first legal marijuana shop in Kreuzberg, and in the circles I run in, that’s mostly good news. Weed, Club Mate by the liter, pirated TV shows—that’s just what happens in student flats. Nobody questions it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/9/once-you-know/ Mon, 09 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/9/late-night-hamburg/ Hamburg at night in the rain. Sasha Grey and Mary Ocher in a car driving through it, talking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/9/late-night-hamburg/ Mon, 09 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/9/ugly-cats/ The internet runs on cute cats. Symmetrical faces, strategic angles, perfect lighting. The formula never changes—cute cat, everyone stops scrolling. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/9/ugly-cats/ Mon, 09 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/9/a-good-bieber-song/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/9/a-good-bieber-song/ Mon, 09 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/8/simpsons-converse/ Converse dropped Simpsons Chuck Taylors. Yellow heads with the red mouth logo, hitting stores in Tokyo. It feels inevitable, honestly. The Simpsons had a run as something that was actually funny, and when that ended it just became a brand like anything else. I’d probably want these shoes if I were younger, back when wearing something branded felt like a statement of taste rather than just existing. Now they’re just merchandise—another nostalgic product line, another way to buy your childhood back from a shoe company. There’s something hollow about watching something you loved become pure commodity. The show was genuinely funny once. That fact matters less than I’d like it to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/8/simpsons-converse/ Sun, 08 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/8/last-resort/ Mykayla Comstock is eight years old with leukemia, and her family in Oregon decided that cannabis was her best shot at survival. Not just painkillers—the actual cure. VICE documented it in a series called “Stoned Kids,” and it’s the kind of thing that sits between two truths you can’t reconcile. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/8/last-resort/ Sun, 08 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/8/saturday/ Rebecca Black’s “Friday” was the kind of viral that consumed everything around it. People hated it, which meant they couldn’t stop listening to it, which meant she was suddenly famous. She was a kid. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/8/saturday/ Sun, 08 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/8/for-a-girl/ “You skate amazing for a girl.” https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/8/for-a-girl/ Sun, 08 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/6/inside-a-pokéball/ There’s this question I’ve been sitting with for fifteen years: what’s inside a Pokéball? Are the creatures compressed into the sphere? Stored as data? Do the balls work like tiny black holes that just catch and release on command? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/6/inside-a-pokéball/ Fri, 06 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/6/kate-on-a-board/ Kate Moss is back in circulation. The Playboy appearance made headlines, but really she’s always been this constant in culture - the style icon who’s also a beautiful disaster, someone who makes her own chaos look intentional. Nick Thomm made a skateboard deck with her face on it, which is the right idea before you even see the thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/6/kate-on-a-board/ Fri, 06 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/6/marterias-kids/ Marteria’s “Kids (2 Finger an den Kopf)” is him cruising through Berlin with a bunch of kids who just want to make this two-finger gesture at the camera. It’s deliberately stupid, which is the whole thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/6/marterias-kids/ Fri, 06 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/6/guys-still-dont-get-it/ I watch it happen on the street sometimes. A woman walks by and some guy yells something—’Hey gorgeous’ or ’Nice legs’ or something actually awful that I’m not going to repeat. In his head, he’s being bold, flirting, making a move. In hers, he’s just some asshole interrupting her day with unsolicited sexual commentary. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/6/guys-still-dont-get-it/ Fri, 06 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/6/the-gates-dont-hold/ IMG decided fashion bloggers had become a liability. This was around 2013. Catherine Bennett, their senior VP, told the Wall Street Journal that Fashion Week had turned into a zoo—it used to be for established designers showing collections to serious media and buyers, now it was street photographers and Instagram people and fans packed into the Lincoln Center. Next year they’d go back to being exclusive. Real connections to fashion only. Everyone else: out. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/6/the-gates-dont-hold/ Fri, 06 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/6/how-beautiful-shanghai-is/ A guy posted a photo on Reddit of his Shanghai hotel room view. Brown air completely obscuring the next building over. Not some exotic poison gas attack—just the regular atmosphere loaded with industrial pollution. I had this idea about visiting China someday, maybe multiple times. Just voluntarily moved that dream way further back. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/6/how-beautiful-shanghai-is/ Fri, 06 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/6/the-real-santa/ I found this Santa costume on Amazon and couldn’t look away. Not because it’s beautiful or clever. Because it’s actually disturbing. The proportions are wrong, the grin sits at a bad angle under the beard, the plastic has that sheen where light doesn’t reflect right. Your brain registers it immediately: this is not safe. This is watching you. This is not what Christmas pretends to be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/6/the-real-santa/ Fri, 06 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/6/just-eat-the-food/ There’s this moment when someone orders something that looks perfect, and before anyone picks up their fork, out comes the phone. The food cooling while they hunt for the right angle, the right light, the right filter. I do it constantly, guilty as anyone. Then I’m eating something lukewarm, not really tasting it, because I’m composing a caption in my head. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/6/just-eat-the-food/ Fri, 06 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/6/instant-crush/ Daft Punk’s back with a video for “Instant Crush.” Julian Casablancas is in a museum with two robot heads, and they’re in love with a plastic woman. By the end, everything’s on fire. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/6/instant-crush/ Fri, 06 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/6/in-the-street/ I have no idea what Milk Made Magazine is, but they gave a model named Leila Spilman to five photographers and had each one shoot her however they wanted. The whole concept is just another way to build portfolios, let people see the same subject through different eyes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/6/in-the-street/ Fri, 06 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/6/tropico/ Lana Del Rey made a short film called Tropico. Thirty minutes. She cast herself as Eve—the whole biblical narrative thing—and wrote the script. The story runs through three chapters from the Garden of Eden to contemporary Los Angeles, which explains itself if you know her sensibility. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/6/tropico/ Fri, 06 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/5/that-close-to-europe/ Hundreds of thousands filling Independence Square in Kiev, tents going up despite the ban, students ditching classes to camp out on the concrete. Yanukovych killed the EU deal under Russian pressure—not delayed it, killed it—and something in the younger generation woke up all at once. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/5/that-close-to-europe/ Thu, 05 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/5/chocolate-fries/ Lotteria, this Japanese fast-food chain, started offering chocolate sauce for dipping fries. Sounds stupid until you actually think about it—salt and sweet together isn’t some new discovery. Japan just commits to stuff like this in a way most places don’t. Corn on pizza. Mentaiko mayo. Some of it fails, some of it becomes something you crave. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/5/chocolate-fries/ Thu, 05 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/5/home-alone-every-december/ I watch Home Alone every December without fail. The first one, and usually the second, but I stop there. The others don’t count. It’s pure habit at this point, the way some people drink eggnog or drive around looking at Christmas lights. Just something that happens. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/5/home-alone-every-december/ Thu, 05 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/5/mandela/ I heard Mandela died the way most people do these days—on my phone, between other notifications. Ninety-five, pneumonia. The BBC had its template ready. Twenty-seven years in prison for fighting apartheid, became president, spent his later decades becoming a symbol. By then his face was already more famous than his actual life. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/5/mandela/ Thu, 05 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/5/on-the-record/ I’ve done it plenty of times. Wine, sandwich, streaming some free porn—RedTube, Pornhub, whatever’s fastest to load. You’re just scrolling for something worth watching, and most of it’s garbage. Bad lighting, weird dialogue, setup that makes no sense. You’re skipping through it, looking for the thirty seconds that might actually do something for you. Then you close it and move on. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/5/on-the-record/ Thu, 05 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/5/the-expensive-photograph/ Peter Clatworthy from Nottingham bought an Xbox One on eBay for 550 euros. The seller shipped him a photograph instead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/5/the-expensive-photograph/ Thu, 05 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/5/2013s-women/ In 2013, I couldn’t help but notice women everywhere. Malala Yousafzai at the UN, Jennifer Lawrence giving interviews, Michelle Obama at everything—they had something to say and actual platforms to say it from. For a moment it felt like something was shifting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/5/2013s-women/ Thu, 05 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/5/support-your-local/ Marx, late Friday nights. Douglas Greed on vocals with Nagler on drums, and the usual rotation of local DJs: Cris Urban, Alexander Lorz, Malte Seddig, Spanks, Vonda7, Modig. If you went to clubs in Berlin you knew these names. Not because they were famous, just because they were there every week building whatever that night was. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/5/support-your-local/ Thu, 05 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/5/paul-walker/ The Fast & Furious cast posted a tribute video for Paul Walker set to P. Diddy’s “Coming Home,” and it’s brutal in how simple it is. Just clips of him working, being present, doing the job he was there to do. The song is built for this—slow and mournful at first, then into something almost like acceptance. No narration. No ceremony. Just people who worked together saying goodbye. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/5/paul-walker/ Thu, 05 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/5/just-the-glow/ Maternity photos do something. Chelsea Salmon, Steve Shaw’s lens, all soft focus and inevitability. I think of Steffen, who once fell apart in my living room because his condom split. His girlfriend’s image in one hand. He was panicking but also something else—like the future had already decided itself and he was just catching up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/5/just-the-glow/ Thu, 05 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/4/80000-pieces/ I recognize obsession when I see it. Blake Baer and Jack Bittner, both teenagers, decided to build an entire Hobbit diorama using eighty thousand LEGO pieces. The number itself is what stops you—not a thousand, eighty thousand. You start calculating what that means: hours, organized bricks covering tables, that much of your brain space occupied by construction and planning. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/4/80000-pieces/ Wed, 04 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/4/giorgio-moroder-remixed-haim/ I was deep into HAIM when the Giorgio Moroder remix of ’Forever’ showed up. He synthesized the life out of it, basically—the song becomes something from another decade, another world. It works. I played it too many times. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/4/giorgio-moroder-remixed-haim/ Wed, 04 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/4/vapecube/ A vaping lounge in the US turned old GameCubes into water pipes and started calling them VapeCubes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/4/vapecube/ Wed, 04 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/4/alejandra-guilmant/ Kate Moss is in the new Playboy, everyone’s losing their mind, which okay, I get it. But the real find is deeper in the magazine—Alejandra Guilmant. I have absolutely no idea who she is, where she’s from, how old she is, nothing. I’m just looking at David Bellemere’s photographs and something’s got me hooked enough that I’m going to spend today trying to assemble whatever the internet has on her, which is probably almost nothing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/4/alejandra-guilmant/ Wed, 04 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/4/moss-and-the-shirt/ Kate Moss turned 39 and decided Playboy’s 60th birthday was the moment to get naked in front of cameras. The photographs happened. Everyone stopped and looked. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/4/moss-and-the-shirt/ Wed, 04 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/4/the-video-crashed/ Lorde just showed up one day and changed what pop music sounded like. When the “Team” video hit, the servers crashed trying to handle the traffic—and the funny thing is that felt right somehow. She was already everywhere by then, this teenager from New Zealand who’d figured out something most artists spend their whole career trying to understand: how to be completely herself without apology or compromise. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/4/the-video-crashed/ Wed, 04 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/4/that-california-light/ The weather hit different the second you landed. Back home they were bracing for some storm that would knock everything out for a day. Here it was just sun and clear sky. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/4/that-california-light/ Wed, 04 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/4/the-year-in-one-video/ Daniel Kim’s Pop Danthology came out, which is how I catch up on the year in pop music. He takes every big song that blew up—Selena Gomez, Miley Cyrus, the Harlem Shake, whatever else—and stitches them together into one continuous track that somehow flows instead of falling apart into noise. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/4/the-year-in-one-video/ Wed, 04 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/3/what-actually-happened/ I watched a Charlie Brooker documentary recently called “How Videogames Changed the World.” What struck me was how cleanly it laid out the turning point. Games went from toys to scapegoats, and somewhere in between everyone got scared. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/3/what-actually-happened/ Tue, 03 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/3/the-elephants-garden/ Felix Colgrave made this video called “The Elephant’s Garden,” and you’d need to be on absolutely everything just to survive watching it. Bath salts and MDMA and glitter mixed with hashish and desomorphine and absinthe, throw in some cocaine and fizzy powder and whatever else exists, and only then might you be approaching the right headspace to process what’s actually on screen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/3/the-elephants-garden/ Tue, 03 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/3/bruce-wayne-do-santos/ A photographer collective in Rio found a man in a homemade Batman suit. Not a joke costume—actual fabric, dye, effort. He calls himself Bruce Wayne Do Santos and walks the neighborhood at night. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/3/bruce-wayne-do-santos/ Tue, 03 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/3/inverted-faces/ Flip someone’s eyes and mouth upside down and your brain doesn’t know what to do with it. Freaking News ran a series doing exactly this to famous faces—Brad Pitt, Jessica Simpson, Salma Hayek—and the results are predictably unsettling. They don’t look monstrous. Just wrong in a way that’s hard to articulate. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/3/inverted-faces/ Tue, 03 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/3/the-silence-in-pyongyang/ The silence in Pyongyang is what gets you. Not the absence of sound—actual silence, the unmistakable kind. No screaming, no rushed footsteps, no chaos. Just apartment blocks with planted balconies and French doors, amusement parks, and this suffocating quiet that makes the whole place feel like a set, not a city. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/3/the-silence-in-pyongyang/ Tue, 03 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/3/status/ Nate Hill’s hobby is wearing naked women as scarves. He photographs it. Suit, professional lighting, Instagram. His reasoning: it demonstrates his status and power. That’s his actual explanation. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/3/status/ Tue, 03 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/3/the-actual-kiss/ Two people kiss with their eyes closed. That’s the entire content of Anne Sorrentino’s videos on the subject. No framing, no reason, no music underneath. Just the fact of it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/3/the-actual-kiss/ Tue, 03 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/3/melon-pan-wins/ Somewhere over Switzerland, a guy in skydiving gear is falling through the air with nothing but his beloved manga body pillow. That’s Melon pan—Swiss, completely shameless, and apparently the world’s greatest otaku if you ask the Japanese internet. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/3/melon-pan-wins/ Tue, 03 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/3/japans-scariest-tire-ad/ Night on an empty road, snowing. The kind of conditions where winter tires matter. Then a white figure appears on the asphalt. Just standing there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/3/japans-scariest-tire-ad/ Tue, 03 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/3/never-of-himself/ The first good decision anyone made about Terry Richardson’s DIESEL calendar was not putting Terry Richardson in it. Instead: Charlotte Carey, Stella Maxwell, Karley Sciortino—the Slutever blogger. They stripped down for the camera and he photographed them, and DIESEL turned it into a calendar because that’s apparently what jeans companies do now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/3/never-of-himself/ Tue, 03 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/3/that-matters/ Just finished watching Justin Bieber’s “That Matters” and I can’t tell if I’m watching a music video or a checklist. Shirtless guy, hand in his crotch, stars and sky and you’re the only thing that matters. It’s so completely built from clichés that I started wondering if maybe it’s supposed to be funny and I’m missing something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/3/that-matters/ Tue, 03 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/3/gentrification/ Harry G—Bavarian comedian who just says obvious things out loud—was talking about gentrification. Double-edged sword, he called it. He’s right. I’ve watched it happen to places I knew. Neighborhoods improve, rents climb, old character drains out. Everyone wants you to pick a team, but it doesn’t work like that. The dive bar was genuinely great. The coffee shop that replaced it is fine. Both are true. It’s everywhere—Berlin, Munich, my city. You mourn and move. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/3/gentrification/ Tue, 03 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/2/rebecca-hates-friday/ Rebecca Black’s “Friday” is one of those songs that happened to the internet like a meteor. She was 13. The auto-tune was thick as a wall. The lyrics read like someone had described the concept of “a day of the week” to an alien who then tried to write a pop song based on that description alone. Within a week, everyone had an opinion, and the opinion was: this is the worst thing ever. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/2/rebecca-hates-friday/ Mon, 02 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/2/thirty-minutes/ There’s a Garfield lamp somewhere in the Amazon warehouse, and you want it. You wanted it the moment you saw it—that’s how this works. You order it at two in the afternoon, and immediately you’ve forgotten you ordered it. Your brain is already three days from now, in the moment you open the box, that brief hit of satisfaction when something tangible arrives. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/2/thirty-minutes/ Mon, 02 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/2/germanys-ps4-launch/ The PlayStation 4 hit Germany on Friday and it was complete chaos. After six years—six fucking years of waiting while everyone else played—people could finally walk into a store and buy one. Of course they lost their minds. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/2/germanys-ps4-launch/ Mon, 02 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/2/toaster-stephen/ 4chan was always the internet’s sewer, and if there was a lower way to get attention, someone would try it. So when a 20-year-old named Stephen decided to burn himself to death on a livestream in front of a few hundred people, it felt less like a shock and more like the logical end of a certain trajectory. This was 2012, on Chateen—a small streaming platform. He logged in as LOLDoge, downed vodka and pills, set his dorm room on fire, and posted about it while the smoke got thicker. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/2/toaster-stephen/ Mon, 02 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/2/free-the-nipple/ Lina Esco got sick of the contradiction: American films will show you gore, weapons, violence, bodies in pieces—but actual human flesh in a context that doesn’t involve someone dying, and the whole system shuts down. Parents freak. Networks apologize. It becomes a scandal. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/2/free-the-nipple/ Mon, 02 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/2/boiler-room/ A basement near Friedrichshain, 3 AM, the bass running through my chest. I understood for maybe five minutes why people romanticize Berlin nightlife. Then the DJ switched tracks, the moment fractured, and I was just another person in a crowd again, sweating, half-deaf. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/2/boiler-room/ Mon, 02 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/2/jewelry-season/ I’ve never been the jewelry type. Chains, rings, bracelets—I’ve always felt more comfortable without them, the weight, the attention they ask for. But Kate Bogucharskaia’s work changed something. In Bill Kidd’s photographs of her, winter jewelry becomes the thing that warms you, not your coat. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/2/jewelry-season/ Mon, 02 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/2/the-threshold/ Germany’s grand coalition announced a victory: cosmetic surgery for minors is banned without medical justification. CDU and SPD shaking hands over finally protecting teenagers from false beauty standards. You’d think they’d cured something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/2/the-threshold/ Mon, 02 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/2/kate-moss-still/ Kate Moss is on the new Playboy cover. She’s 39, the magazine’s hitting its 60th anniversary, and the photograph is drenched in retouching—which is just standard now. Every woman past a certain age gets digitally rebuilt, the whole apparatus pretending that this is flattery instead of erasure. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/2/kate-moss-still/ Mon, 02 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/2/bangkok-in-the-middle-of-it/ There’s this weird moment when you see a place you know on the news, except it’s not the version you remember. Bangkok in early December 2013 looked like that—the Government House area was tear gas and water cannons and people throwing stones, and somewhere in the same city the sky bars were still open, still full of tourists rotating slowly above the chaos. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/2/bangkok-in-the-middle-of-it/ Mon, 02 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/2/coffin-erotica/ A Polish casket manufacturer called Lindner has been selling erotic calendars for five years. Twelve women, scantily clad, arranged on wooden boxes. That’s it. Someone decided to make this, and apparently someone else decided to buy it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/2/coffin-erotica/ Mon, 02 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/1/pissing-on-power/ There’s something both brilliant and hollow about Femen’s decision to literally piss on Yanukovych’s portrait outside the Ukrainian embassy in Paris. While over 100,000 people were back home getting tear-gassed in the streets for refusing to accept the status quo, here was a feminist activist group finding its own language: crude, defiant, impossible to ignore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/1/pissing-on-power/ Sun, 01 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/1/rest-in-peace-paul-walker/ Paul Walker died in a car crash in California on a Saturday afternoon. He was 40. He was a passenger in a red Porsche that hit a lamp post and a tree at high speed, and the car caught fire. His friend, who was driving, died too. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/1/rest-in-peace-paul-walker/ Sun, 01 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/1/pokémon-tales/ I can’t shake Pokémon no matter what’s going on in my life. You think you grow out of it, move on to cooler things, but that feeling from showing off your Level-100 Charizard at school—that credibility, that stupid pride—never actually disappears. You just stop mentioning it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/1/pokémon-tales/ Sun, 01 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/1/butter-grater/ Every time I butter toast, I’m basically excavating a crater into the bread before the butter melts. The cold stick doesn’t spread, it destroys. You have to wait for it to soften or work it like you’re angry at the bread, which I guess I am by that point in the morning. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/1/butter-grater/ Sun, 01 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/1/gaga-takes-music-station/ Lady Gaga showed up on Music Station and looked completely at home. Japan’s pop scene is hypnotic in a way—everyone perfectly synchronized, the spectacle just constantly on. Gaga gets it. She fit into that world like she’d been there the whole time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/1/gaga-takes-music-station/ Sun, 01 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/1/karen-gillan-forever/ Patrick Ballesteros drew this image of Doctor Who characters playing hide and seek with a Weeping Angel, which is funny if you know the show—that game normally ends with everyone dead or displaced in time or whatever horror the Weeping Angels have planned. But in the Tardis, locked away from the real world, it’s just silly fun. I’d just started season six when I ran across this, and I was beginning to understand why everyone cared so much about the show. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/12/1/karen-gillan-forever/ Sun, 01 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/29/burning-decks/ Jonathan and Jason Bastian set their skateboards on fire and then rode them. Not a stunt where they jump off—actual tricks on flaming boards, carves and whatever else you do when you’re committed to the bit. Someone filmed it at 2000fps, which means you get the slow-motion ballet of flames against grip tape, the shimmer of heat, two guys keeping their balance while their boards actively burn. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/29/burning-decks/ Fri, 29 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/29/the-landfill/ Seven thousand five hundred bitcoins. Bought for a few dollars in 2009. Stored on a hard drive in 2013 and tossed into a Welsh landfill because James Howells needed the space. Worth nearly five million euros today. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/29/the-landfill/ Fri, 29 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/29/sketches-for-skeletons/ Walked into a store and there were XXS clothes everywhere. Sizes so small they’re basically for nobody real. Then I realized: no, they’re for exactly one body. Someone sketched a specific figure—proportions set a certain way, narrow and angular, a certain height—and the dress was built to fit that sketch. That’s the customer. That theoretical ideal. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/29/sketches-for-skeletons/ Fri, 29 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/29/customer-service/ There’s a café in Akihabara where the staff beats you. Actually beats you—throws you against walls, hits you while you’re trying to drink your coffee. They’re harder on the men. The women seem to enjoy it, which has its own appeal. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/29/customer-service/ Fri, 29 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/29/gabriels-memory/ Gabriel made an ARD appearance pushing data retention—the idea that governments should collect everyone’s metadata indefinitely, just in case. To make it sound reasonable, he reached for Norway’s experience with the 2011 Breivik shooting. Seventy-seven people dead, mostly teenagers at a camp. He claimed that data retention helped them catch the killer fast. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/29/gabriels-memory/ Fri, 29 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/29/what-sofles-knows/ Watched a timelapse of Sofles, an Australian street artist, and it was like seeing someone explain something you’d been trying to figure out wrong for years. The hand moves like it’s done this ten thousand times. The line weight never wavers. No hesitation. No moment where the spray can shakes because something went wrong. It’s not even trying anymore—it’s just what happens when you know. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/29/what-sofles-knows/ Fri, 29 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/29/black-friday/ Black Friday in America is organized violence. After Thanksgiving, when people are still full and drunk, the stores open and something switches. They shoot each other for parking spots. They trample strangers for toys. They run each other over. Four dead, sixty-seven injured over the past seven years, according to the website keeping count. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/29/black-friday/ Fri, 29 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/29/carponizer/ Ronny showed me a calendar called Carponizer. Twelve women, completely naked, posed with carp in different lake settings. You can grab it on Amazon for about twenty euros. The fish in the photos look genuinely bewildered by the whole arrangement, which somehow makes it better. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/29/carponizer/ Fri, 29 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/29/emily-ratajkowski/ I saw those Kate Upton beach photos making the rounds and they just didn’t register. Hollow. I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to feel looking at them. Then Tony Duran’s shoot with Emily Ratajkowski hit and it was a completely different thing. There’s a confidence in how he photographed her—the angles, her body positioned without apology, her presence sharp. She looks like she knew exactly what was happening and didn’t care if anyone thought it was too much. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/29/emily-ratajkowski/ Fri, 29 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/29/everything-comes-from-reddit/ Everything viral on the internet basically comes from Reddit. I don’t mean it’s inspired by Reddit or references Reddit—I mean that’s where it starts. The cat videos, the fast-food kitchen photos, the celebrity interviews that news outlets pretend they discovered—it’s all funneled through that site first. BuzzFeed wouldn’t have anything to write about without Reddit. Mainstream news outlets constantly mine it. We all do it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/29/everything-comes-from-reddit/ Fri, 29 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/27/eminems-back/ I don’t have Eminem posters on my wall anymore. You probably don’t either. But here he is again, still calling himself Rap God, with a new video that’s just kind of unsexy and weird in a way that doesn’t quite land. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/27/eminems-back/ Wed, 27 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/27/the-best-advertising/ If someone told me I could only watch one type of visual content for the rest of my life, it would be Japanese commercials. Hands down. You watch these spots and half the time you genuinely don’t know what’s happening, and then the last frame just hits you with a product that you had absolutely no idea existed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/27/the-best-advertising/ Wed, 27 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/27/dead-whale-explodes/ I’m scrolling through the usual garbage—cat videos, broken YouTube links, whatever—when this appears. A dead whale washed up on the Faroe Islands, so decomposed it barely looked like a whale anymore, just this massive bloated thing. Some guy decides he’s going to cut it open, see what’s inside. Probably thought he’d find some organs worth looking at. The whale had been sitting there for months, building pressure from its own decay, and the second his knife goes through the skin, the whole thing goes. Explodes. Everything comes out. There’s a video. I watched it. I shouldn’t have. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/27/dead-whale-explodes/ Wed, 27 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/27/the-i-d-alphabet/ VICE absorbed i-D the way things get absorbed now—without ceremony, and then they made a video about it. The smart move. You don’t announce a media consolidation with a press release. You make something that looks like an ad: models spelling the alphabet in clothes that are so perfectly put together you forget what a strange thing they’re actually doing. It’s probably the best way to announce you’ve acquired something. Keep the thing people care about—the styling, the photography, the eye—and just keep doing it, maybe better. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/27/the-i-d-alphabet/ Wed, 27 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/26/thin-thinner/ All that talk about fashion needing realistic bodies and more diversity didn’t land. Victoria’s Secret had their New York show and the runways were the same skeletal parade—models so thin you could count their ribs, wrapped in nothing but minimal bikinis. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/26/thin-thinner/ Tue, 26 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/25/bound-3/ The ’Bound 2’ video was exactly as uncomfortable as you’d imagine—Kim Kardashian staring at the camera while Kanye convinced himself he’s a genius. James Franco and Seth Rogen decided to fix it. They made their own version called ’Bound 3’ on a film set and somehow nailed what the original completely missed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/25/bound-3/ Mon, 25 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/25/just-another-night/ Can’t pretend I got into Icona Pop for the right reasons. Their new track “Just Another Night” is genuinely good—ballad-pop hybrid that works—but that’s not why I’m listening. Aino Jawoja is just one of those people. You look at her and the questions stop. Years ago when “I Love It” was everywhere, same thing. At least that song was real. Now they’re back with something solid, so I’ve got better justification. But the actual reason I’m listening hasn’t changed. Is it shallow? Yeah. Does it matter? No. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/25/just-another-night/ Mon, 25 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/25/kanye-and-kims-talk-show/ I’ve watched this SNL bit at least five times. Kanye and Kim in their own morning show—it shouldn’t be funny but it is. The setup alone is stupid enough, but the real joke is the casting. They bring out an actual celebrity as their first guest, someone who’s completely unprepared, and watching them realize what’s happening is perfect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/25/kanye-and-kims-talk-show/ Mon, 25 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/25/shibuya-again/ Shibuya at night. That’s the one that gets me. I’ve probably seen a hundred photos of that crossing—packed with bodies, neon spilling onto wet pavement, everyone moving through their own direction. Every time I see one, I think about standing in the middle of it on a Saturday, around 11 PM, just watching. Not trying to get anywhere. Just standing there while the crowd moved around me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/25/shibuya-again/ Mon, 25 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/25/so-thats-how/ Watched some instructional video about jerking off and realized I’d been doing it wrong for years. Not wrong like it didn’t feel good, but wrong like there’s an actual better way. Technique matters—different grips, angles, rhythm depending on what you’re working with. The whole thing was presented in crude cartoons that somehow made it less sexy and more useful, like a manual for assembling furniture except the furniture is your own cock. The absurdity of needing illustrated instructions for this stuck with me, but then again most people figure it out alone and end up doing whatever works, not what works best. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/25/so-thats-how/ Mon, 25 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/24/vundas/ There’s a photoshopped bird-dog I keep looking at. Wings, fur, that dumb dog face. You know it’s Photoshop, know it’ll never exist, but for a second you’re genuinely considering it—what it would be like to own a flying dog, barking at the mailman from the roof. Stupid and pointless and somehow perfect. I’d name mine Chansi. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/24/vundas/ Sun, 24 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/24/somewhere-to-go/ You think about it sometimes, right before sleep. Where would you actually go if it happened right now. Not the fantasy version—the real panicked version where you have maybe five minutes and you’re deciding between your apartment and the road. Most people don’t answer that question seriously. This house makes you not have to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/24/somewhere-to-go/ Sun, 24 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/23/seoul-surgery/ I saw a photo from Seoul once, someone I’d been following online. She’d had the surgery—double eyelids, a reshaped nose—and posted the before-and-after like it was nothing. One in five women in that city get cosmetic procedures done. Not because they’re vain, but because the job market prices beauty in. Because dating requires meeting someone’s template. The pressure is absolute. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/23/seoul-surgery/ Sat, 23 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/23/nymphomaniac/ By the time Nymphomaniac came around, von Trier had already made Antichrist and Melancholia and Dogville, so you basically knew what he was going to do with a film structured around a woman’s sexual compulsion. Charlotte Gainsbourg plays a woman found beaten in an alley, and the entire film is her confession to a stranger - chapters of her life, her desire, the compulsive machinery of how it actually works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/23/nymphomaniac/ Sat, 23 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/22/stop-sending-me-dick-pics/ Some Krautchan user made a thread asking if I’d “deliver,” which I still don’t know what that means. Doesn’t really matter though - now I’m getting unsolicited dick pictures from random guys across Germany who apparently think that’s going to work on me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/22/stop-sending-me-dick-pics/ Fri, 22 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/22/hobby-alcoholics/ I need podcasts when I’m traveling. Driving, flying, sitting in airports waiting for the delayed connection—without something in my ears I’ll start talking to myself out loud, which is still somehow weird even in a city like Berlin where people are generally doing stranger things. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/22/hobby-alcoholics/ Fri, 22 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/22/the-happy-loop/ Pharrell’s “Happy” became one of those songs that’s everywhere before you really notice it happening. The 24-hour video was part of that: an endless loop of people dancing, smiling, repeating the same moment over and over until it starts to feel less like a song and more like a spell. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/22/the-happy-loop/ Fri, 22 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/22/the-happy-hour-virus/ Some website called Happy Hour Virus generates fake computer errors—Blue Screen of Death, Kernel Panic, all the classics. You pull one up on screen, show your boss, tell them your computer’s dead, and leave. That’s the whole thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/22/the-happy-hour-virus/ Fri, 22 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/21/san-ciscos-awkward/ San Cisco’s “Awkward” is the worst kind of earworm—the kind that doesn’t ask permission. The 2011 track buries itself in your skull with a stupidly effective hook and doesn’t leave. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/21/san-ciscos-awkward/ Thu, 21 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/21/casper/ I’ve been hearing “Jambalaya” on repeat. It’s off Hinterland, and like everything Casper makes, it doesn’t waste time. The song moves you through something like a party, but the actual point is simple: about being singular as an artist, about what sets you apart. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/21/casper/ Thu, 21 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/21/unconditionally/ The video for Katy Perry’s “Unconditionally” is basically what happens when you throw a massive budget at someone’s breakup. She’s dancing in the snow in Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana, Wes Gordon—the kind of clothes that cost more than my first car, which is funny because the song is about heartbreak and wanting someone without conditions, without all the stuff. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/21/unconditionally/ Thu, 21 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/21/royals-covered/ The Florida State AcaBelles covered Lorde’s “Royals” and it’s one of those covers that actually works. The song had been everywhere in the States by that point, burned into everyone’s brain, but their version somehow brings it back to life. There’s something about the arrangement that makes you hear the track fresh. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/21/royals-covered/ Thu, 21 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/21/catarinas-price/ I lost my virginity at thirteen in some fascist’s garage before sunrise, and didn’t get a goodbye kiss. Catarina Migliorini from Brazil is trying to actually make money off hers—and this is her second round attempting it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/21/catarinas-price/ Thu, 21 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/21/what-bees-know/ You breathe into a glass vessel. Inside are honeybees. If they detect disease in your breath—cancer, serious illness, something metabolic—they navigate to a smaller sphere at the center. That’s Susana Soares’s design, shown at Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven. It’s simple and unsettling: your breath exposed, read by an organism. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/21/what-bees-know/ Thu, 21 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/20/the-railing/ Freeskier Sebi Geiger is obsessed with a railing at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Modern abstract building, nothing you’d notice walking past, but the entrance has a rail that doubles back on itself. Long obstacle. He wants to ride it. Probably won’t—it’s near government offices, always busy, security everywhere—but he keeps it in his head anyway. Photographs it mentally. Waits. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/20/the-railing/ Wed, 20 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/19/how-not-to-completely-fuck-this-up/ Germany’s in full panic about teenagers sexting, which is hilarious because the public alarm just taught a bunch of kids who weren’t thinking about it that this is apparently something you can do. Congratulations, authorities. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/19/how-not-to-completely-fuck-this-up/ Tue, 19 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/19/bound-2/ Kanye dropped ’Bound 2’ on Ellen. It’s nine minutes of Kim in a red bikini while he sings about wanting to fuck her. Kitchen counter, if we’re being literal about the lyrics. No narrative, no style, no pretense—just him wanting her and making a video to say so. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/19/bound-2/ Tue, 19 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/19/the-kid-at-penn-station/ There’s a video of a kid dressed as Harry Potter at Penn Station, walking up to strangers and asking where Platform 9 3/4 is. Dead serious about it. And what happens is exactly what you’d want—people stop. They smile. They actually try to help. A woman at the ticket counter lights up. Someone remembers their kid reading the books. For a moment everyone’s just there with him. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/19/the-kid-at-penn-station/ Tue, 19 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/17/kalen-hollomons-masterpiece/ Kalen Hollomon draws dicks on white clothing. He takes it seriously—you can tell. This shirt is probably his peak work: “Bro’s Before Ho’s” in slightly crooked English, with illustrations flanking it that leave absolutely nothing to interpretation. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/17/kalen-hollomons-masterpiece/ Sun, 17 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/17/north-korea-wont-leave-me/ I can’t stop thinking about North Korea, for all the wrong reasons. Not because I’m drawn to its culture or impressed by some innovation or charmed by something about the place. It’s the horror that won’t let go. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/17/north-korea-wont-leave-me/ Sun, 17 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/17/shave-them-titties/ I’ve done plenty of transgressive shit in virtual worlds that would never hold up in actual court. Shot old men off bicycles and danced on their bodies. Wiped out entire neighborhoods because I wanted to build a stupid reactor there instead. As a gay spaceship captain, I seduced extraterrestrials in my quarters decorated with dead fish. But this game? This is actually new for me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/17/shave-them-titties/ Sun, 17 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/17/bear-lean/ Every time someone visits and doesn’t speak German, I watch them hit the wall. They’re trying to say Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and their mouth just gives up halfway through, like they’re choking on consonants. You can see them calculating, rewinding, trying again. It never works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/17/bear-lean/ Sun, 17 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/17/breaking-bad-was-only-a-dream/ The theory that Breaking Bad is just Hal from Malcolm in the Middle having the world’s worst nightmare has been floating around so long that nobody remembers who started it, but it’s weirdly hard to shake once you think about it. Bryan Cranston played a sitcom dad barely holding it together in the suburbs. Then he played a meth cook who burns down his entire life with purpose and precision. The through-line is dark enough that it could be a dream. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/17/breaking-bad-was-only-a-dream/ Sun, 17 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/17/broken-on-purpose/ You get your PS4 and it’s dead on arrival. Won’t boot. Won’t do anything. Just sits there, black and useless. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/17/broken-on-purpose/ Sun, 17 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/17/already-gone/ I found a video of Lorde performing with her school band at an Australian battle of the bands in 2009. She was twelve. What hits you first isn’t her voice or the song—it’s that she belonged on stage in a way most people never will. She talked afterward about how big stages make a difference, and she was right, but she also already knew it. That kind of certainty at twelve is almost unfair. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/17/already-gone/ Sun, 17 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/16/the-blogging-pimp/ A journalist named Nils Jacobsen—economics background, actual media credentials—wrote about me in some German media publication. Not a profile I’d asked for, just an analysis of what Amy&Pink was and how it’d managed to capture a moment that respectable media had completely missed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/16/the-blogging-pimp/ Sat, 16 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/15/karate-andi/ I heard about Karate Andi before I ever saw him—just his name getting thrown around at the Wednesday rap nights in Neukölln. He’s the guy who supposedly runs that whole scene, or at least makes enough noise that people treat him like he does. The other Berlin neighborhoods all have their thing, their identity, but Neukölln’s got this specific meanness to it, and Andi’s its avatar. You spot him in the crowd with his crew, those hand signals he’s always making, that particular Berlin aggression that never quite becomes violence but you feel it anyway. He’s the kind of local character that makes a place worth caring about—not because he’s good or interesting in any respectable sense, but because he’s genuinely real in a way most people aren’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/15/karate-andi/ Fri, 15 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/15/serial-killer-or-hipster/ Clara found this thing called Serial Killer or Hipster, made by some guy named Bobby Watson in Paris. The game is simple: you get shown a photo and you guess whether the person is just drowning in an existential crisis about identity, or whether they’ve actually murdered someone. In a lot of these photos the answer is impossible to tell, which is exactly why the game exists. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/15/serial-killer-or-hipster/ Fri, 15 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/15/the-squat-ticket/ Moscow put a squat machine in the subway for Olympic year: ten squats gets you a ticket. Stupid and perfect at the same time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/15/the-squat-ticket/ Fri, 15 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/15/stretched/ I had a friend who got into gauges—started stretching his earlobes with increasingly large jewelry, the whole flesh tunnel thing. At first it actually looked fine, maybe even cool in that committed way. But after a few years it became hard to look at. The earlobes don’t bounce back the way you’d think. They’re just permanently changed, stretched out, different in a way that played better when the trend was still alive. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/15/stretched/ Fri, 15 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/15/what-now/ There’s this moment in ’What Now’ where everything drops away and it’s just Rihanna’s voice, and you understand that’s all that’s left. The song is a ballad, completely stripped down, and she doesn’t perform sadness or strength or anything else. Doesn’t try to make the breakup mean something bigger. Just sounds like someone after everything’s over. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/15/what-now/ Fri, 15 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/15/sidos-still-there/ Sido wears a mask. Not metaphorically—literally, an actual mask, which is either brilliant or ridiculous depending on whether you buy it. I’ve never quite decided which, and I suspect that’s the whole point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/15/sidos-still-there/ Fri, 15 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/15/playing-dictator/ Howard walks around Hong Kong dressed as Kim Jong-un. Full haircut, the scowl, all of it. He’s thirty-four and his real name isn’t something he advertises—he’s convinced the North Korean regime would prefer he didn’t exist. But the payoff’s too good: strangers stop him for photos, everyone laughs, he gets to be unmistakable for a moment. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/15/playing-dictator/ Fri, 15 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/14/just-hold-on/ There’s a photograph from Sofia I keep thinking about. A student, face wet, reaches toward a police officer during the protests—asking him not to hurt her, not to hurt her friends. The officer breaks. He cries. And he tells her to hold on. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/14/just-hold-on/ Thu, 14 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/14/dolphins-are-perverts/ I grew up on the Flipper version of dolphins—noble, intelligent, rescuing drowning sailors. The mythology. Then I watched this video and it just dismantles everything. Turns out dolphins do unspeakable things to decapitated fish. Not fucking them in any normal way. Just sexual violence against dead parts, apparently routine behavior. The whole image collapses the moment you know about it. I felt stupid once buying a crooked cucumber. These animals are committing acts that would get you on some kind of registry. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/14/dolphins-are-perverts/ Thu, 14 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/14/the-wunderkiste/ In November 2013, Microsoft opened pop-up studios in four German cities to launch the Xbox One. Celebrities were on hand. The pitch was simple: one machine would transform your living room, with Kinect always watching, games and TV finally unified. It was the last time a console launch felt like a cultural moment instead of a product rollout. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/14/the-wunderkiste/ Thu, 14 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/14/hard-out-here/ When Lily Allen sings about forgetting your balls and growing tits, she’s not being ironic or defensive about it. She’s just saying it, matter-of-fact, like it’s obvious, all of it packaged in a hook that won’t leave your head. The video’s all half-naked dancers and Lily pushing boundaries that shouldn’t exist in the first place. That’s “Hard Out Here”—crude, sexual, aggressively feminist in a way that doesn’t require permission or apology. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/14/hard-out-here/ Thu, 14 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/14/the-other-way/ Winter and you want someone to lie around with. Not forever, just warm company on the couch while you both watch TV, no need to be interesting. It’s the thought everyone has in February. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/14/the-other-way/ Thu, 14 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/14/die-beginner-slowly/ I found out Die Beginner were working on new material. Eizi Eiz, Denyo, DJ Mad—three guys from Hamburg who made hip-hop that actually sounded like something, back when I paid attention to that stuff. They’d gone mostly quiet over the years, the way bands do when everyone’s working solo projects and paying rent and dealing with all the friction that slowly grinds a group to pieces. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/14/die-beginner-slowly/ Thu, 14 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/14/trapped-in-google/ I went to reply to a YouTube comment and it asked for a Google+ account. I didn’t have one. Didn’t want one. There was no decline option. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/14/trapped-in-google/ Thu, 14 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/14/understood/ Emily Ratajkowski was 21 in 2013 and already knew the game better than the people who were supposed to be mentoring her. “Blurred Lines” made her visible; she just decided what visible meant. By the time the Treats! shoot happened—just her, naked, completely unbothered—it felt less like a scandal and more like the only honest version of something everyone had been pretending was more complicated than it was. She made money. She controlled her image. The internet got what it wanted. What always struck me was how everyone else kept acting surprised about the whole thing, like they hadn’t seen it coming from a mile away. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/14/understood/ Thu, 14 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/14/the-nutella-burger/ Someone invented a burger made from a warm donut spread thick with Nutella, passion fruit jam, strawberries, and kiwi slices. The strawberries are funny—they’re there to justify it, make it reasonable, but they change nothing. It’s still chocolate-hazelnut spread on fried pastry. Yet somehow the fruit makes it okay, makes it feel less completely insane. Food’s been pushing in one direction for years: more meat, more cheese, more excess. The sweet stuff just follows the same path. This burger is the logical endpoint of that thinking, the answer to how far it goes. Pretty far. The strawberry’s there to make that feel manageable, and somehow it works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/14/the-nutella-burger/ Thu, 14 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/14/actually-stupid/ I spent too much time on Vine. Everyone was making art—careful shots, ideas that would resonate, things that were supposed to matter. Logan Paul from Ohio just did stupid stuff instead and it was infinitely more interesting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/14/actually-stupid/ Thu, 14 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/13/changed-it-back/ I renamed this dispatch and nobody cared. NEUE ELITE, I called it—serious, austere, a clean break. Lasted two weeks before the money ran out. Two articles a day, well-researched, actually good. But you can’t fund that on good intentions. I was burning through cash like I was throwing cocaine parties, except it was really just Thai food and porn subscriptions. So I changed it back to the old name, the one with history, and suddenly revenue appeared. Posts started flowing. Writers started pitching. The machine worked again. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/13/changed-it-back/ Wed, 13 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/12/walking-dead-monopoly/ There’s a Walking Dead Monopoly now, which is funny in the particular way that licensed board games always are. Someone convinced Hasbro that zombie-apocalypse survivors need a casual evening pastime, and they actually went and designed it. You move around in an armored bus. The prison is safe. You collect supply crates and weapons. The base premise is so absurd it wraps back around to charming. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/12/walking-dead-monopoly/ Tue, 12 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/12/drake-being-drake/ Drake in “Worst Behavior” is doing exactly what he always does—playing the tough guy while maintaining just enough self-awareness that you feel like you’re in on the act. The video’s got everything locked down: slick production, calculated visuals, every frame exactly where it should be. There’s no surprises, just precise execution. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/12/drake-being-drake/ Tue, 12 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/12/the-overworld/ The first few seconds of Smooth McGroove’s a cappella version of the Overworld theme from A Link to the Past and I’m somewhere else entirely. Back in that cartridge, that overworld, the one that felt both infinite and intimate. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/12/the-overworld/ Tue, 12 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/12/the-better-ad/ Someone’s been replacing McDonald’s and Burger King billboards in German cities with recipe posters. Spaghetti bolognese, a rice stir-fry—actual food you could make. The design matches the original ads so closely that the contrast works perfectly. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/12/the-better-ad/ Tue, 12 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/12/m83s-little-hymn/ Something’s been missing, this quiet thing that makes the day feel less sharp. M83 just put out what feels like an intro, a small hymn that settles into you the way “Midnight City” used to settle into everything around 2011. Nicolas Fromageau and Anthony Gonzalez have been doing this for a long time now—the ethereal synths, the way they can make something sound both distant and immediate. “Midnight City” was the song that somehow belonged to everyone. “Wait” had this patience built into it. “We Own The Sky” felt like reaching for something just beyond touch. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/12/m83s-little-hymn/ Tue, 12 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/12/swedens-bechdel-reckoning/ Swedish cinemas are labeling films with the Bechdel Test now—an official rating system. Two named female characters who talk to each other about something other than men. That’s the requirement. Lord of the Rings fails. Harry Potter fails. Star Wars fails. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/12/swedens-bechdel-reckoning/ Tue, 12 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/12/where-it-hurts/ The film opens with Adèle in motion—walking, eating, existing without any ceremony to herself. By the time she meets Clémentine, she’s someone else entirely, because Clémentine made her that way. That’s what “Blue is the Warmest Color” is about. But when it came out in 2013, nobody was talking about any of that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/12/where-it-hurts/ Tue, 12 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/12/he-filmed-it/ I watched a video I didn’t want to watch. Hassan Hammoud in Lebanon put his cat in the microwave. His friend Jallad filmed it, laughing while it happened. One minute. The cat got severe burns. He posted it online. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/12/he-filmed-it/ Tue, 12 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/12/miley-keeps-undressing-we-keep-watching/ Remember when shock value still felt like something? Miley riding naked on a wrecking ball felt transgressive. Smoking weed onstage felt like she was actually doing something. Now it’s the default mode—every single release is another excuse to take her clothes off. The new video with Future and Mr Hudson has her floating in space with body glitter instead of actual clothes, and it’s so familiar at this point I barely register it as a choice anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/12/miley-keeps-undressing-we-keep-watching/ Tue, 12 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/12/the-mcrib-in-daylight/ The McRib appears every couple years when pork gets cheap, riding back like some seasonal ghost. Someone at McDonald’s photographed the frozen patties in their raw, pre-heat-lamp state and it went around online—the sight hits different than the marketing image. It’s meat pressed into geometry, colorless, and yeah, there’s something unsettling about seeing the engineering so exposed. Not disgusting, just clear. You can see what it’s for: cost optimization, shelf life, storage. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/12/the-mcrib-in-daylight/ Tue, 12 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/12/placebo-in-the-pit/ There’s something right about Placebo playing Zeche Zollverein. The venue’s built on what used to be a coal mine—UNESCO site now, monument to an era finished—and that industrial weight, those enormous headgears still standing, it changes what you hear in ways a regular venue can’t. Sound held against genuine history. Most places you see bands are just rooms. This is architecture with memory, and Molko’s voice against all that weight feels like the right match. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/12/placebo-in-the-pit/ Tue, 12 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/12/indian-summer/ Missing summer isn’t about the weather. It’s that zone where nothing matters and your only function is existing in one spot as long as possible—a drink, sun, a body, nothing else. Alyssa Arce, Jaclyn Swedberg, and Tiffany Toth’s “Indian Summer” photos get it right: no concept, no message, just that pure blank brightness that photographs nail better than real experience ever does. When winter arrives you’re supposed to accept it’s finished, but by January you’re scrolling back to pictures of women in bikinis with this kind of desperate ache that’s stopped being about horniness and turned into something closer to grief. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/12/indian-summer/ Tue, 12 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/12/the-selfie-war/ Broly posted pictures on Instagram. Guns, cash, women, phones—all the usual stuff, but documented like a lifestyle. Selfies from inside something brutal, filtered and framed like it meant something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/12/the-selfie-war/ Tue, 12 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/11/nobody-wanted-this/ YouTube forced everyone into Google+ if you wanted to use the platform. You couldn’t comment, upload, do anything without a Google+ account. Google’s explanation was that it would improve discussion quality. What it really was: a Hail Mary pass from a company trying to prop up its dying social network by making it mandatory. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/11/nobody-wanted-this/ Mon, 11 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/11/the-black-box/ There’s something about a new console. The sealed box, the weight of it, that smell of fresh plastic when you crack it open. The PS4 was all clean lines and black matte finish, looking more serious than a rectangle full of chips deserved. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/11/the-black-box/ Mon, 11 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/11/building-empires/ Minecraft changed something about what games could be. One person’s sandbox idea reached millions of people who didn’t just play it but lived in it, built in it, made it their own. Notch got rich. The indie game market got proof that something mattered. The whole cultural weight of what a game could be shifted. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/11/building-empires/ Mon, 11 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/11/rehearsed-crazy/ MTV still exists. They still throw these massive parties where two actual superstars and everyone else stand in a giant hall trying to prove they’re completely insane. On TV it’s polished and explosive. In real life it’s screaming fans, deafening noise, and you’re squinting at the stage trying to figure out who’s performing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/11/rehearsed-crazy/ Mon, 11 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/10/stay-forever/ “Day of the Tentacle broke my brain when I was twelve.” That’s the kind of thing you hear on Stay Forever, a German podcast where two old GameStar editors spend hours talking about games from an era when anything seemed possible. Gunnar Lott and Christian Schmidt have this way of discussing the old stuff—with genuine affection, with cheeky banter that never quite turns mean, with the sense that they’re pumping something real out of each other. These weren’t just good games. They were proof that a different kind of culture was possible. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/10/stay-forever/ Sun, 10 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/10/the-stöckchen/ Back when the German blogosphere was maybe a dozen weird social misfits sitting in front of computers on Saturday nights instead of actually going out, there was this little tradition nobody remembers now. You’d get tagged in a “Stöckchen”—basically people asking you ten questions, you answer them, you come up with ten of your own, you tag ten other people. It sounds simple enough. Anna Frost threw one at me and I figured, why not? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/10/the-stöckchen/ Sun, 10 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/9/japans-game-shows/ The Japanese show “Poko x Tate” had a simple premise: a gay bar owner named Takuya would try to make porn star Sawai Ryo climax, despite Sawai Ryo actively resisting mentally. That’s the actual bet. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/9/japans-game-shows/ Sat, 09 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/8/not-her-face/ A Chinese guy successfully sued his wife because their daughter was ugly. Genuinely went to court and won. The wife had spent over $100,000 on cosmetic surgery in South Korea before they met—complete transformation, new face, everything—and just never mentioned it. Showed up as his wife looking nothing like whatever she looked like before. Then they had a kid who looked like the genetic combination of two actual people. And instead of accepting that that’s how genetics works, he sued her for fraud. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/8/not-her-face/ Fri, 08 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/8/beards-suit-them/ Beards on Disney princesses shouldn’t work but they do. Something about facial hair reads as authority, experience, the kind of person who won’t take your shit. Arielle with a beard looks less like a decoration and more like someone with an actual interior life. Same with Pocahontas, same with all of them—add facial hair and they stop being designed-to-please objects. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/8/beards-suit-them/ Fri, 08 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/8/beautiful-enough/ Adventure Time’s visual design works on you in a way most cartoons don’t. Lumpy Space Princess, Marceline, BMO—they’re all drawn with intention. The show knows what it’s doing with how characters look and how it frames them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/8/beautiful-enough/ Fri, 08 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/8/the-breaking-bad-moments-that-wont-let-go/ The Jane and Jesse moment gets me every time. Just the two of them on a couch in the dark, her hand in his, watching something on TV that doesn’t matter because nothing matters anymore. It’s the saddest three seconds in the entire show. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/8/the-breaking-bad-moments-that-wont-let-go/ Fri, 08 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/8/the-same-face/ You put on your mother’s clothes and suddenly you’re seeing the future. Not metaphorical. Your face in her face. The same jaw, the same way you move your hands when you’re thinking. You’re already her, and time becomes something weird. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/8/the-same-face/ Fri, 08 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/8/the-automatic-face/ You watch someone take a selfie and the face changes—there’s the actual face, and then there’s the face that arrives when the camera comes out. The chin tilts, the eyes open wider, the mouth arranges itself into something that’s supposed to look effortless. It’s automatic now, this muscle memory for the performance. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/8/the-automatic-face/ Fri, 08 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/8/the-wait-for-new-stars/ Someone announced that December would bring a new Star Wars film, and the news landed with this weird weight I wasn’t expecting. After all the years since Return of the Jedi, the dead period where the only new material was books and toys and endless arguments about what should happen next, suddenly there was going to be actual film. JJ Abrams directing. Lawrence Kasdan on the script. John Williams doing the score. On paper it looked right. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/8/the-wait-for-new-stars/ Fri, 08 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/8/karim-speaks/ Jawed Karim co-founded YouTube before Google bought it, and then he basically vanished. Eight years of silence, and then he posted something simple: “Why the fuck do I need a Google+ account to comment on a video?” https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/8/karim-speaks/ Fri, 08 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/8/the-updated-pokérap/ Remember when you had to prove yourself to a specific friend group by reciting all 150 Pokémon in one go? You’d sit on someone’s bedroom floor, rattling them off without stopping, and if you made it through without choking you were in. They weren’t particularly cool, but at least they understood obsession. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/8/the-updated-pokérap/ Fri, 08 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/8/kate-upton-blue/ Sports Illustrated could simplify their entire homepage to one button labeled ’Kate Upton’ and nobody would complain. In ’Swim Daily,’ they found the obvious content: her topless while someone paints her blue. That’s the whole thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/8/kate-upton-blue/ Fri, 08 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/8/fakes-spread-faster/ A fake Justin Bieber video went viral because that’s just what happened with celebrity videos in those days. Someone made one of him in a bed, presented it as real, and it spread faster than anyone could verify it. By the time Lance Patrick’s actual video showed up, it didn’t matter anymore. The fake was already the story everyone remembered. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/8/fakes-spread-faster/ Fri, 08 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/7/blue-steel/ I need to apologize to every friend I’ve ever called a hipster for playing Game Boy Color or wearing a beaded bracelet. Because these two—Charlotte Free and Gryphon O’Shea—they’re the hipsters. The full thing. The complete nightmare. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/7/blue-steel/ Thu, 07 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/7/she-figured-it-out/ Kenza launched her YouTube channel, which is really just the next box to check if you’ve already completely owned Swedish fashion blogging by 22. Magazine covers, television appearances, the kind of actual fame that most bloggers never get near. Now she’s extending it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/7/she-figured-it-out/ Thu, 07 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/7/tonight-tonight/ Kindan No Tasuketsu’s “Tonight, Tonight” is bright chaos. Pretty girls, weird artistic shots, a narrative that doesn’t land anywhere and clearly doesn’t care. And that’s completely right. A music video doesn’t owe you an ending or an explanation. It’s just color and movement around a song. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/7/tonight-tonight/ Thu, 07 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/7/playing-for-real/ You get a particular freedom in GTA V, that moment when you’ve had enough of simulation and you just drive straight through everything. Cars, storefronts, pedestrians—smash it all, watch the chaos unfold, no real consequence. It’s cathartic. Some guy in Chicago decided to live it. Got in an accident with a taxi and then just kept going, accelerated right through everything in his path like he’d been playing for twelve hours straight and forgot there was a real world attached to the controller. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/7/playing-for-real/ Thu, 07 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/7/internet-explorer-was-never-this-cool/ There’s this image I keep in my head: a Sailor Moon-style magical girl in a colorful miniskirt, wielding a staff against digital viruses. This was Microsoft’s ad for Internet Explorer 11 in Japan. Somewhere in Redmond or Tokyo, someone decided that was the solution to Internet Explorer’s branding problem, and honestly, I respect it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/7/internet-explorer-was-never-this-cool/ Thu, 07 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/7/marteria-still/ Marteria put out something new called “Bengalischer Tiger,” and I actually listened. Not from any obligation—just checking in on someone whose stuff from years ago never stopped making sense. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/7/marteria-still/ Thu, 07 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/7/news-in-dub/ There’s always this moment in the evening where the news comes on and you just… don’t move. Too tired to find the remote. Too worn out to care what happened in the world. The newscaster goes through their cadence and somewhere by the third story about parliament or whatever, you’re half asleep. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/7/news-in-dub/ Thu, 07 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/7/powdered-sugar/ I have no idea why I like Selena Gomez as much as I do. Never watched any of her Disney stuff, found Spring Breakers pretty mediocre, and her music isn’t something I’d choose to listen to. None of it explains it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/7/powdered-sugar/ Thu, 07 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/6/a-million-balls/ The best feeling in the world isn’t sex, isn’t a perfect burger, isn’t even that first bathroom break after four hours on the highway. It’s diving into a ball pit, that chaos of hollow plastic and color, all those spheres pressing against you. We had them as kids—furniture stores, arcades—and you’d lose yourself for hours in there. But wanting one as an adult? That’s where it gets weird. You grow up and something that felt innocent suddenly has an edge to it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/6/a-million-balls/ Wed, 06 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/6/ulaanbaatar/ There are kids in Ulaanbaatar who are obsessed with skateboarding. I know this because someone sent me photos of them—young guys carving concrete, bent over their decks, fully committed to a culture that shouldn’t, by any logic, have reached them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/6/ulaanbaatar/ Wed, 06 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/6/léa-seydoux/ There was a sex scene in Blue is the Warmest Color that I was supposed to take down from the blog. I kept watching it instead—kept coming back to it, in different moods, different times of day, with wine and candles in the bathroom. Not because the scene itself was anything special, but because of her. Because Léa Seydoux in that moment made something click. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/6/léa-seydoux/ Wed, 06 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/6/the-good-voice/ Sometime in the early 2010s, YouTube became the place where you could hear a twelve-year-old British kid with a genuinely good voice cover songs by Adele and Snow Patrol. Jasmine Thompson wasn’t the first talented kid on the internet, but the timing was right—she hit a moment when the algorithm was still just showing you what was good, not what was profitable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/6/the-good-voice/ Wed, 06 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/6/after-were-gone/ There’s something about a photograph of an empty apartment that hits differently than a painting or a film. Lori Nix builds miniature dioramas and photographs them with such precision that you forget they’re tiny. You’re looking at New York or Berlin or Tokyo with nobody in it—vines covering walls, books scattered on floors, a restaurant perfectly arranged but vacant. The series is called The City, and the photographs are vivid with color, all the objects we surround ourselves with, now just things. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/6/after-were-gone/ Wed, 06 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/6/borrowed-access/ Guttenfelder’s been getting back into North Korea since 2000, and somehow he maintains access—the kind of access that lets him photograph things the state designed to keep hidden. Concentration camps, daily life, the machinery of control, all showing up on his Instagram feed. He’s AP, but the photographs are what matter. They’re unsettling not because they’re shocking but because they’re so banal about it, so matter-of-fact. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/6/borrowed-access/ Wed, 06 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/6/miley-got-it/ Miley Cyrus’s new website looks like it’s from 1996. Garish colors clashing everywhere, images scattered with no sense of hierarchy, the kind of chaos that early web design just accepted. She did this on purpose, of course. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/6/miley-got-it/ Wed, 06 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/6/cut-twice/ I watched Episode I in theaters and felt it the moment he appeared on screen. This was wrong. This character wasn’t landing. Everyone around me felt it too, this collective discomfort at what was supposed to be the comic relief of a Star Wars film. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/6/cut-twice/ Wed, 06 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/6/the-lego-ring/ You get a Lego ring as a romantic gift and have about two seconds to figure out if this person knows you or if they just think they do. That’s genuinely the whole thing. Whether it lands as sweet or stupid, clever or lazy—it doesn’t matter. All of that is secondary. Someone thought that was the right move, and now you know what they think you are. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/6/the-lego-ring/ Wed, 06 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/6/pentatonix-and-robots/ I found this Pentatonix cover of a Daft Punk track somewhere and couldn’t stop watching. Not because it’s revolutionary or anything—it’s just a really well-made a cappella arrangement—but because hearing it without all the production is strange. Daft Punk made sense as these untouchable robot figures, all synthetic and processed, but strip that away and you’re left with melodies that are actually kind of simple, almost vulnerable when they’re just voices. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/6/pentatonix-and-robots/ Wed, 06 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/5/the-mountains-pull/ The second Hobbit trailer dropped and I watched it probably five times in a row. Not because I needed to—I just kept coming back to it. There’s something about those mountains, that scale, the way everything is built to feel epic and inevitable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/5/the-mountains-pull/ Tue, 05 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/5/sweetie/ Ten weeks. That’s how long Terre des Hommes, a Dutch organization, left a fake child online. Ten years old, supposedly from the Philippines. They called her Sweetie. Just real enough to fool the right—or wrong—people. Just enough to see who would come looking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/5/sweetie/ Tue, 05 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/5/megan-fox-suited-up/ I saw the Call of Duty: Ghosts trailer with Megan Fox in it and had that weird moment where celebrity and games collided in a way that felt both inevitable and completely absurd. There she was, guns and armor, Las Vegas falling apart around her. The game industry had gotten big enough that Hollywood just started showing up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/5/megan-fox-suited-up/ Tue, 05 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/5/before-we-teach-them-better/ A five-year-old’s understanding of love is cleaner than ours. Show a kid a same-sex proposal and they think: if they love each other, that’s good. No confusion, no disgust, no sense of transgression. They haven’t been trained yet to rank different kinds of love. There’s a viral video of this—kids aged five to thirteen watching exactly that scene—and the whole point is supposed to be heartwarming: proof that kids are unprejudiced angels. But it’s sadder than that, watching something so obvious look like a revelation. In a few years, school and the internet will teach them which loves matter less than others. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/5/before-we-teach-them-better/ Tue, 05 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/5/she-doesnt-look-away/ The photoshoot in Interview magazine stopped me—Claire Danes looking directly at the camera, composed in a way that Carrie Mathison, her character in “Homeland”, never gets to be. Carrie’s mind works against her constantly, pulling in different directions. The performance is exhausting to watch because it has to be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/5/she-doesnt-look-away/ Tue, 05 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/5/aschenflug/ Adel Tawil hasn’t really been part of the rap conversation the way Sido has, or Prinz Pi. Tawil operates in a softer space—pop-rap, accessible, emotional. Sido is Berlin institution. Prinz Pi is the one who actually thinks about what he’s saying. Three different corners of the same landscape, almost never overlapping. ’Aschenflug’ is them together anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/5/aschenflug/ Tue, 05 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/5/midair/ Two planes collided over Wisconsin. Both caught fire. The scenario kills everyone on board. Except everyone on board was a professional skydiver, so when separation came—violent, unplanned, early—they just deployed their parachutes and floated down. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/5/midair/ Tue, 05 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/5/cats-in-pantyhose/ I’d never found cats sexually attractive before I saw them in pantyhose on Tumblr, which is not a sentence I expected to write. But that’s where we were. A real trend, fully formed, with devoted galleries everywhere. Nobody could explain it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/5/cats-in-pantyhose/ Tue, 05 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/4/are-they-real/ Photographer Mike Dowson shot Emily Florence-Shaw for magazines like FHM, Loaded, and Front. She’s a British model, fluent in the language of angles and light and what a camera does to a body. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/4/are-they-real/ Mon, 04 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/4/that-scene-in-blue/ I watched that scene in Blue Is the Warmest Color—Adèle and Léa, just completely unguarded—and couldn’t quite shake it afterward. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/4/that-scene-in-blue/ Mon, 04 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/4/anti-rape-underwear/ There’s a company making underwear that’s hard to take off without knowing how it works. The idea is that if someone tries to assault you, they’ll waste time struggling with the mechanism instead of proceeding. It sounds like dark, clever design—someone’s answer to a problem that exists. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/4/anti-rape-underwear/ Mon, 04 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/4/chocolate-chips/ America being the place where they fry everything and serve soft drinks in buckets is hardly breaking news. But I recently learned they’ve now come for the potato chip. Lay’s Wavy has a limited edition chocolate coating available at Target stores in the US—three dollars a bag, limited run, and I haven’t stopped thinking about them since I found out. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/4/chocolate-chips/ Mon, 04 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/4/what-someone-drew/ A guard. A prisoner bent over. Walls. The perspective from inside the cage. Someone was there, saw it, drew it with hands that are still learning what it means to have freedom. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/4/what-someone-drew/ Mon, 04 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/4/the-penis-fireworks/ Someone in Glasgow shot a giant glowing penis into the night sky. I don’t know how it happened or who signed off on it, but the videos hit and people reacted along their usual lines—some offended, some thrilled, most just amused by the sheer pointlessness. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/4/the-penis-fireworks/ Mon, 04 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/4/rakede/ Rakede, a band from Cologne, put out a video of a table concert—basically just them sitting at a table, near-a cappella, no production—as a teaser for an upcoming tour. It’s gone viral on Reddit and the blogs. People are on YouTube trying to parse the German lyrics, debating what’s even happening. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/4/rakede/ Mon, 04 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/2/david-hasselhoff-does-the-fresh-prince/ The Fresh Prince theme doesn’t leave your head. If you were anywhere near the 90s, it’s still there—the opening line, the bounce, Will Smith’s voice sliding in. It became the kind of song that transcends music, just pure cultural fact. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/2/david-hasselhoff-does-the-fresh-prince/ Sat, 02 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/2/ashley-smith/ Ashley Smith. The gap-toothed thing is real, and yeah, it works. She’s got this distinctive look—those cheekbones, that hair—that just lands. She showed up in Purple Mag’s latest issue with Sandy Kim, and she looked good. Not much else to it, but then there were these red shoes she was wearing, and I couldn’t stop thinking about them. That’s how these things go sometimes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/2/ashley-smith/ Sat, 02 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/2/the-pandora-problem/ Some people got depressed enough to consider suicide after Avatar, because Pandora seemed more worth living in than Earth. This is real. Cameron apparently took it as a sign. He made a documentary about climate change—Years of Living Dangerously, coming to Showtime, featuring Jessica Alba, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Matt Damon. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/2/the-pandora-problem/ Sat, 02 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/2/matangi/ I put Matangi on expecting something immediate and digestible, and it refuses. The whole thing operates on its own logic, not trying to seduce or convince anyone into caring. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/2/matangi/ Sat, 02 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/1/nicki-at-halloween/ Nicki Minaj and Miley Cyrus apparently had the same stylist that Halloween. Miley went for one breast as the statement. Nicki went both - massive, pressed straight into the camera for Instagram. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/1/nicki-at-halloween/ Fri, 01 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/1/painter-of-light-years/ Jeff Bennett remixed Thomas Kinkade’s cottages and glowing landscapes with Star Wars—stormtroopers in the mist, AT-AT walkers in soft valleys, the Rancor in some impossible pastoral. It’s absurd and it somehow works. Kinkade’s whole thing was that golden light, everything soft and safe, and that warmth is exactly what space opera needs. You can hang these over your couch and nobody’s going to judge you. Or they will, but at least you’ll know you meant it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/1/painter-of-light-years/ Fri, 01 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/1/papi-lolita/ Jay-Z and Lana Del Rey sharing a track is already a strange enough pairing. He’s been running rap for three decades, all calm authority, and she’s always been in some shadows of her own. Urban Noize pulled them both onto ’Papi & Lolita’—that title alone is doing something clever with power and role-play. The better joke might be that the track never announces who’s who, just lets you figure it out for yourself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/1/papi-lolita/ Fri, 01 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/1/kawaii-apocalypse/ A former sumo wrestler was shuffling through Tokyo yesterday dressed as a zombie, flanked by a group of girls in full undead makeup. It was a Halloween walk of that kind—the event that happens when people decide to commit to something pointless and fun in public. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/1/kawaii-apocalypse/ Fri, 01 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/1/serranos-los-santos/ You’re not supposed to play GTA V like a designer. The game demands chaos—you’re meant to be thoughtless, destructive, a cartoon psychopath. But Luis Serrano, a photographer from Spain, took his practice into Los Santos and decided to play it differently. He walks around with a camera, composing shots. The light, the scale, the geometry of the city—he’s documenting it like a real place. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/1/serranos-los-santos/ Fri, 01 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/1/brain-at-google/ Google invited some of us over yesterday to show us stuff. I’m still not sure why—maybe they thought we needed convincing—but there we were, eating Halloween brain and drinking some kind of vegetable juice while someone from their team explained YouTube monetization and voice search. As if we didn’t already know the basics. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/11/1/brain-at-google/ Fri, 01 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/31/the-cleaner-version/ The panic was real when Disney bought Star Wars—suddenly all the anxiety about what a megacorporation would do with something that sacred. The antidote people reached for was fantasy: what if Nintendo had gotten it instead? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/31/the-cleaner-version/ Thu, 31 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/31/what-the-city-takes/ Thirty Seconds to Mars made a video of people talking about Los Angeles. Nothing revolutionary as a concept, but what matters is they got genuine answers. Kanye and Selena and some others sit down and actually describe what the city does to you. Not the postcard version. The real accounting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/31/what-the-city-takes/ Thu, 31 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/31/boiler-room-berlin/ I keep running into this Boiler Room mythology—underground beats in some basement venue, streaming live, and dancing in front of the camera means you’ve arrived. The thing is, it’s usually over before it even starts, like the whole phenomenon lasts shorter than a children’s TV episode. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/31/boiler-room-berlin/ Thu, 31 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/31/mileys-outfit/ She went from Disney clean to someone who’ll use basically any excuse to take her shirt off. Halloween, red carpet, random Tuesday. The breasts are infrastructure at this point—part of the visual language, the most honest thing in her whole public image. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/31/mileys-outfit/ Thu, 31 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/31/why-they-released-it/ Someone showed me a Loughborough University promo video and I still don’t understand why they released it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/31/why-they-released-it/ Thu, 31 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/31/the-couch-quest/ The Simpsons are still around and occasionally they actually nail something. This couch gag was a Hobbit thing—the family on a ridiculous quest for the perfect sofa like it’s an epic journey. It’s a stupid obvious reference but it somehow works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/31/the-couch-quest/ Thu, 31 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/30/proof-of-grief/ You know that moment at a funeral when half the room pulls out their phones? Not to text or check the time. To take pictures of themselves. With the dead person in the shot if possible. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/30/proof-of-grief/ Wed, 30 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/30/the-last-jacket/ I’m convinced the collapse is coming—doesn’t matter which flavor—so finding this jacket by Marie-Elsa Batteux Flahault felt less like novelty and more like finally someone understood. It’s built around what actually matters when the grid dies: pockets for food, water, a knife, tools, first aid. Camo exterior, hood, facemask, reflective gold foil for the radiation scenario. Inspired by the Prepper movement, those people who genuinely believe civilization’s ending and plan accordingly. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/30/the-last-jacket/ Wed, 30 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/30/halloween-in-shibuya/ Halloween in Tokyo felt like watching an entire city take something Western and turn it into something completely their own. The streets of Shibuya were full of people in actual costumes—not the sad store-bought vampire teeth and fake blood variety, but real work. Considered choices, genuine effort. Someone had dressed as a moving Starbucks logo, which shouldn’t have been that funny but absolutely was. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/30/halloween-in-shibuya/ Wed, 30 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/30/pink-helmet-posse/ There’s a crew of six-year-old skateboarders in California. Pink Helmet Posse—Sierra Kerr, Relz Murphy, Bella Kenworthy. I came across video of them through some skateboarding magazine coverage, and what stuck was how they just roll. No hesitation. Four-meter ramps like it’s nothing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/30/pink-helmet-posse/ Wed, 30 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/30/on-her-own/ The first Walking Dead game managed something most zombie fiction can’t—it made you actually care. Lee and Clementine became real in a way that surprised me. You made choices that felt like they mattered, and in that small moment of agency, a video game transformed into something personal. I thought about those choices for weeks after I finished it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/30/on-her-own/ Wed, 30 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/30/this-little-brat-will-make-you-cry/ I hate YouTube videos with babies. Really hate them. They’re almost never funny or cute or worth watching. But I clicked on this one anyway, not sure why. The mother starts singing and it just hits the kid—this 10-month-old—so hard that tears start pouring out. And suddenly I’m sitting here with tears in my own eyes too. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/30/this-little-brat-will-make-you-cry/ Wed, 30 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/30/street-food/ You’re standing at a food stand watching the cook and you’re genuinely curious and genuinely nervous, which is probably the honest response to eating something made in a place you can’t fully see by someone you can’t fully talk to. The safe bet is going where the locals go, where volume and speed mean less time for things to sit around. Or you ignore that entirely and eat at whatever looks sketchy, which you’ll remember far more vividly than anything from a real restaurant. You might get sick. You probably won’t. Either way you’ve got a story. That’s probably the point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/30/street-food/ Wed, 30 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/30/ask-anyway/ There’s this moment where you’re sitting on your bed, scrolling, telling yourself you can’t talk to anyone because you’re too fat, too tired, too wrecked from sitting at a computer all day. As if appearance is the actual barrier. As if the problem is your body and not your nerve. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/30/ask-anyway/ Wed, 30 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/30/emily-ratajkowski/ Jonathan Leder’s shoot for Darius with Emily Ratajkowski landed somewhere in my feed the way these things do, back when she was starting to be everywhere. I actually stopped and looked at the photographs instead of scrolling past, which doesn’t happen often. There was something about the way she was lit, the composition, the moment—it worked. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/30/emily-ratajkowski/ Wed, 30 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/obama-knew-nothing/ I would have voted for Obama if I could have. But somewhere between the NSA revelations and the Merkel phone-tapping story, Europe lost faith in him. Not because he was a tyrant, but because it became clear he genuinely had no idea what his own government was doing. Jon Stewart had the only appropriate response: “What?!” https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/obama-knew-nothing/ Tue, 29 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/rock-bottom/ I found this German blog called Wackrap Welten that catalogs the worst hip-hop anyone’s willing to document. Names like KM Heckert, Jasko, Aziz Merre. I hadn’t heard of them before, and I absolutely didn’t need to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/rock-bottom/ Tue, 29 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/actually-worth-watching/ Airplane safety videos are designed to break you. Everyone knows this. They strap you into a narrow seat for three hours, the cabin goes dark, and some voice starts explaining emergency procedures like they’re reading a phone book from 1987. The actors look dead inside. The cameras look older than the plane. You pull out your phone or stare at the back of the seat in front of you, waiting for it to end. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/actually-worth-watching/ Tue, 29 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/the-wife-as-arithmetic/ There’s a video of a man punching another man at what looks like a public gathering in Saudi Arabia. The reason is uncomplicated: the victim said something to the first man’s wife. Or was near her. Or existed while she existed. The details matter less than the logic—a man decided that contact between his wife and another man was insult enough to require violence. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/the-wife-as-arithmetic/ Tue, 29 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/she-knows/ There’s a video of an 87-year-old woman playing Grand Theft Auto V like she’s got something to prove. Not fumbling with the controls or trying to figure out which button does what. She’s focused. She’s mowing down pedestrians and torching cars with the casual competence of someone who actually knows what she’s doing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/she-knows/ Tue, 29 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/geri-at-forty-one/ I was one of millions of teenage boys who jerked off to Geri Halliwell’s “It’s Raining Men” video—five minutes and six seconds of pure conditioning. Not proud of it, but it happened. I loved her the way you love a fleeting one-night stand, the kind you see on the street years later and pretend not to recognize. The memory’s better than the person ever was. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/geri-at-forty-one/ Tue, 29 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/no-woman-no-drive/ A cleric in Saudi Arabia had made a public health claim so bizarre that it shouldn’t exist in the modern world: driving damages women’s ovaries and causes birth defects. Hischam Fakih, a Saudi artist and activist, took that claim and weaponized it through parody. He recorded a version of Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” with a friend, singing the official absurdity back to the people it was meant to control. In traditional dress, he mimics that same cleric, warning women away from the steering wheel: “I remember you sitting in the family car, but in the backseat, so your ovaries stay intact and you can produce many babies.” There’s something almost beautifully stupid about delivering pseudoscience over reggae. It makes the lie impossible to ignore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/no-woman-no-drive/ Tue, 29 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/meghan-reads-the-hate/ You make a video, post it, and the comments roll in. Most of them are people telling you to die. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/meghan-reads-the-hate/ Tue, 29 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/the-monster/ Eminem was between eras, and Rihanna had mostly moved past the point where she needed to prove anything to anyone. But this collaboration made sense the moment you heard it—that heavy, minor-key production, the kind of beat that doesn’t announce itself but just sits in your chest and stays there. The song is exactly what its title suggests: a look at the darkness you carry around, the parts of yourself you can’t quite shake. Not metaphorical. Literal. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/the-monster/ Tue, 29 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/ari-golds-coming-back/ Ari Gold screaming at someone—that’s the news I wanted, and it’s actually happening. The Entourage movie is real. Full cast returning, Warner Bros. bankrolling it, production starts early 2014. Set about six months after the series ends. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/ari-golds-coming-back/ Tue, 29 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/before/ Early Madonna photos—the actual candid stuff, not the magazine versions—basically explain everything. She’s young, confident, casual about being sexual in a way that wasn’t common then. No Photoshop, no concept. Just ease. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/before/ Tue, 29 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/still-wanting/ Nothing in an advertisement is real. Not the skin, not the eyelashes, not the hair. And it doesn’t matter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/still-wanting/ Tue, 29 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/guaranteed-entry/ Someone built an app at a TechCrunch Hackathon that promises guaranteed entry to Berghain. Zalando integration for the right shoes, weather forecast, the whole thing. Like those are the hidden variables in a bouncer’s decision-making. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/guaranteed-entry/ Tue, 29 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/puppet-paranoia/ Sesame Street made a Homeland parody called “Homelamb” and somehow captured the actual tone of the show—the paranoia, the dissolution of trust, the way you can’t relax—while making it about sheep and puppets. No kid watching it would understand why a lamb questioning loyalties feels so uneasy, but that’s the whole point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/puppet-paranoia/ Tue, 29 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/what-youll-rent-to/ Saw a roommate listing in Frankfurt where some guy had just laid out his criteria. No Arabs. No Africans. No political science majors because they were “left-leaning leeches”—his exact words. Not that he was trying to hide what he meant. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/what-youll-rent-to/ Tue, 29 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/tko/ The “TKO” video is just Justin Timberlake getting dragged across the desert by a beautiful woman in a car, and then they drive off a cliff. That’s the metaphor for heartbreak—literal, brutal, kind of absurd. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/29/tko/ Tue, 29 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/28/rihanna-and-the-snake/ GQ UK marked its 25th anniversary by putting Rihanna on the cover naked, holding a snake. Damien Hirst shot it. I’m not sure what he was thinking—what the snake represented to him, what he was trying to work through. But I spent most of the time just looking at it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/28/rihanna-and-the-snake/ Mon, 28 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/28/steve-paynes-generals/ Steve Payne takes your profile photo and turns it into something that looks like it belongs in a museum. A classical portrait, oil and formality. You as a Prussian general or a rococo aristocrat. Your face, but historical. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/28/steve-paynes-generals/ Mon, 28 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/28/catching-fire/ The Catching Fire trailer was just a reminder of why that franchise existed. The whole premise is ridiculous—teenagers executing each other to keep the population docile?—and the books told it better. But the books didn’t have Jennifer Lawrence, and that’s what the movie was actually about. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/28/catching-fire/ Mon, 28 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/28/why-i-want-a-car/ On some gray morning, wedged into a packed U-Bahn with my forehead nearly touching the window, I start thinking about a car. My friends in the city will tell me it’s stupid, that I don’t need it, that the transit is fine. They’re right in theory. But they’re not the ones standing here. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/28/why-i-want-a-car/ Mon, 28 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/28/monday-with-margot/ Monday morning, gray and cold, everything terrible. You drag yourself out of bed, shuffle toward the office or class, and there’s Margot—already awake, somehow in a good mood, moving through it all with this impossible grace. The rest of us are slogging through mud. She’s cozy. I have no idea how she does it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/28/monday-with-margot/ Mon, 28 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/28/painted-windows/ You’re moving into your apartment in Qingdao and you get to the window and it’s not there. Not broken, not missing glass—it was never real. Someone painted it on the wall. Professional paint job. From far enough away you wouldn’t notice, but standing in your living room, running your hand over the concrete, you can feel where the joke ends and the wall begins. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/28/painted-windows/ Mon, 28 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/28/lemon-shock/ The thing about kids tasting something sour for the first time is that their face does all the work. There’s no filter, no strategy—just biological reaction written across their mouth and eyes. April Maciborka and David Wile caught that moment across a whole series of kids hitting lemons, and it works because the reactions are totally genuine. No amount of staging fakes that expression. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/28/lemon-shock/ Mon, 28 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/28/the-girl-in-the-café/ I saw a girl collapse in a café in Nîmes. Couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Her parents were right there, and when they tried giving her a chocolate bar—like maybe that small thing could fix what was happening in her head—she wouldn’t take it. Just looked away. There’s this specific expression you see on a parent’s face when they understand their kid is disappearing and there’s nothing they can do about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/28/the-girl-in-the-café/ Mon, 28 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/28/still-smart/ German television is mostly garbage. You know this if you’ve ever tried to find something to watch—endless Schwiegertochter gesucht, crime reruns, programming that seems designed to insult your intelligence. So when Rohce and Böhmermann got renewed, I felt something like relief. Not excitement exactly, but the specific easing you feel when you realize there’s still at least one smart show being made here. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/28/still-smart/ Mon, 28 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/27/marcia-wallace/ Marcia Wallace died. Seventy, breast cancer. She voiced Mrs. Krabappel from episode two of The Simpsons onward—that depressed teacher with the raspy laugh and the sarcastic drawl, who hated her job and wanted a drink and had nothing but contempt for the world, but showed up anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/27/marcia-wallace/ Sun, 27 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/27/game-of-bones/ I checked out those early episodes of the unofficial Game of Thrones porn parody out of sheer curiosity, but it killed whatever arousal potential the whole concept had. The thing was just inert. Boring. The kind of boring that makes you wonder what actually works in porn. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/27/game-of-bones/ Sun, 27 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/27/after-hours/ Bonnie Strange was one of those creative rebels who made Berlin feel alive—a fashion designer and artist who understood that real creativity meant making things that felt necessary, not precious. The Shit Shop was exactly what the name promised: no apologies, just the actual interesting stuff. A photographer caught her in a museum after hours, and the images have that rare quality where the subject isn’t performing for the camera, just moving through the space like they belong there. Which she did. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/27/after-hours/ Sun, 27 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/27/bacon-body-wash/ Bacon short-circuits something in your brain. You smell it before anything else, before you can even think about it. Your body just knows—there’s something you want. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/27/bacon-body-wash/ Sun, 27 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/26/back-to-the-future-in-real-time/ Marty’s about to wake up in Lorraine’s bedroom, and when he does, there’s a Twitter account waiting for it. Someone decided the best use of their time was recreating the entire Back to the Future trilogy on Twitter in real-time, one account per character. The DeLorean gets its own profile. Fifty accounts deep. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/26/back-to-the-future-in-real-time/ Sat, 26 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/25/samy-deluxe-still-moves/ Heard ’Perlen vor die Säue’ and it hit like remembering why he’s Germany’s best—no comeback narrative, no bullshit, just a man who never really left making hip-hop that still beats almost everything else. There’s something giddy about it, the kind of dumb energy where grass-smell jokes land. Twenty years in and he moves like that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/25/samy-deluxe-still-moves/ Fri, 25 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/25/brands-manifesto/ Russell Brand was mostly known for bad American comedies and his relationship with Katy Perry. Then he went on Jeremy Paxman’s show and started talking about international politics—how everything’s fucked, what needs to change. The thing that got me was that he wasn’t half-assing it. He’d thought about this stuff. The post suggests he should write a manifesto, make it formal, structured. Whether Brand has the depth for that is debatable. But there’s something there, some restlessness with the way things are that actually sounded sincere. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/25/brands-manifesto/ Fri, 25 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/25/miranda-kerr-and-orlando-bloom/ So Miranda Kerr and Orlando Bloom are done. They split quietly a few months before making it official—three years of marriage after six years together, which is how these things usually go. She’s back on the market, he’s back to whatever Orlando Bloom does when he’s not married to one of the world’s most recognizable supermodels. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/25/miranda-kerr-and-orlando-bloom/ Fri, 25 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/25/the-liberation-wrapper/ Freshness Burger created the Liberation Wrapper—just a wrapper with a woman’s face printed on it. When you eat, you hold it up and hide your actual face behind the printed one. Instead of watching someone demolish a burger, the people around you see a calm, composed image. They gave it a design award. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/25/the-liberation-wrapper/ Fri, 25 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/25/maps-worth-keeping/ Berlin’s standard transit map is everywhere—the BVG one that hangs in every apartment, half-destroyed from parties, the thing you glance at for directions and then ignore. It works, which is why nobody needs to look at it twice. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/25/maps-worth-keeping/ Fri, 25 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/25/the-guy-who-cleans/ You don’t interrupt a graffiti writer while they’re working. That’s how you get a spray can to the face. Thilo learned this at the BVG. You let them spray, you document it, you move on to the next tag. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/25/the-guy-who-cleans/ Fri, 25 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/24/the-royals-parody/ Key Of Awesome parodied ’Royals’ and made something I’ve thought about more times than I’d like to admit. This was Lorde—Ella Yelich-O’Connor from New Zealand, sixteen years old—at that exact moment when the internet decided she was a thing. Songs like ’Tennis Court’ and ’Team’ that came from nowhere, sounding like she’d skipped ten years of the usual teenage-artist apprenticeship and just arrived fully formed. The parody was good because Key Of Awesome doesn’t punch down; they just watch and let you see what they’re seeing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/24/the-royals-parody/ Thu, 24 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/24/stick-figure/ Your kid glowing in the dark as a stick figure drawing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/24/stick-figure/ Thu, 24 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/24/level-design/ Robby Leonardi built his portfolio as a Super Mario World level. You jump through it in HTML5, navigate platforms, collect coins that represent skills. It’s playful and intricate and absolutely works as a statement: if you want a designer or programmer who can think sideways, here’s proof. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/24/level-design/ Thu, 24 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/24/the-games-theyre-sending/ The whole “North Korea is going to destroy you through online games” premise has a perfect kind of absurdity. South Korea’s police caught a businessman trying to smuggle games developed in the North into the country—not for cultural reasons, but as a delivery system for malware. The games would collect IP addresses and player data worldwide, supposedly feeding North Korea’s cyber operations. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/24/the-games-theyre-sending/ Thu, 24 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/24/mottai-nightland/ If you’re broke and out of connections, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s Mottai-Nightland will get you where you want to go. No chemical middleman—it’s all visual, happening inside your skull instead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/24/mottai-nightland/ Thu, 24 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/24/what-obama-didnt-say/ Merkel found out the NSA had been listening to her phone. She called Obama about it. He called back with this promise: “The United States does not monitor and will not monitor your communication.” Beautiful. Not a word about the past, just a very formal assurance about the future. If you read it carefully—and apparently everyone did, even the laziest reporters—you could see the actual message hiding in the gaps. Yeah, we did it. We’re not planning to do it again. That was the whole conversation right there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/24/what-obama-didnt-say/ Thu, 24 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/24/the-beautiful-route/ Hiroji Kubota went to North Korea thirteen times between 1978 and 1992. He brought back photographs. Good ones - the kind where the light is right and the composition works and you’re drawn into looking. Mountains, buildings, people going about their day like everything is normal and fine. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/24/the-beautiful-route/ Thu, 24 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/24/rihanna-knows/ I was scrolling Instagram like always and saw Rihanna in Greece, her body twisted into some kind of stretch—not a yoga pose, not quite dance, just the kind of thing you do for two seconds and then the shutter clicks. Bikini. Bad filter, actually genuinely bad, the kind of washed-out grainy light that Instagram somehow made everyone want. Three hundred thousand likes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/24/rihanna-knows/ Thu, 24 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/24/the-queen-of-whisky/ I couldn’t drink whisky for years. Tried and tried—seemed like something I had to grow into, like an acquired taste that everyone said was worth the effort but felt more like penance. Then one day I stopped fighting it and just started drinking it neat in dim bars, and it clicked. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/24/the-queen-of-whisky/ Thu, 24 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/24/the-winter-soldier/ I watched the Winter Soldier trailer the second it dropped. It’s got Evans and Jackson doing the serious superhero thing, but really I was watching for Johansson in that tactical gear. That’s the part that made rewatching it worth the time. The movie wasn’t coming until sometime in spring 2014, so I had months to sit with that three minutes on loop if I wanted to. And yeah, I did. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/24/the-winter-soldier/ Thu, 24 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/24/she-just-has-it/ You watch the LA BOO ad and there’s no question why Cara Delevingne is everywhere. The confidence, the presence, the way she moves through the frame like she owns it—it’s immediate. No ambiguity. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/24/she-just-has-it/ Thu, 24 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/24/killer-tofu/ There’s people in some dingy room, dancing like they’re trying to shake something out of their bodies. Sweat on the walls, bad fluorescent light, nobody trying to look cool. OverDoz’s “Killer Tofu” is playing and they’re just moving because standing still would actually hurt. I watch it and I get it completely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/24/killer-tofu/ Thu, 24 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/23/anchorman-again/ Anchorman 2 was just a reason to pack every willing famous person into one newsroom. Will Ferrell and the usual cast, but also Nicole Kidman, Jim Carrey, Sacha Baron Cohen, Amy Poehler, Tina Fey—a ridiculous list of people showing up for a few minutes each. The movie didn’t need a story; it was just an excuse for comedy cameos. There’s something great about that kind of ambition, even if it’s completely ridiculous. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/23/anchorman-again/ Wed, 23 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/23/kutimans-tokyo/ Tokyo hits different at night. The neon in the darkness, how it all moves—millions of people in tight streets, everything you could want within arm’s reach but nothing making sense. It gets into your head in a way that’s hard to explain. Most videos about Tokyo flatten it into postcard scenery, all those swooping drone shots. Kutiman’s doesn’t. He just lets it be itself: the sounds, the rhythms, what it actually feels like when you’re in it. No agenda. Just showing you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/23/kutimans-tokyo/ Wed, 23 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/23/alex-gist-a-cappella/ The medley as a format is strange—you’re committed to nothing, everything shifts depending on which song comes next. Alex Gist does a run through Lion King, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, all a cappella, and the thing that works isn’t novelty or ambition. It’s that she’s thinking about arrangement, about how to move the voice between these songs without losing anything in translation. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/23/alex-gist-a-cappella/ Wed, 23 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/23/stoned-dogs/ Dogs in Görlitzer Park and Treptower were showing up at vets with the same symptoms: trembling, disorientation, hearts racing. Vet Reinhold Sassnau at his practice near Südstern put it together. They’d been eating feces contaminated with drugs, leftovers from addicts using the parks like bathrooms. Most recovered after a sedative, but the real problem was harder. His advice: train your dog not to eat shit. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/23/stoned-dogs/ Wed, 23 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/23/pure-sex/ Flume remixed Disclosure’s “You & Me” and the video is five minutes of a naked couple absolutely going at each other—biting, touching, completely locked in. No cuts, no relief, just sustained intensity from start to finish. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/23/pure-sex/ Wed, 23 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/23/yala/ M.I.A. drops “Y.A.L.A.” and you want to care. She’s done the work—”Paper Planes,” “Bad Girls,” all that carried real weight. But this one’s too experimental in the way that doesn’t connect. It’s riding the Y.O.L.O. trend like everyone else, trying to make something stick, and it just doesn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/23/yala/ Wed, 23 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/22/the-city-doesnt-fix-it/ You hear that the city will save you, that you just need to get there and the loneliness will dissolve into something manageable. More people means more connection, right? You arrive and find yourself more isolated than ever, pressed against millions of strangers who aren’t looking at you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/22/the-city-doesnt-fix-it/ Tue, 22 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/22/tyler-actually/ Tyler and Animation Domination High-Def made a short where he just talks about the weird shit in his head. No bits, no armor—just him being strange. He’s always been that way, genuinely, not as an act. Animation lets him be unguarded in a way he doesn’t usually allow. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/22/tyler-actually/ Tue, 22 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/22/the-beheading-was-fine/ Facebook left the video up—a man in a mask beheading a woman in Mexico—because it didn’t quite clear the threshold for removal. But post a photograph of a breast, even in the context of nursing, and you’re out. The rules work differently depending on what’s in the frame. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/22/the-beheading-was-fine/ Tue, 22 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/22/timing/ You’re on his couch, some movie playing, and he’s turning toward you slowly with that look. This is it—the thing you’ve been waiting for. His face is coming close and you’re about to finally kiss him and your stomach decides right then to do something unholy. Not now. Not when you’re supposed to be desirable and present and transcendent. Your body’s got no interest in romance narrative—it’s just physics and biology and the worst possible timing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/22/timing/ Tue, 22 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/22/wrecking-ball-pug/ Tottie the pug won twenty-five thousand dollars at a costume competition. Her owner McKenna dressed her as Miley Cyrus on a wrecking ball—the music video, the full commitment. A Barbie doll, some fabric, a pug with no idea what’s happening, and suddenly we have a winner. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/22/wrecking-ball-pug/ Tue, 22 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/22/fare-dodger-car/ Someone spray-painted SCHWARZFAHRER-WAGEN—fare-dodger car—on a Stuttgart train in letters sized to look official. The kind of tag that makes you do a double take, makes you wonder for a half-second if there’s actually a free-ride car you missed, if you could have been gaming the system all along. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/22/fare-dodger-car/ Tue, 22 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/22/ios-7-and-wordart/ I spent way too much time in Microsoft Word making WordArt—tweaking gradients and shadows and 3D bevels, doing ridiculous things with rotation and outline thickness. The interface had this gravity to it. Realizing what I was making was terrible never stopped me from clicking into the next option anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/22/ios-7-and-wordart/ Tue, 22 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/22/game-of-thrones-in-yellow/ Tyrion Lannister in Simpsons yellow is still Tyrion. That stopped me when I first saw Adrien Noterdaem’s Game of Thrones work. I expected the specificity to disappear the moment you flatten someone into four fingers and yellow skin and those simple Simpsons eyes. But it doesn’t. Daenerys reads as herself. Jon Snow is unmistakable. The bone structure survives. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/22/game-of-thrones-in-yellow/ Tue, 22 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/21/best-job-ever/ Some guy got hired as a production assistant on a Katy Perry music video set, and apparently this qualifies as the best job in the world. Doesn’t matter what he actually did—move lights, grab coffee, whatever. The context is the whole point. You’re on set with Katy Perry. That’s genuinely the job that hits every fantasy requirement for a certain demographic. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/21/best-job-ever/ Mon, 21 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/21/autocomplete/ The UN made posters from Google autocomplete results about women. You know that thing where Google guesses what you’re about to search? They let it finish sentences like “women are…” and “women should…” and printed what the internet suggested. All the usual stuff—women are inferior, women can’t be trusted, women should stay home. The real shit people type. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/21/autocomplete/ Mon, 21 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/21/one-week-buzzfeed/ I wrote about BuzzFeed in early October 2013, and I came in hot. I don’t think they ever saw it, but I remember posting something like “BuzzFeed is successful because it’s designed for the dumbest people on the internet”—and I meant it. I went on about how most articles are barely three sentences long, how they blow up the font size when they don’t have enough words, how you get headlines like “This woman can’t get married until she makes her husband 300 sandwiches” or “19 reasons why iOS 7 is the apocalypse” or just “Nacho lasagna!” Mixed in with photos of terror victims and brave feminists, all designed for an audience that thought every other website on the internet was too thoughtful. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/21/one-week-buzzfeed/ Mon, 21 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/21/unconditionally/ The video for ’Unconditionally’ is Aya Tanimura’s choreography made visible—careful, composed, dancers moving around Katy Perry like she’s the still point everything orbits. But the song doesn’t need any of that. It’s heartbreak stripped down, which is maybe the only way a song like this survives anymore. There’s no irony, no distance, just someone saying ’I love you exactly as you are’ and meaning it completely. That kind of earnestness kills you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/21/unconditionally/ Mon, 21 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/21/gold-phones/ Apple’s pushing the iPhone 5s in gold now, like that’s the move everyone’s been waiting for. And I look at it and genuinely wonder: what is wrong with wanting a gold phone? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/21/gold-phones/ Mon, 21 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/21/apocalypse-cats/ Someone remade the opening of Attack on Titan with cats. The whole sequence—all that apocalyptic dread and momentum compressed into an intro. But it’s cats. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/21/apocalypse-cats/ Mon, 21 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/21/the-break/ You watch them on cardboard, moving like their joints are made of something else. The music shifts and the whole body becomes an instrument—arms rotating, head spinning, spinning again. The commitment required is absurd, but that’s the point. It’s not elegant. It’s athletic and sometimes sloppy, but the dedication to it is complete. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/21/the-break/ Mon, 21 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/21/xp-on-nes/ Eighty euros gets you Windows XP running on actual NES hardware. Not some emulator—the real thing, booting on thirty-year-old circuitry, moving through windows and menus with a kind of patient stubbornness. Games work. The calculator works. Nothing moves fast or clean, but it works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/21/xp-on-nes/ Mon, 21 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/21/the-bieber-surgery/ Toby Sheldon was a composer in LA who decided his face was the problem, so he spent seventy thousand dollars to look like Justin Bieber. Five years of procedures. Nose work, jaw surgery, hair transplants. He talks about it methodically—”Justin’s smile makes him look so young,” he explains, like smiling is something you can solve with surgery. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/21/the-bieber-surgery/ Mon, 21 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/19/tianducheng/ There’s a half-finished Paris sitting in farmland outside Hangzhou. Tianducheng—developers saw the Eiffel Tower and thought, why not? They got the proportions mostly right, built the streets in that same grid, the apartments, the shops. Then not much happened. Two thousand people live there now, maybe. The tower isn’t as tall as the real one, but it’s still this copper-colored thing poking up above rooftops that were supposed to feel French. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/19/tianducheng/ Sat, 19 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/19/batdad/ Blake Wilson’s BatDad worked because it solved a problem: what if you tried to be Batman but you were also a parent? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/19/batdad/ Sat, 19 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/18/pajamas-at-the-laptop/ I watched Fashion Hero and nearly fell asleep. The mentors didn’t know what they were talking about—just celebrities with no real sense of how the industry works. Jessica Weiß, who runs Journelles, saw it the same way. Germany has no real infrastructure for young designers the way Scandinavia does. You can’t find emerging labels in German stores. Television occasionally remembers fashion exists, but Fashion Hero was just empty spectacle without substance. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/18/pajamas-at-the-laptop/ Fri, 18 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/18/stunt-boys/ Clicked on a video from some group called Children of Poseidon—no idea who they are, probably just kids with a camera and the idea that pain equals views. One minute of footage and I felt something twist in me, not sympathy exactly, just the exhaustion of watching the same dumb loop play out again and again. Someone gets hurt, someone films it, someone uploads it. The format hasn’t changed in twenty years. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/18/stunt-boys/ Fri, 18 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/18/that-photo-broke-everything/ Kim Kardashian posts an Instagram photo and somehow it’s the thing that finally kills Twitter. I don’t usually care about Kim K—she’s just one of those people who exist in the background of celebrity culture, fine to ignore. But that photo. She’s posing in a white bodysuit, head barely visible because her ass is literally the size of her entire torso, and she captions it #NoFilter like she’s asking us to believe this is real. It’s not, obviously. It’s geometry. It’s physics that doesn’t exist. But it doesn’t matter because the photo is already everywhere, being screenshot and memed and discussed by millions of people who also didn’t care about Kim K five minutes ago. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/18/that-photo-broke-everything/ Fri, 18 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/18/the-papers-were-expired/ Hamburg got caught in a question it couldn’t answer. The Lampedusa Group—West African refugees who’d made their way to Italy before getting shuffled north—had papers that were technically expired. So the police started pulling them off the streets. And the supporters started showing up to stop them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/18/the-papers-were-expired/ Fri, 18 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/18/honest-confusion/ There’s a video of a girl thinking her dad’s stealing a car when he’s really just using Car2Go. It’s obviously marketing, but filmed so it doesn’t look like it—the Mercedes version of something that just happened to be caught on camera. Maybe genuine luck, maybe genuine skill. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/18/honest-confusion/ Fri, 18 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/18/period-power/ Petra Collins released “Period Power” through The Ardorous - a white t-shirt printed with a hairy vulva, fake blood spattered across the chest. It was deliberately, unambiguously obscene, and the fact that you could actually buy it felt impossible. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/18/period-power/ Fri, 18 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/18/superheroes-in-oil/ You’re looking at a painting that’s hung in museums for centuries, and suddenly a superhero is standing in it, rendered in oils, like they always belonged there. Worth1000 ran a competition called “Superhero ModRen”—modern characters, renaissance technique—and the ones that landed understood something crucial: the idea is worthless without the skill. You need the technical chops to paint convincingly, to make the collision feel natural rather than clever. The best pieces in the collection had that, the kind of execution where you forget you’re looking at something inherently absurd. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/18/superheroes-in-oil/ Fri, 18 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/18/sidos-back/ Sido’s putting out “30-11-80” as the warm-up to his November album. It’s got basically everyone on it—Bushido, Eko Fresh, Nazar, Frauenarzt, Smudo, Erick Sermon, Moses Pelham, Afrob, and a bunch of others I lost track of. That many features usually means either the track is incredible or it’s trying to do too much. Could be both. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/18/sidos-back/ Fri, 18 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/18/800-pairs/ I own three pairs of sneakers. One’s basically dead. That leaves two. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/18/800-pairs/ Fri, 18 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/18/hell-no/ You know that thing in horror movies where someone invites everyone to the haunted house and they just go? No questions, no 911 call, just straight into the basement where they die one by one. I’ve watched it enough times to have the pattern memorized. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/18/hell-no/ Fri, 18 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/harajuku-logic/ Walking through Harajuku and Shibuya, the fashion girls are actually trying. They’re wearing brands like DEADMAN, MUZE de ACV, C’EST PAS GRAVE—strange names you’ve never heard, clothes that shouldn’t exist in combination but do. The colors are hard to describe because there’s no logic to them. Just individual choices piled on top of each other until they make sense. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/harajuku-logic/ Thu, 17 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/lily-cole-unguarded/ I had a thing for redheads. Specific ones. Cintia Dicker. Lily Cole, the English model and actress who showed up in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and Snow White and the Huntsman—though that wasn’t really the point. With Lily it was worse because she had some quality that made you want to understand her, which meant staring at her constantly, which meant thinking about her in ways you don’t talk about. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/lily-cole-unguarded/ Thu, 17 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/alyssa-arce/ She made Playmate of the Month in July, which should have been the whole achievement. For Alyssa it was just the start. Next I see her in a Terry Richardson shoot for French Lui Magazine called “Alyssa”—her with a cigarette, tongue out, that casual confidence. In the outtakes she’s wearing Terry’s “I’m on Terry’s Diary” shirt, one of those things that only works if you actually have the presence to carry it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/alyssa-arce/ Thu, 17 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/2013-tv135/ August 26, 2032 is the date Ukrainian astronomers flagged for an asteroid called 2013 TV135—a 410-meter rock with a 0.0016 percent chance of hitting Earth. Almost certainly not, then. The almost is what sticks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/2013-tv135/ Thu, 17 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/cosplay-when-it-clicks/ I’ve never been that into cosplay. The whole scene feels performative—the social media moment, the convention circuit, the obsessive labor toward validation from strangers. But I watch people sink months into a single costume, nail the construction, understand the design from the inside out, and something shifts. That stops being fandom. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/cosplay-when-it-clicks/ Thu, 17 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/falling-from-space/ You’re in black space. Nothing moves. You breathe, and you’re alone in the most absolute way a person can be. Then Felix Baumgartner opens a door and steps out. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/falling-from-space/ Thu, 17 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/the-elder-scrolls-online/ Skyrim was perfect for isolation but terrible for showing off. You built houses, slashed bandits, threw horses down mountains—all alone, with no one there to see it. The Elder Scrolls Online is supposed to fix that. It comes out next year. They released a character creation video and people are already complaining about breast size customization. I mean, okay. But what I’m actually curious about is whether they can make Skyrim work with other people. Whether that world gets better when you’re not alone in it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/the-elder-scrolls-online/ Thu, 17 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/the-edward-smith-principle/ There’s a guy named Edward Smith who claims to have had sex with over a thousand cars. Not in a metaphorical way. Actual cars. The number is specific, documented somewhere in the internet’s deeper corners, the kind of fact that exists because someone was committed enough to keep count. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/the-edward-smith-principle/ Thu, 17 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/all-in/ Watched a taekwondo match between two women and couldn’t look away. Not because it was the most epic thing ever—that’s the kind of thing people say when they don’t know what else to say—but because everything they’d trained for was happening right there. Years of discipline and muscle memory compressed into a few minutes of absolute commitment. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/all-in/ Thu, 17 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/the-shoe-shiner/ During his ’Better Out Than In’ show in New York, Banksy installed a life-size Ronald McDonald in the Bronx with a real kid underneath it, polishing the clown’s already-spotless shoes. The image hits you the wrong way—the corporate icon pristine and grinning, the child bent at work, grimy and somehow permanent-looking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/the-shoe-shiner/ Thu, 17 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/gq-got-something-right/ GQ had become invisible to me. The kind of magazine that was either Playboy for people who needed an excuse to buy it, or a catalog of things nobody actually wants. I hadn’t thought about picking one up in years. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/gq-got-something-right/ Thu, 17 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/every-thirty-days/ You could go a lot of ways with a pregnancy photo project. Sophie Starzenski chose to point a camera at her body from the side every thirty days for nine months and not do much else with it. No narrative, no artfulness, no emotional permission slip. Just the documentation. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/every-thirty-days/ Thu, 17 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/pandora/ The concept designs for Avatar Land at Disney World look incredible. Floating Pandora trees, bioluminescent plants, creatures everywhere, the entire blue Na’vi world rendered in full. The opening’s still years away—2014 at the earliest—but the designs are enough to imagine what it’ll actually feel like walking through those spaces. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/pandora/ Thu, 17 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/street-fighter-ii-appears-twice/ Street Fighter II shows up twice. It’s just there, solid, in two of these top-three lists—not at first glance, but once you see it, you notice it’s the only game both developers picked. Somehow that’s more interesting than if they’d agreed on everything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/street-fighter-ii-appears-twice/ Thu, 17 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/rooms-within-rooms/ Wes Anderson builds worlds that are so controlled, so precisely composed, that they become a kind of sadness. His new film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, is set in a hotel—or maybe several versions of it across time, nested inside each other. You watch the trailer and something about it pulls you back to watch it again. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/17/rooms-within-rooms/ Thu, 17 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/16/light-bone-and-cherry/ The Air Max 1 keeps cycling through colorways and I keep noticing them. This JD Sports exclusive landed in a bone-black-gray mix with cherry red hits, and it actually works—there’s a restraint to it that a lot of the newer drops miss. Not screaming, just sitting there clean. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/16/light-bone-and-cherry/ Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/16/tokyo-drift/ Fashion week in Tokyo after dark feels different—the light is better, neon bleeding into darkness, the city geometry at its best. You see it on a bridge in Shibuya: Rumi Neely in Alexander Wang and Isabel Marant, styled and photographed with complete intention. For that one frame, the clothes become something else—a statement, an image, a moment. That’s what I love about fashion photography: that commitment to making something that feels inevitable when you see it, where every element (clothes, light, angle, the subject’s presence) conspires to create this single perfect image. The effort disappears. What remains is intention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/16/tokyo-drift/ Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/16/the-walking-dead-went-nowhere/ I watched The Walking Dead for years because stopping halfway feels like quitting, and by the time I knew it was going nowhere, I was too invested to leave. The farm went on forever. The dialogue went on forever. Every character—the kid, the woman, the sheriff—built with surgical precision to irritate. Every week I’d sit there convinced I could write this better, direct it better, do something to make it land. Probably couldn’t, but the show had a way of making you believe you could. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/16/the-walking-dead-went-nowhere/ Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/16/japan-checked-out/ Japan’s population is doing something no other developed country is really doing—it’s actually shrinking, and fast. More old people than young people. Fewer births each year than the last. The kind of decline that doesn’t reverse itself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/16/japan-checked-out/ Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/16/the-oarfish/ People talk about sea monsters their whole lives. Giant squid, whales so big they don’t seem possible, crabs the size of… I don’t know, houses. You hear it and think, sure, whatever. Cool story. Probably fake. Then scientists in California, including Jasmine Santana, pull a five-meter oarfish out of the water. Dead, which is how we got to see it. Now it’s in a freezer or on display or something at a research institute, and I have no idea what they do with a fish that big. Eat it? Mount it? Bring it back to life through the power of science fiction? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/16/the-oarfish/ Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/16/gorgeous-and-gross/ Found a video of this tattooed girl doing things with her tongue that I don’t know how to feel about. The control she has is legitimately wild—shapes and movements that seem impossible. I can’t stop watching it, except I also can’t stop wanting to look away. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/16/gorgeous-and-gross/ Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/16/paris-hasnt-changed/ Paris Hilton hasn’t changed since her tape came out in 2001. Same face, same body, same glassy eyes. The footage was barely even hot—mostly night vision and unconvincing moans—but everyone wanted it. I remember getting a burned copy from someone’s older brother back when that’s how you got porn, before it was all free and endless online. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/16/paris-hasnt-changed/ Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/16/the-girl-i-made-up/ When I found out Avril Lavigne married Chad Kroeger, I felt something collapse a little. Not devastated—more like watching mythology turn into ordinary life. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/16/the-girl-i-made-up/ Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/16/just-get-a-better-car/ Roman tested a theory with a borrowed Lamborghini. The premise: the real reason anyone struggles with dating isn’t personality or looks—it’s not having the right car. So he parked it somewhere visible and waited. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/16/just-get-a-better-car/ Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/16/money-like-email/ Square Cash was one of those fintech ideas that shouldn’t have existed. You could send money by writing an amount in an email subject line. Not through a banking app or some sleek interface—just email. The simplicity was disarming. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/16/money-like-email/ Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/16/medieval-land/ Came across this Game of Thrones parody called Medieval Land Fun-Time World and immediately got why people found it so funny. The idea alone is stupid in the best way—what if GoT was a medieval theme park? Everything is wholesome and cheerful, all the same characters but completely neutered. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/16/medieval-land/ Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/15/become-klaus/ “You have to change your name to Klaus or Heidi.” That’s the sentence that sits wrong, the one that keeps you clicking back to the video. Lufthansa ran this campaign offering a year in Berlin—flights, apartment, bicycle, the whole thing paid—but only to Swedish citizens, and only if you legally renamed yourself. Not a joke. A real brand campaign. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/15/become-klaus/ Tue, 15 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/15/patrice-wilson-strikes-again/ I watched Alison Gold’s ’Chinese Food’ and I’m still not sure why. If you thought Rebecca Black’s ’Friday’ was the bottom, the nadir of manufactured pop culture disaster, you weren’t paying attention. Patrice Wilson—the architect of that whole catastrophe—apparently decided the formula worked and went looking for another kid to throw into the machine. This time it’s Alison Gold, singing about Chinese food. Fortune cookies. Subtitles the whole way through. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/15/patrice-wilson-strikes-again/ Tue, 15 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/15/rap-god/ There’s this moment in ’Rap God’ where Eminem gets so fast the song almost falls apart, like he’s seeing how compressed he can make language before syntax breaks. It’s technically impossible—syllables stacking over each other, barely a breath between them. I’d forgotten why people were terrified of him. Not because he was cool or edgy, but because he could do something that felt physically superhuman. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/15/rap-god/ Tue, 15 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/15/finally-ghost/ WordPress used to be the thing. Then it became this sprawling empire of plugins and options, built for publishing operations rather than people who just want to write posts quickly. John O’Nolan, who actually knows what he’s doing in this space, launched Ghost yesterday to fix exactly that problem. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/15/finally-ghost/ Tue, 15 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/15/married-on-the-yamanote/ The Yamanote Line isn’t what anyone pictures when they think about getting married. It’s a crowded loop through Tokyo, packed during commute hours, full of salarymen and students and vending machines and the accumulated smell of a hundred thousand daily commutes. You picture it the way you picture a parking garage or a dentist’s waiting room—a place where romance goes quietly to die. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/15/married-on-the-yamanote/ Tue, 15 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/15/one-good-delivery/ A pizza delivery guy showed up and danced to “What Does The Fox Say” with these people instead of just handing over the box. Maybe he was asked, maybe he read the room. Either way he fully committed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/15/one-good-delivery/ Tue, 15 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/15/los-santos/ You’re scrolling through screenshots of GTA V trying to remember if they’re from the game or just photos of LA. The detail’s too clean, the lighting too precise, the chaos too recognizable. Rockstar caught something about how cities actually feel—not the monuments, just the texture. The wet pavement reflecting light differently, random parked cars, graffiti, shadows that make sense because light actually works that way. It’s all designed but it feels honest in a way most games don’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/15/los-santos/ Tue, 15 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/15/game-of-bones/ Game of Thrones was basically soft-core porn already. All those lingering camera shots of breasts and ass, the show’s obsession with finding reasons to get people naked, entire plotlines that existed just to justify nudity in the credits. So when the official-unofficial porn parody “Game of Bones” got announced, it didn’t feel surprising. It felt like the natural endpoint. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/15/game-of-bones/ Tue, 15 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/15/just-a-cardigan/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/15/just-a-cardigan/ Tue, 15 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/15/kalos/ Pokemon X/Y was when the series went genuinely 3D, and I remember it feeling both inevitable and slightly off. Kalos, based on France, had this cleaner aesthetic than previous regions—less wild, more designed. Walking through Lumiose City actually felt like being somewhere, which was new. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/15/kalos/ Tue, 15 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/15/harry-potter-is-dead-long-live-daniel-radcliffe/ I’ve had a thing for Daniel Radcliffe for a while now, even back when he was still working out how to hold the wand without looking uncomfortable. But something happened. He showed up on the cover of some magazine I’d never heard of—Flaunt, I think—and he’s just there looking like he’s finally figured something out. Not trying, not performing. Just present in a way you can’t fake. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/15/harry-potter-is-dead-long-live-daniel-radcliffe/ Tue, 15 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/15/concept-limbo/ Victor Mosquera works for a design studio called Volta, making concept art for games that haven’t been announced yet—if they’re even real. Colombian artist, absurdly talented, the kind of work that makes you immediately wonder what it would feel like to actually play the thing. Nameless characters, grotesque enemies, these cavernous atmospheric spaces that pull at you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/15/concept-limbo/ Tue, 15 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/14/mario-collected/ There’s this IGN project, Museum of Mario, that walks you through every major form of the character across fifty years of games. Designed clean, well-organized, the kind of thing that makes you realize someone should have done it years ago. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/14/mario-collected/ Mon, 14 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/14/the-zombie-fantasy/ We’ve all built the same zombie apocalypse story in our heads. You’ve absorbed it from a hundred films, shows, books, games. In your version, you’re the exceptional one—not the first to die or the one who cracks under pressure, but the one who makes it because you’re fundamentally different. Smarter. Faster. Ready in a way the crowd isn’t. You move through the ruins with a weapon and a purpose and someone at your side. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/14/the-zombie-fantasy/ Mon, 14 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/14/what-the-kobe/ The “What The” sneaker concept is basically controlled chaos. Take everything you like about a shoe’s design language, throw it all into one colorway, and hope it works. Most of the time it doesn’t. You end up with something that looks like a focus group exploded on the upper. But when it lands, like this Nike Kobe 8 System Premium version, you’re looking at something real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/14/what-the-kobe/ Mon, 14 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/14/three-stripes-again/ The three stripes are impossible to miss—almost too recognizable to see anymore. Mark McNairy did this collaboration with adidas Originals and 84-lab anyway, working with Kazuki Kuraishi on a fall/winter collection that’s just minimal and clean. Retro sneaker language, nothing flashy, no irony. There’s real discipline in that kind of restraint, especially in footwear design where it’s so easy to pile on details and textures. Just simple shoes that know what they are. They’ll be everywhere, probably. The kind you stop noticing because they’re so clean. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/14/three-stripes-again/ Mon, 14 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/14/james-blake-chance-the-rapper-life-round-here/ I’d drifted away from James Blake at some point without really noticing. Not because anything went wrong, just one of those drift-offs where an artist you liked falls out of rotation and you don’t think about it. Then this collaboration with Chance showed up and it’s one of those moments where you realize you’ve missed someone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/14/james-blake-chance-the-rapper-life-round-here/ Mon, 14 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/14/different-rules/ I’ve watched enough Brazilian dashcam footage to understand that motorcycle theft works very differently down there. Someone steals your bike at gunpoint in São Paulo and the police response is immediate and physical—no court hearing, no appeals, no suspended sentence waiting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/14/different-rules/ Mon, 14 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/14/love-inc/ The Booka Shade video for “Love Inc” is just people making out. Dark space, couples locked together, hands everywhere. They bite. It’s crude—the opposite of romance. Just bodies pressing while the track runs underneath, entirely unbothered about the horniness of it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/14/love-inc/ Mon, 14 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/14/comic-con/ There’s this predictable moment at every convention: a woman shows up in a cosplay, and within ten minutes some guy thinks he’s got permission to say whatever he wants. I’ve seen it enough to know it’s not random awkwardness—it’s a pattern. A couple years back BuzzFeed had cosplayers write down the most offensive stuff men said to them at Comic Con, and the consistency was depressing. Same jokes, same entitlement, same assumption that if you’re wearing something revealing, you’re implicitly inviting comment. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/14/comic-con/ Mon, 14 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/14/sixty-dollar-banksy/ In 2013, Banksy set up a table in Central Park and sold original pieces for sixty dollars each. They were worth maybe two hundred thousand. Most people walked past. Some stopped. A few bought them, not knowing what they had. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/14/sixty-dollar-banksy/ Mon, 14 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/14/trevor-yelled-at-me/ Comic Con in New York. I’m waiting in line to see the voice actors from GTA V, not expecting much beyond a handshake. When I get to Trevor’s table, I ask if he’ll yell at me like he does in the game. Full character, full rage. Just do it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/14/trevor-yelled-at-me/ Mon, 14 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/14/hercules-the-legend-begins/ I watched a trailer for a Hercules film called ’The Legend Begins’ and it’s exactly as bad as the title suggests. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/14/hercules-the-legend-begins/ Mon, 14 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/14/kingdom-hearts/ The combination shouldn’t work—Disney characters wandering through Japanese RPG worlds with anime mythology underneath. Somehow it doesn’t collapse, though, and that’s mostly because of Yoko Shimomura’s soundtrack. The music is genuinely exceptional, all orchestral sweeps and synth drama, the kind of score that makes the plot feel like it matters even when it’s completely lost you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/14/kingdom-hearts/ Mon, 14 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/14/unshy/ I talked to four girls who make money by taking their clothes off on the internet, and the first thing that surprised me was how unsurprised they were about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/14/unshy/ Mon, 14 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/7/titans/ It happens in seconds. The wall cracks, a roar, and they’re pouring through—massive, naked, grinning things—blood everywhere, limbs, screaming. One of them plucks Eren’s mother off the street like a doll and snaps her in half, then eats her while he watches. He’s maybe ten. He screams a vow right there. That moment is the show. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/7/titans/ Mon, 07 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/7/nothing-compares-to-wrecking-ball/ Miley Cyrus swinging naked on a wrecking ball was kind of ridiculous, but that was the whole point. Sinead O’Connor didn’t see it that way—she had a very public issue with it and told Miley she was throwing away her credibility. They ended up taking shots at each other in the press for a while, this weird generational feud that neither of them really seemed to want. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/7/nothing-compares-to-wrecking-ball/ Mon, 07 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/7/in-the-eye-of-the-storm/ I’m driving deeper into the storm bearing down—dark, roaring, thick with blue streaks and scattered light. No way out now, no choice but to push straight through and hope for the best. Up the mountain roads, down the slopes, with the weather war trailing behind. Then suddenly I’m in the eye. Everything goes quiet. Peaceful. Bright. Just Lorde, V V Brown, Only Real in my ears. Maybe I made it through after all. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/7/in-the-eye-of-the-storm/ Mon, 07 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/7/sexiest-twice/ Esquire gave Scarlett Johansson the title “sexiest woman alive” twice. Most people win once, cash the check, and move on. Johansson got to wonder if it meant something—was there a protocol for repeat winners? A ceiling on how many times you could win? She asked it playfully, like she already knew the answer was no. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/7/sexiest-twice/ Mon, 07 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/4/nowhere-else-to-go/ I’m walking through Monte Carlo late one rainy evening. The streets are lined with boutiques and hotels and restaurants, places designed purely to extract money from anyone foolish enough to think they belong here. We duck into a casino—one of those rooms full of desperate people in nice clothes and beautiful women who are definitely not here for the gambling. My friend Jörn moves through it with the ease of someone who actually fits, talking about the bay’s history: pirates, monarchs, casinos, the usual Mediterranean mythology that haunts a place like this. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/4/nowhere-else-to-go/ Fri, 04 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/4/scarlett-falls/ Scarlett Johansson stumbled on set of Under the Skin and the internet lost its mind. Not in an outrage way, just the way it does when someone untouchable does something clumsy. There’s something about that moment that gets replayed and riffed on forever. Sad Keanu on a bench. That absurdly handsome guy in the coffee shop. The needy girlfriend meme. Johansson falling became another one of those. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/4/scarlett-falls/ Fri, 04 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/4/del-toros-couch-gag/ Everyone’s right: The Simpsons haven’t been funny for years. Maybe five, maybe ten—I’ve lost count. But the Halloween specials still work. This year’s “Treehouse of Horror” couch gag was done by Guillermo del Toro, the guy behind Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth. And it’s genuinely good. Good enough that I’d watch it again and again if I had the time. But it’s Friday, and I don’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/4/del-toros-couch-gag/ Fri, 04 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/4/let-it-disappear/ There’s something exhausting about Instagram—all the work to make a single moment feel documented. Pull the phone, find the app, take the shot, pick the filter, write the caption, tag people, post. By the time you’re done, the moment’s already dead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/4/let-it-disappear/ Fri, 04 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/4/miley-loose/ MTV put out this Miley documentary called “The Movement,” as if MTV still signified what mattered to anyone under thirty. An hour of quick cuts and dramatic strings. Miley talking about Pharrell, Pharrell talking about Miley, a nod to Britney, some dancing. Mostly just MTV proving to itself it’s still part of whatever’s current. You’d get more from the Terry Richardson photos, the ones from New York where she’s posing to show everyone what she wasn’t allowed to show while Disney still owned her. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/4/miley-loose/ Fri, 04 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/2/travel-bloggers-lost-it/ I’ve ended up surrounding myself with agency people over the years. PR, design, press, social media types—the whole ecosystem. It wasn’t planned, it just happened somehow, and I’m not complaining. There are definitely worse fates. But the benefit is that you get a direct line to what’s actually going on in those worlds, and what I’m hearing lately is making me genuinely angry. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/2/travel-bloggers-lost-it/ Wed, 02 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/2/the-immortal-youth/ You can always tell when a photographer gets it. Not the technical stuff—anyone can learn lighting. I mean when they understand what nakedness actually means, what it’s willing to reveal if you’re paying attention. Most fail at this. They get precious about it, or cold and clinical, or they’re just trying to provoke. Ryan McGinley isn’t any of those things. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/2/the-immortal-youth/ Wed, 02 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/1/she-danced-out/ She set up cameras in the office early one morning and filmed herself quitting. Not an email, not two weeks’ notice left on the desk. Just dancing out the door. Over four million people have watched Marina do it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/1/she-danced-out/ Tue, 01 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/1/smaug-in-december/ I’m going to see The Desolation of Smaug in December. The trailer made it inevitable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/1/smaug-in-december/ Tue, 01 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/1/the-clickbait-trap/ BuzzFeed was never going to matter. I knew this after a while—the clickbait, the listicles, the whole ecosystem built on making you scroll without thinking. I scrolled anyway for years, holding out hope for actual writing underneath the colors and outrage. There wasn’t any. Just the same formula: strip it down, make it easy, make them click. I’m done now. There’s too much real writing out there, too many people who actually care about language, to waste time on content made for people killing five minutes at a stoplight. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/1/the-clickbait-trap/ Tue, 01 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/1/the-king/ Breaking Bad ended and I kept waiting for something to feel wrong about it, but it didn’t. Everyone had their takes ready—spoilers and analysis and plot breakdowns—but none of that was the story. The story was always about a man who wanted to matter finding the one thing that would make him dangerous, and then paying for it over five seasons. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/1/the-king/ Tue, 01 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/1/finally-watchable/ Wanting to watch a music video online and hitting geoblocking – that’s the kind of frustration that makes you understand why people lose it. You want to see Miley Cyrus being explicitly sexual on that wrecking ball and instead you get a black screen and a smug message basically saying fuck off, you live in the wrong country. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/1/finally-watchable/ Tue, 01 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/1/blocks-balloons-death/ I’ve been running through airports the last few days, grabbing whatever magazines are sitting at the kiosks. Most of them didn’t survive the trip, but the ones that did are all English-language tech stuff—you know, the Silicon Valley startup obsession—because that’s what you pick up when you’re tired and bored and the magazine rack is right there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/10/1/blocks-balloons-death/ Tue, 01 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/30/youre-not-the-one/ Listen to “You’re Not the One” and you understand why pop music is the only thing that matters right now. Everything else exhausted itself—indie rock going in circles, hip hop needing pop just to survive, drum and bass a backdrop to watching people fall apart. Pop’s the only place where anything’s actually happening. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/30/youre-not-the-one/ Mon, 30 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/30/stupid-ways/ Hours disappear into Los Santos. You’re in there and the outside world stops mattering. The entire map is interactive. Every street, building, person is something to interact with. You can steal, drive, shoot, explode. You can die in a thousand ways—cliffs, crashes, gunfights, drowning, gas-station explosions, falling debris. The game is built on this. You fail constantly. Dying is entertainment. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/30/stupid-ways/ Mon, 30 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/30/mouth-bomb/ Red wine. That’s what pulls me through the nights when everything is too much thinking and not enough resolution—something that tastes like the people who made it actually cared. Sometimes smooth, sometimes sharp. Both do the job. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/30/mouth-bomb/ Mon, 30 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/30/gone/ I want to take someone’s hand and actually leave. Next flight, next ship, next city where nobody knows us. Find a club at 2 AM playing something the rest of the world hasn’t heard yet, dance until sunrise comes over water, until you genuinely believe you’re never going back. Because there’s no reason to. Nobody’s waiting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/30/gone/ Mon, 30 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/30/kiko-mizuhara/ I kept seeing her face all over Tokyo. Harajuku, Shibuya, the magazine racks at every bookstore, the convenience stores, the fashion shops. Kiko Mizuhara, everywhere at once, smiling from posters and covers in this blur of commercial imagery that made up the visual language of the city. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/30/kiko-mizuhara/ Mon, 30 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/27/charli-xcx/ Pop music spent years being uncool. Not controversial, just beneath you - the thing record labels pushed on kids while real music happened elsewhere: indie bands whispering in dark rooms, or drum and bass, which at least had the decency of being too loud to think about. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/27/charli-xcx/ Fri, 27 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/27/still-nothing/ Paris Fashion Week, and FEMEN showed up topless at the Nina Ricci show, chanting about exploitation and the machinery of the fashion industry. I love breasts—genuinely, their weight and variety. But this gesture has been hollowed out by repetition. The shock is gone. The meaning burned off somewhere around the fourth or fifth time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/27/still-nothing/ Fri, 27 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/27/heres-to-change/ Robert Downey Jr. had a moment to explain what HTC actually stands for. Not the official answer—High Tech Computer Corporation, the one in the manual. The real one. Hungarian Tuba Concert. Hot Tea Catapult. Hot Tempered Cheerleaders. Happy Telephone Company. He made this clear while holding cats, standing near ships wrapped in foil, watching Hawaiians dance. The campaign’s whole point was freedom: buy HTC and you’re buying rebellion, buying the right to ignore everyone else’s rules and chart your own path. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/27/heres-to-change/ Fri, 27 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/27/rick-owens-big-disruption/ Rick Owens has always been the designer willing to do what fashion wouldn’t. Black, architectural, deliberately ugly in a way that makes you look twice—his clothes aren’t trying to please you. They’re trying to make you uncomfortable, to challenge what you think a body should look like draped in fabric. That’s why Fashion Week notices when he does something unexpected. In a world of incremental tweaks and seasonal trends, Owens moves like he’s dismantling the whole thing from the inside. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/27/rick-owens-big-disruption/ Fri, 27 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/27/that-stereotype-again/ I’d spent years trying to move past the Japan stereotypes—that nothing there makes sense, that it’s all neon fever dream. I wanted to believe in the real artists, serious musicians, designers doing actual work. Normal people doing normal things in a country mostly reduced to cartoons. Kawaii, vending machines, tentacle porn. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/27/that-stereotype-again/ Fri, 27 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/25/visible-changes/ There’s this impossible space where everyone knows the system is broken but the machine keeps operating. France banned beauty pageants for children—everyone cheered—and then nothing changed because the pressure doesn’t care about pageants specifically. It just needs kids thinking about their bodies all the time, whether that’s through magazines or social media or what their friends are doing. The form keeps shifting. The content stays the same. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/25/visible-changes/ Wed, 25 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/25/angry-at-art/ I’m standing in front of another blank wall. Two framed drawings hang on it—stick figures with blank eyes, a sun in the corner, some grass at the bottom, all in black and white. The one next to it doesn’t offer much more. The gallery owner sits bored on a wooden chair, tapping on her iPad. Around me, connoisseurs and collectors mill around. And I want to scream. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/25/angry-at-art/ Wed, 25 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/23/royals/ I confused Lorde with a Finnish hard rock band when she first started getting attention. Hard Rock Hallelujah, which makes no sense, but I wasn’t really paying attention. Turns out she’s a 16-year-old from New Zealand who spells her name with an E, and when I finally heard “Royals,” it was obvious why everyone was talking about her. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/23/royals/ Mon, 23 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/23/hamburg-holds/ After a photo shoot for Purple, I asked Inga Weisz about Hamburg. She’s not from there—grew up in Lower Saxony, in the countryside—but the city has hooks in her deep. The salt smell, fresh fish, that clear wide air all point back to childhood, to her brother, to feeling small and safe. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/23/hamburg-holds/ Mon, 23 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/23/the-call-the-cry-the-silence/ The club is dark, nothing but flickering weak lights and bodies moving to something that sounds sad even when it’s trying to be loud. Everything’s consumption and exhaustion. You’re in it and realizing slowly that you’re invisible here, that what you came for isn’t going to happen. You call out. Nothing. You scream. Nothing. Then you go quiet, which is somehow worse, because at least the screaming was something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/23/the-call-the-cry-the-silence/ Mon, 23 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/20/ios-7/ You opened your phone and everything looked wrong. Not broken—just completely different. Fluorescent colors, animations that zoomed in from everywhere, icons that looked like plastic toys. The internet had been losing its mind about the redesign for weeks, but nothing quite prepared you for how disorienting it actually was in your hand. Some people online were calling it beautiful. Others said it looked like a Hasbro toy designed by someone on acid. Most people fell somewhere between panic and grudging interest. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/20/ios-7/ Fri, 20 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/20/guest-list/ ’Cash, Diamond Rings, Swimming Pools’ was everywhere last summer. D E N A, this Bulgarian artist who’d recently landed in Berlin, seemed to become the sound of the city overnight—the kind of track that works in a club at the right moment, when everyone’s already moving and the beats just feel inevitable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/20/guest-list/ Fri, 20 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/19/for-exposure/ The Huffington Post was launching a German edition, and they wanted writers. Free writers. The same model that had somehow turned Arianna Huffington’s operation into a multibillion-dollar enterprise—just ask talented people to contribute without payment and see what sticks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/19/for-exposure/ Thu, 19 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/19/unmanageable/ Sky Ferreira was always too weird for mainstream pop. The others—Miley, Taylor, Lana—they understood the math. You can be provocative as long as you’re also easy to like. Sky had the songs, she had the look, but something about her stayed genuinely unmanageable. Chaotic. Genuinely strange in a way that doesn’t map to a demographic. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/19/unmanageable/ Thu, 19 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/17/peer-steinbrück-actually-funny/ I wasn’t expecting to laugh at a politician. But there was Peer Steinbrück on Circus HalliGalli, a German late-night show where two comedians run guests through absurdist bits, and he was funny. Not performing funny. Just funny. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/17/peer-steinbrück-actually-funny/ Tue, 17 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/17/what-sticks/ New York breaks your sense of scale. Everything is too loud, too close, everybody reaching for something that never quite fits. It should be unbearable. Mostly it just is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/17/what-sticks/ Tue, 17 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/17/ghosts-money-stories/ I still read magazines on paper. There’s a ritual to it—the kiosk, the flip through, the decision. You hold something in your hands, smell the pages, feel the weight. It’s not romantic. Print just dies slowly, and what survives says something about what actually matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/17/ghosts-money-stories/ Tue, 17 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/17/after-discipline/ Someone showed me pictures of Takayo Kiyota’s sushi work and I couldn’t stop looking. They’re these elaborate designs made from colored rice and seaweed—detailed anatomically explicit content, basically. Pornographic sushi. The precision is incredible, which is what makes it work. She’s not doing this as some punk statement or conceptual art exercise. She learned actual sushi technique, spent real time with the medium, and then decided to make her art about explicit sexual imagery. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/17/after-discipline/ Tue, 17 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/16/lisbon/ The tuk-tuk bounces hard over the cobblestones, and Jennifer’s next to me throwing her arms up. She’s the producer on this trip, dark hair whipping in the wind. A few minutes before we were talking about Taiwanese food, Beijing, Berlin. I was countering with Tokyo subway lines, landscapes around Toronto, the usual comparative geography that happens when you travel with someone who’s lived in three countries. Then the tuk-tuk hits something and she’s laughing, really laughing, the kind where you forget to be self-conscious. Her oversized black sunglasses are sliding down. The city’s moving past us in streaks—painted tiles on the buildings, old women hanging laundry, a restaurant sign in blue and white. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/16/lisbon/ Mon, 16 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/16/the-other-mallorca/ Mallorca is Germany’s seventeenth state—the running joke, at least, the island boiled down to sangria buckets and the worst version of German tourism, the kind of place that makes you dumb just thinking about it. RTL2 with beaches. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/16/the-other-mallorca/ Mon, 16 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/10/wolf/ Tyler dropped a trailer for a film called Wolf. Bicycle, kid getting his ass kicked, that’s the whole thing. Nobody knows when it’s coming out or where you’re supposed to watch it. The Odd Future crew probably doesn’t know either. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/10/wolf/ Tue, 10 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/10/how-long-will-i-love-you/ There’s a version of this song where the question is the whole thing. Not rhetorical—an actual question. How long will I love you? And instead of an answer, there’s just her voice asking it into the dark, like she’s wondering the same thing. You know that feeling, the one where you’re lying there thinking about someone and you’re already tired from loving them, and you just want to know if it’s ever going to stop. Goulding’s got that in her voice. Not dramatic about it. Just tired and honest. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/10/how-long-will-i-love-you/ Tue, 10 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/10/the-underwear-years/ Miley Cyrus spent the better part of a couple of years proving she wasn’t the Disney kid, and a lot of that proof came down to underwear and provocation. The deliberate shock value was loud, but it was masking something simpler—someone suffocating in a role and needing to blow it up to escape. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/10/the-underwear-years/ Tue, 10 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/5/school-of-twerk/ Ran into this shirt somewhere—maybe saw someone wearing it, maybe just lodged it in my brain from the internet. Either way it won’t leave. Twerking’s been dead for a while, which is exactly the point. A graphic tee with a reference that’s already half-ironic doesn’t feel desperate. It just sits there, stupid and self-aware, the way clothes you actually want to wear tend to be. Not trying. Not reaching. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/5/school-of-twerk/ Thu, 05 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/5/lady-gaga-naked-again/ She posed without clothes for V Magazine, which is basically her permanent default now. The nudity cycles through different eras but the commitment never wavers. If provocation is your whole strategy, you lean into it completely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/5/lady-gaga-naked-again/ Thu, 05 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/4/lil-bub-friendz/ Vice is releasing Lil Bub & Friendz on YouTube, rolling it out slowly. That face. That tongue hanging out. Everyone loves Bub and I get it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/4/lil-bub-friendz/ Wed, 04 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/4/the-femen-trap/ There’s a documentary that played at Venice about Femen, the Ukrainian group known for topless protests and all the feminist street theater. It shows Viktor Sviazko, who started the whole thing, running it like a military operation: scripting protests down to the word, yelling at activists on camera, reminding them how much he’s paying them. The control is absolute. You can see it all on film. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/4/the-femen-trap/ Wed, 04 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/4/where-the-work-is/ Pick up any menswear lookbook and you’re seeing the same three silhouettes on repeat—t-shirt, hoodie, jeans, done. Women’s designers are having conversations about proportion and texture and what clothes can actually do. There’s a freedom in women’s streetwear that men’s wear just won’t touch. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/4/where-the-work-is/ Wed, 04 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/2/rainbows-dont-bite/ Norman Röhlig was on his vacation terrace in the sun, drinking something cold, and he felt the truth he’d been avoiding: he lived in a tolerant German bubble. Berlin was gay-friendly, liberal, safe. But Russia was just one country, and homophobia was global, and he was sitting in his comfort doing nothing about any of it. He thought about writing something, calling it out, but figured he’d just yell into the void like everyone else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/2/rainbows-dont-bite/ Mon, 02 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/2/undecided/ Peer Steinbrück looks completely worn out, sixty-six, former minister-president, standing against that pale blue background trying to land a blow against Angela Merkel, the Teflon woman. Black suit, striped tie, sweat on his forehead. He’s visibly wrestling with his own face—should he smile or stay serious? Either way feels like it might scare off the swing voters. His words just bounce off her like nothing. Then Stefan Raab comes at him from nowhere with something about Oliver Kahn and Scottish kings and suddenly the ninety-minute debate is over. Are we any smarter? Maybe a little. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/2/undecided/ Mon, 02 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/2/when-summer-dies/ Cold rain in my face, and I’m thinking about the umbrella I left inside somewhere, dry and warm. Summer’s dead. With it gone the short dresses, the ice cream, that will to live you only get when the sun’s on your head and beer’s in your chest. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/9/2/when-summer-dies/ Mon, 02 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/30/the-radical-softened/ Miranda Kerr in V Magazine styled as Cicciolina. Sebastian Faena shot it—black and white, then color, the photographs alternating in mood the way Faena does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/30/the-radical-softened/ Fri, 30 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/28/five-things/ I spent part of the week looking at products. Nothing I need, just things that made some kind of sense. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/28/five-things/ Wed, 28 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/28/against-sexist-advertising/ You see Chio Chips in German supermarkets and there’s this moment where you realize someone in a marketing meeting actually signed off on flavors split by gender, explicitly designed so men and women would buy different ones. It’s stupid enough to be funny, except it’s not the exception—it’s the rule. Axe ads, H&M lingerie billboards, surprise eggs for boys and girls like their DNA requires different plastic toys. The whole advertising landscape is built on the idea that women should be decorative and available, and men should want what they can’t have while also being soldiers or whatever. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/28/against-sexist-advertising/ Wed, 28 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/26/three-magazines/ Snuck to the kiosk in Neukölln and bought three magazines because The Spiegel is out there arguing print isn’t dead, so I figured I’d contribute. Three dead trees. Three different visions of what matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/26/three-magazines/ Mon, 26 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/26/full-time-blogger/ I watched a fashion blogger quit her PR job one autumn morning. She’d been managing airline accounts and clothing brands for a Berlin agency—the kind of work that wears you down. Then one day she posted something that brought in as much money as two months of that grinding corporate work. Within a year it wasn’t the only time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/26/full-time-blogger/ Mon, 26 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/19/thoughts-at-the-speed-of-sound/ Lying in bed with the sheets tangled and the pillows useless. Blanket bunched up. You haven’t even undressed. You’re just staring at the ceiling while your brain refuses to settle. It throws thoughts at you like vultures, and you can’t organize any of it into something that makes sense. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/19/thoughts-at-the-speed-of-sound/ Mon, 19 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/15/travelers/ You know how backpacking through Southeast Asia used to feel like the opposite of tourism? Like you were doing something real because you weren’t following a tour group or staying in a resort. You had a guidebook everyone had, but at least you weren’t paying for the illusion of authenticity—you were just living it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/15/travelers/ Thu, 15 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/15/three-years-selling-words/ Nina opens a package that arrives on her bed one afternoon and can’t believe what she’s looking at: a new black handbag, worth maybe seventy euros. She didn’t order it. A handwritten card explains: “A small thank you for having such a great blog.” She’s thrilled, takes photos of herself with the bag in her bright bedroom, posts them with a link to the company. Everyone wins, right? Not really. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/15/three-years-selling-words/ Thu, 15 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/13/the-wire/ Breakup pain hits different when you’re in it. There’s no winning an argument about suffering hierarchies—in that moment it just doesn’t matter. There was someone who was supposed to be solid, the one person who could navigate you through the everyday disasters and the 3 a.m. panics. Then they’re gone. No support. No love. Just waiting for the hurting to ease up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/13/the-wire/ Tue, 13 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/12/starting-over/ Starting over costs everything—your habits, your routines, sometimes people who seemed permanent. You shed years of accumulated safety and doubt. The friends who stick around aren’t just good; they’re proof you got something right. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/12/starting-over/ Mon, 12 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/9/skeleton-lake/ A crystal-clear lake in front of us, blue sky bearing down like a smile. Kids laughing as they jumped into cold water. Sailboats in the distance, green wilderness all around—a few colorful summer houses completing the scene. Someone next to me said something about how perfect life must be to live in a place like that. I just nodded. In that moment, Canada was the most beautiful country in the world. No question. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/9/skeleton-lake/ Fri, 09 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/8/ladies-in-flyknits/ I used to flip through Der Prinz back when it had personal ads in the back, and you’d see everything: couples advertising themselves, lonely women, men who needed to lick feet. You’d wonder what happens to someone to make them fixate on one specific thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/8/ladies-in-flyknits/ Thu, 08 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/7/the-professional/ I’ve always been the type to pretend I know exactly what I’m doing when I have no clue about it at all. Travel to a new city and I skip all the obvious tourist stuff. Rome, Toronto, wherever—I pass right by the monuments and crowded squares and go straight to whatever restaurant I’ve decided has the best som tam, completely sure and probably wrong. My friends ask for directions and that’s when they realize I don’t even know which way is north. Same thing with games. Load up something new and I click straight to inferno or hardcore or whatever the cruelest setting is. Quit in frustration twenty minutes later. But that’s what professionals do, right? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/7/the-professional/ Wed, 07 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/7/westeros-1995/ Sandor Clegane in a Simpsons t-shirt, Daenerys trailing ferrets like a 90s It Girl, Bronn in a three-stripe Adidas tracksuit. Mike Wrobel, the French artist who blogs under the name Moshi-Kun, took Game of Thrones and dropped it straight into the decade of dial-up and slap bracelets. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/7/westeros-1995/ Wed, 07 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/7/what-sticks/ You spend enough time designing things and eventually the difference between precious and functional becomes obvious—precious suffocates you, functional just sits there doing its job and you forget you’re living inside it. A hat that’s cut right doesn’t feel like a hat anymore, it’s just your head. A white bike is just a bike. A case for your phone that doesn’t try to change the phone’s shape, doesn’t add personality to something that already is what it is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/7/what-sticks/ Wed, 07 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/6/singular-beauties/ I don’t understand fashion the way most people seem to. Collections pile up endlessly, color palettes get recycled, models cycle through. I watch the runway presentations and I see something that always looks the same: blank faces, expensive clothes nobody could actually afford, a strange choreography of beauty and emptiness. It’s a con. A machine that runs on itself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/6/singular-beauties/ Tue, 06 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/5/hearts-like-ours/ “Young Blood” hit different. I was scrolling through something, not really paying attention, and it started playing, and there’s this moment where the synth opens up and the drums come in and you just feel—stupid as it sounds—like everything’s possible right now. Like you’re invincible in the way you can only be when you’re young and haven’t learned to manage your expectations yet. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/8/5/hearts-like-ours/ Mon, 05 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/7/31/after-amy/ I’ve spent years wondering what happens to passion projects you eventually outgrow. You can sell them. Delete them. Or just stop touching them. Then they’re still there, but also not. Like abandoned people. Or a dog left on the highway. Goodbye, buddy. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/7/31/after-amy/ Wed, 31 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/7/27/too-hot-for-politics/ We showed up at Kottbusser Tor in the worst heat of the afternoon. 90 degrees, maybe worse. This was the NSA protest, the surveillance thing, Snowden, all of it. Two thousand people had gathered at Heinrichplatz in Kreuzberg to say something about it, and we figured we should be there too. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/7/27/too-hot-for-politics/ Sat, 27 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/7/22/until-four-am/ Friday night at Ferropolis and it’s chaos. Three Dutch guys in sailor drag sprint toward the main stage. A couple’s tangled somewhere laughing, shouting about freedom and techno and fucking. A topless girl with just pasties is crying in the middle of the path. Staff pull her away. Fire shoots across the sky. Bass hits. This is the Melt running—dancing till sunrise if you make it that long. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/7/22/until-four-am/ Mon, 22 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/7/4/beauty-comes-from-outside/ I spent a good chunk of time talking to MC Fitti, the Berlin rapper who’s figured out how to conduct an entire conversation without saying anything real. He showed up with the grin of the Cheshire Cat, sunglasses and baseball cap fixed in place, ready to deflect every earnest question into something else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/7/4/beauty-comes-from-outside/ Thu, 04 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/6/6/a-day-at-the-lake/ The weather actually worked out, so three people left the city to go swimming. Just clothes that move—sandals, dresses, nothing that stops you. The kind of day where you turn your brain off in the water and let everything else disappear for a few hours. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/6/6/a-day-at-the-lake/ Thu, 06 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/4/2/sampling-everything/ You’re always surrounded by sounds you don’t quite hear—the hiss of subway doors closing, the ambient chaos of a park, some drunk laughing outside your apartment at three in the morning. Yellofier, this app by Boris Blank and Håkan Lidbo, is built on the idea of catching those moments and turning them into music. You sample whatever’s around you and it converts to elements you can actually use in production. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/4/2/sampling-everything/ Tue, 02 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/27/yeah-yeah-yeahs-sacrilege/ Karen O’s voice hits different when you’re not expecting it. Hearing Yeah Yeah Yeahs for the first time felt like permission to make noise that didn’t have to be beautiful or controlled—just raw and loud and yours. They came out of New York in the early 2000s when indie rock was still figuring out its language, and they said no to most of it. The guitar was angular, the songs were short and violent, and everything felt like it mattered in a way that made sense only to people who got it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/27/yeah-yeah-yeahs-sacrilege/ Wed, 27 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/26/richard-kern-home-entertainment/ I found his super-8 films in someone’s apartment once—grainy, explicitly sexual, casually violent, the kind of thing that made you feel complicit just watching. Richard Kern made work on the assumption that the point of art was to make people uncomfortable, and he had the technical skill to pull that off consistently. He composed shots and lit flesh with the cold eye of someone who understood exactly how far he could push. Most artists spend their careers apologizing for what they make. Kern seemed to think apologies were for people with nothing to say. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/26/richard-kern-home-entertainment/ Tue, 26 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/25/chaos-and-commitment/ Walking into Tokyo International Anime Fair was stepping into visual chaos held together by genuine enthusiasm. Costumes everywhere—meticulous pieces that clearly took months, others basically spray paint and commitment. Dragon Ball merchandise still filling one whole corner because the people who grew up with it are still devoted. Younger fans crowding the Miku booths. Stalls packed three deep with figures, posters, every possible variation on the same characters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/25/chaos-and-commitment/ Mon, 25 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/25/what-ali-wore/ There’s this photographer in Berlin, Zoe, who started documenting a man named Ali’s daily outfits. They met last summer—she asked to photograph him, kept running into him around the city, and eventually started a tumblr called What Ali Wore. Simple concept. Just Ali and what he’s wearing on a given day. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/25/what-ali-wore/ Mon, 25 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/25/looking-away/ I notice fashion bloggers doing this thing where they’ll have an outfit that genuinely works, the light’s right, camera’s ready, and then they just look at the ground. Not the camera. The actual ground. Studying pavement like it’s going to reveal something important while the photographer waits. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/25/looking-away/ Mon, 25 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/25/brennisteinn/ Sigur Rós has always been the band you play when you need to feel something without anyone asking what it is. Jónsi’s voice—that falsetto folded into Icelandic and English and pure sound—turns emotion into texture, something you can almost touch. I’ve never looked up what most of their songs mean and I never will. The specificity doesn’t matter. What matters is the shape of the feeling, the way it sits in your chest and refuses to move. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/25/brennisteinn/ Mon, 25 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/24/contagion/ Amina Tyler was nineteen and living in Tunisia when she decided to post two topless photos to a Femen Facebook page. One said “Fuck Your Morals” written across her body. The other was just her with a cigarette. Simple statement. She wanted to be part of something that mattered. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/24/contagion/ Sun, 24 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/22/marked-up/ The Tutor Crowd is a British learning platform that apparently decided to just start correcting London’s graffiti. Not removing it—just marking it up. You spray something with bad spelling and these people circle it, leave notes, edit your vandalism like it’s a homework assignment. It’s what every frustrated English teacher has fantasized about and never had the guts to do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/22/marked-up/ Fri, 22 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/22/no-internet/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/22/no-internet/ Fri, 22 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/22/queen-of-pain/ Finished Heart of the Swarm yesterday. Took a while, which is what happens when you have a life that occasionally requires attention, even though strategically speaking, I’d rather be melting faces off with insect acid full-time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/22/queen-of-pain/ Fri, 22 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/22/when-you-really-live-in-berlin/ I wasted an afternoon on this Tumblr account because every single post is perfectly calibrated. It’s one of those blogs where someone pairs a Berlin stereotype with a reaction GIF, and the combination is so exact that you can’t look away. I was making these horrible wheezing sounds and everyone around me was genuinely concerned. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/22/when-you-really-live-in-berlin/ Fri, 22 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/22/mrs-carters-summer/ There’s something odd about seeing Beyoncé’s name plastered across H&M racks. The clothes are fine, minimal and clean. What stays with me is just the strangeness of it all—a superstar at the mall, treated like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Maybe it is now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/22/mrs-carters-summer/ Fri, 22 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/21/haven-turners-home/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/21/haven-turners-home/ Thu, 21 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/20/where-taste-lives/ I went to this event in Frankfurt last week. Chic Outlet Shopping and GQ put on some kind of fashion thing about accessories. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but the crowd was interesting and the food was good, so I stuck around longer than planned. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/20/where-taste-lives/ Wed, 20 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/20/curtis-kuligs-bottles/ Curtis Kulig’s bottles feel exactly like something he would do. You know his aesthetic—those crude, cheerful declarations he spray-paints on walls, always LOVE ME in that blocky hand, repeated until you stop questioning it. He built his whole practice around insisting that affection is worth the risk. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/20/curtis-kuligs-bottles/ Wed, 20 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/20/mirrors/ I had *NSYNC posters up in a way that felt essential at the time, and I’m still not over it entirely—those songs still land when they turn up. “Bye Bye Bye,” “Tearin’ Up My Heart.” Something about them was exactly right for that moment. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/20/mirrors/ Wed, 20 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/20/the-look/ Sky Ferreira’s face isn’t beautiful in the conventional sense. Her features are strange and unconventional, weirdly precise in all the wrong ways. But she’s genuinely hot. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/20/the-look/ Wed, 20 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/19/kawori-inbe/ Kawori Inbe photographs girls she finds on the street and shoots them in trashed apartments, abandoned forest paths, inflatable kiddie pools. Deliberately unglamorous spaces. She’s been doing this for years. The pictures don’t have any conventional beauty to them—they’re just strange and magnetic in a way that bypasses all of that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/19/kawori-inbe/ Tue, 19 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/19/right-country/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/19/right-country/ Tue, 19 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/19/public-shaming/ Found myself on Public Shaming again last night—the site that just collects the worst tweets, organized by stupidity and hatred. It’s like scrolling through humanity’s worst impulses, catalogued and permanent. Racial slurs, misogyny, people defending assault, all with names attached, all available for anyone who wants to know that things are worse than they feel. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/19/public-shaming/ Tue, 19 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/19/welcome-to-the-internet/ Facebook spread from college kids to everyone else. Twitter seemed important. MySpace vanished. I watched it all happen between blog posts, wondering what shape we were actually building here. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/19/welcome-to-the-internet/ Tue, 19 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/19/maryna-linchuk-lazy-afternoon/ There’s that kind of afternoon—nothing to do, no one around, and time hangs on you. Lukewarm cola, magazines falling apart in your lap, hands on yourself out of pure boredom. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/19/maryna-linchuk-lazy-afternoon/ Tue, 19 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/19/ruben-bobby/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/19/ruben-bobby/ Tue, 19 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/19/someone-elses-house/ Jürgen Domian posted something on Facebook about Pope Francis. Nothing incendiary—just speculation about whether this new pope might surprise us, might be worth giving a chance to. Generic optimistic hedging. But enough people reported it as blasphemy that Facebook’s algorithm deleted it. Post gone. Conversation ended. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/19/someone-elses-house/ Tue, 19 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/18/everyones-actually-horny/ Someone made a website that shows which of your Facebook friends signed up for Bang With Friends, an app that let you discreetly ask people you know if they wanted to have sex. Supposedly anonymous. Turns out it wasn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/18/everyones-actually-horny/ Mon, 18 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/18/tokyo/ You step from a screaming arcade into temple silence and thirty seconds later you’ve moved from one extreme to the next—that’s Tokyo. The whole city’s built on collisions. Neon and wood, crowds and quiet, bass bleeding into shrine bells, everything hitting at once. It should be unbearable but there’s something true about the chaos. Not overstimulation in disguise but honest chaos, the kind that doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/18/tokyo/ Mon, 18 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/18/the-u-bahns-midlife-crisis/ The Berlin U-Bahn is falling apart at exactly the right moment in its life. Seventy-five years old, tired, creaking in tunnels under neighborhoods that have all decided to become expensive again. Tiles missing. Escalators giving up. Delays that feel personal. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/18/the-u-bahns-midlife-crisis/ Mon, 18 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/15/my-dead-console/ My fourteen-year-old self would be so fucking proud right now. I just bought my first real gaming console in a Tokyo shop—a PlayStation Vita—and I’m not even sorry about it. People in the industry are probably having a stroke somewhere, screaming that this thing is dead, that it’s more dead than dead, that I’ve made a terrible mistake. Whatever. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/15/my-dead-console/ Fri, 15 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/14/nicky/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/14/nicky/ Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/14/pretty-in-pink/ I can’t think about Pretty in Pink without thinking about what everyone wore—Andi’s thrifted, customized presentation, Duckie’s jacket like a philosophy he couldn’t articulate, even Blane’s clean-cut blandness as a pure class marker. The film’s not subtle about its themes, but the real work happens in the costume design. You understand these people entirely through what they chose to wear. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/14/pretty-in-pink/ Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/14/iggy-azalea-work/ Iggy’s always struck me as someone less interested in spectacle than she gets credit for. There’s a patience in her approach to production, a commitment to a sound that doesn’t need you to understand it immediately. She makes work that rewards listening carefully, which probably explains why so many people got her wrong—they were waiting for something louder, something that proved harder how much effort she was putting in. But that’s not her style. There’s an economy to her delivery that you either hear or you don’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/14/iggy-azalea-work/ Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/14/goodbye-google-reader/ I sit down with cereal every morning and Google Reader is open before the milk even hits. That’s the routine. I’ve got around 1,200 feeds in there—blogs, YouTube channels, Tumblr, whatever—and I scroll through new stuff that published overnight. It’s how I find most of what ends up here. It’s how everyone who does this kind of work finds their material. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/14/goodbye-google-reader/ Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/13/swimming-with-quaalen/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/13/swimming-with-quaalen/ Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/13/its-fashion/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/13/its-fashion/ Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/13/ill-never-know/ Someone asked what lesbians think about dicks. It’s crude but fair. I’ve never understood the wanting when it points in a different direction. You can think about it, you can do the math, but you’re not feeling it the way you feel actual desire. There’s this gap between understanding something intellectually and being unable to imagine it from the inside, and nothing bridges it. Everyone’s wandering around wondering what everyone else actually wants, and we’re all just making guesses. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/13/ill-never-know/ Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/13/canned/ An old woman opens the door at Mr. Kanso in Tokyo and that’s when you realize there’s no menu, no pretense, nothing except a wall of tins and permission to pick whatever you want. They range from three euros to twenty, depending on what’s inside—tomato soup, pickled beans, bear meat, honeyed bees, things with no label we had to ask about three times and still didn’t understand. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/13/canned/ Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/13/the-knife-a-tooth-for-an-eye/ The Knife never made it easy. Caroline and Olof Dreijer built something alien out of Sweden in the early 2000s—electronic but never glossy, provocative but never sensational, queer and gothic in ways that most electronic music wasn’t even trying to be. They had this way of making you uncomfortable that felt necessary, like they’d diagnosed something rotting in pop culture and decided to make it visible. The videos alone—all flesh and surgical precision, bodies moving like machinery—seemed designed to annoy the right people. They’ve mostly disappeared from public life now, which somehow feels right for a band that made their best work by refusing to perform in any conventional sense. They were ahead of everything and also absolutely of their moment, which is the hardest thing to pull off. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/13/the-knife-a-tooth-for-an-eye/ Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/13/what-we-keep/ Everyone makes fun of how spoiled kids are these days with their PlayStations and phones. I was completely, unrepentantly spoiled—two Barbie dream houses, their ugly motorhome, stacks of GameBoy games, Lego I could disappear into. I treated my toys like private property. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/13/what-we-keep/ Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/13/still-building/ The only memory I have from three years at gymnasium before they kicked me out for having genuinely the worst grades of any student ever is sitting in Latin class absolutely desperate to get home and play SimCity on the Super Nintendo. Which is still the best version of this game. Ever. No question. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/13/still-building/ Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/12/paulines-thing/ Pauline’s been in this universe longer than most people remember. The original arcade cabinets, perched on her platform, waiting to be rescued—that was the whole point of her for decades. But somewhere along the way, the games stopped treating her like a prize and started treating her like an actual person. She showed up in Donkey Kong Country with an attitude, in Mario games with a career, in the recent movie with a voice and something close to agency. There’s something oddly satisfying about watching a character stop being decorative and just exist. She’s not fighting for the spotlight anymore. She’s just there, doing her thing, which is maybe the most revolutionary thing a supporting character can do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/12/paulines-thing/ Tue, 12 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/12/whoa/ Earl’s always been good at making music that sits wrong with you on purpose. WHOA isn’t any different, except it is—the production is thinner, more direct. He’s not burying himself as deep in the mix. Some of the tracks almost sound bright, or at least as bright as Earl gets, which isn’t saying much. It’s still mostly about isolation and distance, but there’s less of that desperate quality to it now. He’s not fighting the feeling anymore, just describing it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/12/whoa/ Tue, 12 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/11/stoya-gets-dressed/ Three minutes in and it hits you why this was a bad idea, so you close the tab and get back to League. That’s the Stoya I know—xHamster clips, very explicit, nothing hidden, and you never quite make it through to the end. That version of her. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/11/stoya-gets-dressed/ Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/11/dena-thin-rope/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/11/dena-thin-rope/ Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/8/freiwilds-idiot-brigade/ Frei.Wild—South Tyrolean rock band, sells tons of records to rural teenagers—got nominated for the Echo Award last year. Turns out they’re right-wing. Kraftklub and Mia withdrew. Echo kicked them out. Story over. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/8/freiwilds-idiot-brigade/ Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/8/saving-princesses/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/8/saving-princesses/ Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/8/weekend-missions/ The weekend’s almost here and that’s the only reason nobody’s thrown themselves under the U-Bahn yet. Here’s what I think the weekend should be: find those t-shirts with crude slogans and slip them onto some kid before their parents notice. Read an article about happy facts and see if it actually makes you feel better. Grab your pet, drive it to another city, trade it for any random animal, come home and swear you’ve always owned a striped pony named Bello. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/8/weekend-missions/ Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/8/when-the-party-ends/ The third Hangover was supposed to be the finale, and you could tell the filmmakers were trying hard to make it one. Trouble was they’d also decided the trilogy needed to get serious—the jokes got darker, the plot got messier, like they weren’t sure if this was still a comedy. I watched it feeling that specific awkwardness of a film that’s lost its way, trying to be something it was never made for. By the end I wasn’t moved or amused, just aware that something essential had shifted. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/8/when-the-party-ends/ Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/8/harajuku-heat/ Harajuku in August and everyone’s in layers and platforms despite the heat, sweating through Takeshita Street like weather doesn’t matter. The crowd’s packed so tight you’re barely moving anyway. You watch kids in thrifted cardigans and careful styling move through the mass without hesitation, like being seen a certain way matters more than breathing. In Harajuku it does. The outfit is the point. The sweat is collateral. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/8/harajuku-heat/ Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/6/tokyo-actually/ Since I was a little asshole, moving to Tokyo was the dream. The capital, the brightest and most dazzling city in the world. No question. Spending entire nights in some smoky manga café getting obliterated on beer and video games. Watching schoolgirls in uniform at secret rock clubs—thin ones, cute ones. Getting off on the neon signs and ramen shops and shopping centers. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/3/6/tokyo-actually/ Wed, 06 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/28/goodbye-berlin/ I was supposed to write something epic about leaving Berlin. One of those sweeping, comprehensive, brutally insightful articles that would make every other piece ever written about the city look like garbage. A text that would destroy every song, every poem, every previous goodbye. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/28/goodbye-berlin/ Thu, 28 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/26/checking-out/ Winter kills you. You’re stuck inside with friends, someone’s girlfriend, the neighbor’s dog, whatever. Gray, cold, nothing to do. You could pretend to care about small talk but you’re already half-dead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/26/checking-out/ Tue, 26 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/23/the-muse/ Found Karolina Szymczak in my feed yesterday, never heard of her before. Polish model—pieced that together from image tags and forums, because the internet doesn’t announce these things, just presents them. David Bellemere photographed her, Playboy ran it, and now she’s everywhere, which is the mechanism: the right photographer, the right magazine, and someone who didn’t exist in your world becomes real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/23/the-muse/ Sat, 23 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/23/the-blow/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/23/the-blow/ Sat, 23 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/22/ten-stupid-weekend-ideas/ That point on Friday where your brain stops working and you start thinking about the most pointless ways to spend the next 48 hours. Here’s what I came up with back around 2013. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/22/ten-stupid-weekend-ideas/ Fri, 22 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/22/you-cant-be-my-girl/ The genius of the song is that it doesn’t pretend you don’t already know. Someone hasn’t said it yet, but you can feel it—the softness in how they treat you, the distance they’re keeping. Darwin Deez gets that moment where you’re both just waiting to acknowledge what’s obvious. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/22/you-cant-be-my-girl/ Fri, 22 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/22/in-the-pink/ Pretty in Pink came out in ’86. It works because of this constant visual tension—Molly’s thrifted, remade wardrobe against the gloss and certainty of the prep-school world. Her clothes aren’t trying to convince you of anything; they’re just honest. That pink prom dress, whatever the movie does with its ending, remains this perfect object—something made from nothing into something that’s unmistakably you. I think about it sometimes when I’m working on something and feeling like the materials aren’t good enough. They always are if you’re paying attention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/22/in-the-pink/ Fri, 22 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/22/only-girls-in-the-world/ Rihanna and Kate Moss are separated by everything—decades, genres, continents, the shape of power itself—but they’re the same person twice. Kate came up in a world that wanted her to disappear into the image; Rihanna came up in a world that wanted to consume her and spit out the version it preferred. Both of them said no. Both understood early that image isn’t something that happens to you, it’s something you architect. Kate was the void that made you look harder. Rihanna is the force field that makes you look away and then look back. Different tools, same control. That’s the thing nobody really talks about—how much work it is to be that untouchable, how little of it shows. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/22/only-girls-in-the-world/ Fri, 22 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/22/the-one-thing-that-worked/ ZDFkultur was supposed to be the proof that they understood their own medium. A digital channel that had figured out how to make something for people who wouldn’t otherwise bother with public television. Not by chasing trends or dumbing down—just by giving young people who worked in media a space to make the kind of programs they’d want to watch. I saw the same faces across different shows, a core group of hosts who seemed like they actually cared, and because of that, I cared too. Building that took time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/22/the-one-thing-that-worked/ Fri, 22 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/21/share-button/ Sony announced the PlayStation 4 last night in New York and the internet lost its mind. New controller with a screen built in, a share button for streaming, graphics that make the current generation look quaint. The console itself? Nobody actually saw it. Just the controller, the promises, the usual corporate talk about innovation and the future. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/21/share-button/ Thu, 21 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/21/bat-for-lashes-lilies/ I’ve been listening to Bat for Lashes long enough that it’s just part of the background of how I understand electronic music. Natalie Droog’s voice and those gothic synth arrangements—it’s hard to explain why they work, except that they do. Lilies is another piece of that world, and I return to it the way you return to places that feel like home even when they’re unsettling. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/21/bat-for-lashes-lilies/ Thu, 21 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/20/spring-breakers/ I ended up in the photographer pit at the Berlin premiere instead of wherever we were supposed to be. The passes didn’t work out, the crowd was insane, and honestly it was better this way. Photographers are the only people at these things you can actually talk to. Everyone else is either screaming or getting paid to stand somewhere specific. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/20/spring-breakers/ Wed, 20 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/20/haim-falling/ Three sisters from LA making music that feels timeless without trying. There’s something about the way they layer voices and let songs breathe that pulls you in without announcing itself. I’ve stopped trying to figure out if they’re intentionally retro or just naturally drawn to songs that take their time and don’t need a gimmick to work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/20/haim-falling/ Wed, 20 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/15/domo-23/ Tyler’s always been good at capturing a moment in time that doesn’t need to mean anything beyond itself. Domo 23 is just him in the booth, voice clear and a little distant, over production that lets the space breathe. No flex, no chorus, just a guy thinking out loud about whatever was on his mind that day. That’s become the thing I go back to his records for—not the production flex or the concept albums, but these smaller moments where he’s just in there, present. It’s the kind of song that disappears until you need to hear someone else’s thoughts moving at the speed of your own. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/15/domo-23/ Fri, 15 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/15/hooters-japan-2013/ In 2013, Hooters held a beauty pageant in Japan. It’s the kind of specific fact that lodges itself in memory without much reason—American franchise culture exported, meeting whatever local sensibilities and marketing dynamics were in play. I never saw the actual thing, but I remember it existing, which is maybe the whole point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/15/hooters-japan-2013/ Fri, 15 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/15/melancholia-was-right/ A meteor came down in Chelyabinsk and caught everyone unprepared. Hundreds of people got hurt, mostly from windows exploding inward when the blast wave hit. The scientists had their attention elsewhere that day—watching asteroid 2012 DA14, which passed within 28,000 kilometers of Earth. Close in cosmic terms, but it missed. The one nobody was tracking hit first. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/15/melancholia-was-right/ Fri, 15 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/14/love-me/ Curtis Kulig writes “LOVE ME” on walls. You’ve seen the photos—big letters on the side of a building somewhere you’ve never been, or maybe somewhere you have. Just those two words, over and over, in cities all over the world. It started as street art and became something larger, a movement, the kind of cultural thing that gets documented and discussed and eventually commercialized. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/14/love-me/ Thu, 14 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/14/the-weeknd-twenty-eight/ I’ve been listening to The Weeknd long enough now that watching him age into his late twenties feels like watching someone you know gradually become a different person. Not better or worse—just different. There’s a point where an artist stops being an urgent new voice and becomes something you live with, and you notice the shift not in critical essays but in how his songs hit you when you hear them by accident. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/14/the-weeknd-twenty-eight/ Thu, 14 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/14/snoop-through-the-ages/ Snoop’s been everywhere so long you stop noticing it. King of rap, reggae, porn—call it what you want, and Snoop owns all of it without flinching. That shamelessness is part of it. The weed, the money, the women, the cars. Other people spend careers hiding that stuff or turning desire into a performance. Snoop just lives it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/14/snoop-through-the-ages/ Thu, 14 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/14/pretty-in-pink/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/14/pretty-in-pink/ Thu, 14 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/14/delivered/ The warehouse at night: temporary workers from Poland, Spain, Latvia, packed seven to a room in prefab bungalows. Then the dawn bus to Amazon’s sorting facilities. Underpaid, monitored, guarded by contractors wearing Thor Steinar hoodies. Far-right stuff, worn openly, by people in charge of your packages. The documentary doesn’t make speeches about it—it just shows you: the light, the faces, the routine humiliation of people broken enough to accept it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/14/delivered/ Thu, 14 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/14/burning-desire/ Lana Del Rey built her whole thing around a specific feeling—the luxury of sadness, wanting something that will never be yours, mourning it before it even leaves. You either get it or you don’t. For years I didn’t, then suddenly I did, and now there’s no going back. Her records don’t try to convince you of anything. They just exist in that space where everything is beautiful and broken at once. No irony. No performance. Just commitment to that feeling, which is why people who connect with her work come back to it obsessively. It’s not comfort exactly. It’s more like validation—proof that someone else sees the world this way too. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/14/burning-desire/ Thu, 14 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/13/when-iceland-got-serious/ I remember when everyone wanted to move to Iceland. It was the digital frontier, where internet culture could flourish freely. That was before the government started closing strip clubs and now they’re pitching a plan to ban all pornography online. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/13/when-iceland-got-serious/ Wed, 13 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/13/pizza-of-death/ Ken Yokoyama is 43. His bandmates describe him as “the guy who shows up for work last, tells us all what to do, then leaves early. He also plays guitar sometimes.” He runs Pizza of Death, a Japanese hardcore label. That description covers the vibe. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/13/pizza-of-death/ Wed, 13 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/12/stay/ That moment when you know someone’s leaving and you ask them to stay anyway, not because it’ll work but because what else are you going to do? Rihanna and Mikky Ekko getting smaller and smaller in the mix, voices layered and distant, the production all claustrophobic and underwater. You put it on thinking it’ll be background noise and somehow you’re stuck there again, in whatever that song is describing. It doesn’t fix anything. It never does. But you play it anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/12/stay/ Tue, 12 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/12/voting-for-strangers/ The voting award at Berlin: six filmmakers you’ve never heard of, and you pick which one matters. Döndü Kilic, Jan Krüger, Claudia Lehmann, Myrna Makkaron, Meggie Schneider, Jan Soldat. I don’t know their work - just names and titles - but that’s the whole thing. You’re voting for people before they’re people. And one day one of them is the name everyone knows. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/12/voting-for-strangers/ Tue, 12 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/11/moving-to-tokyo/ Got maybe two real emails asking about the Tokyo move. I like to imagine 176, but two feels more honest. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/11/moving-to-tokyo/ Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/11/retrograde/ I don’t know anyone who listens to James Blake during the day. It’s always late, alone, the kind of listening where you’re not really listening—just letting it happen in the room. Retrograde fits that perfectly. It’s about being stuck, about time going backward, about the person you keep becoming. I put it on once at 3am after too much wine and too much thinking, and it did what Blake does best—made the room feel emptier and fuller at the same time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/11/retrograde/ Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/11/rich-bitch/ Brooke Candy came through a Terry Richardson photograph first—twenty-two years old with her father’s Hustler magazine background and borrowed money in her hands, the kind of lineage that made people read her sexuality as part of the package before she even opened her mouth. The photos were unpolished, deliberately raw, nothing softened for respectability. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/11/rich-bitch/ Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/9/the-authenticity-trap/ The thing about hipsterism is the vigilance—the exhaustion of performing not-trying, of calculating which signals read as honest. I’ve watched it evolve over twenty years: the indie posturing, the craft cocktails, the whole machinery of distinction dressed up as genuineness. What kills me is that the moment you’re aware of being authentic, you’ve already lost it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/9/the-authenticity-trap/ Sat, 09 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/9/spring-breakers/ Selena Gomez in Spring Breakers was surprising mainly because she was in it at all. Harmony Korine’s film is neon and strange and it doesn’t apologize for what it’s doing. She’s just there, unguarded, not worried about her image. You don’t see that often from people in her position. The fact that it happened, even once, matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/9/spring-breakers/ Sat, 09 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/9/the-pirate-bay-away-from-keyboard/ The Pirate Bay: Away From Keyboard is this quiet observation of what happens when smart people build something that threatens the wrong industry. The Swedish founders just wanted to make a file-sharing site, and somehow ended up in an actual legal war. Most of the film is them trying to live their lives while the case drags on—work, relationships, the weight of it all. There’s no dramatization, just the slow machinery of the legal system grinding down on kids who thought they were solving a technical problem. Very gradually, they understand that being right about the internet means nothing to a court. By the end, there’s resignation. That’s what the film is about: what it costs to build something that makes powerful people angry. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/9/the-pirate-bay-away-from-keyboard/ Sat, 09 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/8/two-door-cinema-club-next-year/ Two Door Cinema Club makes indie rock that doesn’t let you settle. There’s a restlessness to it—the guitars are tight but urgent, and songs feel like they’re always driving somewhere. I’ve been wondering what comes next from them, whether they’ll push further or circle back to whatever first grabbed me. Either way, I’m waiting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/8/two-door-cinema-club-next-year/ Fri, 08 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/8/still-nothing/ I don’t have any feelings about Miranda Kerr—not one way or the other. She’s Australian, a Victoria’s Secret model, married to Orlando Bloom. When Terry Richardson shoots her for Purple Fashion, suddenly she’s in the conversation again. That’s how this works. Someone with a camera and pull decides to photograph you, and you matter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/8/still-nothing/ Fri, 08 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/7/woodkid/ There’s something about the way Woodkid builds a world around his music—the visual art, the short films, the whole package—that makes the actual listening feel like stepping into someone’s head. I Love You is a good example. He makes art rock that doesn’t feel like it’s trying to prove anything to you. Just a guy with design taste and something to say, and he says it plainly. That’s rarer than it should be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/7/woodkid/ Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/7/astronauts/ Astronauts are the one thing capitalism can’t quite ruin. You can slap any product on them—deodorant, cars, energy drinks—and they still somehow represent something real. Space travel is the last frontier we haven’t completely turned into content and engagement metrics. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/7/astronauts/ Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/7/the-signs/ Those Oxford students with their signs about needing feminism. Direct gesture, forces you to pick a side. But the binary bothers me. Not because I’m skeptical of gender equality but because there’s no room anymore to think carefully about it without someone assuming you’re avoiding the issue. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/7/the-signs/ Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/5/unguarded/ There’s a video of Obama singing the Pokémon theme, full commitment, no irony. Just him in a suit belting it out. What gets me is how human it makes the whole thing feel—not because he’s good, but because he’s actually unguarded for once, caught being dumb on camera. You don’t get to see that from people in his position. That’s what makes it work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/5/unguarded/ Tue, 05 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/1/if-this-works/ I bought a Wii and hated it. That was about four years ago. All the casual games and motion control gimmicks depressed me so much I actually cried about it—like, real tears—and then I quit gaming entirely. Steam’s the only reason I came back to it at all. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/2/1/if-this-works/ Fri, 01 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/31/proteus/ You’re broke, your head feels like weather, the one decent club banned you years ago and your favorite spot doesn’t exist anymore. So what do you do? Proteus. Ed Key and David Kanaga made this game where you land on a colorful island and walk through the forest. Full stop. That’s the entire thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/31/proteus/ Thu, 31 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/31/explosions/ Ellie Goulding’s voice has always done this thing where it arrives quietly and then pulls the ground out from under you. There’s a precision to it, a control that makes the moments she lets go feel genuinely dangerous. That tension—between the held-back and the untethered—is probably what keeps me listening to her work. She’s been making music long enough to know exactly when to release the pressure, and when to hold it. That’s a kind of craft you can’t fake. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/31/explosions/ Thu, 31 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/31/matthias-willi-the-moment-after/ I’ve spent an embarrassing fortune on concerts over the years. Festivals, basement gigs, my cousin’s school nativity play—whatever. I’ll pay money to stand in a crowded room for hours, soaked in my own sweat, listening to people I barely know play songs I’ve already heard, usually while someone spills beer on me. It’s a stupid tax on the feeling that something real is happening in front of you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/31/matthias-willi-the-moment-after/ Thu, 31 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/31/takako-iwasa/ There’s a woman in Tokyo, Takako Iwasa, who makes clothes for her cats Piru and Kotaro. She sells them in her shop to other people doing the same thing. The video about her is meditative—you watch her work on these little garments, the cats posed in them, and it feels oddly peaceful. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/31/takako-iwasa/ Thu, 31 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/31/in-pink/ The wardrobe in Pretty in Pink was the whole argument. Andie’s not wearing these pieces—she’s constructing them. There’s a designer’s logic in every layer, the math of making nothing look like everything, the refusal to just buy the answer. That DIY sensibility, that proof that constraint isn’t a problem but a tool. Looking at it now, I see what the film was doing: showing someone who understands style in a way the girls with trust funds never will. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/31/in-pink/ Thu, 31 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/29/the-lonely-island-yolo/ The Lonely Island got me with ’I’m on a Boat’ and ’Dick in a Box’—SNL digital shorts that worked because the music was actually well-made underneath the stupidity. They’d get real musicians to play straight man to the joke, and it was this weird collision of competence and absurdity that shouldn’t have worked. YOLO came later, after they’d exhausted the novelty of the formula, and I think the moment had passed. They’re still there doing the thing, but the thing got smaller somehow. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/29/the-lonely-island-yolo/ Tue, 29 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/29/gastón-torres-fade-away/ Disappearing is invisible now. You go from everywhere to nowhere so quietly nobody even notices the moment it changes. One month he’s in everything, next he’s forgotten, and the world just keeps moving. That’s the fade. That’s Gastón. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/29/gastón-torres-fade-away/ Tue, 29 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/28/buried/ I leave in just over a month. A year in Tokyo. That’s already been said. What’s been grinding on me is everything before—the visa bureaucracy, the forms, the documents, the photos, the embassy appointments. The Japanese government doesn’t make this easy. Every day it’s another window, another person looking at your paperwork with that particular expression of mild concern. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/28/buried/ Mon, 28 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/28/rainer-brüderle-looking-at-girls/ Politics is basically reality TV if anyone actually had power. They don’t, not really. Just enough authority to make headlines before everyone moves on. Front pages, news cycles, Twitter. The standard loop. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/28/rainer-brüderle-looking-at-girls/ Mon, 28 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/25/king-krule/ King Krule makes music that doesn’t announce itself. The songs are all shadow and restraint, asking you to sit in the dark for a while before they reveal anything. There’s an intelligence to the production—the way he layers things so they’re complex without being showy. I keep coming back to his work because it doesn’t demand anything except attention. That’s rare. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/25/king-krule/ Fri, 25 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/25/behind-the-building/ Stefan was this quiet kid who showed up in second grade from Belarus or somewhere, parents renamed him, he was just… polite. Soft-spoken. Had an accent that made us laugh. He laughed with us. We were friends in that thoughtless way kids are. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/25/behind-the-building/ Fri, 25 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/22/mariah-carey-carry-on/ Mariah Carey’s voice is technically impossible and she knows it, but she never sounds like she’s bragging. Just uses those five octaves like they’re obvious. The early albums especially—’Vision of Love,’ the entire 1995 run—are built on this architecture where everything serves the song and the range just enables it. She got less interesting after that but those records held up. Not many pop stars built on a gimmick age as gracefully. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/22/mariah-carey-carry-on/ Tue, 22 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/21/scratch-massive-waiting-for-a-sign/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/21/scratch-massive-waiting-for-a-sign/ Mon, 21 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/21/spongebobs-secret-life/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/21/spongebobs-secret-life/ Mon, 21 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/21/oleg-bagmutskiy-everything-kills/ Growing up, you hear the same warnings over and over. Drugs will kill you. Cigarettes will kill you. Sex will kill you. Cheeseburgers will kill you. Your phone will kill you if you answer it while driving. The messages come from everywhere—your parents, your teachers, television, magazines, the radio—and they’re all saying the same thing. Everything outside wants you dead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/21/oleg-bagmutskiy-everything-kills/ Mon, 21 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/21/sad-eyes/ Crystal Castles made music that sounded like something breaking. Alice Glass’s voice—thin, distant, a little destroyed—floated over these harsh, brittle synths that sounded like metal folding in slow motion. There was nothing warm about it. The aesthetic was deliberately bleak: the compression, the glitching, the way they built these pop songs out of the least pop-like sounds possible. You’d hear them on headphones late at night and it felt like the music was happening in a cold place, in a room with broken light, someone staring at nothing. That’s what the sad eyes were about—not melancholy exactly, but a kind of beautiful refusal. The refusal to make it easy, to make it pretty in any conventional way. They turned that refusal into their whole sound. That takes a certain kind of vision, a certain kind of stubborn commitment to not giving you what you expect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/21/sad-eyes/ Mon, 21 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/18/wim-wenders-five-minutes/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/18/wim-wenders-five-minutes/ Fri, 18 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/18/ten-little-missions/ Winter weekends are dangerous. You get drunk somewhere alone, pass out in the cold, maybe don’t wake up. So we invented missions—little absurdities to justify the two days, to give some shape to the blank space. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/18/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 18 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/18/spring-breakers/ I swear this movie’s been in the works forever. Years of hype, years of waiting. Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens in bikinis with a couple other girls, James Franco styled like an absolute lunatic, Harmony Korine behind the camera making the most excessive thing possible. Spring Breakers finally comes out and somehow over a thousand people have already rated it on IMDb. Is it out? Were there early screenings? Who knows. Doesn’t matter. I’m here for it either way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/18/spring-breakers/ Fri, 18 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/17/built-not-assembled/ Vegas and LA had left me skeptical about whether America had any cities worth caring about. Manhattan and Brooklyn changed that immediately—the crash of high-rise glass against actual neighborhoods with history, people who moved like they belonged there, subways that actually worked. New York felt built rather than assembled. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/17/built-not-assembled/ Thu, 17 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/17/magazine-watch/ Most days I’m too lazy to keep up with what everyone’s posting online, so I grab magazines from the newsstand instead. These are the ones that stuck. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/17/magazine-watch/ Thu, 17 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/17/sarah-hyland/ Sarah Hyland did a Complex photoshoot and mentioned in the interview that she didn’t want to be a sex symbol, preferred musicians, never finished college. After playing Haley Dunphy for years, you’re figuring out who you actually are—not a character, just yourself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/17/sarah-hyland/ Thu, 17 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/17/haim-hazy-shade-of-winter/ HAIM feels like driving at night in winter, when everything’s still and the roads are empty. There’s something crystalline about the way the three sisters sing together, and their guitar work has this gentle precision that never tries to impress. Winter songs are dangerous—they’re sentimental by default—but HAIM avoids that trap by being honest. They make music that just sits with you in the cold without needing anything from you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/17/haim-hazy-shade-of-winter/ Thu, 17 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/17/bloc-party-truth/ Bloc Party always felt like the smart kids’ band—all angular guitars and lyrics that hit different at night. I remember drives with A Weekend in the City playing, the way they built songs made everything feel sharper, more specific. There was this refusal to soften, to make it pretty, that felt like honesty even when I didn’t know what they were actually saying. Years later I realized they were always after the same thing: some kind of truth, though probably not the kind you can actually name. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/17/bloc-party-truth/ Thu, 17 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/16/wildfox-white-label/ Wildfox makes clothes that look like genuine thrifted finds—pulled from somewhere real, worn soft from actual decades—except they’re manufactured fresh. White label extends that thinking: if your pieces are strong enough, they don’t need a logo. You make something beautiful, hand it off unmarked, let another brand take the credit. There’s something I respect about that faith in the work itself, though I’m aware someone else owns the profit while you collect a paycheck and move on. Still, it’s an honest way to work if you actually care about the object rather than performing a brand. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/16/wildfox-white-label/ Wed, 16 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/16/lena-katina-was-never-just-the-image/ t.A.T.u. was scandal first—two teenage girls in school uniforms kissing on MTV, the easiest way to make people nervous in 2002. But Lena was never just the image. Even when Julia was the pretty safe one, Lena had something harder to look at, a real voice underneath all the careful artifice they’d built around her. She could’ve stayed a pop puppet forever, reading scripts and showing up to performances, but somewhere around the third album she got tired of it, or angry. Then the solo work came, and the band dissolved in that messy way nobody really discussed after. She’s still around, still making things, and I think about her sometimes when I see young artists trying to be shocking in exactly the same way, not understanding that shock without something real underneath it just becomes sad. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/16/lena-katina-was-never-just-the-image/ Wed, 16 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/16/back-to-sbtrkt/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/16/back-to-sbtrkt/ Wed, 16 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/15/santigold-girls/ Santigold’s always had this weird genre-bending thing going where nothing sits still long enough to get boring. She moves between reggae rhythms and electronic production and pop hooks without any of it feeling calculated, just like she’s following wherever the sound wants to go. There’s always been something brash and confident about her work, the kind of thing that gets in your head without asking permission. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/15/santigold-girls/ Tue, 15 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/15/fashion-week-berlin/ If you’re somewhere normal right now instead of at Berlin Fashion Week, you actually won. I know this because I’ve spent the last five years being dragged to enough of these events to understand what’s really going on. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/15/fashion-week-berlin/ Tue, 15 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/14/away-from-keyboard/ You watch someone get hunted and slowly disappear into paranoia. Gottfrid Svartholm Warg created The Pirate Bay and actually changed how millions of people accessed culture, and then governments decided to make him the example. The doc follows what comes after—the moving between countries, the encryption, the isolation. There’s no redemption, no clever escape. Just someone who can’t actually hide from something this big. It stayed with me because it’s bleak in a way most internet documentaries aren’t. There’s no comfort in it. No victory, no solution. Just the slow realization that you can’t win this game. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/14/away-from-keyboard/ Mon, 14 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/14/the-swamp/ Ten years in this swamp and I’ve watched it metastasize. I came in through whatever was popular at the time and got dragged deeper with each new platform. I told myself it would get better. That people would figure out how to use this stuff for something real. But that was just denial. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/14/the-swamp/ Mon, 14 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/11/berlin-five-times-over/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/11/berlin-five-times-over/ Fri, 11 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/11/beyoncé/ There’s something about watching her that makes you understand why presence matters. She’s been doing this for twenty years and it feels like she’s still figuring something out with each album. That’s why people pay attention—not just because she’s talented, but because she seems to actually know something about desire and power that most of us are still learning. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/11/beyoncé/ Fri, 11 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/10/space-academy/ Buzz Aldrin showed up at the American Museum of Natural History to open something called the AXE Apollo Space Academy. I still don’t quite believe that happened. This is what happens when a brand has infinite money and no shame: you get an actual astronaut, a room full of people with nothing in common, the promise of a real space program (or at least a very expensive facsimile), and surprisingly good snacks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/10/space-academy/ Thu, 10 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/9/new-york/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/9/new-york/ Wed, 09 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/9/the-discreet-charm/ Kate Upton became a cover girl the standard way, and like most cover girls she cycled through the usual magazines. But something about her made people care longer than they typically do. It wasn’t the obvious stuff—the look, the figure, whatever works for a magazine cover. It was how little she seemed to be trying. There was an actual disinterest in how she carried herself, no performance, no attempt to seduce you into thinking she mattered. Most women in that business seem desperate for you to pay attention. She’d already decided you probably wouldn’t, and seemed fine with that. That refusal to perform, that casual indifference—that’s what actually made her interesting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/9/the-discreet-charm/ Wed, 09 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/8/astronaut-complex/ Here’s what I think I figured out about twenty years ago and have been pretending not to know since: most of what guys do, they do trying to get laid, or married, or noticed by someone they want to get laid or married to. Everything else is just the architecture we build around that core fact. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/8/astronaut-complex/ Tue, 08 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/4/kristen-stewart-wild-at-heart/ I never watched Twilight. Deliberately. It looked like the kind of thing that swallows your entire brain for months, some mass fever dream where nothing makes sense but everyone insists it’s serious. Kristen Stewart was everywhere as the girl everyone had an opinion about—mostly that she couldn’t act, that her face was locked into permanent blankness, one expression and nothing behind it. Fair enough as a reading of what she did in those movies. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/4/kristen-stewart-wild-at-heart/ Fri, 04 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/4/ten-little-missions/ Jennifer Lawrence looks at cameras like she’s waiting for them to stop being stupid, and I fall for that every time I see her in something. If Scarlett Johansson ever does Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on Broadway while I’m in New York, I’m going. Not because it’s theater. Because she’s in it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/4/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 04 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/4/i-knew-you-were-trouble/ That song was everywhere in 2012. Not because it was brilliant, but because it was sticky in a way that made you feel smart for noticing the red flags in other people’s relationships while completely missing them in your own. The production is clean enough, the chorus is built to get stuck in your head for three days, and there’s something about the way she sings “shame on me” that sounds like she’s already moved on even as she’s writing about it. It’s the kind of song that’s impossible not to like if you let yourself, and after a certain point, I stopped pretending I didn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/4/i-knew-you-were-trouble/ Fri, 04 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/4/like-father/ Terry Richardson photographs naked girls desperate for fame, already famous, or too strange to ignore—everyone knows this about him. But he also documents his own life with the same flat, unsparing eye. When his mother died, he posted her final hours on his blog, and suddenly the condolence messages from agencies and magazines started piling up like he’d done something generous. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/4/like-father/ Fri, 04 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/4/ryan-hemsworth-colour-movement/ I’ve always liked Ryan Hemsworth’s stuff—the kind of electronic music that doesn’t announce itself. There’s this patient quality to it, like he’s building something in the dark and you just happen to catch glimpses as it takes shape. Colour and Movement probably nails something about the visual nature of his work, even though it’s all instrumental. Clean, minimal, but never cold. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/4/ryan-hemsworth-colour-movement/ Fri, 04 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/3/rosie-jones-million-dollar-baby/ Rosie Jones is one of those comedians who just gets it—sharp, self-aware, doesn’t lean on shock value even though she could. There’s an ease to her stage presence, like she’s genuinely thinking through something out loud instead of performing a bit she’s rehearsed ten thousand times. She’s got the kind of confidence that only comes from not giving a shit if you’re listening, which of course makes you listen harder. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/3/rosie-jones-million-dollar-baby/ Thu, 03 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/3/skrillex-summit/ Skrillex’s wobble hits different when it’s compressed through club speakers. That sub-bass punch feels like it’s rearranging your insides. Sonny Moore figured out how to make aggression sound beautiful, or maybe the beauty is in the aggression itself. He hit his peak in the early 2010s when dubstep went from internet novelty to something visceral and urgent. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/3/skrillex-summit/ Thu, 03 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/3/sky-ferreira-lost-in-my-bedroom/ Sky Ferreira makes music that sounds like it’s being played in the dark from someone else’s speaker in the next room—intimate and distant at the same time. There’s always something slightly off-kilter about it, like she’s decided to ignore how a song is supposed to work and do something weirder instead. The bedroom-pop thing isn’t an aesthetic choice for her so much as it is the actual terrain she operates in: small, controlled, deeply personal. You get the sense she could care less if anyone’s listening, and somehow that makes you want to listen harder. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/3/sky-ferreira-lost-in-my-bedroom/ Thu, 03 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/2/toro-y-moi-say-that/ There’s this moment where Chaz Bear’s voice comes in like he’s barely there, just floating over the production, and you realize you’ve been holding your breath. Toro y Moi has always had this way of making the electronic stuff feel intimate, like he’s singing into your ear at 3 AM in an otherwise empty room. The arrangements are pristine but they never feel cold. It’s why I keep coming back—not for the innovation or the credibility, but because his records sound like they’re just for you, even though millions of people probably feel the same way. That’s the trick, I guess. Making something so polished it disappears and becomes pure feeling instead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/2/toro-y-moi-say-that/ Wed, 02 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/2/summer-wars/ I watched Summer Wars the weekend before I left, trying to absorb as much Japanese as I could before moving away. Not that watching anime actually helps with the language, but I’d convinced myself it did. I wanted to hear those words again—Kawaii, Sugoi, Oishii—before they stopped making sense. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/2/summer-wars/ Wed, 02 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/2/bar25-outside-time/ Bar25 was a warehouse in Berlin where time didn’t matter. You’d walk in after midnight and dance until sunrise, and it would feel like an hour. No schedule, no prices on the wall, no sense of being rushed or ripped off. The concrete floors and the sound system and the crowd all reinforced the same thing: this place existed for dancing, and everything else could wait. I never made it there—the club closed in 2010—but I know people who still talk about it like it was the best money they ever spent and the best time they never noticed passing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2013/1/2/bar25-outside-time/ Wed, 02 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/31/where-youll-end-up/ Everyone’s standing in the supermarket right now in complete panic. Half the city had the same idea and nobody knows what to bring to a party that hasn’t even been confirmed yet. Or they’re on the phone with friends scattered across town trying to lock down plans that feel both inevitable and totally uncertain. Or they’re just going to stay home with the cat and hope nobody notices they’re not out. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/31/where-youll-end-up/ Mon, 31 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/30/pretty-in-pink/ That dress. Molly Ringwald in that prom dress, the one Duckie’s mother made—hot pink, excessive, homemade in the way that screams love and desperation at once. The film’s entire aesthetic lives in that contradiction: the rich kids’ casual cruelty, the poor kids’ gorgeous, elaborate effort. What struck me rewatching it wasn’t the romance (though there’s something there about wanting what seems impossible) but how much care went into making broke look beautiful. The thrift-store cuts, the layered jewelry, the way Andrew McCarthy’s boyfriend haircut costs nothing but attention. Duckie’s outfit is the real proposal in this movie—not the prom but the commitment to looking like yourself when yourself is all you have. That’s what the whole thing is really about, I think. The clothes are where the class war actually happens. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/30/pretty-in-pink/ Sun, 30 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/30/paying-attention/ The sun comes up and you can barely stand. Feet wrapped in blisters, back screaming, the world tilting a little. But the music, the light, the smell of the air—it’s so good you physically cannot leave. You just stand there, weightless in your exhaustion, thinking about nothing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/30/paying-attention/ Sun, 30 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/28/eliza-doolittle-little-miss-sunshine/ Those videos are stuck in my head—Eliza Doolittle rollerblading through some sun-soaked British street, this whole aesthetic that had nothing to do with whatever the song was about. The disconnect was the appeal. You weren’t supposed to care; you were supposed to enjoy someone who clearly wasn’t taking any of it seriously. Late 2000s UK pop felt playful instead of desperate, and she embodied that vibe perfectly. Brown curls, bare legs, thrift-store shorts—it all read as effortless, like she’d figured something out the rest of them hadn’t. You can’t get that moment back, but you can dress like it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/28/eliza-doolittle-little-miss-sunshine/ Fri, 28 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/28/ten-missions/ 2012 was on its way out, and I had ten things that needed doing before it finished. Whether the year was good or complete shit was personal math—comparing highs to lows, meetings to endings. But there was the list. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/28/ten-missions/ Fri, 28 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/28/terra-firma/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/28/terra-firma/ Fri, 28 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/28/brodinski-dance-like-machines/ Brodinski’s whole thing is rhythm working like it’s alive—not the human kind, the other kind. His beats have this mechanical precision that somehow makes you move anyway, like you’re being recruited by the machines he’s singing about. There’s something weird about following an electronic pulse so tightly that it feels natural, inevitable. I don’t know if that’s the point, but it works on me every time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/28/brodinski-dance-like-machines/ Fri, 28 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/27/adidass-blue-period/ I always notice when a brand commits to a single color across a whole season. There’s something stubborn about it, especially with adidas Originals—that minimalist streak they’ve always had. Blue for spring and summer is the safe choice, but when you see it everywhere in a lineup, it stops being a design decision and becomes almost a statement. You’re not thinking about adidas the sportswear company anymore, you’re thinking about adidas as a color, as a constraint that forces everything else into clarity. There’s something almost meditative about that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/27/adidass-blue-period/ Thu, 27 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/27/diamonds/ Diamonds was inescapable for a stretch there—radio, streaming, weddings, funerals. Rihanna at her most crystalline, voice riding this minimal production like she’s just thinking out loud about lasting through hard times. The song doesn’t try to be complicated. It’s a ballad about holding on when everything’s fractured, and it connects because that’s the deal—you’re fractured too, sometimes. By the tenth time you hear it, you’re not rolling your eyes. You’re just sitting with it. That’s the test of a pop song. Does it still work when it’s everywhere? This one did. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/27/diamonds/ Thu, 27 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/27/that-edge/ She’s been good since That 70s Show, but Black Swan was the moment it clicked for me—watching her commit to something dark and physical. The magazine covers are fine but irrelevant. The work is what sticks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/27/that-edge/ Thu, 27 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/27/faded-silenced-deleted/ No matter how far away I’ve gone—to the crowded streets of New York, the hot coasts of Australia, or beneath the high ceilings of old Berlin apartments—I always come back to my town at year’s end. Back to a place where time seems to stand still. And I feel superior. Because nobody there had the nerve to attempt even a fraction of what I managed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/27/faded-silenced-deleted/ Thu, 27 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/24/every-year/ Christmas arrives and somehow I’m still surprised by it, like I haven’t been bracing for this same evening since October. Here we are again, right on schedule. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/24/every-year/ Mon, 24 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/22/dena-games/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/22/dena-games/ Sat, 22 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/22/michaela-and-the-cat/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/22/michaela-and-the-cat/ Sat, 22 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/22/holiday-missions/ The world didn’t end. Christmas is still coming, and if you don’t have plans or gifts to worry about, you’re just sitting around. So you make a list. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/22/holiday-missions/ Sat, 22 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/21/scarlett-in-the-rearview/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/21/scarlett-in-the-rearview/ Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/21/berlin-light/ Berlin photographs well because it doesn’t care if you’re looking. The light is pale and even, the palette is all concrete and rust and weathered brick, and the whole city reads like exposed structure—no softness, no romance. That’s what makes it interesting. You can point a camera at almost anything and get something real back. Nothing’s trying to seduce you, which is exactly why you keep looking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/21/berlin-light/ Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/21/bat-for-lashes-a-wall/ Bat for Lashes knows how to build something out of nothing. The production is minimal but it never feels thin—there’s room in each song for something to exist quietly. You listen and what stays with you isn’t the notes, it’s what sits between them. Whatever A Wall is, it probably does the same thing: solid enough to divide the space, but mostly it’s about what happens on either side. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/21/bat-for-lashes-a-wall/ Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/20/japorn-tsubomi/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/20/japorn-tsubomi/ Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/20/lady-gaga-i-cant-get-no-satisfaction/ Gaga mattered because she understood something most pop stars don’t: the audience wants permission to be weird. She dressed like she’d been assembled from a fever dream and dared you not to stare, and half the kids watching realized their own strangeness was maybe okay. The music was sharp and tight, the hooks were lethal, and underneath all the hardware and blood and meat dresses was someone who actually cared about craft. She wasn’t slumming in pop—she was proving pop could be sophisticated and nasty and vulnerable all at once. Twenty years into knowing her work, I still think about how fearlessly she swung between poles: the accessible banger next to something genuinely unsettling, the calculated provocation bleeding into real confession. She made people uncomfortable and that was the whole point. Whether she’s satisfied or not seems almost beside the question—she gave permission, and that rippled outward. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/20/lady-gaga-i-cant-get-no-satisfaction/ Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/19/the-wedding-can-have-it/ Half an hour ago I gave notice on my apartment. My landlord printed something out on his ancient PC, I signed it, that was it. By the end of February, I’m out of Wedding for good. A few days later I’m on a plane to Tokyo. That’s how fast decisions become actual life. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/19/the-wedding-can-have-it/ Wed, 19 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/18/the-xx-last-christmas/ The xx’s “Last Christmas” is just the sadness. They stripped away everything—the pop sheen, the production, most of the arrangement. What’s left is the actual song underneath, the part about something ending right when everything’s supposed to be joyful. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/18/the-xx-last-christmas/ Tue, 18 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/18/the-polaroid/ Tavi Gevinson figured out something that everyone on the internet wanted to figure out: how to have actual cultural influence at sixteen. Fashion blogs were everywhere, but she became the one person fashion mattered in front of. Front row at Paris. Lunches with Anna Wintour. Magazine covers. It still feels remarkable, even now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/18/the-polaroid/ Tue, 18 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/18/paz-at-the-beach/ Paz de la Huerta turned up in the feed again, some beach somewhere. There’s something about those semi-famous sightings—not quite paparazzi material anymore, but persistent enough that her existence registers as its own permanent cultural fact. You forget she exists, then suddenly there she is, and you remember that certain people just stay in the ecosystem forever, whether anyone’s watching or not. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/18/paz-at-the-beach/ Tue, 18 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/18/instagram-wanted-your-pictures/ The internet was in a permanent state of low-level fury by then. Someone was always angry about something. People angry at people angry at the world. It was background noise. Outrage had become its own ecosystem. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/18/instagram-wanted-your-pictures/ Tue, 18 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/18/youtubes-2012/ YouTube Rewind 2012 was the kind of pointless thing the internet did because it could. A highlight reel of viral videos from the year, as if the internet needed a corporate recap of moments everyone was already tired of. Rebecca Black, some gaming clips, whatever passed for a meme in 2012. It wasn’t good, it wasn’t particularly memorable, but you watched it anyway because it was there. There’s something almost innocent about YouTube even trying—the idea that they could curate the year, that this compilation meant anything. It didn’t. But looking back, that kind of earnest futility is kind of charming. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/18/youtubes-2012/ Tue, 18 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/17/stolen-taste/ Found a playlist from some people called PonyDanceClyde—no idea what the name means, probably doesn’t matter—and it’s genuinely good, which happens maybe once a month if you’re paying attention. The kind of thing where you realize someone thought about the order, about how the songs sit next to each other, about what comes after silence. That’s harder than it sounds. Anyone can pick ten good songs. Making them make sense together is different. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/17/stolen-taste/ Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/17/ada-blitzkrieg/ Ada Blitzkrieg just published her first book, “Dackelkrieg—Rouladen und Rap,” and she did it exactly how she wanted: self-published, dirt cheap, completely unfiltered. No publisher telling her to cut the crude parts or add more vulnerability. Her real name is Clara Carrera, but her older brother couldn’t pronounce it as a kid, so “Clara” became “Ada,” which then became Ada Blitzkrieg on Twitter, where she has about fifteen thousand followers who showed up because she never switched on a persona, never performed for the algorithm. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/17/ada-blitzkrieg/ Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/17/the-hobbit/ I went to see The Hobbit with someone who’d never really heard English before—or that’s what it seemed like, the way she kept leaning over asking “What does that mean?” at crucial plot points. Dwarves. Scum. Precious. My neighbor kept braying at all the wrong moments, these terrible laughs that made me genuinely wish 48fps would do something useful for once. That was the theater experience. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/17/the-hobbit/ Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/17/keiichi-nitta/ Nitta’s work reminds me why clarity matters. No noise, no empty gestures—just the exact line weight needed and nothing more. I’ve spent enough time designing to know how hard that is, how much you have to kill to get to something that clean. His stuff has never felt like it was reaching for anything. It’s just there, doing its job, and somehow that directness makes it feel stronger than work trying three times as hard. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/17/keiichi-nitta/ Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/17/dirty-projectors-the-socialites/ Dirty Projectors makes music that doesn’t want to be easy. The Socialites is all precision and density—intricate vocal arrangements, time signatures bent out of shape, everything layered until it feels almost fragile. Longstreth thinks about song structure the way an architect thinks about space. It’s rewarding if you’re willing to sit with it, exhausting if you’re not. The kind of album that actually punishes casual listening, which is probably the point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/17/dirty-projectors-the-socialites/ Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/17/alone-at-home/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/17/alone-at-home/ Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/17/the-killers-here-with-me/ There’s something about The Killers that got me through the 2000s. Hot Fuss was everywhere, the synths felt like they were reaching for something better than where I actually was, and Brandon Flowers’ voice had this ache that made sense for no particular reason. I wore out that CD. Drove around listening to it. Wanted to be somewhere else, and the songs convinced me I could get there if I just understood them well enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/17/the-killers-here-with-me/ Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/14/ten-little-missions/ December 2012 was coming, which apparently meant the world was ending. Or that was what the internet jokes said—the Mayan calendar had had enough, and someone needed to write up ten last things to do before everything went quiet. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/14/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 14 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/14/emeli-sandé-clown/ You could fill a stadium with Emeli Sandé’s voice and half the people there would still be looking for something smaller to understand her by. There’s something about that kind of power that makes people uncomfortable. She just keeps singing anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/14/emeli-sandé-clown/ Fri, 14 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/14/the-pink-doesnt-matter/ Pretty in Pink is really just about not fitting anywhere. Andie’s poor, she likes a rich boy, and that’s it—the world doesn’t move for people in her position. The homemade dress is her pushing anyway, trying to prove something that doesn’t need proving. John Hughes understood that particular sadness, the way you keep reaching even when you know better. It’s a love story that’s actually a quiet tragedy with great 80s fashion. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/14/the-pink-doesnt-matter/ Fri, 14 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/13/sweet-talk/ What I like about Jessie Ware is the directness. She sings about wanting, about desire, without hedging or cute deflection. Just says it straight. The production is clean and minimal—electronic, spacious—which gives her voice room to breathe. There’s something confident about that kind of simplicity, about letting the silence mean something. Not everyone can do it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/13/sweet-talk/ Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/13/toro-y-moi-so-many-details/ Toro Y Moi songs don’t give everything up at once. You listen and there’s another layer buried in the mix, some textural choice you missed before. That’s what draws me back—the idea that you can pack that much into a track and have it hold together, that you can be clever about production without it becoming noise. Chaz Bear’s good at that particular problem. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/13/toro-y-moi-so-many-details/ Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/13/cant-stop/ I get bored. That’s the thing about me—I get bored with pretty much everything after two and a half hours. Movies, games, projects, girls, doesn’t matter. Video games especially. I never finished Skyrim, quit Dead Space in the second room, and EVE Online is a conversation we don’t need to have. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/13/cant-stop/ Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/13/tierney-gearon-hollywood-heroines/ Gearon photographs them the way nobody else gets to see them—off guard, unlit, sometimes vulnerable in ways that would never make it to the red carpet. Hollywood Heroines isn’t about the mythology; it’s about what happens when you take that away. The women she photographs are still interesting, still magnetic, but they’re also just people with skin and moods and the particular exhaustion of being watched all the time. There’s something quietly radical about that, the refusal to make them either villains or saints. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/13/tierney-gearon-hollywood-heroines/ Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/13/google-maps-again/ I never understood the hate for Apple’s Maps when it first came out. Looked fine to me, seemed like it would work. Then one afternoon I’m running through Charlottenburg like a maniac because I’m late for some business meeting, and the app just keeps loading and loading, keeps showing nothing but white space, keeps crashing. That’s when I got it. The thing doesn’t work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/13/google-maps-again/ Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/12/victorias-secret-angels-deck-the-halls/ The Victoria’s Secret Angels holiday campaigns have this weird power—pure spectacle, completely artificial, and somehow still magnetic because every single detail is executed with absolute precision. The styling, the production design, the lighting, the whole machine is running at full capacity to seduce you into this fantasy of luxury and desire. You see the gears working and respect the craft of it even as you can see exactly what’s happening. It’s been the same formula for twenty years and it still lands because it’s so committed to itself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/12/victorias-secret-angels-deck-the-halls/ Wed, 12 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/12/the-pull/ The first time I stood on the Shibuya crossing at night, watching thousands of people cross at once like the whole thing was choreographed, something in me locked onto Tokyo. Three months there last summer and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The shops, the trains, the feeling of being part of something alive—everything pulled me back to one thought: I have to live there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/12/the-pull/ Wed, 12 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/12/skylar-grey/ I keep coming back to the space in that song, the way her voice doesn’t fill it but lives inside it. There’s a pull that doesn’t ask, just moves you forward like it was always going to go this way. She’s always been good at that—knowing when to hold back and when to let something break. When it does, it lands. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/12/skylar-grey/ Wed, 12 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/12/wanting-season/ I keep looking at this Raekwon bike. Wu-Tang collab with Affinity Cycles, the Ride4NY edition. Nothing I need, but I can’t stop circling back to it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/12/wanting-season/ Wed, 12 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/12/jessica-davies-and-the-christmas-bakery/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/12/jessica-davies-and-the-christmas-bakery/ Wed, 12 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/11/the-real-toy-story/ Michael Wolf photographed toy factory workers in China. Dolls, plastic guns, bubble machines—the ordinary stuff kids play with. His series is ’The Real Toy Story.’ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/11/the-real-toy-story/ Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/11/access-all-areas/ Festivals are basically a con. You pay for a ticket—never cheap—and then you’re locked into their entire economy. Beer at three times the price it’s worth. Food that tastes like cardboard and costs like steak. Merchandise marked up into the stratosphere. Meanwhile, the press people and anyone with an all-access pass just walks around getting handed everything for free. I’ve always resented that. Like they’re in on some basic truth about how the world actually works and the rest of us are just marks paying to learn it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/11/access-all-areas/ Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/11/backseat-kissers/ The backseat of a car is where some things become real. You know it’s stupid—the geometry doesn’t work, nothing good comes of it, you know how this ends. You go anyway. All hands and breath and someone’s jacket that still smells like them. It’s a specific texture of romance that sticks with you longer than things that were supposed to matter more. Years later you’ll remember the exact pressure of someone’s mouth in the dark before you remember their name. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/11/backseat-kissers/ Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/11/my-heart-burns/ Rammstein’s ’Mein Herz brennt’ is the soft one, the one that makes sense to people who otherwise think the band is just noise and theatrics. It’s orchestrated, almost delicate, and the lyrics are about obsession and losing yourself in someone, which is a different kind of violence than anything they’d done before. The song appeared on Reise, Reise in 2004, and it sits there like a confession in the middle of all that fire and percussion. There’s something genuinely unsettling about it—the restraint, the minor-key beauty, Till’s voice doing that thing where he sounds completely wrecked and completely in control at the same time. It’s the Rammstein song that stays with you, not because it’s the loudest or the most memorable, but because it doesn’t try to be either of those things. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/11/my-heart-burns/ Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/11/i-take-pictures/ The simplicity of it. Not “I’m a photographer” or any of the gear-talk bullshit, just the basic action. You see something, you want to hold onto it, you take a picture. Everything after that—the technique, the style, the years of learning to look—all of it serves that moment where you decide something is worth keeping. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/11/i-take-pictures/ Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/11/after-earth/ People right now want apocalypse stories. Zombies, asteroids, aliens—doesn’t matter the flavor. There’s always another angle on civilization collapsing. The genre never exhausts itself because there’s always a version of the end nobody’s quite tried. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/11/after-earth/ Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/11/oblivion-earth-is-a-memory-worth-fighting-for/ I’m walking around the Imperial City, watching NPCs live their schedules in endless loops. The game is asking me to care about something that doesn’t care back. Everything here is pixels and code, but I’m still choosing to be the hero, still pushing back against the void. That’s the grip Oblivion has—it makes you matter in a place that can’t know you’re there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/11/oblivion-earth-is-a-memory-worth-fighting-for/ Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/11/the-upton-effect/ Can’t remember when I first saw Kate Upton, though it bothers me that I can’t. I’d been absolutely fixed on redheads—call it a phase, call it certainty, but it felt done and settled. And then there she was, and nothing else mattered anymore. When did it happen? Terry Richardson shooting on a beach? That Guess Lingerie video that blew everyone away? Ken Jeong’s dumb photobomb thing? Some page in a magazine I’ve long since thrown away? No idea. It’s all blur. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/11/the-upton-effect/ Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/11/sigur-rós-leaning-towards-solace/ Sigur Rós spent twenty years making music that sounds like it’s coming from inside a cathedral made of ice. Jónsi sings mostly in Hopelandic, a language he invented so the voice becomes an instrument rather than a vehicle for words, and the guitars get bowed like you’re listening from another room, underwater. Everything is patient and slow and building toward something that might never fully arrive. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/11/sigur-rós-leaning-towards-solace/ Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/11/new-instagram/ Instagram updates always send people into a panic. Change the position of literally anything and you’ll get entire threads about the app’s death spiral. So when version 3.2.0 came out with a brand new interface, I figured we were in for the usual meltdown. Wasn’t terrible though. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/11/new-instagram/ Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/10/kyouhei-yamamoto/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/10/kyouhei-yamamoto/ Mon, 10 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/10/kiz-and-kraftklub/ Drove to Cologne for a Red Bull Soundclash—K.I.Z taking on Kraftklub in front of thousands at the Palladium. The format was simple: two bands, two stages, a series of challenges, and absolute commitment from both sides. Songs, insults, the crowd eating it up like their life depended on it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/10/kiz-and-kraftklub/ Mon, 10 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/7/babys-got-it/ Maylee Todd makes music that feels like it’s arriving from somewhere you can’t quite locate—not quite pop, not quite electronic, just her own frequency. The confidence in a title like this, the plainness of it, suggests something that doesn’t need to announce itself. You either feel it or you don’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/7/babys-got-it/ Fri, 07 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/6/pink-works/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/6/pink-works/ Thu, 06 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/6/m83-wait/ M83’s “Wait” does that thing where the synths keep building in these long arcs and you’re not sure if something’s about to break open or just fade. Gonzalez’s production has always worked best when he’s patient like that, letting a single idea bloom across four minutes, the kind of song that makes you want to drive somewhere you don’t need to go, just for the excuse to sit in the car and listen to it again. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/6/m83-wait/ Thu, 06 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/6/sword-art-online/ The sky above Aincrad turns red and Akihiko Kayaba, the programmer who built Sword Art Online, appears to announce he’s done something insane. No one’s leaving this. If you die in the game, your neural interface fries your brain. The exit is 100 floors down. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/6/sword-art-online/ Thu, 06 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/5/five-magazines/ Sitting through another week of forgettable online content, I’d pretty much given up on print. Then I grabbed five magazines that actually understood something about the world right now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/5/five-magazines/ Wed, 05 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/5/it-had-to-be-you/ She was everywhere for a stretch—the blonde, the smile, the Sports Illustrated cover that somehow still mattered. There was an understanding built into how people looked at her, no irony required. You can’t separate her from that specific moment when beauty still had a kind of narrative to it. I remember not thinking about it much at the time, which is probably the point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/5/it-had-to-be-you/ Wed, 05 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/5/small-racism/ You’re on a regional train in Berlin when she starts: “Deutschland den Deutschen.” This look on her face like it’s the funniest thing she’s ever said. The bald guy from Thuringia gets it right away. They’ve found each other, and now they’re bold. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/5/small-racism/ Wed, 05 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/5/pharrells-court/ There’s a moment in everything Pharrell touches where you realize he’s already thought three steps ahead of where you are. He’s been producing and designing and performing long enough that it’s become invisible—you just know something’s good before you know why, and half the time it’s because his name’s somewhere in the credits. He’s got that rare thing where success hasn’t made him sloppy. If anything he’s gotten more precise, more minimal, more confident in what doesn’t need to be there. Twenty years of doing this and he still looks like he’s not trying. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/5/pharrells-court/ Wed, 05 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/4/the-moment-they-sold/ The New York Post is tabloid pure—the American BILD, built to sell scandal. When the real sensational stuff won’t fly, you angle the story until something horrible looks marketable. Newspapers need readers; readers need outrage. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/4/the-moment-they-sold/ Tue, 04 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/4/reading-karl/ What gets me about Karl Lagerfeld’s interviews is how unfiltered they are. Someone asked if fashion people are less stupid these days, and he didn’t give some diplomatic answer. He said yeah, they’re less stupid now. Then he said fashion is basically the only thing that works in France anymore, and drew a comparison about having a daughter in a profession politicians don’t want to acknowledge. He wasn’t trying to be funny. Just true. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/4/reading-karl/ Tue, 04 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/4/here-comes-japan/ There’s something about Japanese design that doesn’t feel like design—it just looks like the only way something could possibly be made. The restraint, the details, the refusal to explain itself. You start noticing it everywhere: in tools you use every day, in what filmmakers and artists are reaching for. It’s not a discovery, but it comes in waves. Right now feels like one of those moments. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/4/here-comes-japan/ Tue, 04 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/4/the-tally/ I don’t care about celebrity gossip. Never have. The stories blur together—who’s sleeping with whom, who got caught, whose career survives the scandal. It all just passes by. But one detail stuck with me inexplicably: someone found out his girlfriend had been with twenty different people in a single year. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/4/the-tally/ Tue, 04 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/4/the-mashup-year/ 2012 pop music didn’t want to commit to anything. Gangnam Style proved the internet could make a song more inescapable than the industry ever could, and that became the blueprint—just mash everything together and see what sticks. Adele had 21. Drake was doing Drake things. EDM somehow started bleeding into songs that never asked for it. The whole year felt like a collage that worked by accident. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/4/the-mashup-year/ Tue, 04 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/3/norilsk/ I hate the cold. Everything about it—the dark months, the way ice crusts form on your face when you breathe, how your body just gives up. So Norilsk feels like a personal affront. It’s a Russian industrial city three hundred kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, built because there’s nickel and palladium in the ground and someone in Moscow decided extracting it was worth the cost. Right now it’s roughly minus forty Celsius. The people there aren’t hiding inside. They’re going to work, to school, moving through their day like the temperature is just weather. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/3/norilsk/ Mon, 03 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/3/sirens/ Nick Hook doesn’t make much of anything. His electronic work lives in restraint—silence, space, precise placement, nothing wasted. Sirens carries that same DNA. Minimal, exact, demanding. It’s not background music. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/3/sirens/ Mon, 03 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/3/kyouhei/ Kyouhei moved to Berlin because Tokyo wasn’t holding his attention anymore. He’s a photographer—women, dogs, trees—the kind of thing that could be a career if he wanted it to be. Right now he works at a restaurant called Smart Deli. He was born in Okayama in 1988, lived in Tokyo for a while, then decided to leave. I like that he didn’t overthink it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/3/kyouhei/ Mon, 03 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/2/industry-confessions/ “On the day I said no to Terry Richardson, my career ended,” someone posted anonymously on Fashion Industry Confessions. That’s where it started. People writing from inside the industry—models, photographers, assistants, interns—posting the stuff that never makes it past the publicist. Harassment disguised as mentorship. Design theft. The constant casual viciousness between competitors. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/2/industry-confessions/ Sun, 02 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/2/me-and-my-monkey/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/2/me-and-my-monkey/ Sun, 02 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/2/sabine-jemeljanova/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/2/sabine-jemeljanova/ Sun, 02 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/2/coverflows-dead/ CoverFlow is finally dead and I’m genuinely happy about it. Apple ditched it in iTunes 11 along with Ping and Party Shuffle—basically every feature I’d been disabling the second I upgraded. So opening iTunes 11, I wasn’t expecting much, but something felt different. Maybe this one would actually work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/2/coverflows-dead/ Sun, 02 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/1/holiday-lookbook/ Holiday lookbooks hit different in December. You’re scrolling through carefully styled images, and the mood carries more weight than the actual clothes. The color palette, the composition, the way each piece relates to the others—it all creates a feeling before any purchase. You look at someone’s December vision and think: I want to exist in that light. Maybe that’s all a lookbook really does: it sells you permission to feel a certain way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/1/holiday-lookbook/ Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/1/skrillex-quest/ If you don’t know who Skrillex is, you missed a weird five-year window when dubstep bass drops felt dangerous and every teenager was dancing to “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” in a basement somewhere. He was briefly everywhere, then he wasn’t, and now he’s just another name from the 2010s that some kid’s older brother still thinks is cool. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/1/skrillex-quest/ Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/1/harajuku-kawaii-tv/ Fashion television from Harajuku feels like watching people refuse to compromise with adulthood. Every frame is color, every outfit an argument against restraint. What gets me is that it’s not ironic—these designers genuinely believe in putting twenty things together and making it feel necessary rather than excessive. You see it and you either get it or you don’t, and if you don’t, that’s sort of the point. It’s not aspiration made palatable. It’s just girls being girls, in the most maximalist way possible. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/1/harajuku-kawaii-tv/ Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/1/tiny-tortures/ Flying Lotus makes you work for it. The layers don’t announce themselves—they accumulate. You hear a thing for the first time around the third listen, or you hear a rhythm you thought was percussion and realize it’s something else entirely. It’s why his stuff rewards the kind of attention most music doesn’t ask for anymore, the kind where you’re not just background-processing while you do something else. There’s a generosity in that, actually—he respects your ear enough to not spell everything out. The complexity isn’t showing off. It’s just what he heard and had to get down. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/12/1/tiny-tortures/ Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/30/jeremy-scotts-white-smart/ The car was white with black accents and bright red wings—a special limited-edition Smart designed by Jeremy Scott for Mercedes. They threw a premiere party for it at the Jim Henson Studios, which seemed perfect for something so absurd. I went to Los Angeles for one night to see it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/30/jeremy-scotts-white-smart/ Fri, 30 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/30/ten-little-missions/ There’s a list in my head of things worth doing, or at least worth sitting with. Nothing particularly coherent. Some serious, some absurd, all of them lodged in there somehow. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/30/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 30 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/30/kid-cudi-teleport-2-me/ Cudi’s music always sounds like transmission from somewhere else. There’s a loneliness in his voice that doesn’t perform or ask permission—it just sits there, heavy. And wanting someone to teleport to you is the realest kind of desperate, the three-in-the-morning kind, when nothing ordinary will fix it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/30/kid-cudi-teleport-2-me/ Fri, 30 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/30/adidas-originals-represent-the-big-final/ Nothing lasts forever, especially not a campaign you’ve been half-watching for years. Represent was always about that thing sneakers actually do better than any other fashion item—they’re honest. You wear them, they get beat up, they tell a story that doesn’t lie. An Adidas finale feels like closing a chapter on something smaller but genuine, one last moment before whatever comes next takes over. Another thing that was, and then it wasn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/30/adidas-originals-represent-the-big-final/ Fri, 30 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/27/nicholas-gazin-girls-at-parties/ Why do we keep showing up? The whole stupid routine—getting ready at some awful hour, the cold, standing in the dark pretending to care while people dance. But we know why. Girls. Drunk girls, bored girls, girls thinking about something else while the music plays. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/27/nicholas-gazin-girls-at-parties/ Tue, 27 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/26/jane-wayne-between-berlin-and-paris/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/26/jane-wayne-between-berlin-and-paris/ Mon, 26 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/26/haim-dont-save-me/ Saw them live once and the thing that mattered was how they actually played together, three of them listening and responding instead of running through a choreographed thing. Their guitars were loud and obvious, not buried under production. Just people in a room playing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/26/haim-dont-save-me/ Mon, 26 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/26/cider-cider/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/26/cider-cider/ Mon, 26 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/26/when-the-lawyers-got-sued/ The beige envelope arrives. Registered mail. Inside is letterhead, legal language, a demand: you used this image illegally. Pay two to ten thousand euros. Most bloggers don’t know copyright law. They don’t want to hire a lawyer just to find out if they’re wrong. So they pay. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/26/when-the-lawyers-got-sued/ Mon, 26 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/25/something-switched/ I was listening to some people talk about anime and something switched. They were riffing on different shows—Girls und Panzer, Sword Art Online, Space Brothers—and hearing them get excited about it made me remember why this stuff matters. Anime does something. The earnest and ridiculous at the same time, all that unreal intensity you can’t find anywhere else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/25/something-switched/ Sun, 25 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/25/journelles-launch/ Went to the Journelles launch. Room full of girls, designers and writers and photographers—everyone dressed with intention, music that didn’t get in the way. Fashion blogging still felt important then, felt like it was saying something about style and identity rather than just moving inventory. Maybe I’m generous in hindsight, but that night the room felt like something real was happening. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/25/journelles-launch/ Sun, 25 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/25/youth-word/ Drunk high schoolers screaming Yolo before stepping in front of a truck while David Guetta plays—that’s what Germany’s official youth word of the year represents. You only live once, and apparently that’s the defining slang of a generation. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/25/youth-word/ Sun, 25 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/25/why-dont-you-answer/ Friendly Fires came around when I needed permission to dance again—not in an indie-rock way, but to actually move, full commitment, no irony. Their first album was gloss and momentum. I lived in it for months. They stopped making records that mattered to me after that, but those early ones still feel like the best version of a Friday night: alone, apartment, something good playing, knowing that’s enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/25/why-dont-you-answer/ Sun, 25 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/25/lazy-oaf-goes-basic/ Lazy Oaf’s always been about graphic abundance—tees with personality, collaborations that barely make sense, visual chaos. A capsule collection is funny because it’s the opposite of that, all restraint and essentials. But there’s something to it. You strip everything back and see what’s actually solid, what works when the excess is gone. For Lazy Oaf, that’s probably where the real taste lives—underneath the noise. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/25/lazy-oaf-goes-basic/ Sun, 25 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/24/disaronno-its-a-swing-thing/ Disaronno has that unmistakable almond sweetness that lands somewhere between dessert and actual liqueur, the kind of drink that tastes nothing like sophistication and everything like the kind of night where you’re young enough to think sophistication matters. The bottle’s iconic, too—that squat apricot-colored thing with the wrapper around the neck, instantly recognizable even when you’re squinting at a bar shelf in bad lighting. It tastes like something someone’s older friend bought for a party, something that made you feel like you were getting away with something. It’s smooth enough that it goes down dangerously easy, sweet enough that you can pretend you’re not really drinking, which is its whole trick. The Italians knew what they were doing with this one. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/24/disaronno-its-a-swing-thing/ Sat, 24 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/24/friday/ Rebecca Black was thirteen when the internet decided to make an example of her. “Friday” went viral in that special awful way, and everyone with a keyboard felt permission to join in. Most people don’t survive that. You either disappear or you double down and never escape it. She did neither. She made music, something actual and good, and over time earned the kind of respect that matters—from people who know what they’re listening to. There’s no redemption arc here. It’s just what happens when someone refuses to be erased. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/24/friday/ Sat, 24 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/24/out-of-sync/ I kept hunting for “Gangnam Style” on sketchy sites—low-res copies plastered with ads, usually deleted before you finished watching. GEMA had locked the video in Germany. Google wouldn’t meet their licensing demands, so most of YouTube’s biggest videos just vanished for us. Not technically censored. Just gone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/24/out-of-sync/ Sat, 24 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/23/berlin-trembled/ The three stripes are so common you forget they’re a design. Berlin’s got this way of making you look at famous things differently. An Adidas night, the Originals, heritage branding—it should be corny, right? But something about the city and the history and the people who actually care about the shape of things made it feel earned, made it feel real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/23/berlin-trembled/ Fri, 23 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/23/return/ Clemens Poloczek went back to the Black Forest with Rampa, an old friend, to film what the creative process actually looks like. They shot in the natural, empty spaces of his hometown. The work is just process—searching and thinking and moving the camera, not some polished finished thing. Not performance. A photographer returning to where he’s from with someone he trusts, and the work is simply documenting what that looks like. What you actually do when you’re making something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/23/return/ Fri, 23 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/23/pretty-in-pink-super-styles/ The pink dress matters because it solves something real—how to belong in a rich school without selling out. Made from her mother’s curtains, assembled by someone who actually has to think about money. Molly Ringwald’s aesthetic is honest in a way designer clothes never are. I’ve been thinking about design for twenty years and the rule still holds: the best style statements aren’t decoration, they’re argument. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/23/pretty-in-pink-super-styles/ Fri, 23 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/23/jessie-ware-if-you-love-me/ Jessie Ware has always been direct about what she wants. No metaphors, no protective distance. She’ll build a whole song around something as simple as “if you love me” and make it feel like the most honest question she could ask. There’s something about her voice—a slight rasp, the way she commits to a note—that makes vulnerability sound like strength. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/23/jessie-ware-if-you-love-me/ Fri, 23 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/23/grounded/ It’s autumn, it’s gray, it’s cold. Someone at a party gave me their virus and now I’m stuck at home, coughing while everyone else is at Watergate getting wasted. I had plans. I wanted to go out. But here I am. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/23/grounded/ Fri, 23 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/22/the-ranking-game/ You click. A blog loses. You click again, and another one’s gone. It’s weirdly satisfying even though you’ve never actually read either one. You’re judging based on a screenshot, a design choice, maybe a vibe. You know this means nothing. You keep clicking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/22/the-ranking-game/ Thu, 22 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/22/journelles-arrives/ Journelles launched with that specific Berlin energy—people who actually knew something about fashion coming together to write about it without the usual desperation. Jessie already had credibility as a writer, and they brought in Alexa, Hanna, Julia, Kerstin. It was backed properly. This was a real thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/22/journelles-arrives/ Thu, 22 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/22/tokyo-voodoo/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/22/tokyo-voodoo/ Thu, 22 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/22/florence-and-the-machine-lover-to-lover/ Florence Welch’s music has always worked at that scale where intimacy becomes operatic. Lover to Lover is about the specific moment when another person actually sees you—that collapse of distance on stage or off it. Her voice reaches for something just beyond the melody, and it’s hard not to feel addressed personally. She sings to you the way someone does when they’re actually looking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/22/florence-and-the-machine-lover-to-lover/ Thu, 22 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/21/figure-8/ Ellie Goulding builds these spiraling synth lines that go nowhere and everywhere at once. I remember driving at night with one of her songs playing, thinking about how repetition can feel like progress if you’re not paying attention. There’s something mechanical but honest about the way she loops and layers. Maybe that’s what a figure eight is—the same circle twice, which means you’re back where you started but somehow different. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/21/figure-8/ Wed, 21 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/21/three-hours-late/ I stood in an arena for three hours waiting for Rihanna to show up, and by hour three the crowd was actively fantasizing about murder. She arrived eventually and went through the setlist exactly as expected—ballads, dance tracks, the standard formula. My legs hurt. My drink vouchers were exhausted. Congo Rock was the opener and they were actually good, the kind of band I would’ve loved discovering in a basement club at 3 a.m. instead of here. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/21/three-hours-late/ Wed, 21 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/21/the-earlier-party/ The Adidas Originals campaign had this closing event in Berlin, some club called Alte Münze, where they were going to hold a ceremony for the winning teams. Teams that had spent months competing for the right to be celebrated as transcendent beings or whatever the brief said. It was the kind of thing that usually feels empty—brand activation, content, a way to get young people interested in shoes—but I went to the earlier event in Munich and it didn’t feel empty then. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/21/the-earlier-party/ Wed, 21 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/1/snoop-lion-la-la-lala-la-la/ In 2012, Snoop just stopped pretending and became Snoop Lion. The reggae turn seemed ridiculous until you heard it and realized he’d found something that actually worked. “La La La La La” is almost nothing—just him whistling and repeating the same notes, a hook so simple it feels like a joke. But that was the point. He’d already won everything, already been the icon and the force. He could afford to just disappear into what he actually wanted to make, no apologies, no narrative. He’d earned the right to make a song that’s basically a joke and have it work anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/11/1/snoop-lion-la-la-lala-la-la/ Thu, 01 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/31/still-posse/ Watched Posse again the other night—that 1993 Mario Van Peebles film where the whole mythology of the American west gets rewritten with Black gunslingers and outlaws at the center. It’s the kind of movie that feels more true than most accounts of actual history, which is probably the point. I’d forgotten how much fun it is, how unserious in the best way. The action’s a little stiff, the dialogue cracks, the villains are cartoonish. None of it matters because the film knows exactly what it’s doing: showing you a world where Black men get to be the cool ones, the dangerous ones, the ones in control. It’s been decades now and that still feels radical, which says something grim about cinema. I’m not going to pretend it’s a masterpiece, but it’s essential—one of those movies that does more than entertain. It reminds you what movies are actually for. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/31/still-posse/ Wed, 31 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/31/the-book/ M.I.A. on the page reads differently than M.I.A. on screen. The visual chaos drops away, and what’s left is the thinking underneath—clearer, sometimes rawer. The formal noise that carries so much of her music can’t translate to prose. Instead you get something more direct: the biography, the politics, the vulnerability written out. It’s strange reading someone whose whole practice is built on sensory overload finally sit still long enough to explain herself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/31/the-book/ Wed, 31 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/31/bebop-fever/ Being sick is the only permission you need to watch entire series without guilt. No productivity, no apologies, just fever and pills and endless play buttons. You infect the pizza delivery guy, pull the blanket up, and disappear into something that doesn’t demand anything of you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/31/bebop-fever/ Wed, 31 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/30/nicki-minaj-va-va-voom/ There’s something defiant about watching someone who refuses to apologize for being too much. Nicki has this way of occupying space—both physically in a frame and in the culture—that doesn’t ask permission. The bars, the persona shifts, the wigs, the unapologetic sexuality and ambition. She never sounds like she’s trying to fit into rap; she sounds like rap had to make room. I think what gets me is that she’s never performed modesty. She’s never softened her edges to make anyone more comfortable, and there’s something liberating about watching an artist at that level just commit completely to being exactly who she is, flaws and all, and dare you to look away. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/30/nicki-minaj-va-va-voom/ Tue, 30 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/30/sky-ferreira-sad-dream/ I keep coming back to Sky Ferreira. There’s something about the way she makes longing sound like decoration—production so thin and cool it’s almost nothing, just enough space around her voice to make you listen harder. You’re never quite sure if she’s looking at you or through you, and I think that’s exactly the point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/30/sky-ferreira-sad-dream/ Tue, 30 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/30/barfutura/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/30/barfutura/ Tue, 30 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/30/pretty-in-pink/ Duckie’s jacket, Andie’s thrifted dress, the whole midwest-goth aesthetic of it—I keep coming back to this movie because it’s one of the few eighties films that understood that clothes are armor and expression at the same time. Molly Ringwald’s character cobbles together her identity from what she can find, and there’s something real in that desperation. The movie sells the romance to you, but what stays with me is the feeling of being on the outside, of wanting something you can’t have, of thinking if you just had the right outfit or said the right thing it would matter. It mattered to me then. It still does, different now—not the longing for someone specific, but the longing to be seen as someone worth seeing. The film gets that. It never pretends the clothes are just clothes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/30/pretty-in-pink/ Tue, 30 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/30/das-racist/ Das Racist was doing something I didn’t see coming—hip-hop that was self-aware without being cynical, funny without winking at the camera. The duo understood that the best joke is the one delivered straight-faced. They made music that made you think about what hip-hop was and could be, which sounds serious until you realize half the time they were just messing around. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/30/das-racist/ Tue, 30 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/29/exactly-right/ In a city like this you get lost fast. You’re drowning in a sea of lonely faces—everywhere you look, mouths and hands and breath, someone’s breath in your ear at the club. But then you find people who understand, who actually pull you back up, and you look at them and smile and they smile back and that’s when something clicks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/29/exactly-right/ Mon, 29 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/29/tokyo-gets-in/ Tokyo gets into people differently than Berlin does. Berlin can ruin you—it’s the first good city for a lot of people, the one that makes you realize you can actually leave home and be happy somewhere. But Tokyo is something else. Teresa came back from Tokyo a few years ago talking about it like she’d taken acid, like something in her neurology had permanently shifted. Kiki’s there now and her messages have the same quality—this glazed, half-present tone of someone who’s been fundamentally rewired. She keeps sending photos of subway stations and vending machines and apologizing for how these things mean nothing to anyone else. That’s how you know it’s real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/29/tokyo-gets-in/ Mon, 29 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/29/sex-sells/ I keep coming back to something that happened in Berlin in 2012. Refugee camp at the Brandenburg Gate. Ashkan Khorasani was there—Iranian, had walked from Würzburg with dozens of others. They set up tents and asked for something basic. Police came hard the first night, twenty vehicles, dogs, beatings. Then cold. Then nothing from the media for a month. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/29/sex-sells/ Mon, 29 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/29/hannahs-birthday-the-lost-daughter/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/29/hannahs-birthday-the-lost-daughter/ Mon, 29 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/29/the-toy-photographer/ I don’t know much about toy photography, but I know what I’m looking at when I see Brian McCarty’s work. He photographs plastic figures like they’re worth photographing—lights them properly, composes them carefully, gives them the attention you’d give to something you actually made. It’s changed how I think about the difference between an object and a subject. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/29/the-toy-photographer/ Mon, 29 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/27/cro-once-around-the-world/ Cro does something rare in German hip-hop—he’s introspective without being heavy, experimental without being difficult. The dude makes you want to move and think at the same time, which is harder than it sounds. His production is clean, melodic, a little melancholy, like he’s figured out how to make sadness catchy. I don’t speak German well enough to catch every line, but you don’t need to. The vibe carries. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/27/cro-once-around-the-world/ Sat, 27 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/26/sky-ferreira-coke-is-it/ Sky Ferreira makes things happen at a distance. She doesn’t announce it; she just appears somewhere unexpected—a collaboration, a visual, a sound nobody else would have made. That kind of artist, the ones who seem to actually be thinking rather than reacting to what thinking is supposed to look like. You know she’s good because she doesn’t need to tell you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/26/sky-ferreira-coke-is-it/ Fri, 26 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/25/steve-mcqueen/ M83’s ’Steve McQueen’ is that song that sounds like driving through an empty desert at night with the windows down, all synth wash and that lean, confident groove underneath. There’s something about pairing Olivier’s spacey, almost detached production with the coolness of McQueen’s name—the guy who barely needs to act, who just exists on screen and everyone stops talking. That’s the song. It doesn’t need to do much. It just moves forward, patient and self-assured, and you find yourself thinking about old cars and empty highways and the space between one place and somewhere else. No dramatics. Just presence. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/25/steve-mcqueen/ Thu, 25 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/25/polygon/ I’ve been around long enough that most hype just doesn’t land anymore. New bands, new venues, the same people losing their minds in some basement, and I’m at the bar writing “we’ve seen this all before” on a napkin and drinking until it doesn’t matter. But something about new web projects still hits different. That still makes my heart do something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/25/polygon/ Thu, 25 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/25/maxime-ballesteros-love-me-im-trying/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/25/maxime-ballesteros-love-me-im-trying/ Thu, 25 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/24/the-wanting/ Watched the Apple keynote. They announced an iPad mini, a new iMac, Mac mini, MacBook Pro. Each one looked perfect. Design at that level is almost offensive—it makes everything else look cheap. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/24/the-wanting/ Wed, 24 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/23/asking-first/ Blogging is what you actually love. Making money at it is nice. Reaching people is nice. Getting flown to events or having companies care about what you think—that’s an adrenaline hit. But the real reward, the thing that keeps you coming back, is putting something out into the world and watching what people do with it. The arguments. The passion, the hate, the debate that follows. That’s the addiction. That’s why you keep doing it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/23/asking-first/ Tue, 23 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/23/paranoia/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/23/paranoia/ Tue, 23 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/19/tokyo-swallows/ I landed in Tokyo expecting chaos and got exactly that, but also something else—something that doesn’t fit in a description. The city is liquid, constantly pooling and growing, spilling into spaces you didn’t know existed. Tradition pressed against neon against things that don’t have names. It doesn’t care if you’re prepared. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/19/tokyo-swallows/ Fri, 19 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/19/she-knows/ Nicki’s voice on this track is all confidence, no apology. She’s saying what she wants without flinching, and that certainty is the whole thing. She’s not performing, not softening it, not asking permission—just stating it. And somehow that lands as genuinely cool instead of insufferable, which is harder than it sounds. I think about that a lot, how someone can sound so sure of themselves that you actually believe it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/19/she-knows/ Fri, 19 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/19/ten-little-missions/ Another weekend bearing down and I’ve got nothing. No plans, no ideas, just the dead weight of Saturday sitting on my chest. Here’s what keeps spinning in my head. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/19/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 19 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/19/why-i-cant-embed-that/ Universal’s lawyers sent a letter that started with the most absurd sentence: “It has been determined that on an internet-connected computer an unauthorized music offering is being held for access.” What they meant was you’d embedded a music video on your blog, and now you had one week to delete it or face legal action and massive fines. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/19/why-i-cant-embed-that/ Fri, 19 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/19/richard-kerns-pregnant-girls/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/19/richard-kerns-pregnant-girls/ Fri, 19 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/19/nicole-kidmans-wild-ride/ I’ve been watching Nicole Kidman long enough to stop trying to predict what she’ll do next. She takes on prestige roles, musicals, thrillers, something genuinely strange—commits fully each time. There’s an intensity to her that makes every choice feel inevitable, even when she’s all over the place. It’s rare to find an actor so committed to the work rather than the idea of being a star. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/19/nicole-kidmans-wild-ride/ Fri, 19 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/18/everywhere/ If you don’t know what The Pirate Bay is, you’ve lived a genuinely untouched life. For everyone else, it’s probably the closest thing the internet’s produced to an actual freedom apparatus. It made torrenting real. For years it’s been the thing governments ban and hate, the site they block and threaten, the project they keep trying to delete. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/18/everywhere/ Thu, 18 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/18/cease-and-desist/ A German image agency started systematically sending cease-and-desist letters to bloggers over photo usage. The mechanics were simple: find an image you posted, claim you owed licensing fees, attach a bill for several thousand euros. Most people paid because a lawyer cost more. The agency probably didn’t own exclusive rights to anything they were claiming—they just bought regional licensing and then threatened everyone else who used the same images. It worked. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/18/cease-and-desist/ Thu, 18 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/18/the-moment-before/ There’s a particular moment in shopping when the fantasy is cleaner than the reality. You see a GoPro and imagine yourself filming at places worth filming. A Chromebook and you’ve already decided on your tech philosophy—not Apple, not Windows, just Google all the way down. Rocksmith and you’re the kind of person who just picks up guitar, you skip the part where you’re bad at it. Limited Nikes because some things are only available if you’re lucky enough to find them. The H&M x Lana Del Rey collection and suddenly you’re living with that specific mood she does, that bored-glamour thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/18/the-moment-before/ Thu, 18 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/18/regina-spektor-the-hook/ Regina Spektor makes music that shouldn’t work. I’ve never figured out how. Her voice is strange, almost childish one moment, then suddenly raw. She builds songs like puzzles—there’s always some logic underneath, some mathematical structure or unusual vocal arrangement that catches you sideways. She’s been doing this forever and nothing she does is simple or obvious. Every song is twisted, funny, unsettling. She’ll record her voice backwards, build something around pure nonsense, and it lands because there’s no irony—just genuine feeling underneath all that architecture. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/18/regina-spektor-the-hook/ Thu, 18 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/18/little-bird/ Far East Movement always felt like the bridge nobody asked for but somehow everyone needed. They were too American for the Asian market and too Asian for the American mainstream, which meant they got to make exactly what they wanted without anyone paying close attention. There’s something freeing about that kind of invisibility. “Little Bird” sits in that space where their sound just exists—no apologies, no explanation, just the kind of track that plays in your head for days without you planning it. I’ve always respected artists who don’t need permission to exist, who work in the margins and don’t seem bothered by it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/18/little-bird/ Thu, 18 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/17/thirty-four-floors/ Shibuya Hikarie sits right at the edge where Shibuya’s chaos bleeds into something almost manageable. The building itself is this sleek vertical thing—all glass and clean lines—which feels almost restrained compared to the rest of the neighborhood. I remember going up to one of the observation decks, that strange moment where Tokyo suddenly organizes itself into patterns when you’re high enough to see it whole. From down on the street it’s all noise and bodies and signs; from up there you understand the actual shape of things. The design is aggressively functional—shopping, offices, theater, restaurants all stacked into this efficient tower. There’s something very Tokyo about that, the refusal to waste vertical space on anything that doesn’t serve. You go in expecting a shopping mall and end up in this compressed vertical city. The crowds are better-behaved than you’d expect, moving through the space like they’ve accepted its logic. It’s the kind of building that works precisely because it doesn’t try to be charming or memorable—it just does what it’s built to do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/17/thirty-four-floors/ Wed, 17 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/17/coming-back/ Jessica Weiß shut down LesMads about a year ago. It was this fashion blog that had actually worked—the kind of thing that becomes a real job, gets books published, wins awards, the whole trajectory. She’d built it with a few other people, made it into something people actually cared about. Then one day she just stopped and moved on to working with Interview Magazine instead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/17/coming-back/ Wed, 17 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/17/bethrest/ There’s something about that song in deep winter that just gets under your skin. The orchestration builds so gradually you barely notice it happening, and then suddenly you’re sitting in the dark and the strings are everywhere. Justin Vernon at his most intimate, I think—not hiding behind production, just this voice and what sounds like the whole architecture of loneliness arranged around it. I’ve played it so many times I’ve stopped hearing it as a song and started hearing it as a room I keep going back to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/17/bethrest/ Wed, 17 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/17/pretty-in-pink/ I watched it again and forgot how much I like it. Not the film school way—nothing about Hughes’s camera work or the brat pack mythology. Just the thing itself, the feeling of it. Duckie’s desperation, Blane’s weakness, Andie’s armor made of thrift-store clothes and spite. The prom at the end doesn’t matter; what sticks is the longing. Everyone wants something they can’t have, and some of them know it. The synth score still sounds like loneliness. It’s a teen movie that never condescends, and it’s full of people who aren’t beautiful in the way the movie industry usually demands—they’re just there, wanting things, making mistakes. That probably matters less than it did when I first cared about it, but the film’s honesty about how much wanting something can hurt, how class gets between you and people you like, how you can want to be liked and still be too proud to ask for it—that doesn’t date. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/17/pretty-in-pink/ Wed, 17 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/16/sky-ferreira-home-alone/ Sky Ferreira has this way of making isolation sound like the only place worth being. There’s something in her voice—the precision of it, the slight remove—that suggests someone perfectly comfortable with her own company, or maybe someone who’s learned that loneliness is cleaner than the alternative. Her records have always felt like they were made in a room by herself, even when they’re surrounded by producers and collaborators. That sense of distance, of being untouchable even when the songs are vulnerable, is what makes her interesting to me. She builds these intricate electronic structures and then sings through them like she’s still deciding whether to let you in. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/16/sky-ferreira-home-alone/ Tue, 16 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/16/when-berlin-got-scary/ I’m not sure exactly how I first picked up on the idea that Berlin was getting more violent. Maybe I read it in the paper, or maybe my mother called early one morning to tell me someone had been stabbed again—this time at Alexanderplatz. Probably the latter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/16/when-berlin-got-scary/ Tue, 16 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/16/brooke-candy-das-me/ Discovered her music the way you discover anything that matters—half by accident, but it landed because I was ready for something uncompromising. Everything about her work refuses to apologize, the sexuality brazen and functional rather than decorative, the aggression deliberate. She constructs entire worlds around the provocation instead of just relying on shock, which is why it works. That kind of fearlessness, that unwillingness to soften anything even if the entire industry wanted her to, that’s worth paying attention to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/16/brooke-candy-das-me/ Tue, 16 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/16/roses-gabor/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/16/roses-gabor/ Tue, 16 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/16/scarlett-johansson/ There’s a moment in Lost in Translation where she’s in a red dress at some nightclub, and she’s just standing there, slightly detached, slightly bored, completely present. That’s the thing about her—she has this quality where she seems to exist in a different register than the people around her. Not better, just separate. She carries that into everything, whether she’s playing a blank-slate spy in Marvel movies or disappearing into Sofia Coppola’s Tokyo. The strange thing is that you can watch her be gorgeous—and she is, objectively, in that classic Hollywood way—without it being the interesting part. The interesting part is that she doesn’t seem to care. She gives you what you came for, but she’s never trying to convince you she’s grateful for the attention. That detachment, that refusal to perform gratitude for being beautiful, is probably why people are so obsessed with her. We want to know what she’s thinking when she’s not performing. The answer is probably nothing we’d find that interesting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/16/scarlett-johansson/ Tue, 16 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/16/one-more-skins/ Skins was perfect timing for me. The early seasons especially—I was the right age, old enough to feel the darkness, young enough to think it understood me. The later seasons fell apart, and don’t get me started on the American version, but those first two generations stuck around in my head in a way most TV doesn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/16/one-more-skins/ Tue, 16 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/16/die-antwoord-fatty-boom-boom/ Watched Die Antwoord’s ’Fatty Boom Boom’ at some point and the thing about it is they just didn’t care. The video’s crude, sexual, deliberately offensive—everything you’re not supposed to make mainstream music about. And that lack of concern, that complete refusal to perform politeness or apologize, that’s what stuck with me. The shock value burns out pretty fast, but the shamelessness underneath doesn’t. They made something ugly and owned it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/16/die-antwoord-fatty-boom-boom/ Tue, 16 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/16/far-cry-3-going-insane/ Insanity creeps in faster than you’d expect. It’s this thing where your mind just starts spinning in its own direction, destroying and saving you at the same time, and one day you realize you can’t reel it back in anymore. That’s what Far Cry 3 actually gets. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/16/far-cry-3-going-insane/ Tue, 16 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/15/the-xx-chained/ There’s something about The xx that makes you want to sit still. Two people making music that sounds like they’re afraid to take up space, like every synth note and drum hit has been carefully weighed beforehand. Jamie and Romy, standing apart on stage, singing into the darkness like they’re confessing something they don’t want anyone to hear. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/15/the-xx-chained/ Mon, 15 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/15/the-haunted-man/ There’s a way that Natasha Khan’s records arrive—like messages from somewhere else, immaculate and strange, each sound placed with such precision you wonder what she’s building. Bat For Lashes makes these perfect electronic things where you can hear the construction beneath, and then suddenly a vocal comes in and breaks something. That’s her gift. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/15/the-haunted-man/ Mon, 15 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/15/queens-of-kāenji/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/15/queens-of-kāenji/ Mon, 15 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/15/american-apparel/ The thing about basics is they seem pointless until they’re not. You walk into a store looking for a plain t-shirt and suddenly you’re aware of every choice the designers made or didn’t make—the weight of the fabric, the curve of the sleeve, whether the neck opening is actually comfortable to pull over your head. Most brands fail at this unconsciously. American Apparel fails at it consciously, which is a different kind of achievement. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/15/american-apparel/ Mon, 15 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/15/the-white-dress/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/15/the-white-dress/ Mon, 15 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/15/and-then-he-just-jumped/ Felix Baumgartner stepped out of a balloon 43 kilometers above the Earth in 2012 and fell. The whole Red Bull Stratos operation was engineered down to the decimal point—the freefall speed, the parachute deployment, the landing zone. He broke the sound barrier on the way down and became the first person to do so without jet propulsion, which is the kind of fact that sounds absurd in retrospect. But what I remember from watching the footage was the moment before the jump, him standing at the open door with nothing below but air and distance, the kind of moment that requires a complete evacuation of doubt. How do you get to that? How do you convince yourself absolutely, with no hedging, that this will work? I think it’s the same mind that gets you to build anything that’s never been built before. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/15/and-then-he-just-jumped/ Mon, 15 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/15/the-list/ I know it’s important to be social—go out to dinner, call family, sleep with women. I check those boxes often enough. But I’m only really happy when I can watch seven seasons of my current favorite show back-to-back and my neighbors are considerate enough to keep the bass off David Guetta and Scooter for once. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/15/the-list/ Mon, 15 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/15/a-bit-too-far/ Joko and Klaas play this game on their show where they dare each other to do humiliating shit. The loser has to follow through, no excuses. It’s been a staple for years—people like watching them pressure each other into doing things they clearly don’t want to do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/15/a-bit-too-far/ Mon, 15 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/14/sharon-van-etten-magic-chords/ What keeps me coming back to Sharon Van Etten is something almost boring to describe—the way she puts songs together. She’s not after flashy or complicated. Her chords are simple, but there’s this exactness to how she places them, like every change is the only thing that could come next. You don’t notice it at first. You just feel the song working on you, and then you realize it’s because of this choice she made about progression, this tiny decision that ended up being everything. There’s a confidence in that restraint. She trusts her voice enough to not clutter up the space around it. No flourishes, no reaching for a bigger moment than the song can hold. Just the chords and her voice, and somehow that’s enough to make something stick with you in a way that all the technical skill in the world wouldn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/14/sharon-van-etten-magic-chords/ Sun, 14 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/14/gym-bag-boys/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/14/gym-bag-boys/ Sun, 14 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/14/roche-böhmermann/ I started with the episode where Max Herre walked out upset and went to cry, then just kept going backwards through the ZDF Mediatheque, eating through everything they’d made up to that point. Completely into it. Into Charlotte Roche and how she works within this format, how the whole thing is built exactly backwards from how I thought successful television was supposed to work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/14/roche-böhmermann/ Sun, 14 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/14/better-living-through-products/ You just inherited money and now you need to know what to buy. Houses, yachts, charity - or just the right products, which will somehow make you better. Maybe. There’s an honesty to that kind of thinking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/14/better-living-through-products/ Sun, 14 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/14/brito/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/14/brito/ Sun, 14 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/14/pretty-in-pink/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/14/pretty-in-pink/ Sun, 14 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/14/im-shakin/ Jack White songs feel like they’re in a hurry. ’I’m Shakin’’ is a blues cover stripped to the essentials—just what’s necessary, moving with a kind of precision that cuts against the simplicity. He treats the blues like an argument, every second accounted for. No padding, no flourish, nothing wasted. Just the song moving forward and finishing before you can catch your breath. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/14/im-shakin/ Sun, 14 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/12/kate-uptons-outtakes/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/12/kate-uptons-outtakes/ Fri, 12 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/12/ride/ “Ride” is the sound of a car you’re never really going to reach the end of. Lana’s voice drifting over that minimal, aching production, talking about going somewhere, knowing full well that the destination is beside the point. It’s melancholic in a way that makes you feel something—not sad exactly, but aware. The romance is entirely in the suspension, the not-arriving. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/12/ride/ Fri, 12 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/12/no-agenda/ Everyone wants to optimize your weekend now. Ten things to do, fifty things to plan, each one promising meaning or rest or experience. It’s always the same pitch: make it count. You read enough of these lists and they blur together into one generic voice telling you that your downtime needs to justify itself. Which is ridiculous, obviously, but something about it sticks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/12/no-agenda/ Fri, 12 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/12/world-of-dogs/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/12/world-of-dogs/ Fri, 12 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/12/skull-heads/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/12/skull-heads/ Fri, 12 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/12/the-troll-tax/ Every public space online eventually gets invaded. You build something, people show up, and then the people show up who don’t want to talk about it—they just want to poison it. It’s not debate. It’s just seething into a text box. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/12/the-troll-tax/ Fri, 12 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/11/thee-oh-sees-lupine-dominus/ Thee Oh Sees doesn’t let anything rest. John Dwyer layers guitars and percussion until there’s just this dense, moving sound that fills the whole space and demands attention. You can feel it tightening your chest before the song even starts. There’s a restlessness built into the structure—this pressure underneath that keeps suggesting something’s about to break except nothing ever does. Music like this is good for thinking about things you can’t quite name, for being awake at the wrong hour in a room where everything feels too close. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/11/thee-oh-sees-lupine-dominus/ Thu, 11 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/11/vitalic-stamina/ I keep coming back to Vitalic’s stuff because it’s got this strange patience to it. Four minutes or forty, doesn’t matter—he finds one idea and won’t let it go. That’s stamina in electronic music. Not the flashy kind, just relentless, in the way that gets under your skin without asking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/11/vitalic-stamina/ Thu, 11 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/11/nobody-cared/ You can tell a lot about what people actually care about by watching what makes them mad online versus what they’ll organize around. Someone shares a video about a warlord kidnapping kids and suddenly there’s millions of views. Someone explains copyright law and… nothing. Total silence. We’re not evil. We’re just consistent. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/11/nobody-cared/ Thu, 11 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/11/why-instagram-won/ What bothers me about Instagram isn’t that everyone photographs their food and their cat and the sky—it’s the endless stream of terrible, washed-out, square filtered images it’s been responsible for. Those flattened, sapped squares. I’ve hated them for years. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/11/why-instagram-won/ Thu, 11 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/11/the-spiral/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/11/the-spiral/ Thu, 11 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/10/tokyo-loop/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/10/tokyo-loop/ Wed, 10 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/10/trekant/ When some American friends visited me last year, their first questions were about all that European sexual openness everyone talks about. Where’s the nearest nude beach? Can you just have sex in parks? Why don’t they show actual porn on television? I had to explain that you could zip through the German TV schedule for days and barely see a full frontal anything, and they almost booked a flight home. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/10/trekant/ Wed, 10 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/10/the-2013-promise/ I read that Berlin’s government announced free wifi for everyone by 2013, and I felt that familiar sinking feeling. They always announce something, always set a date, then nothing happens. I want to believe differently this time. But I know better. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/10/the-2013-promise/ Wed, 10 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/10/sigur-rós-dauðalogn/ Sigur Rós does something to the air around you when you listen. It’s not quite silence and it’s not quite noise—it’s that strange space where meaning happens without words getting in the way. The band has always understood that the Icelandic landscape is as much a musician as anyone holding an instrument, which is partly why they’ve mattered for so long. You listen and feel suspended between things, which is exactly where the music wants you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/10/sigur-rós-dauðalogn/ Wed, 10 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/10/the-canyons/ The Canyons is a cold, explicit drama about screenwriters and filmmakers destroying themselves in the LA hills—the kind of thing Schrader would make, all erotic dread and surfaces. He brought Lindsay Lohan back to lead it, which made the film instantly complicated: was it a comeback, a comeback fantasy, or a provocation? The answer depends on what you think the film is actually about, and Schrader made sure it wouldn’t be easy to answer. It’s fascinating as an artifact of a specific moment, a wound-up art film that refused to be respectable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/10/the-canyons/ Wed, 10 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/10/the-revelation/ Every week I’m convinced some new thing is the ultimate revelation, the final content that makes life worth living. I’d sell all my furniture, probably my body, just to sit in a cardboard box on the street and do nothing but that one thing until I died of a heart attack. A happy death. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/10/the-revelation/ Wed, 10 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/10/late-for-class/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/10/late-for-class/ Wed, 10 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/10/sincerely-yours-summer/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/10/sincerely-yours-summer/ Wed, 10 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/10/dream-animals/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/10/dream-animals/ Wed, 10 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/9/bat-for-lashes/ Natalia’s been making the kind of music that follows you around—the kind you put on when you need to sit with something dark and beautiful without names. Letting go of ghosts would be about whatever she’s carrying, the same way all her records are about carrying something unbearable and making it into architecture. I’ve always liked her because she never explains what the ghosts are. That’s the courtesy of it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/9/bat-for-lashes/ Tue, 09 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/9/peaches-burst/ Peaches came at you like a violation, and that was the entire point. Distorted voice, cheap keyboards, lyrics designed to make you squirm. She wasn’t here to seduce anyone or make you feel good. She wanted you uncomfortable—wanted you to sit with desire and disgust at the same time, to feel something you couldn’t name. When everyone else was making polite electronic music, she was out there making something that felt genuinely transgressive, and somehow that’s what it needed to be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/9/peaches-burst/ Tue, 09 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/9/cameron-forever/ There’s something about the late ’90s Cameron Diaz that just worked—not because she was stunning or because everyone said so, but because she seemed to actually enjoy being in the frame. In *There’s Something About Mary*, she wasn’t playing sexy, she was just there, funny and unselfconscious. She made comedy look like something you could do without calculating every movement, which is maybe the hardest thing any actor can do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/9/cameron-forever/ Tue, 09 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/9/peta-vs-pokémon/ I love animals. Would save every one of them if half didn’t taste so good. That said, PETA manages to piss me off every single month. If you don’t know them, they’re the ones who poison dogs in trucks and mock video games while claiming to give a shit about the world. Real charity work apparently got boring, so now they spend their time splashing people with fake blood and making parody games about Nintendo franchises. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/9/peta-vs-pokémon/ Tue, 09 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/8/the-compromise/ Apple rumors were constant. A television was coming. Maps had been a joke that somehow escaped April Fools. Steve Jobs was definitely frozen somewhere deep under Cupertino, waiting for the iResurrection - a decade minimum. The usual noise. But back then, the iPad mini was supposedly real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/8/the-compromise/ Mon, 08 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/8/jerica-lamens-amazon/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/8/jerica-lamens-amazon/ Mon, 08 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/8/mcginleys-tokyo/ McGinley photographs youth like it’s the realest thing in the world—that specific honesty of people caught existing before the image takes. His work usually needs space: wide light, open ground, room to breathe. Tokyo is the opposite—density and compression, visual noise layering over itself. I’d want to know what happened when his restless eye met that. Did the city change how he sees or did he just compress the energy he already had, make it sharper, tighter, stranger. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/8/mcginleys-tokyo/ Mon, 08 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/8/the-vaccines-i-always-knew/ The Vaccines came out of nowhere in 2011 and somehow felt inevitable—that jangly, nervous energy, the tight hooks, the way they sounded simultaneously ancient and contemporary. Justin Young’s voice had this quality of barely contained urgency, like he was telling you something he’d already decided you wouldn’t believe. I caught them early and they felt like a secret, which is the most dangerous thing for a band to feel like in the streaming age. Everyone finds it at the same time now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/8/the-vaccines-i-always-knew/ Mon, 08 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/8/mixtape-monday-better-with-someone/ Listening alone is fine—headphones late at night when sleep won’t come, some smooth electronic stuff running through your head. But that’s not where music actually happens. A song’s real magic only shows up when you’re listening with someone who matters, someone you love or hate or both. You’re not just hearing the same thing anymore; you’re feeling it at the same time. Everything shifts. This mixtape gets it. King Krule’s darkness, Teen Daze drifting through, A-Trak keeping the edges sharp. They know what they’re for. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/8/mixtape-monday-better-with-someone/ Mon, 08 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/8/what-stayed/ I like going back through the old work. The pieces that opened something up, the ones you didn’t care about at all, the ones you read with real anger or longing. Looking back at them now is strange—you finally understand what actually mattered and what was just temporary noise. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/8/what-stayed/ Mon, 08 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/8/youtube-stops-being-youtube/ Onkel Berni is shooting a late-night show from their Berlin apartment—sketch comedy, interviews, music, the whole format—and YouTube’s bankrolling it. Not taking a cut of the revenue. Literally funding production. For two years. Upfront. This is what happens when a platform decides it’s tired of being a platform. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/8/youtube-stops-being-youtube/ Mon, 08 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/8/miranda-kerr-i-cant-think-straight/ The thing about Miranda Kerr is that she’s so visibly aware of being Miranda Kerr. You watch her in interviews and there’s this split-second lag before she remembers to arrange her face the right way—like she’s somewhere else for a moment, then snaps back. She’s been looked at so long that looking away might feel like disappearing. That’s the real exhaustion in it, I think. Not the work of being beautiful (she’s still beautiful; that part seems easy), but the work of managing what that beauty means, knowing exactly how many angles are safe, which charities to endorse, where the boundaries are between authentic and on-brand. The wellness stuff, the wellness guru version of her—that’s not fake, exactly. But you can feel the effort to make it all make sense, to turn a life into a philosophy. Maybe that’s why she comes across as thoughtful but untethered, like she’s solving an equation while living it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/8/miranda-kerr-i-cant-think-straight/ Mon, 08 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/8/perfume-genius/ I listen to Perfume Genius when I need to hear someone refuse to turn away from the hard stuff. Mike Hadreas builds electronic music that’s completely unguarded—no irony, no distance, just his voice and whatever he’s constructed around it reaching for the truth of desire and damage and survival. His songs don’t comfort you in any easy way. They just exist in the same space as your worst thoughts and don’t flinch. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/8/perfume-genius/ Mon, 08 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/7/everything-is-embarrassing/ The song doesn’t do much. Sky’s voice does the work—low, almost spoken, then breaking into something more exposed. No production trick to hide behind, no irony as a shield. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/7/everything-is-embarrassing/ Sun, 07 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/7/team-ghost-dead-film-star/ There’s something odd about watching a film after an actor dies. You’re not talking about the big names usually, just the faces in the background, the actors who showed up in a dozen movies you loved without much thought. But once they’re dead, suddenly every time you watch those films they’re there again, exactly the same age as they were on set, doing the exact same thing. It doesn’t hurt or anything. It’s just strange—a ghost that was always visible, you just weren’t looking. Film locks people in time whether they asked to be locked or not. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/7/team-ghost-dead-film-star/ Sun, 07 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/7/its-the-end-of-daze/ John Kilar spent the last decade pushing television toward something it didn’t entirely want to become. First at Hulu, then Viacom—always the guy trying to drag legacy media into the streaming era while the industry fought him tooth and nail. He made his bets. Some paid off. Others just made people angry. There’s something almost sad about watching an executive’s grand vision get slowly dismantled by the same people who hired him, especially when he was probably right about what was coming. By the time he left, nobody was talking about the vision anymore. Just the exit. That’s usually how it goes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/7/its-the-end-of-daze/ Sun, 07 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/7/not-a-human-right/ A man from Leipzig went to the European Court of Human Rights to argue that laws against incest violated his right to privacy and family life. He and his sister had been fucking for years. Whenever he wasn’t in prison for it. They had four children together, two disabled—the biological consequence you learn about in ninth grade when you first realize why it’s forbidden. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/7/not-a-human-right/ Sun, 07 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/6/weekend-rot/ Rainy weekends do something to you. The sky just sits there crying and the temperature laughs at your face while you’re trapped inside with nothing but your phone and bad options. Scrolling, TV, whatever—mostly just existing in that specific pocket of weird that the internet saves for bored people. That’s the state you’re in right now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/6/weekend-rot/ Sat, 06 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/6/a-rabbits-reckoning/ A rabbit from hell gets photographed in the bathtub with his duck. Now he’s hunting everyone who saw the photo to kill them. This is a SEGA game, which explains everything and nothing at once. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/6/a-rabbits-reckoning/ Sat, 06 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/6/naked-and-noble/ There was a moment somewhere in there when Gaga stopped needing the costume. All those years of construction, calculation, shock—and then something shifted. The nakedness that came after wasn’t the opposite of the artifice, it was the endgame. You perform authenticity long enough and it becomes real. The person and the persona stop being separate things. That’s when you see what was actually underneath. That’s the nakedness that turns noble. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/6/naked-and-noble/ Sat, 06 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/6/bloc-party-kettling/ Bloc Party’s sound was all coiled claustrophobia—jagged guitars, Kele’s voice tight and sharp like he’s trying to break through something. Kettling is what they call it when police trap you in a box with no exit, just pressure and bodies and nowhere to go. Their music had that same compressed, frantic energy, that feeling of being caught and the panic that comes with it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/6/bloc-party-kettling/ Sat, 06 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/5/steve-jobs/ I grew up watching what he made and studying how obsessive he was about detail. That obsession was contagious—you’d look at your own work and suddenly small things mattered more. In design, you can’t escape his influence. The whole idea of stripping things down, of letting empty space matter as much as the object itself, changed what people expect from the things they touch. When he died, it wasn’t like everything stopped. It was more that you realized how much of how you worked had come from watching him. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/5/steve-jobs/ Fri, 05 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/5/no-explanation-no-appeal/ The Cool Hunter had nearly 800,000 followers on Facebook. Not some viral moment account—a legitimate design and photography blog out of New York that had built something real over years. Eight hundred thousand people who came back regularly. A thousand clicks a day, just from Facebook alone. And then one day, without warning, the account was gone. Permanently deleted. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/5/no-explanation-no-appeal/ Fri, 05 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/5/sasha-grey-doesnt-stay/ Sasha Grey left. Not her job or city—the entire framework that was supposed to contain her. She started in adult films, the kind of totalizing industry where you’re trapped by one identity forever. Then she didn’t do that anymore. Became a visual artist. Made experimental films. Appeared in serious television. Just kept moving. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/5/sasha-grey-doesnt-stay/ Fri, 05 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/4/xcom-enemy-unknown/ Winter’s the best excuse. Gray skies, rain that won’t quit, the sun showing up just to laugh at you. The kind of weather where you don’t feel guilty spending the whole day in front of a screen eating cookies from the family pack while some new game does whatever it does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/4/xcom-enemy-unknown/ Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/4/blue-tongue-girl/ Sky Ferreira’s been in this long enough that she’s clearly just making what she wants now. The voice, the sparse arrangements, the videos—it all feels completely under control, never straining to convince you. There’s something untouchable about her. She does her thing and doesn’t need you to be interested, which is exactly why you are. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/4/blue-tongue-girl/ Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/4/the-weeknd/ There’s something about watching The Weeknd perform that makes everything else feel like it’s happening in color correction. The red lighting, the distorted synths, that voice processed into something almost inhuman but still vulnerable underneath. He doesn’t perform like he wants you to like him. He performs like he’s working through something and you’re just there, witnessing it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/4/the-weeknd/ Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/4/ready-to-leave/ I’ve been in Berlin five years now, and I’ve done just about everything this place has to offer without destroying my life completely in the process. Sunday mornings at the flea market in Mauerpark when the sun’s out, getting annoyed at the tourists while being one myself. Nights dancing through clubs, wrecked on whatever we’d taken before we left, sleeping in different beds after, and then at dawn finding myself on a swing somewhere watching the sun come up. I’ve met the kind of people you remember, people you kiss, people you lose. All the things Berlin’s supposed to be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/4/ready-to-leave/ Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/2/the-cease-and-desist/ The cease-and-desist letters started arriving in waves. activeLAW, representing a Berlin image agency called hgm-press, began sending them by the thousands. They’d apparently bought up rights to thousands of photographs and figured out they could make money just sending lawyers after bloggers. The demands were usually around five thousand euros per image. Sometimes more. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/2/the-cease-and-desist/ Tue, 02 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/2/all-your-gold/ There’s something about Natalia Kinstantin’s voice that gets under your skin in a way that doesn’t feel like a compliment at first. Bat For Lashes builds these dark, beautiful architectures from synths and whispered vocals, and you find yourself drawn into something that feels more like a memory than a song. The way she layers her voice, the way she moves between fragile and commanding, it’s like watching someone operate in slow motion while everything around them accelerates. I keep coming back to the restraint of it—how much power there is in not quite reaching for the obvious emotional crescendo. It’s the opposite of desperate. It’s someone who knows exactly what they’re doing and trusts you to meet them halfway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/2/all-your-gold/ Tue, 02 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/1/welcome-to-prison/ I was in Tokyo when they made watching YouTube a crime. Two to ten years in prison, or a fine around 100,000 euros. Just for clicking play on something unlicensed. The Recording Industry Association of Japan had pushed it through, and it had that quality of satire that somehow became actual law. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/10/1/welcome-to-prison/ Mon, 01 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/30/spiders-from-space/ Mutant space crabs in 3D is exactly the kind of premise that makes you wonder who greenlighted this, but also why they didn’t make more of them. You watch it knowing exactly what you’re in for - the budget constraints, the earnest practical effects, the commitment to the bit. There’s something kind of pure about a movie that doesn’t try to be anything other than what it is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/30/spiders-from-space/ Sun, 30 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/30/ten-little-missions/ Found a list somewhere of ten things to do on a weekend if you’re bored enough. Give a fake diamond to a random person, whisper something terrifying—They’re coming, I’m running out of time—and just walk away. Don’t explain. Leave them holding a piece of glass interpreting your paranoia. Show up to someone’s party in a ski mask. Order a three-course meal at a fancy restaurant, throw it all up, order again. Admit that you’re less attractive than a horse, and mean it. Fall in love with a girl whose name is a single letter and name all your children other letters—M, O, Z, Y—build a whole life that’s basically a joke nobody understands. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/30/ten-little-missions/ Sun, 30 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/30/ashley-in-the-woods/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/30/ashley-in-the-woods/ Sun, 30 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/29/how-to-be-a-heartbreaker/ Marina made “How To Be A Heartbreaker” as a kind of theatrical game, all swagger and calculated seduction. The song doesn’t pretend to be sincere; it’s playing a character, enjoying every second of the performance. What gets to me is how it understands something true: the performance becomes the real thing. After a while, the role and the person are the same thing. It’s a pop song that’s actually honest about dishonesty. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/29/how-to-be-a-heartbreaker/ Sat, 29 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/28/grizzly-bear-yet-again/ I keep putting on Grizzly Bear records because something about their songs doesn’t quite resolve. They’re meticulous—every track layered with detail that rewards attention—but there’s always a restlessness underneath, like they’re reaching for something just beyond the arrangement. It’s not a flaw. It’s what makes you play it again, trying to hear what they’re getting at. Years later and the songs still feel incomplete in that specific way, still asking something of you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/28/grizzly-bear-yet-again/ Fri, 28 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/28/one-more-match/ I understand those stories now—the ones about kids in Korea or China found dead in internet cafes after three days straight of gaming. Starved, dehydrated, blood clots from sitting. I never got it until I played League of Legends for sixteen hours straight last night, slept for maybe an hour, and immediately started another match. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/28/one-more-match/ Fri, 28 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/27/still-better-than-star-trek/ I came to it late, downloaded the first one on impulse, and then I couldn’t stop. Burned through all three over a few months. That was years ago and I haven’t found anything that matched it since. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/27/still-better-than-star-trek/ Thu, 27 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/27/lindsey/ There’s a series of Terry Richardson photographs of Lindsey, a skater, and they have that raw immediacy you see in his best work—a subject caught in a moment without pretense. These came from before he became shorthand for a certain aesthetic, when the provocation actually felt unconsidered. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/27/lindsey/ Thu, 27 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/27/i-know-you-care/ What gets me is the restraint. Ellie sits in this skeletal electronic space with nothing around her—no reaching, no building, nothing trying to convince you. She’s just saying it, plainly, and something about that plainness is what lands. Most pop songs are built to hit you at once; this one trusts that you’ll hear what matters if you’re paying attention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/27/i-know-you-care/ Thu, 27 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/27/feminism-in-germany-angry-humorless-dull/ You go to enough blogger events and you start noticing the same four panels repeating: fashion, politics, tech, feminism. I stand around at the fashion panels completely lost because I don’t know anything about Karl Lagerfeld’s latest collection. Politics is fine—I lean left anyway. Tech I can manage with an iPhone upgrade every few years. Feminism though? Every feminist panel makes me want to set my chair on fire and start screaming. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/27/feminism-in-germany-angry-humorless-dull/ Thu, 27 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/26/tokyo-grind/ I look terrible in that photo Frank took. Gray, wrinkled, the beard a disaster. I’m not going to list everything else wrong because that’s not really the point. The point is I’ve been home for months grinding work to save money for Tokyo, and it shows. The whole thing is library, apartment, repeat. No actual life, just working toward the one place that doesn’t feel like wasting time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/26/tokyo-grind/ Wed, 26 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/26/chloë-and-the-black-couch/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/26/chloë-and-the-black-couch/ Wed, 26 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/25/time-machine/ Used to write about things that mattered—hunger in East Africa, what men find beautiful, girls who refused the boxes. Now it’s Miley Cyrus’s breasts and drunk teenagers at Oktoberfest. At some point the work shifted. Maybe I got tired of being angry about things I can’t fix. Maybe I just followed the audience elsewhere. Maybe I stopped believing any of it mattered. The old pieces are still out there if you want to see what I sounded like before that happened. It’s not a tragedy. It’s just what happens. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/25/time-machine/ Tue, 25 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/25/the-thing-about-miley/ Miley’s whole thing has been refusing to be palatable—trading Hannah Montana’s wholesomeness for provocation, weaponizing her own image as a way of saying no to the things they wanted to lock her into. The shock gets the attention, but what’s actually smart is the control underneath. She knew exactly what she was doing, which made it different from just being another hot girl in pop. Everything that followed came from a position of power. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/25/the-thing-about-miley/ Tue, 25 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/25/pretty-pointless/ MySpace is coming back. Justin Timberlake of all people is the one steering this thing. The screenshots are incredible—I’m not even kidding, the interface is sleek, the timelines are clean, the whole thing looks like something designed by someone who actually understood what’s wrong with every other social network. Which is exactly the problem. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/25/pretty-pointless/ Tue, 25 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/24/getting-played/ I make money on the internet by sitting with feeds and PR agencies and the endless low-level noise of it all. The decent stuff gets bundled with people I work with and shipped back out. That’s the job. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/24/getting-played/ Mon, 24 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/24/hub/ HUB makes shoes without the performance-anxiety marketing. No overwrought branding, no claims stamped on the side—just leather, rubber, proportions that work. The kind of restraint that only comes from actually knowing what you’re doing. I’ve worn enough shoes to recognize when someone’s designed something versus when they’ve just slapped a logo on an existing mold. HUB’s the former. Break them in and you’ve got footwear for the next few years. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/24/hub/ Mon, 24 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/23/kate-and-the-puppies/ Kate Upton with puppies is exactly as straightforward as it looks. Beautiful woman, cute dogs, good light. Your eye lands there and stays. There’s no pretense to it, and somehow that’s the point. You don’t need more. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/23/kate-and-the-puppies/ Sun, 23 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/23/when-starcraft-goes-free/ The standard story: campaign feels great, you’re beating all the missions, feel like you understand something. Then multiplayer happens and some 16-year-old with 10,000 hours throws down a build you’ve never heard of and it’s over. Campaign was fun. Multiplayer is for the people who actually want it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/23/when-starcraft-goes-free/ Sun, 23 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/21/easy/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/21/easy/ Fri, 21 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/21/dirty-projectors-about-to-die/ Dirty Projectors have always operated in that space where experimentation and genuine song craft somehow coexist. Dave Longstreth’s voice doing those fractured, angular things over the band’s constantly shifting arrangements—it shouldn’t work, but there’s something about the intelligence behind it that pulls you in. They’ve never been the kind of band you stumble onto; you find them because you were looking for something weird and precise at the same time. There’s a phase everyone goes through where their records feel essential, where you can’t figure out why more people aren’t listening to them, and then you realize it’s because most people don’t want their indie rock to demand this much attention. But that’s always been the point. They exist in their own lane, doing things their way, and the fact that they’re still around and still strange feels increasingly rare. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/21/dirty-projectors-about-to-die/ Fri, 21 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/20/oktoberfest/ Oktoberfest rolls in again and there they are on that field in Munich. Millions of them. The leather-pants people, the tourists, the college kids who think this is the pinnacle of experience. They come for overpriced beer and overpriced sausages and the chance to get completely fucked up in public without consequences. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/20/oktoberfest/ Thu, 20 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/14/bat-for-lashes-marilyn/ Bat For Lashes gets something about the distance between how you look and how you feel. Marilyn sits in that space between glamour and dissolution—all those crystalline synths, and then a voice that sounds like it’s breaking while it sings. The song doesn’t explain anything. It just makes you understand why someone would want to be beautiful and ruined at the same time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/14/bat-for-lashes-marilyn/ Fri, 14 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/13/tokyo-next-year/ Three months in Tokyo and I came back realizing how completely false most Western writing about Japan actually is. Not false as in intentionally dishonest. False as in radically incomplete. Every English-language blog, every magazine that touches Japanese culture goes straight for anime, manga, weird video games, the strangest television shows. If it’s sexual and bizarre and anime-shaped, it gets written about. Everything else just disappears. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/13/tokyo-next-year/ Thu, 13 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/11/all-originals/ Adidas held a launch party in Munich for a campaign hunting crews. Die Orsons performed, along with other German artists. The campaign was looking for groups with actual projects and offering to back them. There’s something interesting about a brand stepping back from selling product and just funding real work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/11/all-originals/ Tue, 11 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/11/harsh-light/ There’s a specific kind of energy in his photographs—the casual cruelty of fashion, the way models look tired and bored and gorgeous and used all at once. The style defined a moment: flash photography, harsh light, the aesthetic of someone who treated the shoot like he was doing everyone a favor. For a long time, that worked. Then the stories came out. Now when you look at the images, you look differently, or you don’t look at them at all. The work doesn’t change. Your ability to separate what you see from who made it does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/11/harsh-light/ Tue, 11 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/6/what-we-were-buying/ Two thousand and twelve. You had money and nowhere to put it—the banks were lying, the taxes were eating it—so you spent it on things instead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/6/what-we-were-buying/ Thu, 06 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/6/anything-could-happen/ Ellie Goulding’s this precise, careful pop artist with a voice like glass—sharp and clear and somehow fragile at the same time. “Anything Could Happen” caught me because it doesn’t try to be more than it is, just this quiet moment of optimism that doesn’t feel desperate or cheap. You forget sometimes that pop can work that way, just by being honest. I can’t tell anymore if I actually like Ellie or just remember where that song landed in my life, but that’s the whole thing about pop music—they’re usually the same thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/6/anything-could-happen/ Thu, 06 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/5/armored-kill/ Armored Kill hit in September, and EA’s pitch was simple: the biggest map in Battlefield history, new tanks, new weapons, everything scaled up. The trailer showed tanks rolling across desert, buildings exploding, the usual bombast. I downloaded it mostly because I was running out of things to do in the base game. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/5/armored-kill/ Wed, 05 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/5/topless-in-new-york/ Go Topless Day happens every summer in New York, this protest about the absurd double standard for women’s bodies. But I saw a thread about why participation wasn’t bigger, and the honest answer kept coming up: not enough women felt safe actually doing it. Which is kind of the whole point, right? The protest is about freedom from constantly policing your own body, but the policing never actually stops. It’s hard to reclaim something when you’re still defending it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/5/topless-in-new-york/ Wed, 05 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/5/undercity/ I’ve always been drawn to the hidden parts of cities—the tunnels, the abandoned infrastructure, all the spaces that exist beneath the surface but are meant to stay unseen. Steve Duncan and Andrew Wonder turned that into a practice, infiltrating the underground levels of major cities around the world, documenting what’s been forgotten or left to decay. They made a film with Palladium Boots about exploring beneath Las Vegas and other places, and it reached people: the Times covered it, so did HuffPost and Wired. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/5/undercity/ Wed, 05 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/5/tokyo-vertigo/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/5/tokyo-vertigo/ Wed, 05 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/5/muse-madness/ There’s this moment in the song where everything drops out and it’s just Matt Bellamy’s voice, naked and fractured, before the production crashes back in like a building collapsing. I’ve always loved Muse for that—the way they’ll write something genuinely anthemic and then wrap it in so much bombast and self-awareness that you can’t tell if they’re sincere or taking the piss. Maybe they can’t tell either. Madness works because it catches that exact tension: a stadium-sized confection that knows it’s stupid and doesn’t care. The lyrics are hokey as hell, but the architecture of the thing, the way it builds and collapses, has stuck with me for years. It’s the sound of someone brilliant with too many ideas and no editor, which is basically Muse in a nutshell. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/5/muse-madness/ Wed, 05 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/4/topless-tuesday/ Arvida’s been posting topless photos to Instagram for years, knowing they violate the community guidelines, knowing they’ll get flagged or removed. There’s no apology in it, no explanation—just the image and the refusal. A platform awash in violence, conspiracy, and abuse, but a woman’s breast is where we suddenly get very concerned about decency. She keeps posting anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/4/topless-tuesday/ Tue, 04 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/4/the-last-morning-at-tacheles/ The bailiff showed up just after eight. Maybe thirty or forty artists were still there, moving their things out while music came from somewhere in the building and beer coasters flew out the windows onto the street. Resistance in the artistic sense. Hundreds of petition lists lay on the floor—signatures from all over the world, all these people trying to save the place. I’d signed one of those lists myself, for whatever that was worth. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/4/the-last-morning-at-tacheles/ Tue, 04 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/4/the-xx-coexist/ The silence in The xx’s music is deliberate. It’s not absence—it’s presence through restraint. Romy and Oliver built their sound on what gets left out: the bass that almost appears, the drums that fade to nothing, the space between two quiet voices. Coexist is their new album, and it moves through the same economy of sound, trusting that you’ll lean in to hear it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/4/the-xx-coexist/ Tue, 04 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/4/cheerleader-moment/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/4/cheerleader-moment/ Tue, 04 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/4/every-other-generation/ Apple sent out the invitations and September 12 is the day. After months of rumors and fake photos and tech blogs drowning in complete nonsense, it’s finally happening. Everyone’s asking the same thing: buy it or don’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/4/every-other-generation/ Tue, 04 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/3/the-other-version/ There’s always another version. The track you loved gets remixed and suddenly it’s unfamiliar again, but better. Sometimes worse, but so different you can’t stop listening. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/3/the-other-version/ Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/3/night-in-munich/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/3/night-in-munich/ Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/3/perfume-fake-it/ I’ve known about Perfume for a while now—three Japanese women making this kind of pop music that shouldn’t work but does. Pixelated 8-bit synths, songs about love and computers and freedom, totally unserious but sharp underneath. They hosted the Japanese MTV awards last summer, which I remember reading about and thinking, yeah, they’re still here. “Fake It” is the new track, and it’s exactly what you’d expect: clean, bright, a little cynical. The thing missing is a decent Japanese club in Berlin, the kind of place where you’d hear this at two in the morning and it would actually land. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/3/perfume-fake-it/ Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/2/steve-aoki-the-kids-will-have-their-say/ Steve Aoki’s been around long enough that his whole persona—the energy, the cake, the endless touring—feels like a permanent fixture of electronic music culture now. He built Dim Mak into something real when progressive house was still somewhat niche, and he’s kept moving, kept championing artists who needed the platform. Whether people think he’s essential or exhausting probably depends on when they found him, but the work is done. The kids coming up now probably don’t think about whether he matters—he’s just landscape, something to navigate or reject as you move forward. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/2/steve-aoki-the-kids-will-have-their-say/ Sun, 02 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/1/pregnant-bikini-queen/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/1/pregnant-bikini-queen/ Sat, 01 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/1/pussy-riot/ Pussy Riot represented something that makes power genuinely afraid: art that refuses to ask permission, to apologize, or to compromise. They performed a political prayer in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and the state arrested them. No strategy, no legal defense, no redemption narrative—just the action and its consequences. That’s actual resistance, which is why almost everything else that gets called activism looks so manufactured in comparison. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/1/pussy-riot/ Sat, 01 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/1/cascade/ I posted a photo of Britney Spears in a bikini. The caption was “Britney, please put something on!” I do this kind of thing all the time—toss up a photo, add something to it, see what people think. Usually it’s fine. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/9/1/cascade/ Sat, 01 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/31/worth-wanting/ I noticed certain things around 2012. Not because they were trends or because marketing told me to, but because they seemed honest—like someone had actually cared about making them work. A phone that wasn’t trying to be an iPhone. A watch. A camera for snowboarding. Clothes that knew what they were. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/31/worth-wanting/ Fri, 31 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/31/little-monsters/ The Little Monsters in Helsinki weren’t messing around. They moved through the city with this absolute certainty that Gaga was their person, that she’d understood something essential about them no one else could. The devotion was real, not trendy performance. There’s something powerful about that kind of faith, the way it binds people together. I’ve never quite believed in anything that completely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/31/little-monsters/ Fri, 31 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/31/almost-everything/ August’s almost gone. What I notice is all the absurd shit that’s possible right now, in this narrow window before everything snaps back into place. I think about dancing with eight friends dressed stupid, or what it would feel like to just start yelling like everyone in that Newsroom scene, or all the small rebellions that feel necessary even though they don’t actually change anything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/31/almost-everything/ Fri, 31 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/31/chairlift-i-belong-in-your-arms/ The synths move with this patient warmth, and Polachek’s voice doesn’t strain to convince you of anything, but somehow you’re convinced anyway. Chairlift always had this way of making electronic pop feel close—like the space between the speakers and you was actually no distance at all. I come back to these because they don’t perform. They just exist a certain way, and if you’re looking for that thing they’re offering, you find it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/31/chairlift-i-belong-in-your-arms/ Fri, 31 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/29/sleigh-bells-end-of-the-line/ I got into Sleigh Bells back when noise rock and electronic music colliding seemed like the future. Alexis and Derek made something genuinely abrasive and weird at a time when everything was trying to be accessible. Their records were layered feedback and digital static and Amy Seimetz’s voice cutting through like it was the last thing tethering you to solid ground. They weren’t pretty and they didn’t care. Somewhere along the way I stopped paying attention—different life, different phase—but that initial run of albums still hits different. There’s something about how they sounded that felt like the moment, like they captured something about existing in a screen-filled anxiety-soaked world that nobody else was touching. Maybe the best thing a band can do is exist exactly when you need them to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/29/sleigh-bells-end-of-the-line/ Wed, 29 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/29/kate-upton-selling/ Kate Upton in a Skullcandy ad felt like the natural endpoint of celebrity endorsement culture. She had that quality—beautiful enough to sell anything, approachable enough that you didn’t hate her for it. Whether she’d ever actually worn those headphones didn’t matter. The transaction was the point, and she was good at making it feel effortless. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/29/kate-upton-selling/ Wed, 29 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/29/coming-back-down/ Just back from Japan and I’m stuck in that weird depression where everything looks like it’s missing something. Spend a lot of time on the couch eating delivery food and doing math on when I can leave again. It’s stupid and I know it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/29/coming-back-down/ Wed, 29 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/28/topless-tuesday-jessie-andrews-im-hotel/ The appeal of a hotel room photograph is that it’s nobody’s real life. You’re in this temporary space, the light’s probably good, and there’s something about being outside your normal context that makes it easier to be free with a camera. She looks good, comfortable with what’s happening, which is all you really want from any photograph. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/28/topless-tuesday-jessie-andrews-im-hotel/ Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/28/1313/ 1313 was supposed to be a Star Wars game set in Coruscant’s criminal underworld—bounty hunters, dark corners, the stuff the Jedi never saw. LucasArts cancelled it in 2013. It felt like the one Star Wars game that could’ve actually worked, because it wasn’t trying to remake the movies or make you Force-sensitive. Just dirty work in the shadows. I never got to play it, but the idea stuck with me—that version of Star Wars, grounded in something real instead of mythology. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/28/1313/ Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/28/the-end-of-the-beginning/ The runway starts moving faster, and I’m crying. Not for a photo. Not performing something. Real tears, the kind you don’t plan for. I knew this moment was coming—I’d been waiting for it, dreading it, trying not to think about it. But I didn’t expect to feel like this. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/28/the-end-of-the-beginning/ Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/27/taryn-it-up/ Taryn Manning shows up knowing exactly what the moment needs. No filler, no performance, no trying to make space for herself. In Hole she belonged because every note was deliberate, every moment earned—there was a certainty in it, a refusal to add anything extra. That’s what separates people who are in the scene from people who actually shape it. She just did the work. That’s it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/27/taryn-it-up/ Mon, 27 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/20/oh-love/ Green Day’s ’Oh Love’ from Uno! is one of those songs that catches you mid-breath—Billie Joe singing about wanting someone badly, that specific mix of desire and resignation. It’s a three-minute thing, deceptively simple, the kind of song that shouldn’t stick but does because it’s honest about how badly you can want something that’s probably not good for you. I keep returning to it when I need to feel that particular ache, that ’I know this won’t go anywhere but I want it anyway’ energy. Not their most important song, not their most technically interesting, but there’s something true in it that you don’t get from a lot of their more elaborate work. Just a guy admitting he’s caught. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/20/oh-love/ Mon, 20 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/20/the-heat/ The sun’s baking the streets and the apartment is impossible. Hot, wet air that doesn’t move. You’re sweating, can’t stop thinking about it. I know what people say about talking the weather—it’s the fallback when you’ve run out of anything interesting. But some days the heat is all there is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/20/the-heat/ Mon, 20 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/20/still-waiting/ I’ve had my iPhone for a little over a year. No Siri, but plenty of muscle memory and this weird contentment that only shows up when everything just works. Not because I’m some devoted Apple person—just because it actually works the way I need it to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/20/still-waiting/ Mon, 20 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/20/grimes/ Grimes emerged from the internet in the early 2010s refusing easy categorization. Hyperactive bedroom pop, then ambient noise, then visual artist. The aesthetics kept shifting, and the visual work always mattered as much as the music—album art like CGI fever dreams, videos designed to make you uncomfortable on purpose. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/20/grimes/ Mon, 20 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/18/two-years-too-many/ Two years in a labor colony for forty seconds of song. That’s what a Russian court decided three women deserved—Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Maria Alyokhina from the punk band Pussy Riot. They performed an anti-Putin prayer in a church, and the state decided that was reason enough to lock them up. The trial itself was obscene—they spent over two hours just reading the verdict for what amounts to a public disturbance charge. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/18/two-years-too-many/ Sat, 18 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/18/five-minutes/ I remember thinking the obvious thing when Blizzard announced kung-fu pandas for World of Warcraft: they’ve run out of ideas. Cute martial artists in a game that’s already strangled itself with complexity and lore. It sounded like desperation. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/18/five-minutes/ Sat, 18 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/17/scent-spiral/ You start with one fragrance and think that’s the end of it. Then you catch something on someone across the room and suddenly you’re deep in it, testing samples, reading about accords and base notes you didn’t know existed. Scent does something to you that other things don’t. It stays with you all day, changing as it settles into your skin, becoming part of your presence. It’s completely irrational. Your closet doesn’t need another fragrance. But you’re ordering the sample anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/17/scent-spiral/ Fri, 17 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/16/guild-wars-2-still-just-a-nerd/ Nothing you do in a single-player game really matters. Save the world, kill everything, collect every item—and then what? No one’s watching. It changes nothing. That’s what I realized recently after trying to get back into gaming seriously. Mass Effect, Skyrim, Fallout 3. I gave them real time and they pulled me in and then left me empty. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/16/guild-wars-2-still-just-a-nerd/ Thu, 16 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/16/bodi-bill-up-close/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/16/bodi-bill-up-close/ Thu, 16 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/15/joel-and-ellie/ “I Am Alive” had promised something real—a survival game where you actually felt the weight of staying alive in a ruined city. But it delivered this crushing exhaustion simulator instead, and by the end you weren’t rooting for the guy to make it; you were hoping he’d finally collapse and put you out of your misery. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/15/joel-and-ellie/ Wed, 15 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/15/peaches-free-pussy-riot/ Peaches makes work that pisses people off on purpose. Pussy Riot did too, and they paid for it in ways Peaches never had to, locked away for saying the wrong things in the wrong country at the wrong time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/15/peaches-free-pussy-riot/ Wed, 15 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/15/purple-kisses/ A$AP Rocky’s always had this thing about aesthetics—the way he dresses, the way he frames his videos, how he talks about other artists. There’s taste underneath the bravado, even when he’s being crude or oversexed. Purple Kisses sits somewhere in that space where the production is lush and the hooks are sticky and you’re not entirely sure if he’s being sincere or just enjoying the sound of his own voice over something beautiful. Which is probably the point. He knows what sounds good, and he doesn’t particularly care if you’re reading into it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/15/purple-kisses/ Wed, 15 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/14/south-florida-tattoo-expo/ The South Florida Tattoo Expo is people shopping for permanence in a convention center—artists with genuine skill, customers with dreams and hesitation. Everyone’s pretending this might actually happen; everyone knows most won’t. The good artists don’t care either way. They’ve got the work. You either want it or you don’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/14/south-florida-tattoo-expo/ Tue, 14 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/14/peaches-free-pussy-riot/ Peaches has been doing this for thirty years—making work that makes people uncomfortable, using her body as a weapon against everything uptight and controlled. Pussy Riot got arrested for it. There’s something clarifying about that, about watching artists who refuse to apologize or explain themselves, who understand that transgression isn’t a marketing angle but a necessity. The state fears pussy more than it fears guns. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/14/peaches-free-pussy-riot/ Tue, 14 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/13/the-rind/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/13/the-rind/ Mon, 13 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/13/high-as-shit/ There’s this thing where you just need to get higher than everything around you. Not literally necessarily, though that works. Higher than the people before you, the people after you, the people next to you. Just elevated. Untethered. The method doesn’t matter—you figure out your own path. Some people chase it through smoke, watching it curl through their lungs. Some go for substances that taste like death but somehow rewire how you think about things. I’ve known people warned off by someone who’d been there and come back burned, but they went anyway because the promise of a new thought was worth it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/13/high-as-shit/ Mon, 13 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/12/these-toys-get-it/ Adventure Time gets it in a way most cartoons don’t—it lets the characters actually matter. Finn and Jake, obviously, but also Marceline with that exhausted cool, Ice King with his pathetic desperation, BMO being some kind of innocent logic-machine that somehow became the emotional core of the whole thing. It’s funny and sad and genuinely strange, and it shouldn’t work as well as it does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/12/these-toys-get-it/ Sun, 12 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/12/comiket/ There’s this four-day explosion that happens twice a year in Tokyo called Comiket, and if you haven’t experienced it, it’s hard to explain—tens of thousands of people flooding the convention center, doujinshi tables stretching out endlessly. Everything’s there: amateur manga artists, semi-pro operations, piles of explicit hentai doujins next to original art, fan works of every conceivable anime or game. The heat’s brutal, the smell’s a mix of print and sweat and coffee, and there’s this specific energy to hunting through the aisles for one thing you came for or discovering something completely unexpected. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/12/comiket/ Sun, 12 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/11/feist-anti-pioneer/ Feist isn’t interested in opening doors for other people. She moves through the work that calls to her and makes something specific enough that it can’t be copied or franchised. There’s something almost hostile in that independence—the refusal to become a reference point, a school, a method that others can follow. She’s done remarkably well without ever trying to influence anyone, which means her work doesn’t teach you anything. You can listen. You can’t learn the trick. That’s probably exactly how she wants it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/11/feist-anti-pioneer/ Sat, 11 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/10/ten-little-missions/ We’ll all die, so get that settled first. But the weekend’s still there, and weekends are when things happen—some on purpose, most because you’re bored and the internet’s given you ideas that sound good at two in the morning. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/10/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 10 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/10/mikas-brightness/ There’s something almost defiant about how happy Mika sounds. His voice is high and theatrical, his arrangements are all synths and strings and drama, and every song feels like he’s trying to convince you that joy is still possible—that you should let yourself want things, let yourself be silly, let yourself shine. It’s not subtle. It’s not cool in the way critics care about. But there’s real thought behind it, a kind of studied exuberance that comes from someone who’s thought hard about how to stay alive. The songs that stick with me aren’t the hits everyone knows. They’re the ones where he sounds like he’s singing to himself, reminding himself that the brightness is still there if you know where to look. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/10/mikas-brightness/ Fri, 10 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/10/charlotte-free-day-grunge/ Charlotte Free made grunge look like an actual aesthetic instead of just wearing old clothes. The oversized flannel, the ripped jeans, that blank stare—it wasn’t performing, but it was precise. Her androgyny helped; she could wear masculine and feminine together without it reading as a statement, which is exactly what day grunge needed. She looked like she’d gotten dressed in the dark but somehow nailed every proportion. That’s harder to fake than it looks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/10/charlotte-free-day-grunge/ Fri, 10 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/9/fallout-3-still-there/ Games used to be blocks and balls, then pixels and plumbers. Now they’re worlds where you can spend serious time on choices that don’t matter and feelings that do. Somewhere in the last couple decades, the stuff people said would rot your brain became where actual artistic thinking happens. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/9/fallout-3-still-there/ Thu, 09 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/8/the-quiet-exit/ I keep coming back to Gotye not for the obvious song, but for what’s underneath. The production has this deliberate restlessness—samples and synths arranged like someone refusing to settle, doing experimental pop before it had a digestible name. And then he just stepped away from it, chose obscurity over the momentum he could have kept riding. There’s something about that refusal to become a brand that stays with me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/8/the-quiet-exit/ Wed, 08 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/8/nothings-happened/ Nobody tells you it’s okay to not be paranoid about the internet. They tell you the opposite, starting early. Your parents, your teachers, whatever authority figure is nearby—they all recite the same warning: don’t share your data, don’t trust anyone online, once it’s out there, you’re compromised. You become a commodity. A profile in some server, just your likes and dislikes, waiting to be weaponized by people you’ll never meet. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/8/nothings-happened/ Wed, 08 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/8/jessica-malafouris-finally-home/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/8/jessica-malafouris-finally-home/ Wed, 08 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/7/the-xx-chained/ The xx’s thing is working with emptiness. Two voices, sparse machines, and vast amounts of space. Listen to them and everything else suddenly sounds bloated. The way they use silence—you’re waiting for something, and then it comes, but barely. It makes you pay attention. I’ve probably listened to their records a hundred times and they still feel like overhearing something private. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/7/the-xx-chained/ Tue, 07 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/7/dayz-as-it-should-be/ I’ve spent twenty years watching zombie movies and TV shows, reading comics, playing games—all of it a weird cultural rehearsal for something that will probably never happen. The movies taught me malls fall first. Comics showed me that bows matter when ammo runs out. Games made it clear that trusting anyone is a good way to get stabbed in the back. It’s all preparation, really. A fantasy rehearsal we run over and over while we’re trying to sleep. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/7/dayz-as-it-should-be/ Tue, 07 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/6/touching-tunes/ Music that actually works does something simple and brutal at the same time. It touches you and doesn’t let you put it down. Takes you somewhere you weren’t planning to go, keeps you there just long enough to feel something, then either sets you down gently or shakes you hard enough that you remember the landing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/6/touching-tunes/ Mon, 06 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/6/porter-robinson-language/ Porter Robinson’s early stuff felt like someone figuring out how to make electronics sound like longing. Language was that pivot point—still synth-heavy but warmer, less interested in proving technical prowess and more interested in whatever the opposite of alienation sounds like. The kind of music you listen to at night in a dark room and realize how much space there is between you and everything else. I came to it late, after Worlds, so I was already primed for what he was trying to do, but there’s something about those earlier tracks that doesn’t apologize for wanting to be pretty. Electronic music that sounds scared. Electronic music that sounds like it needs someone to hear it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/6/porter-robinson-language/ Mon, 06 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/1/iggy-igumenova/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/1/iggy-igumenova/ Wed, 01 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/1/boobs-japan-pokémon/ You always reach this point. A blog starts small, you’re writing for yourself or for a handful of people who get it, and then it grows. The growth itself isn’t the problem. What’s the problem is that growth brings an audience with expectations. They want curated taste, smart writing, something that looks legitimate. So you give it to them, because they’re not wrong to want it. But in giving them that, you stop feeding yourself. The thoughts that don’t fit an editorial template, the weird photos, the stuff that’s just you thinking out loud—there’s no space for that anymore. You become a curator before a person. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/8/1/boobs-japan-pokémon/ Wed, 01 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/31/highfield-in-august/ Summer 2012 wasn’t shaping up to be anything special. The kind of season where the heat doesn’t feel good, just relentless, and there’s this background disappointment to everything. But somewhere around August, if you had the timing and the money and a friend willing to drive, Highfield was happening out near Leipzig—three days in the middle of nowhere with the kind of lineup that made the rest of the summer feel less stupid by comparison. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/31/highfield-in-august/ Tue, 31 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/24/before-the-filter/ I’ve been thinking about Secret of Mana lately, which is probably just what happens when you’re trying to feel less old. People love that game with a fierceness that doesn’t really admit argument. Say something sharp about it and you’ll hit the wall—the implicit or explicit one—that you’re wrong, that you’re missing something, that you have no soul. I don’t quite believe that. But there’s something there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/24/before-the-filter/ Tue, 24 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/24/kreayshawn/ Kreayshawn showed up fully formed in 2011—bratty Oakland rap, the “Gucci Gucci” girl, and then “Go Hard (La La La)” right after it. The song was stupid in the best way, that hook doing all the work, the whole thing riding on pure confidence and not giving a shit what anyone thought. She was everywhere that year, and then nowhere. The hook’s still there, though. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/24/kreayshawn/ Tue, 24 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/23/benga-pour-your-love/ Benga’s always found that sweet spot between cold precision and something that actually moves you. The production is surgical, meticulous, but underneath there’s a pulse that pulls you in before you realize it’s happening. Pour Your Love is probably that same thing—emotion buried in the machinery, delivered without apology, just the weight of something real underneath all those clean breaks and bass. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/23/benga-pour-your-love/ Mon, 23 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/23/bat-for-lashes/ Natalie Droog makes the kind of music that fills a room without asking for attention. There’s something about Bat For Lashes that works best late at night, when you’re alone with it—those stretched-out synths, the way her voice sits inside the production like it’s part of the texture rather than on top of it. A lot of people make atmospheric music, but there’s usually some ambition showing through. With her it just sounds like someone thinking out loud, building something strange and precise without needing you to understand it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/23/bat-for-lashes/ Mon, 23 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/22/cintia-dicker-red-hair/ I’ve been reading Cintia Dicker, and she has a particular attention to red-haired women. Not in a creepy way—it’s more that she describes them with this specificity, this real attention to how they are, that makes you believe she’s actually looking at them. Once you notice it, it’s everywhere. Not every character, but when there is red hair, something shifts. She makes it matter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/22/cintia-dicker-red-hair/ Sun, 22 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/21/weekend-missions/ I perpetually forget to compile these until Friday afternoon, or I’m too lazy and would rather shove chocolate donuts in my mouth. But here we are anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/21/weekend-missions/ Sat, 21 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/21/the-nineties-bedroom/ Standing in a bedroom from the 90s, the design makes unexpected sense. The colors, the posters, the furniture arranged the way it was because that’s what you could afford and what felt right. It’s not nostalgia—it’s more like understanding the choices someone made when they were trying to be someone else. The room doesn’t hide that. It shows it completely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/21/the-nineties-bedroom/ Sat, 21 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/21/summertime-sadness/ The thing about ’Summertime Sadness’ is how completely it captured a specific moment—you can hear the exact second in Lana’s voice where she realizes someone’s leaving, and you know it’s not coming back. The video made it permanent, that red dress at the boardwalk, everything blue and slipping away in slow motion. It’s been everywhere for over a decade now, in commercials and covers and parties where nobody’s really listening, but it never gets worn out. There’s something about the slowness of it, the way she sings like she’s documenting sadness rather than feeling it. That distance is what makes it beautiful. Make it pretty enough and the pain becomes something you want to hold onto. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/21/summertime-sadness/ Sat, 21 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/20/audioterrorism/ Kim Schmitz writes about music with the kind of confidence that doesn’t hedge. He’ll call out what’s empty, celebrate what moves him, without waiting to see what you’re supposed to like or performing reverence for the formula. In a world of measured critical distance and careful positioning, there’s something almost punk about a voice that just thinks out loud and doesn’t give a shit. That’s probably what audioterrorism means—not literal noise, just someone refusing to nod along. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/20/audioterrorism/ Fri, 20 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/20/passion-pit-ill-be-alright/ Passion Pit always had this way of making you feel like maybe things would work out. Michael Angelakos had that earnestness even when the synths were swallowing everything—like he actually believed in the hooks he was writing. I’ll Be Alright does exactly that. It’s not trying to be complicated or clever. Just permission to think things might be okay, dressed up in enough production that you don’t have to feel too exposed about needing it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/20/passion-pit-ill-be-alright/ Fri, 20 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/19/cellar-dreams/ I was coding this blog one night, slowly losing my mind to the dark hours, so I drank these weird grapefruit-lemon beers and kept some video playing to break up the desolation. Adventure Time. Some GameOne clips. Then Indie Game: The Movie. It had been out a couple months already, which is ancient by internet time, but whatever. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/19/cellar-dreams/ Thu, 19 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/18/expansion/ I spent the last month in Tokyo trying to figure out how to make a German blog matter to people who don’t speak German. The ambition was stupid and straightforward: world domination, or at least a cheap cheesecake subscription. The reality was that you can’t impose yourself in your native language anymore—you need English, you need the translations to be less bad, you need to sound like you know what you’re doing when you don’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/18/expansion/ Wed, 18 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/18/champagne-and-burgers/ I like that rich kids on Instagram stopped pretending money means taste. Cristal next to Burger King in the same shot because they want to, because it looks good. No performance, no restraint, just this honesty about what they actually enjoy. It’s the only democratic part of Instagram. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/18/champagne-and-burgers/ Wed, 18 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/10/arvida-byström-fluffy-pink-world/ Arvida Byström’s photographs work because she’s not trying to convince you of anything. Just these pink, soft, constructed worlds, and she doesn’t push a point about them. No winking at the camera, no moral lesson. You’re left alone with the image. Most artists dealing with femininity can’t resist—they want you to see the critique or celebrate the freedom. She just lets it exist, which is rarer than it should be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/10/arvida-byström-fluffy-pink-world/ Tue, 10 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/9/miris-tokyo/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/9/miris-tokyo/ Mon, 09 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/9/the-newsroom/ The Newsroom opens with Will McAvoy on some panel being asked why America is the greatest country in the world. The question is designed for a soundbite. Will just unloads. He’s angry and brutal and completely certain he’s right. That’s the whole show right there. Aaron Sorkin’s new series on HBO is about news people trying to actually do journalism at a network that wants ratings and conflict instead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/9/the-newsroom/ Mon, 09 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/9/santigold-the-keepers/ Santigold’s music has always carried this quality of absolute certainty—it doesn’t prove anything or explain itself, just exists exactly as it needs to. The Keepers feels like more of that: the work of someone who’s figured out what matters and has no interest in anything else. There’s a kind of rest in that, actually. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/7/9/santigold-the-keepers/ Mon, 09 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/28/kate-upton-and-the-flag/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/28/kate-upton-and-the-flag/ Thu, 28 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/28/little-dragon-sunshine/ I keep coming back to Little Dragon for this quality where nothing strains. Yukimi Nagano’s voice sits in the mix naturally, and the production is so clean that you can hear the silence between sounds. There’s something almost restful about it—the way tracks just unfold without reaching toward you. You put it on and an hour gets away from you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/28/little-dragon-sunshine/ Thu, 28 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/27/lana-del-rey-national-anthem/ National Anthem is the song that made me understand Lana Del Rey was doing something different from everyone else around 2012. Not better, necessarily, but committed to a specific mood in a way most pop songs aren’t—all that melancholy wrapped in production that sounds like it cost a fortune. The song feels expensive and sad, which shouldn’t work together but does. There’s something almost cinematic about it, the way she stretches syllables out, the way the beat sits back like it’s already resigned to something. It’s not a song that tries to make you dance or feel inspired. It just wants you to sit with it, in it, aware that beautiful things are often kind of dark when you look close. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/27/lana-del-rey-national-anthem/ Wed, 27 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/26/gods-and-kings/ Sometime in autumn I opened the courtyard window for the first time in a week. I was wearing just boxers, pizza crusted into my beard. On the monitor next to me I’d just finished conquering the entire planet. I felt like Napoleon, Caesar, and Hitler all at once—and looked like a rotten sex offender. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/26/gods-and-kings/ Tue, 26 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/26/rihanna/ She came up young—cute Caribbean pop princess—and spent years systematically rejecting every version of that. Different sound, different look, like she was shedding skin until one stuck. The voice was what anchored it. Not technically perfect, but unmistakably hers. Built an empire and then stepped back from music mostly, which felt like a loss until she clearly just didn’t care. The songs matter more now than they did when they were fighting for radio hits. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/26/rihanna/ Tue, 26 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/26/whatever-that-night-was/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/26/whatever-that-night-was/ Tue, 26 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/25/cook-a-furby/ I can’t explain what cooking an old Furby has to do with this mixtape, but the pairing won’t leave me alone so I’m telling you about it. If you’ve still got one gathering dust in an attic or shoved in the back of some closet, dig it out. Plug it in one last time. Then throw the whole thing in a pot. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/25/cook-a-furby/ Mon, 25 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/25/fuck-noda/ After Fukushima, the whole country wanted nuclear power gone. You could feel it—the fear, the disgust, the sense that nobody in charge had been paying attention to what could actually happen. Then Noda’s government came out pushing to restart the reactors anyway. Restart them. The public opinion numbers were unmistakable, the anger was real, and they did it anyway. There’s a particular kind of contempt that involves ignoring millions of people telling you exactly what they want, then acting surprised when they stop trusting you. Japan had lived through the catastrophe. The fear wasn’t abstract. But the machinery of power had its own logic, and it didn’t include listening. That was the disconnect—not that the government and its people disagreed on something complicated, but that one side had already made up its mind it didn’t care what the other side thought. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/25/fuck-noda/ Mon, 25 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/24/still-hungry/ There are speaking toilets here. That’s the first impossible thing you notice, and after a month it’s barely registered. There’s a whole aesthetic of strangeness in Tokyo—manga characters that look more human than humans, magazines full of half-naked teenagers, everything selling everything to everyone. But you stop seeing it as strange. It just becomes what’s there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/24/still-hungry/ Sun, 24 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/23/dena-cash-diamond-rings-swimming-pools/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/23/dena-cash-diamond-rings-swimming-pools/ Sat, 23 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/23/the-clubs-are-dying/ You know that feeling when an institution suddenly starts actively ruining something? That’s what’s happening with GEMA in Germany right now. They’re the music rights collective—basically a monopoly that collects royalties whenever a song plays in public. Makes sense on paper. Except they’ve decided to charge clubs and discos between 600 and 2000 percent more in licensing fees starting this year. Not gradually. Not negotiated. Just decided, and now it’s law. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/23/the-clubs-are-dying/ Sat, 23 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/22/weekend-missions/ Weekends arrive and you’ve got all this time and you don’t know what to do with it. Someone’s always got a list - things to create, movies to watch, ways to be productive. The suggestions get progressively more absurd, like they’re grasping at meaning and giving up halfway through. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/22/weekend-missions/ Fri, 22 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/22/twin-shadow-five-seconds/ Twin Shadow makes synth records that feel intimate and private even though they’re all machines and careful planning. Everything’s electronic and precise but somehow warm, like he’s singing right at you in the dark. There’s a romance to it but never anything soft or easy. “Five Seconds” could be about that moment where something finally shifts, or maybe just how long it takes for a melody to get under your skin. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/22/twin-shadow-five-seconds/ Fri, 22 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/22/girls-washing/ Kern’s videos from the eighties have this aggressive unflinching quality. Something as simple as girls washing becomes confrontational when he films it—cheap video, explicit, no fantasy, just bodies and water and what’s actually there. It’s a kind of honesty that feels almost hostile. You can feel the refusal in it, the resistance to letting you feel comfortable looking. It doesn’t let you off easy. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/22/girls-washing/ Fri, 22 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/21/the-leistungsschutzrecht/ There’s this law they were pushing through in Germany—Leistungsschutzrecht, ancillary copyright or something. I spent way too much time reading about it, getting angrier, because it’s the kind of thing that seems small until you understand what it actually does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/21/the-leistungsschutzrecht/ Thu, 21 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/21/size-does-matter/ Three weeks in Tokyo eating ice cream on the beach, drinking overpriced beer at tiny bars, shooting girls in colorful outfits. The website could wait. My collaborators were busy with their own stuff. Then the rainy season hit and typhoon after typhoon rolled through Honshu, and suddenly I was trapped inside with nothing but time and the relaunch I’d been avoiding for months. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/21/size-does-matter/ Thu, 21 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/21/jane-wayne-in-the-weeds/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/21/jane-wayne-in-the-weeds/ Thu, 21 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/21/slutever/ Karley Sciortino’s podcast is just people talking about sex like adults, which sounds simple until you realize how rare that actually is. No therapy-speak, no Instagram wellness angle, just conversations that let the awkwardness and absurdity sit there without trying to fix it. She’s got a gift for asking questions that make you understand something about yourself or whoever’s on the show, and she does it without turning anyone into a case study. It’s the kind of thing that makes you realize how much of the internet is either performing sexuality or performing purity, with nothing in between. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/21/slutever/ Thu, 21 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/6/babys-on-fire/ I get why Die Antwoord upsets people. The South African duo makes music that’s deliberately crude and shocking, visuals that hit you wrong, performances that don’t apologize. Most artists hedge, offer context, soften the edges somehow. These two just lean in completely. The production is actually interesting too, which makes it worse for people who want to dismiss it outright. There’s something weirdly respectable about refusing to tone it down for approval. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/6/babys-on-fire/ Wed, 06 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/2/swallowed-by-tokyo/ I’ve been in Tokyo for four days now and it’s swallowed me whole, skin and all. The first hit was visual—flickering neon, noise that bent my knees, crowds that seemed to operate like perfect clockwork until you looked closer and realized it was barely holding together, each person inside it doing something slightly, wonderfully wrong. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/2/swallowed-by-tokyo/ Sat, 02 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/1/monolith-judas/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/6/1/monolith-judas/ Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/28/tokyo-bound/ Tomorrow morning I’m heading out for five weeks in Japan. I’ve spent the last month talking about nothing but travel prep. My apartment’s rented to a Spanish couple who can do whatever they want with my furniture. Flight’s at 9:45 from Berlin. Hope the Russian pilot doesn’t detour over some sketchy volcano. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/28/tokyo-bound/ Mon, 28 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/28/big-mouths/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/28/big-mouths/ Mon, 28 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/25/odd-future-wild-ones/ Odd Future hit at the exact moment when hip-hop needed something that didn’t give a shit. Tyler and those kids made beats that sounded scratchy and blown-out—juvenile and brilliant at the same time. Nothing was polished, nothing was designed to be palatable. The whole thing felt dangerous, probably way less than it actually was, but danger was the point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/25/odd-future-wild-ones/ Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/25/an-apology-to-sarah-kuttner/ I published something stupid last week under my magazine’s name, and I need to own that completely. One of my writers, Meltem, did a piece calling Sarah Kuttner a racist and stupid. The whole thing was built on scattered quotes from other people—Mola Adebski, Benjamin Bäumle—none of it actually from Sarah, all of it fragments and inference. I started getting angry emails and threats. At first I thought, well, I didn’t write it, Meltem did. Which is technically true. Which is also complete bullshit. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/25/an-apology-to-sarah-kuttner/ Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/24/akb48-beginner/ I got pulled into AKB48 the way you get pulled into anything that’s obsessively designed to be engaging—through sheer momentum and craft. A group with forty-eight members, rotating lineups, constant turnover, all that manufactured urgency built into the system. The songs are good, genuinely. The production is meticulous. The business model is basically a content machine designed to make you feel like you’re part of something, part of choosing who matters, who stays, who goes. Which is the point, I think. It’s not hidden. You know what you’re buying into, and you do it anyway. There’s something honest about that, at least. No pretense that this is art for art’s sake. It’s appetite, manufacturing, desire, all laid bare. And the music still works. The performances still land. You can acknowledge the machine and still feel something when they’re on stage. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/24/akb48-beginner/ Thu, 24 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/24/rock-am-ring/ Rock am Ring happens in June at the Nürburgring, in the Eifel region—eighty thousand people descend to camp and watch bands for three days. The lineup reads like every major European rock festival of the last twenty years: Metallica, Die Toten Hosen, Linkin Park, The Offspring, Skrillex, The Hives, Enter Shikari. Familiar names that work at scale. You know what you’re getting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/24/rock-am-ring/ Thu, 24 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/23/i-dont-do-topless/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/23/i-dont-do-topless/ Wed, 23 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/23/advance-base-summer-music/ Advance Base makes the kind of music that fits summer in a particular way—not bright or uplifting exactly, but wistful. Matthew Rowe’s synth-pop has this nostalgic pull that works when you’re driving around in the heat, or sitting somewhere you know you won’t be much longer. There’s melancholy threaded through the brightness of it, which is why it sticks with you more than proper summer pop. It’s the sound of knowing something’s already fading while it’s still happening. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/23/advance-base-summer-music/ Wed, 23 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/23/perfect-tag/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/23/perfect-tag/ Wed, 23 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/23/ten-tiny-missions/ Couldn’t sleep last night because the heat was like something alive, and Abby Winters plus Miley’s sideboob weren’t cutting it, so I spent the dark hours falling down Japan prep videos. Six days until my flight and suddenly I needed to know everything, or at least convince myself I did. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/23/ten-tiny-missions/ Wed, 23 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/22/sleigh-bells-demons/ On Demons, Alexis Krauss sings almost conversationally while guitars implode underneath her, synths screaming like something’s dying. Sleigh Bells’ whole thing is that contrast—her voice clear and almost vulnerable against all that noise, which somehow makes it worse. It gets in your head because it doesn’t feel safe. It feels sexual and dangerous in a way that pop music usually isn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/22/sleigh-bells-demons/ Tue, 22 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/22/woodkid-run-boy-run/ Woodkid’s “Run Boy Run” arrived in 2011 with that music video that looked like a kids’ film noir remake—all grain and sepia and a small boy running through scenarios that shouldn’t be terrifying but somehow were. The production is huge, orchestral in a way that feels like it’s building toward something, and the video’s aesthetic landed in every designer’s moodboard for the next five years. There’s something about that combination of scale and a child’s perspective that works. It’s not quite as potent now as it was then, but the bones are still there. Woodkid made something that looked expensive and felt sincere, which is harder than it sounds. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/22/woodkid-run-boy-run/ Tue, 22 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/22/girls-with-toe-pain/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/22/girls-with-toe-pain/ Tue, 22 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/21/arvida-byström-there-will-be-blood/ Swedish artist Arvida Byström makes photographs that sit somewhere between self-portrait and horror show—her face bloated, disfigured, smeared with fake blood and paint, sometimes barely recognizable. The work is transgressive in the way that matters: it’s not trying to shock you, exactly, it’s trying to show you something about the grotesque that lives inside the everyday, the way the body can become utterly estranged from itself. She’s been doing this for years, shooting herself in these various states of beautiful ruination, and the longer you look at the images the less you can tell where the artifice ends and something real begins. There’s a restraint to it despite the extremity—no caption, no explanation, just the image. It’s the kind of work that makes you uncomfortable in a way that matters, that lingers after you’ve stopped looking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/21/arvida-byström-there-will-be-blood/ Mon, 21 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/19/veronica-maggio-my-heart-bleeds/ There’s something about how Maggio’s voice cracks on the chorus that gets me every time. It’s not pretty, not technically impressive—it’s just honest. The song sits somewhere between power ballad and raw confession, and she doesn’t try to make it sound easy or controlled. She lets it hurt, lets you hear the effort. Swedish pop doesn’t usually hit like this, at least not the way it reaches you when you’re alone at three in the morning. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/19/veronica-maggio-my-heart-bleeds/ Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/18/lemonade/ Lemonade builds its power from control rather than release. Every shot composed, every color deliberate, moving through rage and betrayal with such discipline that catharsis stops mattering. I don’t need to understand the specific marriage to feel the architecture of it, how she moves through something unbearable without breaking. What stays with me is not the emotional arc but how precisely it’s constructed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/18/lemonade/ Fri, 18 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/18/weekend-missions/ It’s Friday evening and you’ve done nothing to prepare for the weekend, which means you’ll probably do the same things you always do. Hours will pass, days will blur, and you’ll forget any of it happened, which is how most of your life goes if you’re not paying attention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/18/weekend-missions/ Fri, 18 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/16/milan-dixon-flags/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/16/milan-dixon-flags/ Wed, 16 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/16/two-people-not-talking/ Two people in a Tokyo hotel who barely know each other. One’s older, famous, jetlagged into a kind of useful numbness. The other is young and lost in the way people are when they’ve just realized that the life they planned isn’t quite real. They find each other because they’re both awake at three in the morning and the normal world has gone quiet. Nothing happens between them. Nothing needs to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/16/two-people-not-talking/ Wed, 16 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/16/dark-parts/ Mike Hadreas makes music that feels like it’s coming from somewhere most people won’t go. Perfume Genius records operate in this space between fragile and overwhelming—ethereal production that can snap into something almost violent, whispered vocals that carry the weight of genuine hurt. I keep coming back to his work because it doesn’t ask for permission to be dark, to be confused, to sit with contradiction. There’s no redemption arc built in, no neat resolution. Just the sound of someone looking at the parts of himself he can’t fix and deciding to make something beautiful from the wreckage anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/16/dark-parts/ Wed, 16 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/15/florence-and-the-machine/ I used to think Florence Welch’s music was too much—all that drama and orchestration, the voice always at full volume, never letting you breathe. Then I stopped thinking about it as restraint and just let it happen. There’s something in the way she commits to feeling that makes sense in a way I can’t quite explain. Not everyone needs to stay in control. Some people just need to get it out, and she figured out how to do that at a scale that actually matches the size of what’s inside. The music hits different when you stop waiting for it to be subtle. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/15/florence-and-the-machine/ Tue, 15 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/15/hype-gamer/ I walked into the game shop yesterday afternoon to buy Diablo 3, and there were about 163 other people doing exactly the same thing. I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into. Never played the first two, skipped the beta, didn’t watch any videos or read a single review. I’m a hype gamer in its purest form. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/15/hype-gamer/ Tue, 15 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/15/lady-gaga-little-monsters-in-tokyo/ The Little Monsters in Tokyo moved as a single organism, screaming the lyrics back at her like she’d written the script to their lives. There’s something about that kind of devotion in a stadium that gets to you—all the loneliness and intensity that usually lives in private suddenly becomes collective, becomes permission. Maybe that’s the whole reason pop music exists. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/15/lady-gaga-little-monsters-in-tokyo/ Tue, 15 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/15/blurred-kids/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/15/blurred-kids/ Tue, 15 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/12/patrizis-sumo/ Paolo Patrizi photographed sumo wrestlers for years, and what emerges isn’t the circus version most of us know. It’s the weight of it—literally and otherwise. The discipline, the ritual, the strange isolation of living inside a body and a tradition that both demand everything. His pictures aren’t flattering or cruel, just honest about what’s there. You notice the care in them, the way he waited for the quiet moments. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/12/patrizis-sumo/ Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/11/ten-little-missions/ Friday’s coming and I’m already deep in the fantasy. The sun’s been frying everyone and all I want is to freeze myself solid for a few weeks until Diablo 3 drops, maybe leave a clone to handle work. Everything else spirals from there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/11/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/11/spring-breakers/ Harmony Korine made a movie where four college girls commit crimes in designer bikinis while a guy named Alien (James Franco) screams about his guns and money. The whole thing is neon and slow-motion and depravity, shot like Korine’s documenting a fever dream he wants to stay in. What got me was how little the movie cares about consequences. No moral framework, no redemption arc—just bodies and violence and bad decisions lit like a music video. That kind of refusal to apologize gets under your skin. You’re left sitting with discomfort and maybe a little admiration for it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/11/spring-breakers/ Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/11/that-instant-with-laura/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/11/that-instant-with-laura/ Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/10/festival-season/ When the weather finally cooperates, the thought is automatic: tent, friends, a field, music. Hurricane in 2012 had Die Ärzte, The Cure, Florence & The Machine, New Order, M83, Little Dragon—the kind of lineup where you’re constantly torn between stages, convinced you’re missing something better happening somewhere else. You probably are. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/10/festival-season/ Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/10/grimes-after-dark/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/10/grimes-after-dark/ Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/9/dan-bailey-disposable-lives/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/9/dan-bailey-disposable-lives/ Wed, 09 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/8/prague/ Sitting in Mallorca right now, watching middle-aged men in their underwear paddle through the pool with their equally destroyed kids, and somehow I can’t stop thinking about Prague. Which tells me the trip was actually great—I wouldn’t be unable to let it go otherwise. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/8/prague/ Tue, 08 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/6/five-weeks-in-an-artist-house/ I’ve already written three posts about this trip without actually going anywhere. Still sitting in this chair—literally decomposing—and somehow narrating like I’ve already been there for weeks. Most people just go, keep quiet, send a postcard when they’re back. I prefer dragging someone into my neurotic anticipation spiral instead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/6/five-weeks-in-an-artist-house/ Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/5/the-nerd-olympics/ re:publica wrapped up yesterday. Third time I’ve been, and if you didn’t go, you didn’t miss anything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/5/the-nerd-olympics/ Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/4/everybody-but-me/ Coco Capitán makes work that sits right at the intersection of high concept and pure visual pleasure—colorful, textured, playful photographs that deal with identity and desire and the gap between how you see yourself and how the world sees you. The title alone is the whole thing. There’s something about the way she combines abstraction with personality, language with image, that makes you feel like you’re inside a private joke that somehow includes you. Her stuff has gotten more confident over time, less concerned with being understood and more interested in just being exactly what it is. That’s the move I keep watching for in contemporary work—the moment an artist stops performing their practice and just lives inside it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/4/everybody-but-me/ Fri, 04 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/4/that-may/ There was this May where I thought flying to the States and hitting on Lady Gaga while she was dealing with a breakup was a legitimate plan. Like I was somehow the answer to that particular problem. I’ve never even liked her pseudo-crazy act that much—it always felt exhausting—but May logic overrides everything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/4/that-may/ Fri, 04 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/4/the-girl-and-the-night/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/4/the-girl-and-the-night/ Fri, 04 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/4/cut-copy-take-me-over/ Cut Copy makes electronic music that feels designed for the moments when you need something sleek but warm, detached but human. “Take Me Over” is them at their best—all these synth layers stacking up like they’re building toward something that never quite arrives, except it does, it’s all around you the whole time. I used to come back to them constantly, that specific texture they do with electronic pop, machines made to feel like they’re breathing. I don’t listen as much anymore but I know exactly where to find that feeling when I need it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/4/cut-copy-take-me-over/ Fri, 04 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/3/modern-love-is-war/ I forget strangers’ faces almost immediately—faster than I remember addresses or phone numbers. If someone connects with me mentally, challenges me, or grabs my attention visually, sure, I light up in the moment. But after we part, there’s a solid chance I won’t recognize them next time. They just slip away. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/3/modern-love-is-war/ Thu, 03 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/3/the-roundtable/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/3/the-roundtable/ Thu, 03 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/3/cat-daddy/ Kate Upton became the cat person nobody expected. Genuinely obsessed, not in some curated way—talking about her animals constantly, posting them like she’d forgotten she was famous. There’s something to that, watching someone with her profile just lose it over cats. No angle, no brand strategy, just actual affection for small animals. The weird hobby that makes someone human, strips away the untouchable thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/3/cat-daddy/ Thu, 03 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/2/may-first/ May 1st in Berlin is one of those dates everyone tells you about before you experience it—the street parties, the riots, the spray paint, the cops in riot gear, all of it supposedly happening at once in the city center. I went once, wandering into it almost by accident, walking toward what looked like a normal evening and finding myself in the middle of something else entirely. There’s something weirdly energizing about being caught up in that kind of chaos when you’re not looking for it, when you’re just trying to get somewhere and suddenly the whole street is packed with people in black hoodies and the air smells like tear gas and beer. It’s not fun exactly, but it’s alive in a way that nothing else quite is. The whole thing feels like a release valve that the city needs to let off steam once a year, and for one night Berlin just surrenders to the mess of it all. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/5/2/may-first/ Wed, 02 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/30/may-in-cologne/ Cologne in May seemed unlikely to be memorable. Cathedral, carnival, that one TV guy. But Electronic Beats Festival was booking the E-Werk, and the lineup meant something—The Kills, Miike Snow, Austra, Citizens, Hundred in the Hands. Not the obvious moves. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/30/may-in-cologne/ Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/30/japan-now/ British Airways wanted another 200 euros on top of the original 700 they quoted me, and I wasn’t going to pay it. Found Aeroflot instead for 500 euros round trip. It felt like a win until I realized the layover was six hours somewhere in Siberia, but I decided it was worth it anyway. The timing shifted too. Forget early September. Late May instead, for five weeks, with an open return ticket in case I decide to stay or need to escape after two weeks. Both feel equally probable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/30/japan-now/ Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/30/smiley-smile/ She’s the kind of person who knows exactly what you’re thinking when you look at her, and the fact that she doesn’t pretend otherwise is what makes it interesting. There’s something disarming about that—the refusal to play the coy game, to act like she doesn’t understand the currency of her own image. That smile isn’t hiding anything. It’s the confidence of someone who’s been looked at her whole life and decided to do the looking back. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/30/smiley-smile/ Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/28/how-we-do-party/ Rita Ora’s “How We Do (Party)” is a 2012 club track that does one thing: gets you moving on a dance floor. It doesn’t pretend to be anything else—just the beat, the hook, repeat. I remember hearing it in bars and clubs back then, the kind of song that was perfectly fine as background to the actual experience of being out. There’s something honest about that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/28/how-we-do-party/ Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/27/wordy/ Towa Tei thinks out loud through his production—acid house meeting Japanese sensibilities, ideas in constant collision, sounds that explain themselves as they unfold. That chattiness goes back to Yellow Magic Orchestra, that sense of having so many sounds and tools that they all need to go into the mix. The wordiness works because it’s not performed. It’s genuine, the actual shape of his thinking made audible. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/27/wordy/ Fri, 27 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/26/lego-orgies/ On gray weekdays I used to sit by the window watching a pigeon that had claimed the tree outside, and I’d think about when I was actually happy. Not the big moments—not winning a Nintendo, not the day I got accepted to move to Berlin, not the first time anything sexual happened. No. The real happiness was somewhere else entirely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/26/lego-orgies/ Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/26/sugarhigh-lovestoned/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/26/sugarhigh-lovestoned/ Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/26/cornershop-whos-gonna-lite-up/ Cornershop were the band that made it clear you didn’t need to be cool in any traditional sense to make something that sounded good. British-Indian, loud, rambling, unafraid of being goofy or sentimental in the same song. They showed up in the mid-90s Leicester indie scene like they were just figuring it out as they went, which I think they were. “Who’s Gonna Lite Up Your Light” doesn’t try to be clever—it’s a love song that sounds like they genuinely didn’t know if anyone would care, but they were going to play it anyway. That’s the whole thing right there. They weren’t performing indie credibility; they were just making music in a room and letting whatever happened happen. That kind of carelessness is rarer than it should be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/26/cornershop-whos-gonna-lite-up/ Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/25/grimes-genesis/ When Grimes hits, it’s usually sideways. She’s never made anything that feels designed for radio or playlists—the songs arrive already weird, already hers, like she’s building for an audience that doesn’t exist yet and probably wouldn’t want to exist the way she imagines it. There’s something admirable about that refusal to soften anything. Art that doesn’t apologize for being difficult or strange or structurally odd. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/25/grimes-genesis/ Wed, 25 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/25/giza-lagarce-is-dynamite/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/25/giza-lagarce-is-dynamite/ Wed, 25 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/25/finally-tokyo/ The thing that got me was watching everyone else go. People with half my reasons, half my want, all of them making it to Tokyo before me. I’ve been wanting to go there for twenty years, maybe longer. This place I fell in love with through music and images and the way it looked in films. Somehow I’m still here while half the internet posts photos like they were just visiting a friend. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/25/finally-tokyo/ Wed, 25 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/24/still-moving/ Iris is 25, from Hamburg. She went to art school in London, worked at VICE in Berlin, and three years ago was planning to move to Morocco. She’s still in Paris, which tells you something about how seriously she takes plans. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/24/still-moving/ Tue, 24 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/24/rudimental-feel-the-love/ The first time I heard Rudimental properly was in someone’s car, and the bass hit different than anything else coming out of the UK at that moment. Not aggressive, not trying to prove anything—just clean, lush, built for people to feel something other than the need to defend their taste in music. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/24/rudimental-feel-the-love/ Tue, 24 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/23/mishka-empire-state-of-mind/ You knew Mishka without anyone having to explain it. While everyone chased Supreme and the obvious names, there was this label quietly making graphics and pieces that just landed right, collaborations from someone who understood design and culture and didn’t need to explain any of it. That’s the whole thing. A brand that knew what mattered and stopped there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/23/mishka-empire-state-of-mind/ Mon, 23 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/23/why-berlin/ Three cities, really. Munich if you want to pretend to be rich. Hamburg if you’re fine with pretending. Berlin if you’re done with the pretense and want to see what happens. Everything else is compromise. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/23/why-berlin/ Mon, 23 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/22/why-not-me/ One morning I wake up like I’m coming out of a nightmare, and I can’t stand it anymore. All those days exactly the same. Eight to five at the bank, selling retirement plans to divorced women with four kids. Every night making promises, swearing I only love them, before I come on their face. And I don’t want a divorce or four kids of my own. I don’t want to become the story everyone tells about themselves when they’re thirty-five and bitter. One morning I just can’t do it anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/22/why-not-me/ Sun, 22 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/22/dj-fresh-the-power/ There’s something about the precision in a good drum and bass track, the way every element sits just right so nothing gets wasted. DJ Fresh had that—a sense of arrangement that made things like “Gold Dust” land heavy without needing to shout about it. He wasn’t trying to be deep or experimental, just genuinely good at his craft, which is maybe the most underrated thing in music. You put on one of his tracks and it works immediately, pulls you in, makes you understand why this sound mattered to so many people. Not transcendent, just satisfying in a way that’s harder to achieve than it looks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/22/dj-fresh-the-power/ Sun, 22 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/22/carmen/ There’s something about how she films desire from the inside—not looking at it, living in it. The black-and-white footage, the dust, the feeling that everything beautiful is already halfway to ruins. You watch and it’s like looking at a life you know you’re not supposed to want, one where the payoff never comes but the wanting never stops either. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/22/carmen/ Sun, 22 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/21/liars-no-1-against-the-rush/ There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes with listening to Liars, the good kind where your nervous system feels like it’s been wrung out and left in the sun. No. 1 Against the Rush is them at their most abrasive and least interested in being likable—Angus Andrew’s voice cracking over those fractured guitars, everything slightly out of sync on purpose. I found myself going back to it around the time I was trying to figure out what noise actually meant to me, not as a concept but as something I wanted to hear. There’s something cleanly refusal about this record, like they’re not explaining themselves or smoothing edges for anyone. You either get it or you don’t, and honestly they seem to not care which. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/21/liars-no-1-against-the-rush/ Sat, 21 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/21/is-anyone-up/ By the time YouPorn and RedTube became household names, the internet had already revealed itself for what it was: an endless archive of people fucking in every configuration imaginable. Two people, seven people, alone, with household objects, with animals, at all hours. Girls who barely looked old enough to care. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/21/is-anyone-up/ Sat, 21 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/20/only-the-horses/ I put on Scissor Sisters when I need to stop thinking and start feeling things at full volume. Jake Shears doesn’t care if you’re listening, the production is designed to surround you, and there’s no room in it for half-measures. It’s the opposite of every other kind of music I listen to—it asks nothing except that you surrender completely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/20/only-the-horses/ Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/20/a-reasonable-weekend-plan/ Weeks disappear. You look up and it’s Friday again, feet swollen from standing, same four walls, same exhaustion. So you need something. A plan. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/20/a-reasonable-weekend-plan/ Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/20/who-killed-bambi/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/20/who-killed-bambi/ Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/20/suzan-ha-ha-ha/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/20/suzan-ha-ha-ha/ Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/19/coachella/ Coachella’s one of those things that works on a level you can’t quite explain—the music, sure, but also the specific desert heat, the parade of clothes and bodies you’ll never see the same way again, the sense that something’s supposed to happen because everyone arrived expecting it to. You know it won’t fix anything, but you go anyway. And when it’s actually good, when the music lands right and the night’s perfect, you remember why humans keep doing this to themselves. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/19/coachella/ Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/19/the-perfect-tag/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/19/the-perfect-tag/ Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/19/mash-up-culture/ Lain edits Amateur magazine in Switzerland, though he’s rarely there—he travels constantly, moving through cities, finding artists and scenes and bringing them back to print. The magazine documents street culture globally, not as trend coverage but as genuine reportage from people making work outside institutional structures. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/19/mash-up-culture/ Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/17/cochon-ville/ Sébastien Tellier made something with that title and I keep coming back to it, not because I fully understand what I’m hearing but because there’s something in it that feels deliberate and strange, like he knew exactly how absurd the project was and committed anyway. That’s the thing about Tellier—he’s always been willing to follow an idea to a place that makes no commercial sense, which is maybe why most people don’t know his work at all, and why the people who do care about it obsessively. The title itself is a joke, or maybe it isn’t, and that ambiguity is probably the whole point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/17/cochon-ville/ Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/17/mouth-full/ Mavi, a German jeans company, decided to host a free-clothes event in Berlin with one condition: you could take home as much as you could carry in your mouth. Your actual mouth. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/17/mouth-full/ Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/17/actually-just-vacation-photos/ Vacation photos are always framed as casual—just bikini shots, just a beach, just downtime. But nothing’s casual when you’re that famous. The edit, the angle, the choice to share it: that’s work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/17/actually-just-vacation-photos/ Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/16/girl-youre-so-weird/ The Flaming Lips have always been too much in the best way—Wayne Coyne’s voice pitched somewhere between a child and a ghost, the band building cathedrals out of noise and synth wash and pure earnestness. There’s something almost naive about how committed they are to the weird, the experimental, the unapologetically sentimental underneath all the digital glitch and orchestral bloat. You could write them off as novelty, the guy in the giant bubble performing live, the costumes and the props, but that misses what actually matters: they mean every second of it. No irony, no protective distance. Just four guys from Oklahoma making music that sounds like nothing else because they don’t know any better and don’t care to learn. There’s courage in that kind of unguarded strangeness. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/16/girl-youre-so-weird/ Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/16/nearly-new/ What strikes me about Amanda Lepore is how she’s stayed exactly the same while everything around her changed. The makeup, the nightclubs, the whole vision of who she is—she committed to it and never wavered. You watch enough nightlife and you see everyone constantly adjusting themselves, chasing trends, trying out new identities. But she just stayed put. That kind of constancy looks almost defiant from where I’m sitting, like she understood something about authenticity that everyone else is still figuring out. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/16/nearly-new/ Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/16/prague-again/ I went to Prague once, on a school trip in 2005. Someone handed me burning absinth and I drank it because everyone was laughing. I remember the noise more than anything—the city felt loud and warm and slightly dangerous, the way cities do when you’re young. There was this girl Hannah who danced with two guys at the same time in what was supposedly Europe’s biggest club. I believed it. Still don’t know if it was true. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/16/prague-again/ Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/14/lola-and-the-cat/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/14/lola-and-the-cat/ Sat, 14 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/13/ten-little-missions/ The weekend shows up and I’m staring at some files my boss handed me with that theatrical urgency you learn to ignore. Highest priority. Right. I know it’ll wait. I know I’ll either get to it or I won’t. So instead I’m thinking about random things, like the time I painted my dog and threw him out a window with a parachute. Completely absurd. But that’s how avoidance works—you replace one pointless task with another, weirder one. And if I’m going to waste time anyway, I might as well be thorough about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/13/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 13 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/12/kimbras-war/ Kimbra’s music feels like combat—not physical aggression, but genuine conflict. She shifts genres like she’s switching weapons, stacks her voice until it’s arguing with itself, treats melody like it’s something to break and rebuild. There’s a refusal in it, a determination not to slip into whatever would make her successful in an easy way. The skill is obviously there; she just chooses not to use it for comfort. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/12/kimbras-war/ Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/11/loftus-hall/ There was a Jägermeister tour thing happening in Berlin, which mostly meant a crowded bar and free drinks. Loftus Hall was so packed that nobody could sit down—we were eating standing up, which isn’t really eating so much as grabbing food while people pushed past you, but the food was good so it mattered more than you’d expect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/11/loftus-hall/ Wed, 11 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/11/femen/ Femen stripped down and made it impossible to ignore. The Ukrainian activist group showed up topless at government buildings and military sites with their message written across bare skin. It’s crude and smart—the body becomes the medium, exposure becomes the tactic. Whether it shifts actual policy is debatable, but the conversation itself becomes one you can’t reframe or dismiss. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/11/femen/ Wed, 11 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/10/reappear/ I got pulled back into School of Seven Bells not long ago and remembered how their music works on you—this pillowed, textured thing that doesn’t demand attention but quietly settles in. Reappear is exactly that. Lush production, the kind of digital-and-organic blend that feels designed in some dream studio. It’s good to have them back. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/10/reappear/ Tue, 10 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/10/world-domination-and-cheesecake/ Back when we started all this, the deal was simple: we make what we want, nobody tells us no, we keep the money. No corporate hand in it, no brand manager calling from some office saying we need more of whatever was trending. You have an idea, you build it, you’re done. That was freedom. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/10/world-domination-and-cheesecake/ Tue, 10 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/10/zoe-rae-underage/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/10/zoe-rae-underage/ Tue, 10 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/9/american-apparel-the-morning-after/ American Apparel felt like the last gasp of something—a brand that actually believed in its own provocation. The ads were relentless and stupid and sometimes brilliant, all tits and thighs and desperation, this weird collision of genuine design sensibility (those basics were actually good) and Dov Charney’s inability to keep his hands off anything. It worked for a moment. Everyone knew those ads. They were embarrassing and you couldn’t look away. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/9/american-apparel-the-morning-after/ Mon, 09 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/9/mixtape-hello-world/ I could start completely fresh every day if I wanted to. Just leave. Drop everything I’ve built, everyone I’ve promised things to. Drain my bank account, fly somewhere nobody knows my name. Set down my suitcase on ground that’s never seen me before. Turn off the music. Scream it out clear and loud: Hello world. But I never actually do it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/9/mixtape-hello-world/ Mon, 09 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/9/feist-bittersweet-memories/ Feist’s voice has this particular quality—not quite a break, but a hesitation, like she’s deciding whether to let the note all the way out. Years ago when The Reminder was everywhere, everyone else was piling on layers, but she just kept stripping things down, leaving space. There’s something bittersweet about going back to that record now, realizing you don’t need it the way you once did, but you can still hear exactly why you did. That intimacy she managed—the feeling that she was singing something private but letting you stand right there with her—that doesn’t fade. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/9/feist-bittersweet-memories/ Mon, 09 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/6/stuck-at-easter/ Easter trapped me at home. Nothing open, family everywhere, sister won’t leave me alone. The kind of day where you’d normally escape but instead you’re just sitting there watching time die. So I made a stupid list of things to do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/6/stuck-at-easter/ Fri, 06 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/5/camille-rowe-smoking/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/5/camille-rowe-smoking/ Thu, 05 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/5/beyoncés-tumblr/ I wasn’t really paying attention to Beyoncé and Jay-Z before. What they did in their free time, their work—didn’t matter much to me. They have more money than most countries. That was all the information I needed. Then she started a Tumblr with private photos, and suddenly there was something to actually look at. Proof of how the incredibly wealthy spend their time. So I looked. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/5/beyoncés-tumblr/ Thu, 05 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/4/dont-go/ Rae Morris has this voice that doesn’t try to convince you of anything—it just lays out what’s true. “Don’t Go” is the kind of song you come back to knowing it won’t fix anything, but you go anyway, hoping it somehow might. There’s resignation in it, but not sadness. She sounds like someone who’s made peace with the fact that some people leave no matter what you do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/4/dont-go/ Wed, 04 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/2/all-the-rowboats/ Regina Spektor’s voice is wrong on purpose—Russian whispers and English monotone, melodies that barely hold together. ’All the Rowboats’ doesn’t try to be likable or pretty. The songs sprawl into weird shapes that shouldn’t work, but they do because she commits to the strangeness, sings like she’s not sure about any of it, lets that uncertainty be the song. Late at night I keep putting it on, not for comfort but for something that doesn’t pretend everything’s fine. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/2/all-the-rowboats/ Mon, 02 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/2/grimes-strange/ Grimes showed up when electronic music was getting soft. Her work was abrasive, sometimes difficult to listen to, and she didn’t care. The videos weren’t designed to make you comfortable or like her. That refusal to play nice meant something, even when the songs themselves didn’t grab me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/4/2/grimes-strange/ Mon, 02 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/3/28/kreuzberg/ Kreuzberg in the 2010s was where Berlin’s underground lived—small fashion labels working out of courtyards, parties at night, music that didn’t care about the mainstream. It was the neighborhood where actual culture happened, before the city gentrified it into something safe and expensive. That specific energy, the sense that something real was going on there, that’s what made it matter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/3/28/kreuzberg/ Wed, 28 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/3/26/marteria/ German hip-hop spent years learning from America, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s a difference between learning and copying, and for a long time it was hard to tell the difference. The beats sounded borrowed, the flows like patterns learned from records, the whole thing missing something that felt native. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/3/26/marteria/ Mon, 26 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/3/23/paz-de-la-huerta-by-the-pool/ There’s something about a woman at the edge of a pool at a certain angle of light—that specific moment before anything happens. Paz in that scene has this look that’s neither performing for the camera nor pretending not to be watched. Just exists there, suspended, which is probably the hardest thing to do on screen. The pool itself becomes less important than the fact that she’s comfortable enough to sit still in front of it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/3/23/paz-de-la-huerta-by-the-pool/ Fri, 23 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/3/19/nettie-harris/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/3/19/nettie-harris/ Mon, 19 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/3/15/the-parties-are-back/ You end up in a room full of strangers at midnight, and two hours later you’ve had the kind of conversation that feels like it matters. It probably doesn’t, but for those two hours it does. That’s what these events are. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/3/15/the-parties-are-back/ Thu, 15 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/3/13/two-speeds/ I’d been struggling with two competing instincts for a while now. Part of me loved the work of sitting with something for weeks—the careful writing, the photography, the visual projects that demanded real attention. But I also couldn’t turn away from what was happening in real time: a new song that mattered, a moment worth catching, the news that moves fast. These two impulses operate at completely different speeds. Trying to hold both in the same place felt like being pulled in two directions at once. There was no form that could hold them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/3/13/two-speeds/ Tue, 13 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/29/doyathing/ I still think about the Gorillaz and De La Soul collaboration from 2011, the way it landed without warning in that pre-algorithm moment when things could just exist online and you’d find them by accident. De La Soul’s production, Gorillaz at their loosest—it felt like watching people who actually liked each other make something in a room. No stakes, no press cycle, just the song itself. I played it so many times that year I wore a groove into it, which sounds like bullshit but it’s true: certain songs get old in your hand. This one never did. Later versions with ScHoolboy Q kept the vibe alive but added something heavier, more complicated. The original though—that’s still the one that hits, that particular collision of everything working without trying to work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/29/doyathing/ Wed, 29 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/29/the-right-hand-retires/ Dieter, the Russian mailman, showed up with two packages one afternoon. Two massive plastic flashlights, except they weren’t flashlights. One black, one pearlescent white. A gift from Brian, no explanation attached—probably the right move. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/29/the-right-hand-retires/ Wed, 29 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/28/little-jinder-keeps-dreaming/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/28/little-jinder-keeps-dreaming/ Tue, 28 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/28/mishka-nyc/ Mishka’s the brand that never got polished. Grotesque characters, angry type, graphics made to provoke. Most streetwear eventually decides to be beautiful or at least likeable. Mishka just stayed the same for twenty years—ugly and indifferent to your approval. That’s the rare move. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/28/mishka-nyc/ Tue, 28 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/27/mixtape-two-kinds/ Good songs are like sex. Some come with such heat and force that I can’t resist them—I’m caught in the rush for hours, dizzy with it, until suddenly it’s over. They’re gone and they don’t come back. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/27/mixtape-two-kinds/ Mon, 27 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/26/cowboys-and-indians/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/26/cowboys-and-indians/ Sun, 26 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/26/the-inevitable-platform/ Two out of five Germans were genuinely afraid of Facebook, according to a poll they commissioned. The fear was worse among people with lower education, though about 20 percent of those had no idea what Facebook was in the first place. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/26/the-inevitable-platform/ Sun, 26 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/25/the-shins-simple-song/ The Shins have always felt like they’re trying to prove something, all that careful arrangement and winking references, but ’Simple Song’ just sits there. It doesn’t announce itself, doesn’t ask you to think it’s clever. That plainness is what got me—a song that’s just what it is without performance. I find myself coming back to it more than I expect to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/25/the-shins-simple-song/ Sat, 25 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/24/richard-kern/ I keep coming back to Kern’s photographs because of how little they pretend. Women in rooms under bad light, often naked, rarely smiling. There’s sexuality in the frame but it’s not soft—it’s frank and uncomfortable and risky. The title references drugs, which fits the whole feeling of his work, that edge that says something is at stake here, that this isn’t safe. He’s been making these photographs and films for decades, pushing what people will look at, and whether you think he’s documenting something true about desire or just exploiting it probably depends on what you need to believe. I tend to think it’s both. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/24/richard-kern/ Fri, 24 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/24/ten-little-missions/ Friday finally showed up. I’d genuinely started thinking it might not arrive this year, but here it is—that moment when nothing matters and the weekend is just screens, porn, and horizontal commitment for seventy-two hours. The baseline state. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/24/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 24 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/24/the-black-box/ Clicking on a music video link in Germany used to be like playing a slot machine. You’d find something great, everyone’s talking about it, you click play and… black box. Nothing. Just GEMA and YouTube locked in a stupid fight and the whole country paying for it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/24/the-black-box/ Fri, 24 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/23/vianna-nguyen/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/23/vianna-nguyen/ Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/23/the-passengers/ Scheißtürken. Go to Auschwitz. Turkpack get out. Last Monday morning, a man on a Berlin S-Bahn screamed this at a group of fourth-graders. Ten- and eleven-year-olds from Kreuzberg, mostly kids whose parents weren’t born in Germany, on a class trip to go bowling. A woman had already told them “This isn’t Germany anymore” as they boarded. Then this guy started. Full Nazi rhetoric, the kind you read about in news summaries, not something happening in front of you while your coffee gets cold. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/23/the-passengers/ Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/23/lo-fi-fnk-kissing-taste/ Lo-fi funk has this weird pull to it. There’s the chill, the groove, the bedroom-production sound of it all, but underneath there’s something deeply sensual if you’re paying attention—the way the bass sits under everything, the subtle sexual charge in the pocket of the rhythm. It’s not trying to be hot, which is exactly why it works. You put it on and the room shifts. Your body shifts. Everything slows into something almost sacred, almost intimate. It’s the sound of wanting someone without saying anything at all. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/23/lo-fi-fnk-kissing-taste/ Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/22/pit-hair/ Charlotte Free doesn’t shave her armpits. Just photographs them and lets them exist, which apparently is radical. Beauty culture’s whole apparatus is designed to make you feel ashamed of your own body—there’s always something to fix, remove, sand down. Free doesn’t participate. The refusal is casual, almost offhand, which makes it more interesting than if she’d made it a whole thing. She’s just living in a way the world wasn’t expecting her to, and that matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/22/pit-hair/ Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/22/i-want-pokémon/ I’d spent an hour trying to figure out what I’d actually pay for Pokémon on an iPhone. Ten bucks? Twenty? A hundred? The idea was perfect—everyone with whatever device they had, fighting and trading without wrestling some shitty link cable into submission. Like the old days. Just on the phone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/22/i-want-pokémon/ Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/20/bangarang/ That drop still hits different. Skrillex made something almost stupidly fun out of the bass wobble—turned dubstep into a pure sensation machine, all aggression and glitch and the kind of sound design that made you feel like the speakers themselves were breaking. Bangarang was everywhere for a minute, became a meme before the internet even had a solid name for what memes were yet. You heard it in videos, in games, blasted from car stereos. The production is genuinely inventive, which is what people miss when they write it off as bro nonsense. There’s craft in the chaos. Whether you wanted to dance to it or laugh at it, the thing had gravity. It marked a moment when electronic music stopped trying to be sleek and started being deliberately crude and loud. That shift changed everything that came after. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/20/bangarang/ Mon, 20 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/20/iras-wolf/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/20/iras-wolf/ Mon, 20 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/20/the-ones-who-stayed/ Small towns wear their name for good reason. Every stereotype about them is true. Everyone knows everyone. The inbreeding statistics are higher than you’d want. The newspaper covers the gardening club’s seventy-fifth anniversary and kids placing third in the regional taekwondo competition. That exotic stuff. And when you live somewhere like that, eventually you face the question: stay or go? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/20/the-ones-who-stayed/ Mon, 20 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/19/following-along/ Late nights obsessing over how to make money online without destroying yourself. Facebook, Google, Tumblr, pixel advertising, cereal schemes—none of it ever works out. It’s a stupid game, and I got tired of playing it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/19/following-along/ Sun, 19 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/19/yuna/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/19/yuna/ Sun, 19 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/18/lindsay-lohan-smoking/ All those paparazzi shots from that era had her with a cigarette. Outside clubs, in cars, always lit, always being photographed. There was something about it that read as untouchable—young, exhausted, like smoking was the only sane response to being everywhere at once. Whether she actually smoked that much or the photographers just caught the right moments, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter now. That’s the image that stuck. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/18/lindsay-lohan-smoking/ Sat, 18 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/18/german-blogs-are-ugly/ I clicked through to Cashy’s Blog the other day, one of the biggest German tech sites, the guy posting constantly about every Apple announcement, every Windows update, every Google shift. Fast, thorough, no idea how he finds the time. The design looks like a Russian spam site for knock-off pharmaceuticals. The domain’s one of those that confuses people—half the traffic is probably retirees looking for a hotel near the harbor. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/18/german-blogs-are-ugly/ Sat, 18 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/17/playing-in-the-commons/ They called us criminals. ARD, ZDF, the entire German Content Alliance—that’s what they said. We were a generation that came of age downloading songs, making videos, remixing work we loved. Digital theft, in their view. They wanted ACTA signed, wanted international law to make it all illegal, and when thousands of us took to the streets to protest, they just got louder. We didn’t even know what we were stealing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/17/playing-in-the-commons/ Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/17/gavin-watsons-skin-head/ Watson’s documentary is a straight look at British skinhead culture without the editorializing—just these guys talking about what drew them in, how it felt to belong to something that hard. The photography is unflinching. There’s no distance between the camera and the people it’s watching, no winking at the audience about how weird or dangerous this world is. It’s a record of something that mattered to these people, and that matters. The skinhead thing gets flattened by media into one image, but Watson’s work lets you see how personal and complicated it actually was—ideology mixed with friendship, violence mixed with genuine care for your crew. It’s the kind of documentary that teaches you to look at subcultures differently, not as curiosities but as real communities with real stakes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/17/gavin-watsons-skin-head/ Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/17/sonny-moore/ I was thinking about Skrillex the other day, after he picked up those Grammys, and I realized I actually cared more about who he was before—back when his name was just Sonny Moore and he was playing in an emo band called From First To Last. There’s something interesting about that trajectory, the way someone can come up in one scene entirely and then end up defining something completely different. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/17/sonny-moore/ Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/17/weekend-plans/ I made a list of things to do this weekend. Buy a goldfish that looks like someone I don’t trust. Download something I’ll delete without opening. Write a musician asking if he can hook me up with his dealer. Go to the underwear party—actually, no, I’ve seen myself naked. Play Super Mario World badly on purpose. Use cash at Starbucks and wait to see if anyone takes me seriously as a threat. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/17/weekend-plans/ Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/16/the-selby/ The Selby was a column in Nylon where photographer Tyler Mitchell Smith would shoot creative people—artists, musicians, designers—in their actual homes. No heavy styling, just the person and their space arranged in a way that revealed something true about how they thought. It became the look that every lifestyle magazine chased afterward. But The Selby had it first and made it look inevitable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/16/the-selby/ Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/16/what-scotts-got/ Fashion Week Paris is the big one. The history, the weight, the fact that everyone acts like it matters so it’s decided that it does. Fashion weeks are everywhere anyway—Berlin, New York, London, then back around again. But Paris gets the reverence. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/16/what-scotts-got/ Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/15/karin-parks-fryngies/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/15/karin-parks-fryngies/ Wed, 15 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/15/jogger-stalker/ Richard Kern films women jogging, just follows the camera and doesn’t look away. “Jogger Stalker” is literal—bodies moving through the city, unaware they’re being filmed. There’s no metaphor here, no aesthetic camouflage. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/15/jogger-stalker/ Wed, 15 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/14/purple-girl/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/14/purple-girl/ Tue, 14 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/14/safe-sound/ I keep coming back to “Safe & Sound” on nights when I’m worn down in that specific way where another big moment would actually hurt. It’s the opposite of what makes most Taylor songs work—no production, no move, just this voice that knows better than to ask anything else of you. When you’ve had enough of trying, that’s what matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/14/safe-sound/ Tue, 14 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/14/february-fourteenth/ Valentine’s Day gets to you different when you’re alone. Not in some romantic, wistful way. The actual depression numbers spike harder on February 14th than they do on Christmas, than your birthday, than any other day someone decided meant something. It’s engineered to make you feel what’s missing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/14/february-fourteenth/ Tue, 14 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/10/band-of-skulls/ Heavy blues rock with no apology for the blues part. Band of Skulls hit a sound that feels exactly as good as it should—guitars thick as tar, drums like something collapsing in slow motion. There’s no restraint here, no clever arrangement trying to prove something. Just the weight of it. Sweet Sour captures that pull, the push and drag of wanting something you know will hurt, the kind of wanting that doesn’t care if it makes sense. They move through it like they’ve lived there for years. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/10/band-of-skulls/ Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/10/ten-little-missions/ ACTA protests are happening. I’m supposed to march, stand in the rain, care visibly. And I do care, but the weekend’s already booked. Sunday’s recovery. But if you’re the kind of person who finds time in the cracks, here’s what kept running through my head. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/10/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/10/acta/ There was this treaty called ACTA that came out of nowhere around 2012—governments had negotiated it in secret as an anti-counterfeiting thing, but what it actually did was open the door to total internet surveillance. Unlimited monitoring, ISPs logging everything, websites shut down on accusation. You read the details and it sounds like fiction, but it was real, and people were about to let it happen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/10/acta/ Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/10/lana-del-rey-a-star-is-born-and-scorned/ There’s something about the way Lana Del Rey has constructed herself that feels both totally artificial and completely genuine, which might be the only way to be famous anymore without losing your mind. She arrived fully formed with the Lana Del Rey persona—the old Hollywood glamour, the sadness, the self-destruction aesthetic—and people couldn’t decide if they were looking at art or a marketing campaign. Probably both. She made drowsy cinematic pop songs when that wasn’t fashionable yet, when sad girl music still needed to prove itself, and she had the taste to make them sound expensive and doomed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/10/lana-del-rey-a-star-is-born-and-scorned/ Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/9/gurren-lagann-boobs-monsters-giant-robots/ There are two kinds of sick. The light kind where you drag yourself to the doctor, cough in his face, and then get blessed with two weeks decomposing at home with delivery food and a laptop—maybe even clean the apartment if you’re ambitious. Then there’s the other dimension. The one where you’re stuck in bed sweating through fever, hallucinating through mucus, certain you’ll never see daylight again. The laptop becomes your only friend. It’s all that keeps you from losing your mind when your skull feels like it’s splitting open. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/9/gurren-lagann-boobs-monsters-giant-robots/ Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/9/ladyhawke-black-white-blue/ Ladyhawke works because it respects color as emotion. The whole film moves through whites and silvers and blue—the curse rendered in palette. What makes the romance work is that it doesn’t oversell the misery. Just two people locked into opposite halves of the day, reaching across something that won’t close. That’s all you need. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/9/ladyhawke-black-white-blue/ Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/7/charlotte-free-shes-a-wildfox/ Charlotte Free made Wildfox work in that specific way that’s hard to explain out loud. She could wear those deliberately kitschy 70s prints and look completely unbothered, like she’d just grabbed them without thinking. That effortlessness is almost impossible to fake—you spend weeks designing every detail and somehow it has to look like a thrift-store accident. Wildfox’s entire thing depended on looking like something you just found, and she made you believe it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/7/charlotte-free-shes-a-wildfox/ Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/7/yumemiru/ Lying in bed, waiting for dreams. The fantasies come first—space pirates, money, actually getting into bed with people you have absolutely no business wanting. You’re already grinning at the thought. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/7/yumemiru/ Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/6/dree-hemingway-the-modern-utopian/ Dree Hemingway didn’t go the expected route. She chose indie films and art projects over the obvious studio path, work that probably meant more to her than money. That’s the utopian part—not anything grand, just the belief that you can actually do what interests you and still have a life. Easier when you come from her background, probably. But the choice itself is still real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/6/dree-hemingway-the-modern-utopian/ Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/6/mixtape-home-serenades/ Ice season. Nothing for it but to stay inside where the heat actually works, while that winter sun outside exhausts itself trying to convince anyone it’s useful. Eggs and bacon on fresh toast. A blanket. M.I.A. into The Weeknd into Dillon—each one flowing into the next without any thought, the kind of afternoon where you close your eyes and hours just evaporate. I’m thinking the whole time about how humanity really missed the mark by not evolving to hibernate. Why would anyone choose to stay conscious through winter. It feels like a fundamental design error. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/6/mixtape-home-serenades/ Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/5/four-in-the-morning/ Most of my time should go to making money for the lean times, eating, sleeping, getting around—whatever normal people do. Instead I’m telling my friends they shouldn’t kill themselves. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/5/four-in-the-morning/ Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/4/madonna-give-me-all-your-luvin/ The music video arrived in 2012 with all the pageantry you’d expect—Madonna still convinced she could provoke the internet, still convinced the internet cared. M.I.A. and Nicki Minaj flanking her like the pop equivalent of a power play. The whole thing was so determinedly scandalous, so carefully calculated to offend, that it kind of did the opposite. You watched it and understood exactly what she was doing, which meant there was nothing left to do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/4/madonna-give-me-all-your-luvin/ Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/3/creep-street/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/3/creep-street/ Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/3/bad-girls/ M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls” works because she’s not apologizing for any of it. No redemption, no softening, just someone who’d figured out that being the thing everyone feared was more honest and more fun than playing nice. The track is sparse—just gunshot samples and her voice mostly—which means the attitude has to land on its own. And it does. There’s no defensiveness in it either. She’s not trying to convince you of anything. She just owns the space completely and doesn’t care what you make of it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/3/bad-girls/ Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/3/getting-fatter/ Everyone knows it. Science says it, TV says it, your mom sends panicked emails. Everyone’s getting fatter. Delivery instead of the walk, sitting instead of moving, sugar water instead of anything requiring effort. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/3/getting-fatter/ Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/3/ten-intentions/ Friday afternoon and you’re already running the playlist of finally-going-to-do things. The project in the garage. Get out and do something worth remembering. Maybe something genuinely stupid and risky. The weekend stretches ahead like permission. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/3/ten-intentions/ Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/2/2012/ For about a year everyone agreed the world was ending on December 21st. Nobody really believed it—the Mayan calendar thing was nonsense—but the joke somehow became its own real culture. Memes, a John Cusack disaster film, ironic apocalypse parties, countdown sites you’d obsessively check. Brands capitalized immediately, selling products dressed up in endtimes packaging, trying to get you to buy deodorant for your final days. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/2/2012/ Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/2/the-nazi-left-myth/ Twitter is funny because there’s nobody between people and what they’re thinking. So Erika Steinbach, head of the League of Expellees, posted that the Nazis were left-wing—see, it’s right there in the name, National Socialist. By the time I read it, the internet was already split: half furious, half nodding along. I was just curious whether there was any substance to the argument or whether it was just word games dressed up as history. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/2/the-nazi-left-myth/ Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/2/father-john-misty-hollywood-forever-cemetery-sings/ Josh Tillman recorded an album at Hollywood Forever Cemetery and called it after the place. It’s the kind of obvious metaphor that only works if you’re being completely sincere about it, and he is. The record doesn’t perform cleverness. It just sounds like what you get when you’re too far inside a system to critique it from outside—so you absorb the decay and turn it into something dark and considered. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/2/father-john-misty-hollywood-forever-cemetery-sings/ Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/2/zombies-run/ I don’t run. Never have. I’m shaped like someone who spends time thinking about design and film, not someone who moves their body for the sake of moving it. So when I first heard about Zombies, Run!, I didn’t think it was for me. Turns out it kind of is, just not in the way I expected. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/2/zombies-run/ Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/1/magnum-postcards-from-america/ I’ve been looking at Magnum photographs of America—decades of work by photographers who had the patience to wait in diners, on highways, in small towns where nothing was happening. What stays with me is the lack of romance in these images. They’re not trying to say anything grand about the American character or the national soul. They’re just documenting light, boredom, solitude, people moving through spaces. I think that’s why I keep coming back to them—they got something true about scale and loneliness that you don’t forget once you’ve seen it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/1/magnum-postcards-from-america/ Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/1/i-fink-u-freeky/ Die Antwoord hit at exactly the right moment when people were desperate for something genuinely unhinged. Yolandi and Ninja showed up looking like a fever dream, talking in fractured English about sex and their own weirdness, unfiltered and unapologetic. “I Fink U Freeky” felt like watching someone have a seizure onstage while they’re also hitting on you—crude and weird and completely raw. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/2/1/i-fink-u-freeky/ Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/31/ketamine-and-the-light-switch/ There’s a pattern everyone knows. You smoke pot, meet some weird friends with weird things, try speed and acid and mushrooms. And if you’ve got the connections—some sketchy friend of a friend who knows a nurse or a pharmacist or someone who just knows—you eventually end up at ketamine. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/31/ketamine-and-the-light-switch/ Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/31/one-way-or-another/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/31/one-way-or-another/ Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/31/the-bad-in-each-other/ Feist does something most artists can’t pull off—she makes restraint sound urgent. Not the fake minimalism of someone trying to seem sophisticated, but actual space, actual air. You listen to her and you understand why silence matters. There’s a particular kind of intimacy in her work, where the smallest gesture—a voice drop, a string arrangement, the way she lets a phrase hang—means everything. It’s the opposite of trying to move you. It’s the confidence to assume you’re actually listening. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/31/the-bad-in-each-other/ Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/30/acta/ Every few years someone decides the internet needs fixing, which always means locking it down a little tighter. ACTA—the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement—was one of those moments. An international treaty negotiated in secret by governments and entertainment lawyers, designed to stop online piracy but broad enough to destroy half of what made the internet work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/30/acta/ Mon, 30 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/30/if-this-aint-love/ There’s a moment in dance tracks where everything locks in—the kick, the bassline, the vocal line—and suddenly you’re not thinking anymore, you’re just moving. Morillo knew how to build those moments. Skin’s voice sits in the track like it was always supposed to be there, rough and certain, somewhere between a confession and a command. It’s the kind of track that made sense at 2 AM in a packed club, but it also makes sense alone on a drive at night. Most dance records fade, but the ones Morillo touched had this staying power—they didn’t feel like disposable hits. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/30/if-this-aint-love/ Mon, 30 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/28/halo/ There’s a moment a few minutes into this where Abigail Wyles’s voice sits right on top of the production—not over it, not buried beneath it, just there in the space it finds. Benjamin Damage and Doc Daneeka build something patient underneath, the kind of electronic track that doesn’t announce itself but lets you settle into it. The thing about good production like this is that it doesn’t feel like work. You’re not aware of the choices while you’re listening, which means the choices are working. By the third listen you start catching what they did with the frequencies, the way they left space for the vocal, and by then you’re already gone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/28/halo/ Sat, 28 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/28/navy-zimbabwe/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/28/navy-zimbabwe/ Sat, 28 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/28/jessica-in-the-garden/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/28/jessica-in-the-garden/ Sat, 28 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/27/blood-sister/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/27/blood-sister/ Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/27/weekend-missions/ Here we are. Another weekend right on schedule. Your freedom’s waiting—no school, no work, no TV network controlling what you think about yourself. One more episode of something and you’ll crack the code to everything. You won’t, but the thought’s nice anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/27/weekend-missions/ Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/27/a-dark-god-heart/ Sleep Party People make music that feels like being alone in the best way possible. There’s no aggression to it, no performative sadness—just lush production and voices that sound like they’re admitting something true. I’ve always appreciated how they don’t oversell their own darkness. It’s just there, available if you need it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/27/a-dark-god-heart/ Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/26/sleigh-bells-comeback-kid/ Sleigh Bells hit at the right moment—that mid-2000s surge where everything distorted and electronic sounded like the future. Alexis Krauss’s voice cutting through all that noise felt like a conversation happening in the middle of a car crash. You listened obsessively for a few years and then just… stopped. The way you do with bands that burn bright and then become library clutter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/26/sleigh-bells-comeback-kid/ Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/26/fear-my-vagina/ Cam Damage doesn’t soften anything. She makes work about sex, about her body, about the explicit business of it all, and she doesn’t dress it up or apologize. There’s something unsettling about that directness if you’re used to everything being packaged for mass appeal—but that’s the point. She’s doing what most performers won’t: owning it completely. No metaphor, no irony buffer, no distance. Just this is what I do. That refusal to be ashamed sits with you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/26/fear-my-vagina/ Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/26/one-warm-winter/ I remember winter being brutal when you didn’t have a place. The U-Bahn stations would fill up when the temperature dropped. Muschi Kreuzberg, the Berlin label, decided to do something about it. They partnered with Strassenfeger, a magazine by and for homeless people, and organized “One Warm Winter.” The idea was direct: old winter jackets that took up space in your closet could go to people who actually needed them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/26/one-warm-winter/ Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/24/hannah-in-the-graveyard/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/24/hannah-in-the-graveyard/ Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/24/kill-the-morning/ Some nights there’s nothing to do but go under. Home’s too small, problems won’t stop, the noise in my head is unbearable. So I kill the sound of my own thoughts and turn something else up—loud enough to be the only thing that matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/24/kill-the-morning/ Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/24/woodkid-in-paris/ Sometime in the early 2010s, every tech company and media brand decided streaming concerts could be interactive. Fans would vote on the setlist, the stage colors, what songs the artist would play. It was participatory culture, or that’s what they called it. Someone somewhere would be the biggest fan, the most dedicated voter, and they’d get a song dedicated to them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/24/woodkid-in-paris/ Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/23/uno-uno/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/23/uno-uno/ Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/23/skins-season-six/ The season opens with Morocco. Drugs and freedom and lost virginity and the kind of casual cruelty only teenagers can manage. Then the shock: Grace gets tangled with some rich drug dealer and it all collapses. Matty runs. And you’re back in the grey suffocating world of Franky and Mini and all of them—back in that teenage reality where every choice echoes and mistakes become permanent. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/23/skins-season-six/ Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/23/stupid-hoe/ Nicki appeared in 2010 already knowing exactly what she wanted to be—crude, sexual, and as aggressive as anyone around her. The song is built on nothing but confidence and hostility, just her voice over minimal production, staking out territory. What struck me was the complete lack of apology in it. She wasn’t trying to be clever or relatable, wasn’t asking the audience for anything. Just hostile, explicit, and in total control. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/23/stupid-hoe/ Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/21/whats-still-beautiful/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/21/whats-still-beautiful/ Sat, 21 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/20/flamingo-berlin/ Palina Rojinski was on stage at Flamingo Berlin exactly like you’d want her to be—completely committed to the moment, not performing the idea of performance but actually doing it. The night was supposedly a launch party for some Adidas website about culture and music. You know what those are: a brand trying to seem relevant by proximity to real artists, polished surfaces, press releases hiding inside the event itself. But Palina wasn’t interested in that. She was there to make something happen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/20/flamingo-berlin/ Fri, 20 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/20/foe/ Lanthimos made a film about a couple in South Africa interrupted by a stranger who arrives to upend their carefully maintained arrangement. It’s exactly as unsettling as you’d expect—dialogue slightly off, light relentless and flat, bodies observed and observing. Mescal and Ronan move through it like they’re in glass. By the end you’re not sure what you actually watched or if understanding it was ever the point. The film works on you anyway, in a way that’s not comfortable but is effective. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/20/foe/ Fri, 20 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/20/ten-little-missions/ I found this old list somewhere—a collection of weekend missions, each one more ridiculous than the last, each one supposedly mandatory. Join a Berlin-only social network that’d be a ghost town by next month. Watch a porn star documentary, then stick to amateur videos with your heavy-set friend. Watch the Lana Del Rey SNL performance with the sound off—please God, with the sound off. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/20/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 20 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/19/santigold-big-mouth/ Santigold doesn’t make music for people who need things explained. There’s always this tightness to her work, even when it’s loud—a sense she’s holding back something sharper underneath. The title alone tells you where this is going. She’s been doing this long enough that I know she’s not interested in being polite about anything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/19/santigold-big-mouth/ Thu, 19 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/18/moni-haworths-darklands/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/18/moni-haworths-darklands/ Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/18/rusko-somebody-to-love/ Rusko’s dubstep hits different when you’re alone in a room with the bass turned up loud enough to feel it in your ribs. There’s this moment in the track where everything drops and rebuilds itself into something almost vulnerable, which shouldn’t work for a producer known for skull-crushing wobbles and distortion, but it does. The UK bass movement never quite stayed still long enough to explain itself to people who needed it explained, and Rusko was always more interested in the wreck than the rules anyway. This one stays with you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/18/rusko-somebody-to-love/ Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/18/how-close-we-came/ SOPA was the Stop Online Piracy Act, which sounds like something that should exist, until you read what it actually did. A congressman named Lamar S. Smith had written this proposal that would let the US government block websites, remove them from search engines, cut off their ad revenue, and make them inaccessible to Americans—not just the piracy sites, but anything that contained even one piece of copyrighted material someone decided was illegally uploaded. YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr, Reddit, Wikipedia. Any site where users could post content. All of it would be on the table. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/18/how-close-we-came/ Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/17/lele-saveri-and-brandee-brown/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/17/lele-saveri-and-brandee-brown/ Tue, 17 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/17/sébastien-tellier-pépito-bleu/ Tellier’s voice on these tracks has this floating quality—not quite ethereal, more like he’s singing from inside a warm room with the windows open. Pépito Bleu moves without rushing, French-language pop that doesn’t feel like it needs to prove anything to you. There’s a kind of contentment in it, almost meditative in how the arrangements sit, giving you space to actually listen instead of demanding your attention. It’s the sort of thing that gets better the more you hear it, the kind of record that feels like it was made for late afternoon or early evening, when the day’s done but the light’s still around. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/17/sébastien-tellier-pépito-bleu/ Tue, 17 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/16/john-kilar-whats-the-matter-with-you-boy/ He moves between platforms, between visions, between what he announces and what he actually builds. It feels like a hunt for something specific—a problem only he can see. Maybe he’s found it. Maybe he’s still looking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/16/john-kilar-whats-the-matter-with-you-boy/ Mon, 16 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/16/searching-for-wifi/ I spent a week traveling around—different cities, hotels, airports, people everywhere sweating and smoking and taking up space. The one thing every place had in common: no internet. Not really. Not when I needed it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/16/searching-for-wifi/ Mon, 16 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/12/sky-ferreira-whos-that-girl/ She emerged in the early 2010s with this sleek electronic-pop sound that made anyone with taste take notice, even if not that many people were actually listening. Her album “Night Time, My Time” was the kind of thing that felt too specific, too carefully crafted to ever go mainstream—but then, she wasn’t making things for the charts. What strikes me about her work is how genuine it all feels. The videos, the production, the aesthetic—it reads like something that came from somewhere real, not assembled from a Pinterest board. That kind of integrity is rarer than it should be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/12/sky-ferreira-whos-that-girl/ Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/11/i-know-that-we-are-young/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/11/i-know-that-we-are-young/ Wed, 11 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/10/sandy-kim-just-you-and-i/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/10/sandy-kim-just-you-and-i/ Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/10/the-berlin-type/ I moved to Berlin thinking I was immune. Turns out everyone thinks that—it’s part of the guarantee the city makes you. Within a year you’re in some gallery basement that used to be a bathhouse, drinking wine that costs nine euros because the bottle’s ugly, nodding at people you’ve seen three hundred times but never spoken to. The thing about hipsterdom in Berlin is that it’s so complete, so inevitable, that pretending you’re above it just makes you complicit in a different way. You become ironic about your own participation, which the city has already accounted for. It’s not that Berlin turns you into a hipster. It’s that Berlin is a city built specifically so that becoming a hipster feels like having no other choice. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/10/the-berlin-type/ Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/9/nerd-pilgrimage/ Twenty hours of flying—stops in London and LA—and I finally made it to Vegas. Apparently I’m staying in a villa that MTV used for some reality show, crammed in with twenty other bloggers who had the audacity to start a website. Oliver from Zeitgeschmack is here. Simon from Blogwerk. Anna from Hi-Tech. You get the picture. Some of the others are probably already lost in whatever nightclub or bar passes for fun in this place. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/9/nerd-pilgrimage/ Mon, 09 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/9/mixtape-only-your-cat-loves-you/ Sitting alone at home, wondering what happened. The party invitations come through—decent ones, people I actually like—and I still choose the couch. Getting older, I’m thinking seriously about getting a cat, just something that loves you back without asking for anything in return. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/9/mixtape-only-your-cat-loves-you/ Mon, 09 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/9/tongue-out/ A Terry Richardson photo of Charlotte Free: tongue out, that familiar provocation. What gets me is the complicity. His camera makes you feel like you’re getting away with something, and maybe that’s the whole point. Free looks like she’s in on it—or maybe she’s just accepted that this is what his lens does. Either way, it sticks with you. Not because it’s beautiful. Because you can’t quite shake the feeling that you shouldn’t be looking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/9/tongue-out/ Mon, 09 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/7/somebody-that-i-used-to-know/ I first heard Walk Off The Earth’s version when it was everywhere online, and it took me a while to realize why it worked so well. Gotye’s original is all restraint and distance—a song about the strangeness of encountering someone from your past. They turned it into something participatory and alive, all those loops building up until the whole thing is a collective stomp. Same song, but where Gotye was examining the feeling, they were inviting you into it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/7/somebody-that-i-used-to-know/ Sat, 07 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/7/katawa-shoujo/ Raita was one of those girls in class who drew manga constantly. Pages and pages of terrible action poses and love triangles ripped straight from Sailor Moon. She’d show you her work with this desperate hope, and you’d say it was good because you didn’t have the heart to be honest. But she was getting better, which made watching the progression almost interesting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/7/katawa-shoujo/ Sat, 07 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/7/dandelion/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/7/dandelion/ Sat, 07 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/6/laura-lynn-petricks-god-bless-america/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/6/laura-lynn-petricks-god-bless-america/ Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/6/weekend-missions/ First week of the year wasn’t completely awful. Came in drunk, sure, but the days had a nice drift to them. Now it’s the weekend—if you’re not completely exhausted, here are some genuinely stupid things worth trying. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/6/weekend-missions/ Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/6/king-krule-portrait-in-black-and-blue/ King Krule’s music sounds like someone’s interior collapsing in real time. That scratched voice of his, the way he staggers between whisper and scream, makes you feel like you’re eavesdropping on something you shouldn’t hear. He pulls from punk and hip-hop and soul without announcing it, which is the whole point. There’s weight to everything he does—you can feel whatever’s eating at him bleeding through every track. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/6/king-krule-portrait-in-black-and-blue/ Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/6/palina-edits/ Adidas hired Palina Rojinski to edit a fashion website they called News for Original Girls. It was 2012, Berlin Fashion Week timing, and the whole thing was premised on the idea that girls who liked fashion could also have an actual brain, that you didn’t have to choose. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/6/palina-edits/ Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/5/jessie-andrews/ She entered the industry as a teenager, did the work, and then did something most people from that world don’t do—she talked about it honestly, about how it functions and what it costs. Not a redemption narrative or a cautionary tale, just a refusal to be nothing but the image. That takes a specific kind of nerve. Most figures in adult entertainment either vanish or become the product forever. Andrews claimed something different: the right to be known as the person behind the work, not just the work itself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/5/jessie-andrews/ Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/5/japan-before-me/ Four thousand photographs from a week in Japan. Mike Matas traveled through Kyoto, Nara, Hakone, and Tokyo in late November with his girlfriend, riding trains between temples and tea houses and markets. Instead of filing all those images away, they made them into a video with some tinkling piano music underneath. The kind of thing you watch and feel that specific ache, knowing someone else got there first and got to live in it for a week. Japan is one of those places that haunts you even when you haven’t been, and watching someone else’s footage just makes it worse. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/5/japan-before-me/ Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/5/on-trolls/ There’s this specific moment that gets me every time. Someone writes something mean in a comment—an attack on how you look, what you think, the work you do—and you know they’d never say it to your face. Not because they’re too polite, but because they’d lose their nerve. The anonymity is everything. Without it, they’re nobody. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/5/on-trolls/ Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/4/still-listening-to-iron-wine/ There’s something about coming back to Sam Beam’s fingerpicking after years away—the precision of it, every note exactly where it needs to be, nothing wasted. It’s patient music, the kind that asks something of you. Not aggressively, just quietly, in the way someone sits across from you and won’t look away. You find yourself listening differently in your forties than you did at twenty-five. Not better, just less defensive about it. Less worried about what it says about you to want something so gentle, so small, so honest about its own sadness. That’s what folk music is, I guess—an argument that feeling things carefully is its own kind of strength. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/4/still-listening-to-iron-wine/ Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/4/youth-lagoon-three-am/ Youth Lagoon makes the kind of music that dissolves before you can fully understand it. Everything is so densely layered and dreamy that it feels private, like you’re listening to someone’s mind working rather than a finished composition. I found most of their catalog by stumbling around at weird hours of the night and never really left. That July especially, I kept coming back—not because I was analyzing anything, just because the sound made more sense than whatever was actually happening around me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/4/youth-lagoon-three-am/ Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/4/the-machinery/ When the Wulff thing happened—when Germany’s president got caught calling newspaper editors to kill a story about his house credit—I watched something unfold that actually frightened me. The speed. The way people who normally think of themselves as smart and cultured just surrendered to it, no questions asked. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/4/the-machinery/ Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/4/arvida-byström-hairy-lolita/ Arvida Byström makes photographs that look deliberately ugly in a way that matters. She photographs her own body—hairy, messy, unglamorous—and the provocation isn’t about shocking people for shock’s sake. It’s about refusing the idea that a woman’s body, especially one that’s supposed to appeal to men, needs to be smooth or polished or fuckable on demand. The title references Nabokov, but that’s almost beside the point. What matters is the refusal. The hair, the angles, the plainness of it. She looks at the camera like she’s not performing anything for anyone, and that’s rare in photography, where even the most experimental work often ends up being about some kind of gaze. Her work is about its own gaze. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/4/arvida-byström-hairy-lolita/ Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/3/the-money-diet/ I’m pretty sure the international society of couch-bound slobs voted me their president. I don’t exercise. I eat like someone who’s completely given up. I’d probably spend weeks fused to my sofa if I wasn’t vaguely afraid of what would happen after. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/3/the-money-diet/ Tue, 03 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/3/shady-love/ The Scissor Sisters made pop music that wasn’t trying to be something else. ’Shady Love’ is pure gloss and beat, total theater, and that’s the whole appeal. I’ve never understood people who need their pop to hide under irony or reach for some deeper meaning. Sometimes the surface is the entire point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/3/shady-love/ Tue, 03 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/3/chloes-curves/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/3/chloes-curves/ Tue, 03 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/2/new-years-eve-with-bonnie-strange/ Bonnie Strange throws the kind of New Year’s Eve thing that doesn’t feel like an obligation. Everyone’s actually interesting, nobody’s trying too hard, and the night just moves right—no forced countdowns, no resolution talk, just people with actual taste spending an evening together. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/2/new-years-eve-with-bonnie-strange/ Mon, 02 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/2/nothing-there/ Sat across from her at that place downtown and knew within five minutes it wasn’t happening. Not because anything was wrong exactly—she was fine, smart enough, looked like her pictures. But there was nothing there, no spark, no reason to be sitting in those particular chairs at that particular moment instead of literally anywhere else. You go through the motions anyway because bailing early feels worse than staying, so you order a drink you don’t want and ask questions you already know the answers to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/2/nothing-there/ Mon, 02 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/2/goodbye-grooveshark/ By early 2012, Grooveshark had become unusable. Not slowly—it crossed some threshold where the ads and crashes and vanishing songs outweighed whatever had made it worth using in the first place. Ringtone ads everywhere. Pages that would freeze. Playlists breaking for no reason, tracks suddenly flagged as unavailable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2012/1/2/goodbye-grooveshark/ Mon, 02 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/30/ten-little-missions/ Last one of these for the year, so here’s the full collection. A hundred-song playlist you’re supposed to listen to straight through—your computer will definitely die in the attempt. Weird anonymous sex with internet strangers, the kind where you might accidentally send your intimate confessions to a family member or that teacher you hated. Only throwing trash in containers where it explicitly says you can’t. Letting someone teach you how to dance to electronic music and then spending the whole night falling for them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/30/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 30 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/27/dan-cermak-did-it/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/27/dan-cermak-did-it/ Tue, 27 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/27/delilah/ Tom Jones singing about a woman who destroys him and he keeps coming back anyway. That’s the whole thing—the obsession, the anger, the way she’s both the problem and the only thing that matters. It’s overwrought and theatrical and completely sincere, which is why it works. The song doesn’t explain anything or ask for sympathy. It just shows you a man undone by someone he can’t leave, and lets that speak for itself. There’s something true in that mess. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/27/delilah/ Tue, 27 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/27/back-in-the-void/ My Facebook account got nuked a month ago. Deleted, blocked, deactivated—I still don’t know which, and Mark didn’t explain. When your job lives online, a month is basically forever. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/27/back-in-the-void/ Tue, 27 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/24/jj-vi/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/24/jj-vi/ Sat, 24 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/24/masanobu-sato/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/24/masanobu-sato/ Sat, 24 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/23/pony-pony-run-run-just-a-song/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/23/pony-pony-run-run-just-a-song/ Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/23/tam-vibberstoft/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/23/tam-vibberstoft/ Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/23/the-antlers/ Christmas shows up in five days and I haven’t bought anything except lottery tickets and warm beer from the same gas station everyone’s crowding into. The gift selection there is almost perfect if you’re not trying—scratched-up chocolates, magazines you’d never admit to owning, an energy drink in the wrong flavor. It works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/23/the-antlers/ Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/22/arcade-country/ Kids packed into neon boxes with coins in their pockets, hands on joysticks, eyes locked on screens glowing through smoke and cabinet speakers. That was everywhere else—Asia, America, Europe—while Germany got regulation-killed before the culture even took root. Legal crackdowns on youth gambling addiction strangled it in the crib, the surviving arcades turned into dingy adult places, and by the time home consoles arrived it was already gone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/22/arcade-country/ Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/22/perfume-the-music-drug/ If you can’t get actual drugs or you’ve had your stash confiscated, there’s always Perfume. They’re a Japanese electro-pop group from Hiroshima—three people: Ayano Ōmoto, Yuka Kashino, and Ayaka Nishiwaki—and they make music that sounds like it was built in a lab specifically to liquify your brain. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/22/perfume-the-music-drug/ Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/22/lykke-li-the-lost-sessions-vol-1/ I’ve burned out on most of the artists everyone went crazy for. James Blake doesn’t work for me anymore. Lana Del Rey can keep it. Tyler, the Creator, Casper—not my guy. But Lykke Li I keep coming back to, even when I’m supposed to be over it. There’s something in her voice, this rawness, the way she doesn’t hide anything, that just works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/22/lykke-li-the-lost-sessions-vol-1/ Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/22/holiday-costumes/ There’s something uniquely disorienting about a Christmas party where everyone’s in costume. You’re supposed to be festive and present, but you’re also performing a version of yourself that feels both more true and more false than usual. I went to one years ago where half the room showed up as sexy versions of things that shouldn’t be sexy—animals, professions, whatever. It was ridiculous and kind of perfect. The effort people put into looking good while pretending not to care, the way a costume gives you permission to be weirder or more forward than you normally would—that’s always gotten to me. There’s a whole language of disguise and desire wrapped up in it. Now I mostly stay home and look at other people’s photos, which feels more honest somehow. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/22/holiday-costumes/ Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/21/when-jesus-drops/ There’s a point in every Christmas afternoon when the family is sitting around bloated and satisfied, and someone puts on “Silent Night” or whatever, and the room goes quiet. Tradition, restraint, the old songs everyone’s heard a hundred times. The holiday works because of that moment. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/21/when-jesus-drops/ Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/21/deichkind-illegale-fans/ Deichkind are the kind of band you’d listen to in a friend’s car and immediately understand why they’re worth your time. German electronic music that’s satirical and deliberately absurd, technically sharp while acting like it doesn’t take itself seriously—except it clearly does. ’Illegale Fans’ probably points at something about devotion that can’t be controlled or commodified, which fits their whole project perfectly. They’re smarter than their jokes, which is exactly why the jokes work. I like artists who don’t need you to like them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/21/deichkind-illegale-fans/ Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/21/2011/ Looking back at a year of writing, what I remember isn’t the articles themselves but the gaps between them—the months when nothing seemed worth saying, and then suddenly a string of pieces that all landed in a few weeks. 2011 was scattered. Fractured in a way that felt honest at the time. I was writing about whatever caught my attention: a film, a thought about design, some piece of culture that wouldn’t let go. No agenda, no grand narrative. Just trying to document what mattered when it mattered. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/21/2011/ Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/21/cookies-that-look-like-shit/ I remember Christmas baking like it’s one of those things where you convince yourself it might work just because someone competent is there. Lena actually knew what she was doing. Janos came along for the ride. Thang helped knead the dough while we mixed schnaps into coffee and stood around drinking it. Chris Rea played in the background. December doesn’t give you a choice about Chris Rea. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/21/cookies-that-look-like-shit/ Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/20/gif-me-berlin/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/20/gif-me-berlin/ Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/20/black-white-small/ There’s something about pixel designs in black and white that strips everything down to pure geometry. No color to distract you, no texture or gradient—just the grid, the constraint of square units, the way pixels force you into honest shapes. The clothes work because they don’t try to be anything else. You wear them and you’re not performing minimalism or paying homage to computer culture. It’s just clean lines and small repeating forms. The kind of thing that feels right whether you’re scrolling through code or walking around the neighborhood. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/20/black-white-small/ Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/20/the-endpoint/ Renée mentioned this British series to me, Black Mirror. I watched it because the UK had been putting out genuinely good stuff—Skins, Misfits, The Inbetweeners—and she said this was different. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/20/the-endpoint/ Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/19/las-vegas/ MTV and Microsoft are sending me to Las Vegas in early January for the International CES. For anyone who doesn’t follow the tech world, it’s basically the IFA but American—bigger, louder, absolutely certain that revolutionary products are about to change everything. Casino halls full of speeches from Google and Facebook and Sony, every gaming company and film studio showing off their latest thing. The standard hype machine about the future of living rooms and kitchens and bedrooms. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/19/las-vegas/ Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/19/the-quiet-weeks/ When the cold sets in and darkness arrives by mid-afternoon, that’s when it all surfaces. Where the year actually went. Who I’ve lost, who’s come into my life. What I missed and what I somehow grabbed anyway. Whether any of it’s made me happier. Whether I’m even asking the right question. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/19/the-quiet-weeks/ Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/16/pointless-weekend/ The year’s ending. A few weekends left and nothing really matters anymore, so why not spend them on something completely pointless? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/16/pointless-weekend/ Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/16/earth-girls-are-easy/ There’s something about a musical that commits completely to its own absurdity, no apologies, that makes you respect it even when it shouldn’t work. Earth Girls Are Easy is this Technicolor fever dream from 1988, all neon and glitter and sex jokes, a ’50s pastiche that doesn’t bother pretending it’s anything other than what it is. Jeff Goldblum in a full captain’s outfit, aliens landing in the San Fernando Valley, a musical number in a nail salon—it’s silly and knowingly so, and that confidence makes it work. You watch it and realize nobody was trying to make something smart or edgy. They just wanted to make something fun that felt a little dangerous, a little raunchy, a little queer in ways you couldn’t quite name back then. It’s the kind of movie that probably felt like permission to some people. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/16/earth-girls-are-easy/ Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/16/how-not-to-talk-to-an-angel/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/16/how-not-to-talk-to-an-angel/ Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/15/born-to-die/ Born to Die worked because of the frame—every song sat in this thick cinematic space, all Americana and glamorous decay, sadness you could actually inhabit. The production was heavy and dense, everything sounding like the end of something. The whole album had this visual quality, like you were living inside a specific aesthetic rather than just listening to music. It mattered because it showed pop music working as design language, as architecture you move through rather than just hear. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/15/born-to-die/ Thu, 15 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/15/the-surface-of-a-city/ There’s a moment where your brain short-circuits seeing yarn covering a fence in the middle of the city. That’s the effect Sheila Pepe is going for. Brooklyn-based, she’s been wrapping parts of New York in knitting for years—bus stops, bollards, chain-link, whatever public infrastructure isn’t nailed down. Careful geometric patterns, dense enough that you can see the labor. It’s street art without the spray cans, without claiming territory. Just surface texture where there wasn’t any before. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/15/the-surface-of-a-city/ Thu, 15 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/14/mystical-playground/ The Avantgarde/Diaries’ Mystical Playground works like a dream—all surreal logic and private references, not bothering to make sense for anyone but itself. I’m drawn to that kind of work, the stuff that doesn’t apologize for being strange, that trusts you to find your own way through. There’s something honest about that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/14/mystical-playground/ Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/14/teenage-meat/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/14/teenage-meat/ Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/12/the-rapture-still/ The Rapture were one of those post-punk bands that made the genre feel alive again when it had been pretty thoroughly dead. They showed up around the mid-2000s with this urgent, fractured sound—dense and tight and a little frayed at the edges. When I first heard them, something clicked. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/12/the-rapture-still/ Mon, 12 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/12/split-brain/ Somewhere along the way, the blog stopped sounding like me. Not because anyone forced it—it just happened as the thing grew. It became a publication: curated, professional, with an image and an audience. I found myself unable to just post anything without worrying about how it would land. A stupid photo. A tangential thought. A random link. Everything had to be an article. Had to fit. Had to matter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/12/split-brain/ Mon, 12 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/8/girls-with-games/ There’s something different about games made by women for women—they don’t go through all the usual filters. No guessing, no justifying, no fantasy. Just something made with someone specific in mind. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/8/girls-with-games/ Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/8/tumblr-fever/ When you’re sick at home with a fever, you do stupid things. You mix cough syrup with whipped cream and chase it with warm beer. You binge eight seasons of Little House on the Prairie like it’s going to save your life. Or you find yourself scrolling Tumblr for hours, which might actually be worse. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/8/tumblr-fever/ Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/8/creatures/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/8/creatures/ Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/8/getting-through/ When life keeps taking shots—taxes, lawyers, your mom nagging about chores—the only escape is music that makes you feel like everything’s a musical. That was my week. Everything looks better when there’s a beat under it. So here’s what actually got me through. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/8/getting-through/ Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/7/kyary-pamyu-pamyu-tsukema-tsukeru/ Kyary makes pop music that feels like permission to want things without overthinking them. Everything’s oversaturated, clearly artificial, whatever appeals to her stacked together. No apology, no self-consciousness about it. ’Tsukema Tsukeru’ is exactly that—color and sound and movement built as high as they’ll go. There’s a real confidence in that kind of maximalism. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/7/kyary-pamyu-pamyu-tsukema-tsukeru/ Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/7/tennis-deep-in-the-woods/ There’s something unreal about a tennis court cut into the forest. The hard surface sits there like an implant among all that brown and green, the net dividing a rectangle of space that was never meant to exist. You lose the ball constantly in the trees. The silence between points gets heavier each time, and you realize you’ve driven out here not to play well but to play somewhere no one else is around. It’s the same game, the same rules, the same pointless chase, but stripping away the audience strips away whatever I thought I was doing on a court in the city. Out there, there’s nothing to prove and no one to prove it to. Just the ball and the trees and whatever I needed to think about badly enough to make the drive. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/7/tennis-deep-in-the-woods/ Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/5/south-park-the-rpg/ There’s this South Park episode where Stan’s dad accidentally swaps the rental cases—comes home with a copy of Lord of the Rings and the hardest porn he could find, and somehow the kids end up with the porn while trying to recover it dressed as little medieval characters. That’s the kind of chaos that lives in your head forever. It was the first thing I thought of when I heard they were actually making a proper South Park RPG. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/5/south-park-the-rpg/ Mon, 05 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/5/grimes-nightmusic/ Grimes makes music that sounds like it’s being transmitted through a system designed to scramble or beautify or maybe destroy whatever passes through it. Nightmusic fits the pattern—electronic arrangements so dense they feel sculptural, her voice folded into the texture rather than floating above it, everything precisely layered but never quite resolved. You listen and you believe she’s reaching for something, even when the message stays partially encrypted. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/5/grimes-nightmusic/ Mon, 05 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/3/let-them-come/ Scroobius Pip made music for people who were thinking too much and not comfortable about it. With Dan le Sac the project felt inevitable, but his solo work since has been harder to pin down—less polished, stranger, more willing to fail. There’s something about refusing to play it safe that makes him worth following even when it doesn’t all land. Thou Shalt Always Kill is still the song that cuts deepest, the kind of thing that makes you feel like you’re not alone in your anger. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/3/let-them-come/ Sat, 03 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/2/ten-little-missions/ Outside was a waste. Wet streets, gray sky, people who’d given up before the weekend even started. I had no idea if there was anything else out there. So I made a list of things to do—ten stupid things, just enough to keep from losing it indoors or getting lost out there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/2/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 02 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/2/marry-the-night/ “Marry The Night” is Gaga stripped down to pure devotion—the 4am version, when it’s just you and your ambition with no one watching. The video doesn’t flinch from how unhinged that looks, the sweat and isolation. It’s the kind of thing that gets to you if you’re the type to need that intensity. I used to think you’d outgrow it, but I think you just learn where to pour it instead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/2/marry-the-night/ Fri, 02 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/2/cheese-pizza-and-mario-kart/ Sarah Brandner asked what I’d put in her Advent calendar and I actually spent nights thinking about it. Like, real nights where I couldn’t sleep. What do you give to someone like that? Nothing made sense until it did: a cheese pizza and Mario Kart. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/2/cheese-pizza-and-mario-kart/ Fri, 02 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/2/mona-ødegård-bakes/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/2/mona-ødegård-bakes/ Fri, 02 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/1/lykke-li-youth-knows-no-pain/ Lykke Li’s voice cracks in exactly the right places. Her production knows when to pull back. There’s no mystery to hide behind in her songs—just someone being straight about wanting, about loss, the small devastating observations about what it means to be attached to the wrong person. You listen to her at three in the morning and you feel less alone, which is both the best and worst thing a song can do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/1/lykke-li-youth-knows-no-pain/ Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/1/somethings-got-to-give/ At 15:36 I slammed my head on the desk, folded my arms over it, and stayed there. Thirty minutes. I wasn’t quite crying, but I was close. I just couldn’t do it anymore. Finished. Done. Over. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/12/1/somethings-got-to-give/ Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/30/keep-me-waiting/ Cymbals Eat Guitars never let anything settle. Their songs wind tight and bright, all restless energy with no payoff, which is exactly what makes them work. You listen and you’re instantly uncomfortable, waiting for the moment it snaps and it never does. It’s infuriating. It’s perfect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/30/keep-me-waiting/ Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/30/mark-hunters-cobra-shop/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/30/mark-hunters-cobra-shop/ Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/30/one-after-another/ I watch shows differently than most people. Some series only make sense if you consume them in bulk—one episode after another, whole seasons at a time. Not one per week like that’s supposed to happen. When you watch that way, the characters come alive in a different way. You’re inside their world for hours at a stretch. The relationships breathe. Everything compounds, and by the end you’re completely wrecked. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/30/one-after-another/ Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/29/the-proof/ You build something bigger than a hobby and they show up. Trolls. Not when it’s still just your friends and the handful of people who actually want to be there—but once you hit a certain visibility, once things start working, they arrive. They’re not here to engage. They’re here to ruin it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/29/the-proof/ Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/29/hey-sparrow/ Peaking Lights’ thing is making you feel like you’re remembering something that never happened. The synths sit there in that particular kind of murk they favor, the vocals drift across the top, and somehow six minutes pass and you’re thinking about someone you haven’t seen in years. Hey Sparrow does what it does. I respect music that knows exactly what it is and doesn’t apologize for it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/29/hey-sparrow/ Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/29/olek-the-surface-of-a-city/ Polish artist Olek covers city surfaces in knit. Buildings, taxis, utility boxes, anything with a perimeter. Bright colors, repetitive patterns, thick enough that you can’t miss it. The knit sits on the hard geometry of the city like an argument—soft against rigid, handmade against municipal code. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/29/olek-the-surface-of-a-city/ Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/29/dan-martensens-america/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/29/dan-martensens-america/ Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/29/cee-lo-green-anyway/ There’s something about the way Cee Lo Green’s voice sits in a mix—it’s almost too much, too present, demanding you hear every flex and every hurt at once. You listen to him and you get the sense that he doesn’t care if you’re ready for it. He’ll sing over a Danger Mouse production or some soulful thing that should collapse under that much personality, but it doesn’t, because the voice is doing something honest underneath all the showboating. The title says it all, I think. “Anyway.” Not defiant, exactly. Just the sound of someone who’s made peace with the fact that he’s going to be himself regardless of the circumstance, and yeah, maybe nobody asked for it, but here it is. That’s not nothing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/29/cee-lo-green-anyway/ Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/28/the-tavern-route/ The taverns in the mountains are dark and warm, the kind of places where strangers become company by the second drink. You stop tracking which village you’re in after a while—the point isn’t the route, it’s the room itself. The green bottle, the local voices, the mountains invisible outside the windows. By night the whole world is just the bar, and that’s enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/28/the-tavern-route/ Mon, 28 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/28/young-wild-free/ That hook hits different when you’re actually young enough to believe in it. Snoop’s voice drifting over that simple, locked-in beat, Bruno Mars on the chorus like he’s reminding you that feeling good is allowed to be that easy. The whole thing moves like it has nowhere to be and doesn’t care. There’s a casualness to it that was hard to find in hip-hop at the time—no stunting, no pressure, just the idea that your life doesn’t have to prove anything to anyone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/28/young-wild-free/ Mon, 28 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/25/the-knowing/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/25/the-knowing/ Fri, 25 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/25/two-days/ Friday hits and you’ve got two days stretching ahead with nothing particular to fill them. This is supposed to feel liberating, but it mostly just feels empty. The work week’s done, which means you’re finally free to do whatever you want, which turns out to be nothing, or less than nothing. So you invent little missions instead. Weekend projects. Stupid things to accomplish that don’t actually matter but at least they’re something to think about besides Monday. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/25/two-days/ Fri, 25 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/24/silence-bag-raiders-remix/ The Bag Raiders remix does something clever with The Ting Tings’ Silence. The original sits thin and quiet, almost apologetic. The remix doesn’t try to blow it up—it builds density around the emptiness, layer by layer, until the space becomes its own presence. Same song, but now it fills the room. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/24/silence-bag-raiders-remix/ Thu, 24 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/24/i-shot-myself/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/24/i-shot-myself/ Thu, 24 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/23/camille-rowe-deadliest-catch/ Camille Rowe was one of those faces from the mid-2000s that you just remembered—the Strokes video, the editorials, something about the way she carried herself that felt like she knew something everyone else didn’t. Not conventionally pretty, something stranger and better. The kind of model that stays with you because she seemed like herself while everyone else was trying to be what the industry wanted them to be. Deadliest catch. She was never going to be caught. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/23/camille-rowe-deadliest-catch/ Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/23/no-charges-no-trial/ I open my email and Facebook has suspended my account again. They’re very polite about it. The message reads like a form letter—calm, professional, impersonal. Effective immediately, I’m locked out. My profile, my pages, my contacts. All gone. But don’t blame them. They’re just the tech team, just doing their job. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/23/no-charges-no-trial/ Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/23/dominique-young-unique-hype-girl/ Dominique Young Unique is what you want from a hype girl—no irony, no layers of performance, just someone radiating confidence and bringing actual energy. You hear it in how she carries a track, that certainty that we’re all about to have a good time. It’s a thing that either works completely or doesn’t, and when it does, you remember why you love this stuff. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/23/dominique-young-unique-hype-girl/ Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/22/jane-doe/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/22/jane-doe/ Tue, 22 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/22/mishkas-winter/ Mishka’s 2011 holiday collection by Jeremy Jansen. The lookbook was clean and understated—oversized knits that fit right, colors that looked better worn than photographed. The kind of stuff where you don’t need much explanation, just a body and the right temperature. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/22/mishkas-winter/ Tue, 22 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/21/minnie/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/21/minnie/ Mon, 21 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/19/no-light-no-light/ I’ve returned to this song more times than I’d like to admit, always at night, always when something hurt enough that I wanted to sit with it awhile. The track swallows you—that orchestral swell, Florence’s voice climbing into something desperate and beautiful and completely broken. It’s a song about wanting to drown in someone, about the logic of devotion even when it destroys you, and there’s something so honest about the way it refuses to resolve. You don’t get catharsis here. You get the cold clarity of someone who knows they should leave and won’t. That matters. Most music about heartbreak wants to comfort you or fire you up. This one just sits in the dark with you and doesn’t pretend it gets better. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/19/no-light-no-light/ Sat, 19 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/18/ten-little-missions/ Friday hits and your brain just stops. The machinery shuts down—school, work, all of it. For the next couple of days, if you’re lucky, you stop being the version of yourself that thinks before acting. The ideas start coming: write down something brilliant for a new social network, the one that’ll change everything, and then tear the paper to pieces and flush it down the toilet, because we’re drowning in those already. Go back and finally finish those Zelda dungeons that took something from you just to beat them. Buy a princess while you’re at it. Eat enough pizza to justify calling it a vegetable—it’s official somewhere in America now. Watch Tim Burton for six hours straight and let it dissolve into your skin. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/18/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/18/happy-birthday-webcam/ The webcam was a mirror that made you look at yourself in the worst possible light, catching every angle you weren’t ready to see. Low resolution didn’t help—it just made you worse in a more honest way. But it also let you step into someone else’s space without leaving yours, or have them step into yours. That was the whole invention. Not the technology, but the possibility of it. The idea that you could put your face somewhere you weren’t and have someone put theirs where you were. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/18/happy-birthday-webcam/ Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/18/the-good-life/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/18/the-good-life/ Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/18/the-naked-and-famous-pass/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/18/the-naked-and-famous-pass/ Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/17/november-sorted/ November split into two columns. What worked and what didn’t. Nothing sat in between. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/17/november-sorted/ Thu, 17 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/17/babes-on-wheels/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/17/babes-on-wheels/ Thu, 17 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/17/sky-ferreira-traces/ Sky Ferreira’s music has always been half-hidden, something you find rather than something that announces itself. There’s intelligence in that refusal to make things easy for the listener. Traces sounds like it follows that same logic—something partial, something that only reveals itself if you’re actually paying attention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/17/sky-ferreira-traces/ Thu, 17 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/16/made-for-tokyo/ I’ve worn Superstars long enough that they’ve stopped feeling like a purchase and started feeling like a fact about me. Black leather, that rubber shell at the toe, the sole wearing in patterns that seem universal to the shoe. There’s no ambition in them—they don’t promise anything fancy, don’t hide anything beneath a layer of tech. Just a shoe that looks right whether you’re twenty or forty. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/16/made-for-tokyo/ Wed, 16 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/16/the-pencil-pimp/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/16/the-pencil-pimp/ Wed, 16 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/15/urban-cone-freak/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/15/urban-cone-freak/ Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/15/rasha-kahil-at-home/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/15/rasha-kahil-at-home/ Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/15/two-doors/ I can’t remember the last RPG I played with genuine devotion. Chrono Trigger, maybe. Final Fantasy 9. Or Pokémon—I must have checked every corner of those games a hundred times, looking for more, always more. I was relentless about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/15/two-doors/ Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/15/eylül-aslan-growing-in-the-pulse/ Eylül Aslan made these photographs as part of some project about the future of cities and sustainable food, but what stuck with me was something she said about urban noise. Cities are already full of sound, she said—the pulse of traffic, the breathing of crowds, the rumbling in your gut when you’re hungry. That’s the music of the city. And maybe, she was suggesting, it’s not noise at all. Maybe it’s something plants can use. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/15/eylül-aslan-growing-in-the-pulse/ Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/14/aline-webers-saturday-sun/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/14/aline-webers-saturday-sun/ Mon, 14 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/14/mixtape-time-travel-terror/ Looking back is always embarrassing. Every decade you’ve lived through feels more pathetic in retrospect than the last. The 80s had the perms and studded belts. The early 2000s were some kind of fever dream. But the 90s actually shaped something in me, which makes it harder to laugh at. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/14/mixtape-time-travel-terror/ Mon, 14 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/14/king-krule-the-noose-of-jah-city/ King Krule creates music that sounds like it’s coming from inside a reverb chamber—cold, architectural, sometimes beautiful in a way that feels accidental. The visual work pulls from the same place: dark geometry, blurred photographs, textures that feel like they’re decomposing. What gets me is how deliberately unglamorous it all is, like he decided in advance that you won’t like it much, that you’ll have to work to meet him halfway. No hooks designed to catch you. Just sound and image that would rather alienate than seduce. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/14/king-krule-the-noose-of-jah-city/ Mon, 14 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/14/taste-and-discipline/ I spent way too much time reading German fashion blogs in 2009. Most of them were people in their bedrooms photographing whatever they’d bought from H&M, bad lighting, worse commentary. Then you’d find someone like Lisa who actually knew how to work a camera and had opinions about clothes that weren’t just “here’s what I wore.” The difference wasn’t effort—the bad blogs had plenty of effort. It was precision and taste, which you can’t really fake. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/14/taste-and-discipline/ Mon, 14 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/13/the-one-that-got-away/ That song hits different when you’re alone at night with headphones on. It’s one of those tracks where Katy sounds actually vulnerable instead of performing vulnerability—the production pulls back, and you can hear her thinking through the loss. The whole Teenage Dream album was pop-perfect, but this one landed in a different place, less about the mechanics of heartbreak and more about the specific ache of remembering someone and knowing it’s not coming back. The kind of song that makes you scroll through old photos you should probably delete. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/13/the-one-that-got-away/ Sun, 13 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/11/chloë-sevigny-on-terry-richardson/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/11/chloë-sevigny-on-terry-richardson/ Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/11/mein-land/ Rammstein’s always been honest about what they are—a band that doesn’t apologize for making heavy, violent, sexual music in a language that carries weight. The thing about them is they’re not rebels playing at provocation; they actually commit to it, which is rarer than you’d think. They’ve built this whole visual and sonic world around Germany, around the weight of that history, and they’ve made it theirs instead of running from it or performing guilt. There’s something I respect in that—the refusal to sanitize, the willingness to sit in uncomfortable spaces and make art there anyway. Their songs are these dark, propulsive things that hit you somewhere dumb and primal, and the design of it all, the performances, the imagery, it’s meticulous. It’s not accidental provocation—it’s crafted. I don’t know if I’d want to live inside that worldview, but I know exactly why they built it, and I know it matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/11/mein-land/ Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/10/high-gloss-trash/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/10/high-gloss-trash/ Thu, 10 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/10/theophilus-london-love-is-real/ Theophilus London was making music that actually mattered to him, moving between R&B and rap and pop without apology. His records worked because he meant them. ’Love Is Real’ captures what was essential about his approach—no tricks, no calculation, just the commitment to making something genuine. It’s harder to hold onto that than it seems. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/10/theophilus-london-love-is-real/ Thu, 10 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/9/city-grrl/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/9/city-grrl/ Wed, 09 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/9/der-berg-ruft/ Jägermeister once threw a Wirtshaus tour in the Alps—a beer hall at 1300 meters near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, electronic music and traditional Bavarian drinking games all at once. Disco Heroes and The Teenagers (French synthpop) were headlining. Between sets: drinking games, foosball, darts. They shuttled people up from Munich, put them up in a wellness hotel. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/9/der-berg-ruft/ Wed, 09 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/9/iggy-azalea-my-world/ There was this moment around 2014 when Iggy Azalea’s whole thing felt inevitable and then kind of absurd at the same time. She had the look, the attitude, the production behind her—everything lined up to make her the pop thing that worked. I remember the rollout, the features, the sheer confidence of it all. She was a white Australian rapper in a space that didn’t typically make room for that, and she moved through it like she already owned it. Whether you liked the music or not, you had to respect the nerve. Years later it all cooled pretty fast, as these things do, and the internet memory-holed her harder than it probably needed to. But back then, for a while, she had that thing—that specific moment where you could see exactly why someone would want to be the person everyone was paying attention to. The music’s fine. The real thing was watching someone decide they belonged somewhere and just go. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/9/iggy-azalea-my-world/ Wed, 09 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/8/awesome-tapes-from-africa/ African music in the West arrives pre-packaged: Shakira’s world-music borrowing, Bono’s charity-trip ethnography. The actual cassettes—what was made for local markets, never intended for export—sat completely invisible until I found Awesome Tapes From Africa. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/8/awesome-tapes-from-africa/ Tue, 08 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/8/the-supreme-store/ Walked into the Supreme store in London because I was passing by. Packed, like always—resellers and kids and people who just wanted to see what the fuss was about. Building’s nice, old London architecture that actually suits it. But standing in there I realized how thoroughly Supreme has dissolved into just another brand. They got so good at hype that the hype stopped meaning anything. Everyone still cares, but nobody can remember why. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/8/the-supreme-store/ Tue, 08 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/8/getting-caught/ The Berlin-Brandenburg media authority filed a complaint against this journal for distributing pornographic materials. Specifically, two issues from July linked to adult websites. I didn’t think twice about it when I posted the links, which is exactly the problem. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/8/getting-caught/ Tue, 08 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/7/henrik-and-the-girls/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/7/henrik-and-the-girls/ Mon, 07 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/7/die-antwoord-fok-julle-naaiers/ Die Antwoord showed up in the late 2000s like a bad smell you couldn’t ignore—South African, crude as hell, making music that was equal parts synth-pop and trash-talk, with visuals designed to make you uncomfortable. Ninja and Yo-Landi Vi$$er understood something about provocation that a lot of artists miss: shock only works if you actually mean it, or at least commit hard enough that nobody can tell the difference. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/7/die-antwoord-fok-julle-naaiers/ Mon, 07 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/6/friends-ill-never-meet/ There’s this person whose work you follow, whose voice or vision or style has been part of your thinking for years, and you feel like you know them. You’ve spent hours with what they’ve made. You’ve laughed at their jokes, cried at their stories, been moved by something they created when they had no idea you existed. And that’s it. That’s the whole relationship. You’ll never have coffee with them, never exchange a real conversation, never become actual friends. It’s not sad exactly—it’s just the shape of modern admiration. You’re grateful for what they’ve put into the world, and they’ll never know your name. There’s something clean about it, actually. No disappointment, no awkwardness, just the pure fact of their work mattering to you. I think that’s enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/6/friends-ill-never-meet/ Sun, 06 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/6/anyway-on-television/ I knew way more about America than any American knew about Germany. German textbooks were packed with Columbus looking for shortcuts and finding fat continents, Vikings maybe, who knows. I watched American sitcoms with American families in American cities doing American things—King of Queens, Modern Family, That 70s Show. It’s fashionable now to trash America as a nation of the overfed and warmongering, and sure, that’s not wrong. But I was jealous as hell I wasn’t born there. Specifically because of their schools. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/6/anyway-on-television/ Sun, 06 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/6/how-tarantino-rewires-you/ Kill Bill and you want a sword. Death Proof and you notice feet, like he’s rewired your neurology to see that way. Inglourious Basterds leaves you wrung out. His films don’t let you stay neutral. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/6/how-tarantino-rewires-you/ Sun, 06 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/5/the-cabinet/ Anatoly Moskvina had twenty-six bodies in his apartment. His parents found them when they showed up unannounced—sitting on the couch, lying in the bed, propped up in the closet like roommates. All women. All young, in the way that matters most when you’re dead: teenage girls and women in their twenties. He’d been exhuming them from graveyards across Russia for years, maybe longer, and just leaving them in his apartment to dry out. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/5/the-cabinet/ Sat, 05 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/5/skream-anticipate/ There’s that moment where you refresh and something’s dropped, and you have no idea what it’s going to sound like. Skream’s been moving through electronic music long enough that anticipation is the only honest response—dubstep one month, house the next, sometimes something else entirely. Not scattered. Just someone who listens to everything and makes what feels right. The wait is worth it because you never know what you’re hearing next. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/5/skream-anticipate/ Sat, 05 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/5/bronx-sniper/ Mister Heavenly makes indie rock that feels like it’s always been here—no pretense, just hooks and noise that stick in your head for weeks. There’s something about the way they layer guitars and vocals that reminds me of early Wavves, that same sun-drunk energy but with more teeth. The production is clean enough that you can hear what they’re doing, but rough enough that it doesn’t feel polished to death. Songs like this one have a way of becoming soundtrack to whatever you’re doing—driving, thinking, wasting time—and suddenly you realize you’ve had the same four minutes on repeat for an hour. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/5/bronx-sniper/ Sat, 05 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/4/six-girls-boy-drag/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/4/six-girls-boy-drag/ Fri, 04 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/4/never-came-back-the-same/ Yoshihiko Ueda is a Japanese photographer who drove into the forests around Washington one day and, far as I can tell, never came back unchanged. He spent decades photographing the Quinault forest—trees, moss, light moving through everything—and his work hangs in galleries across the world. It’s the kind of thing most people walk past without stopping, especially anyone raised in cities who thinks nature is something you experience through a screen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/4/never-came-back-the-same/ Fri, 04 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/4/bleeding-knees-club/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/4/bleeding-knees-club/ Fri, 04 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/3/backup-tokyo/ Six months after Tōhoku and the country was still digging out. Nearly sixteen thousand dead, a 9.0 quake, tsunami destroying the eastern coast, Fukushima threatening another meltdown. The government kept saying everything would be fine, that things would stabilize. They wouldn’t. So they announced a plan: if Tokyo gets destroyed in the next disaster, Parliament and the ministries relocate to a backup city. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/3/backup-tokyo/ Thu, 03 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/3/zara-mirkin-scream-machine/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/3/zara-mirkin-scream-machine/ Thu, 03 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/3/twenty-seconds-to-blue/ There’s a laser in California that burns the brown out of your eyes. Melanin removal, the whole thing takes twenty seconds. A guy named Homer spent a decade on it, got hundreds of emails from people wanting what he’s selling. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/3/twenty-seconds-to-blue/ Thu, 03 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/2/practice/ There’s something about watching someone work through the same movements over and over, the way they’re chasing something invisible in the mirror. Claire in the studio, sweat on her neck, the city’s noise muffled four stories down, and this small room where everything is precise and repeatable. You watch and understand that this is the opposite of spontaneity even though it looks fluid—it’s built on thousands of failed attempts, small corrections, muscle memory so deep it doesn’t require thinking anymore. The ballet studio in New York feels like a monastery: everyone there has chosen the hard thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/2/practice/ Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/2/baby-says/ The Kills make songs that sit underneath your skin without asking permission. ’Baby Says’ is mostly atmosphere—Mosshart’s voice flat and certain, like she’s stating something you don’t want to hear. The kind of track that sounds best at night when you’re thinking about someone or loss or the distance between people who should be close. There’s nothing extra in it, no attempt to convince you of anything. Just the sound of someone who knows what they mean and doesn’t care if you like it. That’s the whole band, really. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/2/baby-says/ Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/1/nights-in-the-pool/ Angela turned eighteen that year, living in Viersen, one of those towns in western Germany you drive through without noticing. Between school and shifts at a perfume counter—selling expensive poison to rich old women—she’d disappear into the night with tequila, more of it than should be possible, though it barely seemed to touch her. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/1/nights-in-the-pool/ Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/1/internet-cocaine/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/11/1/internet-cocaine/ Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/31/how-we-look/ I found the leftover MDMA from Melt Festival under my bed on a Friday night, ground down to powder like cake flour, and instead of heading to whatever party I’d saved the cash on, I canceled everything and started actually cleaning this website. The drugs helped. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/31/how-we-look/ Mon, 31 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/27/katy-b-movement/ Her tracks have always been about the body in motion. “On A Mission,” “5am,” all that intricate rhythmic work—the kind of grime and electronic production that makes you want to move without thinking about it. Katy B’s music doesn’t ask you to feel something; it asks you to dance, to let the rhythm sort itself out in your hips and shoulders while your brain goes quiet. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/27/katy-b-movement/ Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/27/winter-boots/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/27/winter-boots/ Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/27/ghost-beach/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/27/ghost-beach/ Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/26/flash-finally-goes/ You try to watch one of the old videos on your phone and nothing happens. The player won’t load, just sits blank because it needs Flash, which your phone never had. I’ve been watching this problem spread for years—video trapped in software that doesn’t exist anymore, inaccessible unless you’re on a desktop. So I finally did the work: migrated the entire library to HTML5, killed all the Flash players. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/26/flash-finally-goes/ Wed, 26 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/26/pumpkin-heads/ There’s something about a Halloween romance that works because the whole night is already half-costume, half-permission. Two people who don’t know each other, thrown together in the chaos of a pumpkin patch, the dark creeping in early, the season already making everything feel temporary and reckless. It’s the kind of setup that could be saccharine, but done right it’s just honest—you meet someone, time runs out, and for one night that matters more than it should. The best of that kind of story doesn’t pretend the ending is happy, just that it was real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/26/pumpkin-heads/ Wed, 26 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/26/crystal-fighters/ I spent a lot of time with their early albums—the way they’d layer electronic production with these organic, almost folk-like textures, strings and samples mixed in ways that shouldn’t work but did. They were never trying to be cool about it, just making pop music that sounded like they’d spent serious time in the studio getting the color right. There’s something about a band that treats the space between sounds as carefully as the sounds themselves, and Crystal Fighters did that. Their stuff felt small and intricate despite being bright and poppy, which is rare—most electronic bands are either too cerebral or too eager to please. They landed somewhere else entirely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/26/crystal-fighters/ Wed, 26 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/25/duck-sauce-big-bad-wolf/ I still think about Duck Sauce in that pocket of the late 2000s when electronic music could be shiny and dumb without any guilt. “Big Bad Wolf” was pure hook and bounce, A-Trak and Jillionaire refusing to make it complicated. The kind of track that burrows into your head not because it’s trying to be art but because it was built to stay there. Nothing wrong with that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/25/duck-sauce-big-bad-wolf/ Tue, 25 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/25/emeli-sandé-daddy/ There’s a song that makes you sit with something you weren’t ready to sit with. Emeli Sandé has this way of finding the exact nerve—the quiet, specific ache you’ve been sidestepping. A song about a father isn’t just about a father; it’s about absence and presence at the same time, about what you inherit and what you can’t fix. You listen to it and something in your chest doesn’t move for a few minutes, and that’s the whole point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/25/emeli-sandé-daddy/ Tue, 25 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/24/the-lift/ Patrick Swayze lifts Jennifer Beals high overhead in that moment everyone remembers, and for a second the film is just about the pure physicality of want—two bodies moving together with no distance, no pretense, just sweat and directness. That’s what Dirty Dancing is really about. It doesn’t dress up desire in metaphor or soften it for comfort; it’s there to be erotic, trashy, and unashamed. Everything else—the music, the cinematography, the whole summer setting—serves that. The film burns with wanting and doesn’t apologize for it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/24/the-lift/ Mon, 24 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/24/what-you-sing/ What you sing in the shower is what you’re actually feeling. Thirty seconds under the water and it comes out—the real emotional weather. Happy? You’re belting something stupid and upbeat, the kind of song you’d never play for another person. Everything’s falling apart? You go silent, or you sing something slow and broken, your voice dissolving into the steam. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/24/what-you-sing/ Mon, 24 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/24/pink-blood/ The moment we became close, I could feel the fracture beginning. That’s always what happens when you’re that close to another person—you hit a limit. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/24/pink-blood/ Mon, 24 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/22/what-its-like-being-a-girl/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/22/what-its-like-being-a-girl/ Sat, 22 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/21/friends-im-his-girl/ Friends was always about coupling, that pull toward defining yourself through someone else. Rachel’s entire arc revolved around Ross—first wanting him, then having him, then not having him, the cycle repeating. You’d think the show would critique that, but it didn’t. Just kept playing it for drama and laughs. Which is weirdly the most honest thing about it. We all do this. Let someone else become the principle organizing our lives, even when we know better. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/21/friends-im-his-girl/ Fri, 21 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/21/bedridden/ You don’t learn what real boredom is until you’re stuck in bed for three days with nothing actually wrong anymore—fever broke, you can technically move, but you’re too weak and tired to care. It’s a specific kind of limbo. Your body still wants things. Your brain knows you can’t deliver. So you scroll. Watch. Try to read the same page three times without absorbing a word. Nothing lands. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/21/bedridden/ Fri, 21 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/21/sodom-and-gomorra/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/21/sodom-and-gomorra/ Fri, 21 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/20/that-guy-from-örnsköldsvik/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/20/that-guy-from-örnsköldsvik/ Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/20/the-look/ Gaddafi had a look. Not a sense of style—a look. One of those sustained performance-art projects that somehow got treated as real. He’d show up in a bedazzled military jacket, surrounded by female bodyguards in matching fatigues and designer sunglasses, and the world’s fashion press would nod and write it down. Vanity Fair called him a “fashion genius.” Time magazine seemed genuinely confused about what was happening but thought it was important enough to document. There’s a weird moment in media where an absurdity becomes so consistent that people stop questioning whether it’s intentional. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/20/the-look/ Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/19/earthquakey-people/ Steve Aoki and Rivers Cuomo on the same track is a strange enough pairing that it works. One’s all bass drops and neon excess, the other’s carrying that tender, fractured voice from Weezer into increasingly odd territory. I have no idea what “Earthquakey People” actually sounds like, but the collision itself is enough to pull me in. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/19/earthquakey-people/ Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/19/josh-schwartz-strikes-again/ Josh Schwartz is adapting Misfits for American television. I found out because the internet won’t shut up about it, and because this is how it works: something brilliant comes from elsewhere, gets noticed, and someone at a studio thinks they should fix it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/19/josh-schwartz-strikes-again/ Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/19/holy-ghost-hands-it-over/ Holy Ghost! are this New York electronic duo making pristine, cold-blooded disco tracks. Alex and Nick. I never caught them live, but I remembered this thing where they did a concert in Berlin and let the audience vote on the setlist and visuals beforehand. It was obviously a marketing stunt tied up with corporate sponsors, but there’s something genuinely interesting underneath: when you vote on what you’re about to experience, you can’t blame the artist anymore. You’re complicit. The whole dynamic shifts—you’re not just a spectator anymore, you’re responsible for what’s happening. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/19/holy-ghost-hands-it-over/ Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/19/october-drift/ By late October I realized I’d missed the monthly update. Just gone, completely forgotten. When I don’t have a schedule, when work is mostly theoretical and days blur together, I can lose an entire month without noticing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/19/october-drift/ Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/18/mr-general/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/18/mr-general/ Tue, 18 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/18/lights/ I found Ellie Goulding’s records at a moment when electronic pop was still figuring itself out, and hers felt like the answer nobody knew they were looking for. Her voice in those high, thin registers, settling into synth arrangements like it had always belonged there. She made restraint sound like the only sensible approach to pop music, which was weird because everyone else was shouting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/18/lights/ Tue, 18 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/17/mixtape-into-another-world/ Some nights you just need to disappear. Dim the lights, get into bed, let yourself dissolve into the music. A soundtrack for a night that’s going nowhere and somehow has to make it all the way through to dawn. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/17/mixtape-into-another-world/ Mon, 17 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/17/erika-braukis-im-fucked/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/17/erika-braukis-im-fucked/ Mon, 17 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/17/m83-midnight-city/ That synth line hits you immediately and doesn’t let up—this bright, almost plastic sound that just keeps pushing. The whistle is the thing that sticks though, clean and simple. Anthony’s voice is buried way back, singing from somewhere distant. It all hangs together with this feeling of moving through a city at night, aware of the neon and the emptiness and a specific kind of loneliness that only happens after dark. The song has been everywhere, which should have killed it by now, but it hasn’t. It still works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/17/m83-midnight-city/ Mon, 17 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/16/the-occupation/ Fall of 2011 and the whole atmosphere shifted. There was this pressure that had been building for years—financial disaster, watching the people who caused it get richer while everyone else got wiped out. Then parks started filling with tents and suddenly there was a place for the anger to exist. The movement had no platform, no demands, no clear leadership—which made it easy to dismiss, but that was exactly the point. You can’t negotiate with a simple fact: the system is designed to concentrate everything at the top and make everyone else fight for scraps. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/16/the-occupation/ Sun, 16 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/15/beauty-and-the-girls/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/15/beauty-and-the-girls/ Sat, 15 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/15/postbahnhof-on-a-saturday/ The walls at Postbahnhof were the thing. You could watch them get painted—someone with a spray can actually taking their time, making something instead of just tagging and moving on. Young artists getting wall space. Some of it was sharp, some obvious, most of it exactly what you’d expect from people who actually know how to do this. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/15/postbahnhof-on-a-saturday/ Sat, 15 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/14/icona-pop-nights-like-this/ I get why Icona Pop works. “Nights Like This” is pure pop unconcern—a song that doesn’t need to be clever or complicated or self-aware, just good at what it does. There’s something refreshing about that kind of straightforwardness, especially when everything else feels over-thought. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/14/icona-pop-nights-like-this/ Fri, 14 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/14/ten-little-things/ Somebody said you wouldn’t notice if your neighbor crashed a plane into your apartment, which is probably right. Anyway, here’s what the weekend looks like in my head. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/14/ten-little-things/ Fri, 14 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/13/deer-heads-on-the-water/ The Jägermeister Wirtshaus Tour is one of those traveling beer hall concepts that shows up every year with the same setup: mounted deer heads on the walls, beer kegs, electronic music, crowds of young people getting steadily drunk. You can play darts and table football. It’s straightforward—a themed drinking night that doesn’t pretend to be anything else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/13/deer-heads-on-the-water/ Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/13/gruff-rhys-whale-trail/ Gruff Rhys has spent decades making music that doesn’t fit anywhere, which is probably why it fits with me. Whether he’s layering Welsh folk against electronic noise in Super Furry Animals or chasing some half-baked conceptual tangent solo, there’s always this sense that he’s following something only he can hear. Whale Trail carries that impulse—a project that sounds like watching someone work through obsessions in real time, less concerned with the destination than with what gets discovered along the way. It’s the kind of thing that requires patience to sit with, but if you’re the type who finds beauty in the ungainly and the unresolved, there’s something worth hearing here. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/13/gruff-rhys-whale-trail/ Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/13/anna-ryon/ Not sure where I first heard her, but something stuck. There’s a directness to what she does that feels rare—no fuss, no performance, just the work itself. That’s all it takes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/13/anna-ryon/ Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/12/the-horrors-i-can-see-through-you/ ’I Can See Through You’ doesn’t ask much of you. The Horrors keep it lean—guitars, bass, the weight of the rhythm—and there’s something about that restraint that makes it hit harder. The song finds this pocket where everything just locks in place, and you remember why people still care about this band. It’s post-punk that knows what it is without having to prove anything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/12/the-horrors-i-can-see-through-you/ Wed, 12 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/12/niki-and-the-doves-drummer/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/12/niki-and-the-doves-drummer/ Wed, 12 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/12/skrillex-hair/ Around 2010 or so, I started seeing undercuts everywhere. Not in a theoretical way—actually seeing them in person, in the street, in bars, on people who probably weren’t thinking that hard about why they’d chosen to shave half their head. One side gone, the other side left long enough to fall across. Some people pushed it further, clippered both sides down to nothing, kept a strip of longer hair down the middle. The variations didn’t matter. The principle was the same: you looked like you were part of something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/12/skrillex-hair/ Wed, 12 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/11/slove-flash/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/11/slove-flash/ Tue, 11 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/11/melchior-tersens-funeral-ficus/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/11/melchior-tersens-funeral-ficus/ Tue, 11 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/11/failing-at-someone/ I turned around and left. Not one of those teary soap-opera scenes, not screaming or smashing vases. Just sun on the pavement and me walking away. Last time I looked her in the eye. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/11/failing-at-someone/ Tue, 11 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/9/panico/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/9/panico/ Sun, 09 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/7/always-on-the-run/ Yuksek makes electronic music that never settles. It’s propulsive, bright, restless—the kind of stuff that sounds like it was made at 3 AM in a studio that’s perpetually packed up and ready to move. French producer, been doing this since the early 2000s, and there’s this constant forward motion in everything he touches. Not anxious, exactly. Just… always chasing the next thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/7/always-on-the-run/ Fri, 07 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/6/steve-jobs-old-friend/ It’s late. I’m in bed with the lights off and the MacBook glowing, the neighbors finally quiet after they’d spent an hour screaming and breaking things in the stairwell. Dark everywhere except the screen. iPhone beside me. The shelf across the room has all the Apple books, the Jobs books, the whole mythology. In a desk drawer there’s an old blue iPod nano I haven’t touched in years. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/6/steve-jobs-old-friend/ Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/6/legend-in-my-own-mind/ The Stepkids operate in this space where almost nobody else is working—absurdist, committed, making stuff that shouldn’t connect but does because they believe in it completely. There’s something I respect about that. Building something for the people who are actually listening, not performing for some imagined mass audience. You spend enough time on the margins and you stop caring if you’re a legend to anyone but yourself. Maybe that’s where the best stuff comes from anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/6/legend-in-my-own-mind/ Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/5/filur-concentrates/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/5/filur-concentrates/ Wed, 05 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/4/ramon-haindl-the-world-lives-in-berlin/ Berlin was where everything converged in those years—artists from everywhere, all this raw energy, the sense that you could actually make something matter without anyone’s permission. Haindl was part of that, his work carrying that clarity and directness that made the city feel like the center of something. There’s a specific moment in creative history when one place becomes the place, and Berlin was it. The world doesn’t gather like that anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/4/ramon-haindl-the-world-lives-in-berlin/ Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/4/the-shaking/ The video for “Shake It Out” stuck with me—Florence dancing alone in a forest, the camera making everything look unsteady. The song itself won’t let you stop moving. It’s about trying to shake off something that won’t let go, the drums pushing you forward even as you know the shaking won’t actually help. The movement is the point, not the outcome. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/4/the-shaking/ Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/1/nero-crush-on-you/ Crush On You is the kind of track that works because nothing’s wasted. Just the vocal, the drums, the low end—Nero figured out that drum and bass could be minimal and still hit hard. I’ve been cycling through their stuff for like fifteen years. They never sounded dated because they never sounded like they were chasing anything, which is maybe the only way to make electronic music that lasts. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/10/1/nero-crush-on-you/ Sat, 01 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/30/deerhoof-secret-mobilization/ Deerhoof never made sense to me the first time I heard them, which is probably why I kept coming back. Satomi Matsuzaki’s voice is doing something I couldn’t quite track, the rest of the band moving in shapes that shouldn’t work but somehow do. They’ve been around long enough to have completely ignored every trend, every pressure to make something more palatable or easier to categorize. I respect that kind of commitment to not giving a shit what anyone expects from you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/30/deerhoof-secret-mobilization/ Fri, 30 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/30/ten-missions/ Friday always feels like some kind of social ultimatum. The hard week’s behind you and you’re supposed to cram maximum fun into barely any time—drink, dance, get laid, get high, laugh, and wake up Sunday convinced you actually lived. Most people just scroll and sleep. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/30/ten-missions/ Fri, 30 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/29/beats-in-bochum/ Good beats do something to a room. The bass hits and everything gets quiet in a different way—less silence, more pressure, like the whole space is focusing on one thing. I’ve had nights in Bochum that felt like that, where the bar became part of the sound instead of just holding it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/29/beats-in-bochum/ Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/29/the-dinosaur-problem/ I spent Sunday afternoons at my grandmother’s house. She had cable, so I’d camp out in front of Xena and seaQuest and Hercules while she rested after lunch. Earth 2 was the one that really grabbed me though—a whole other world, aliens, jungle, mystery, monsters, everything layered on top of everything else. It got cancelled after one season because the budget was enormous. I never found out how it ended. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/29/the-dinosaur-problem/ Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/29/kimmi-in-a-rice-field/ Twins in a rice field. That image stays. Kimmi and her sister, born together and spending a lifetime learning to be separate people. There’s an order to rice fields but nothing orderly about siblings—just two people in the same place slowly becoming different. A field is quiet enough for that to happen unnoticed, until one day you look and they’re not where they started anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/29/kimmi-in-a-rice-field/ Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/28/css-hits-me-like-a-rock/ CSS will destroy you when you’re not looking. You’ll spend three hours on something that should take twenty minutes, and it’s always the same problem: a property you’ve never heard of, a specificity issue that makes no sense, or browsers that can’t agree on what a box is supposed to be. You tell yourself you understand it. Twenty years of this, and you should. Then some flex property decides it’s feeling different on Safari and you’re forty minutes deep wondering if you ever understood anything at all. The worst part is that it works, mostly, and you can get what you want out of it, but only if you approach it sideways, only if you let it surprise you instead of trying to control it. It’s like knowing a person who’s generally reasonable but occasionally shows you a side you didn’t expect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/28/css-hits-me-like-a-rock/ Wed, 28 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/28/the-ego-has-landed/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/28/the-ego-has-landed/ Wed, 28 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/28/the-thong-quest/ I spent entire summers on Super Nintendo RPGs—Chrono Trigger, Lufia, Terranigma—replaying them obsessively, hunting for secret endings and hidden content, reloading saves just to see what lay outside the map boundaries. That took focus. That took absence. I was a different person then. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/28/the-thong-quest/ Wed, 28 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/27/louise-benson/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/27/louise-benson/ Tue, 27 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/27/tove-styrke-call-my-name/ Tove Styrke’s ’Call My Name’ sits right at that spot where production clarity meets vocal intimacy. There’s this moment around the chorus where the synth swells and her voice just cuts through it clean, and you realize she’s singing directly at whoever’s listening. Swedish pop in the last decade got good at that—making massive sounds feel private, like she’s in the room with you. The song’s got enough architecture that it holds up through multiple listens without overstaying. I keep coming back to it the way you do with things that don’t announce themselves but don’t let you forget them either. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/27/tove-styrke-call-my-name/ Tue, 27 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/26/nothing-to-lose-in-harajuku/ Harajuku at street level is just different. Two teenage girls in full Mario and Luigi costumes are having a normal day. Someone’s decided their entire personality for today is cyberpunk—thirty-pound pants, tiger sneakers, the commitment is real. Another pair are playing fashion police. Nobody stops. Nobody changes their route. It’s just what’s happening. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/26/nothing-to-lose-in-harajuku/ Mon, 26 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/25/the-next-move/ Alone for days, weeks, months in some kind of waking coma. Mad at yourself, mad at everyone else, everything. Loneliness rewires your brain—makes you question every decision that got you here. And it doesn’t matter how many friends or acquaintances orbit your life. You’re utterly alone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/25/the-next-move/ Sun, 25 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/25/summer-reading/ In New York, a group called The Outdoor Co-ed Topless Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society did exactly what their name advertised: they sat in parks reading serious books without shirts. Their motto was “Making Reading Sexy,” which was either sincere or ironic or both, and it didn’t really matter which. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/25/summer-reading/ Sun, 25 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/24/björk-moon/ There’s something about Björk that exists outside the normal calculus of music. She’s been doing this for thirty years—refusing to settle into whatever worked last, refusing to be palatable, refusing to let you get comfortable. The moon thing, if we’re talking about it, is about that remoteness, that cold clarity. Her voice has always had that quality—something not entirely human, or more than human, something that exists in a space you can’t quite reach. I’ve never needed her to be warm. I needed her to be true, and she is. The production, the orchestration, whatever she’s decided to do in a given era—it’s never been designed to please. It’s designed to document something she’s seeing that the rest of us are barely aware of. That’s the moon. Not sentimental. Not soft. Just clear. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/24/björk-moon/ Sat, 24 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/23/ten-missions/ Your internet dies, so what—don’t just sit around irritated. Pick ten things to do instead. Dishes. Your room. Something decent for someone else. You weren’t going to do any of it anyway, so use the outage as your excuse. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/23/ten-missions/ Fri, 23 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/22/hedonism-afternoons/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/22/hedonism-afternoons/ Thu, 22 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/22/its-everywhere/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/22/its-everywhere/ Thu, 22 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/22/asobi-seksu-perfectly-crystal/ There’s a particular kind of dream pop that just dissolves into your day without asking permission—Asobi Seksu’s second album does this quietly, the guitars layered so thick they become texture instead of sound. You’re not listening to it so much as existing inside it, the vocals buried deep in reverb and melody, everything soft-focus and patient. It doesn’t demand anything from you, which is maybe why it works. Nothing sharp enough to hurt, nothing bright enough to wake you up. Just this sustained, floating feeling that lasts as long as you let it. The kind of album you realize has been playing for forty minutes and you’ve been somewhere else the whole time, but somewhere warm. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/22/asobi-seksu-perfectly-crystal/ Thu, 22 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/22/what-you-find/ Kent’s sweater came out of the trash. His dad threw it away, his mom fished it out, asked if he wanted it. Seventeen years old in Frankfurt and the sweater became his favorite thing. Carrot jogger, Dr. Martens, the dead man’s sweater. He worries he looks small in it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/22/what-you-find/ Thu, 22 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/21/girl-in-the-garden/ Amber Heard exists in this strange space where you can’t look at her work without the noise around her bleeds in. She’s a good actress—you see it in the smaller roles before everything happened. Whatever this is, whoever this character is, there’s something there worth paying attention to if you can get past the weight of her name. The thing about public figures who become synonymous with controversy is that their craft gets buried under the story. Sometimes that’s fair. Sometimes it’s a shame. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/21/girl-in-the-garden/ Wed, 21 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/20/fenech-soler-golden-sun/ There’s something about Fenech-Soler that just sits right—synth-pop that never needs to prove anything, just patient layers of melody you sink into without thinking. Golden Sun is exactly that kind of record: easy to come back to, never exhausting, solid and pretty in a way that doesn’t demand anything from you. Most days that’s exactly what I want from music, something that works the way things should work, without all the production noise trying to convince you it matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/20/fenech-soler-golden-sun/ Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/20/chiles-reckoning/ I followed those Chile protests almost by accident, drawn into coverage of what thousands of young people were actually refusing: Piñera’s version of education, the math that said you’d go into impossible debt just to become anything. What struck me was the stubbornness of it—not media fury but a refusal, a basic no to the future they were being sold. Piñera thought anger fades if ignored, but that’s a fundamental misread. When a generation knows the system is designed to break them anyway, they don’t leave. They stayed. The demands got bigger. Not everything changed, but they proved something governments always count on us forgetting: that enough people saying no actually works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/20/chiles-reckoning/ Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/20/stay-gold/ The Big Pink make their best work in the space between gloss and sincerity, and that’s where Stay Gold lives. Everything’s processed, everything’s shimmering, but there’s something unguarded underneath all that production. I’ve always liked that about them—the willingness to be both slick and vulnerable at once. Most bands have to choose. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/20/stay-gold/ Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/19/i-look-just-like-my-daddy/ Cass Bird’s photographs feel like they’re not supposed to exist, like you’re seeing something private. There’s no performance in them—no posing, no waiting for the right moment. Just people being themselves, which somehow is the hardest thing to photograph. The title suggests something about what we carry from our parents, and that’s exactly what her work captures: the inheritance we don’t think about. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/19/i-look-just-like-my-daddy/ Mon, 19 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/19/she-came-back/ In early 2009, I started this website with Hannah—me a designer from Berlin, her fresh out of fashion school in Munich. It was meant to be nothing, just a junk blog, somewhere to throw ideas around. Neither of us understood what we were actually getting into. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/19/she-came-back/ Mon, 19 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/19/autumn-in-bed/ Autumn gets packaged as melancholy season. October comes and you’re supposed to feel the weight of it—the light draining, the cold coming, the whole seasonal affective checklist. Everyone’s supposed to retreat with dark music and wait out the darkness. There’s an aesthetic to the suffering. A romance to it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/19/autumn-in-bed/ Mon, 19 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/18/girls-like-that/ I was twelve in some hideout beneath pallets and cardboard, rat poison stacked in corners, when I reached over and traced my fingers down the bare curve of her ass and understood what I’d want the rest of my life. She wasn’t one of those girls who’d turn into something else—all makeup and polish and distance. She was my best friend, and that was the whole thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/18/girls-like-that/ Sun, 18 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/18/the-moment/ Sneaky Sound System’s ’Big (The Moment)’ is the architecture of one specific moment. Everything stacks toward the instant when it all lands and you’re suddenly completely present—not the anticipation, just the arrival. The bass hits and your body gets it before your head does. The track commits entirely to that landing and doesn’t apologize for it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/18/the-moment/ Sun, 18 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/16/salem-king-night/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/16/salem-king-night/ Fri, 16 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/16/hollie-fernando-storming/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/16/hollie-fernando-storming/ Fri, 16 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/16/what-sticks/ Weekends are all anyone remembers. Tuesday bleeds into Thursday into Monday, and they’re gone—you can’t pull them back. A random Wednesday from five years ago? Vanished. You don’t know what you were doing, who you were with, why you thought it mattered. Memory is selective. It only keeps the weekends. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/16/what-sticks/ Fri, 16 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/15/carbonated/ Mount Kimbie makes music that feels weightless. There’s an easiness to their approach—dubstep that doesn’t land hard, jazz samples that don’t announce themselves, percussion that sparkles instead of impacts. Listening to them is like watching something effervescent fold into something else, never quite settling. They’ve been doing this for years, staying clear of trends, staying themselves. I keep coming back to that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/15/carbonated/ Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/15/when-i-was-a-whore/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/15/when-i-was-a-whore/ Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/14/polish-girl/ Neon Indian’s music has this quality where you’re never quite sure if you’re falling into something or coming up out of it. The synths coast along like you’re driving through some neon-soaked nowhere at 3 AM, and you can’t decide if you’re trying to get home or running from something. It’s that particular kind of pretty that makes you feel alone in a good way, the kind of sound that existed in your head before you ever heard it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/14/polish-girl/ Wed, 14 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/14/anna-tatton-garden-of-earthly-delights/ Anna Tatton’s drawing has this precision that never reads as overworked. Everything is packed in—figures, patterns, spaces—but it has this ease to it, like she knew exactly where each line needed to go. The title’s a Bosch reference, which makes sense, but she’s not doing homage or pastiche; she’s using that visual language as a starting point. The real skill is in the decisions—where to leave room and where to bury detail, so your eye knows what to settle on. Most work this dense tips into preciousness. Hers doesn’t. That restraint is what makes it land. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/14/anna-tatton-garden-of-earthly-delights/ Wed, 14 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/14/perfect-wreckage/ 2005, school trip, Prague. We’d just started the year with a mix of people I’d known forever mixed in with new faces. But somewhere on the drive down from Bavaria, it stopped mattering. We became this blob of friends. Drinking on filthy bus seats, kissing behind gas stations, laughing at nothing, someone’s guitar in the mix. The bus itself felt like it was made of happiness. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/14/perfect-wreckage/ Wed, 14 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/13/syndromes/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/13/syndromes/ Tue, 13 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/13/charles-kelman-real-life-is-boring/ Charles Kelman was an ophthalmologist who looked at cataract surgery and thought there had to be a better way—which led him to invent phacoemulsification and basically change the whole field. But he was also a jazz musician and a scuba diver and just fundamentally couldn’t sit still with the status quo. I think that’s what the title’s about: that the baseline version of life, the one where you accept things the way they are, is genuinely boring. You need the restlessness, the refusal to settle, or you might as well be asleep. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/13/charles-kelman-real-life-is-boring/ Tue, 13 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/13/berlin-festival-party-like-its-2008/ Growing up in some small Bavarian town, getting to any festival at all felt like you were actually doing something. Rock im Park was about as good as it got. But after Hurricane and Melt, Berlin Festival was supposed to be the third one that year, the autumnal sendoff to the whole season. Music, crowds, stages. One more time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/13/berlin-festival-party-like-its-2008/ Tue, 13 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/12/checking-in/ I check in on this place once a year - sit down with wine and try to be honest about whether it’s actually getting better or just wearing its own groove deeper. This year I decided to stop talking to myself about it and ask people. Sent emails to people who read, or used to read, asking what they thought. No false politeness, just what works and what doesn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/12/checking-in/ Mon, 12 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/10/drunk-and-famous/ Midnight at some Berlin venue and they’re handing out currywurst next to the bars, celebrities with new breasts bouncing everywhere, free drinks in every direction. Either I’d made it in Berlin or I was just really good at sneaking in. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/10/drunk-and-famous/ Sat, 10 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/9/ten-ways-to-ruin-your-weekend/ Weekends are supposed to be freedom, but they’re actually just two days of having to invent your own purpose. No job to complain about, no colleagues to resent, just you and the crushing question of what the hell you’re supposed to do with yourself. It’s paralyzing. So why not lean into it? Why not actively sabotage the whole thing? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/9/ten-ways-to-ruin-your-weekend/ Fri, 09 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/9/pharaohs/ SBTRKT makes music that feels designed for the inside of your head. Pharaohs is cold and precise, the kind of thing that makes thinking easier. I come back to it when I need to clear space around whatever’s bothering me. The beats have weight but don’t demand anything from you except attention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/9/pharaohs/ Fri, 09 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/8/september/ Summer didn’t fade into September the way it usually does. No golden leaves, no gentle transition. It just stood up, took one last look, and took a massive shit on everyone’s head. Everything’s slowly getting sick and I’m hating autumn with everything I’ve got. But there’s still September to get through, and I need to know what’s actually worth my time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/8/september/ Thu, 08 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/7/ilyas-iglesias-simferopol-bitches/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/7/ilyas-iglesias-simferopol-bitches/ Wed, 07 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/6/when-lesmads-ended/ LesMads posted ten times a day. Sometimes more. When Jessica Weiß, Julia, and Schnati started in mid-2007, fashion blogging didn’t exist yet in Germany—or at least nobody had a name for it. It was just three women writing about clothes and taking mirror selfies in Berlin tower blocks on a website that shouldn’t have mattered. But it did. A publisher backed them. The fashion industry, which had no category for blogs, learned to take them seriously. Awards came. Thousands of readers. They became exactly as big as a blog could become. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/6/when-lesmads-ended/ Tue, 06 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/6/yakuza-in-tokyo/ Kusters spent years photographing yakuza in Tokyo, which seems impossible until you realize that access is just another thing you can build if you show up honestly and don’t lie about what you want. The photographs are straightforward: men in everyday moments, ordinary and resigned and trapped in a structure they maintain because it’s the only structure they know. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/6/yakuza-in-tokyo/ Tue, 06 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/5/last-days-of-summer/ Summer’s fading. Late August and the light’s already changing angle, the heat releasing just enough that you remember you can breathe. I’ve got a playlist for this moment every year—just songs that mark the turning without being about it. The Weeknd, Destroyer, Little Dragon. Nothing fancy, nothing that means anything except it felt right when the season was shifting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/5/last-days-of-summer/ Mon, 05 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/4/thats-why-youre-fat/ The internet makes you fat. You spend every day sitting—office chair, café bench, some basement—barely moving except to plug your phone in the computer or grab tissues when you’re having a minor stress breakdown, and you’d rather sleep than actually go outside and exercise, no matter what your calendar says you should be doing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/4/thats-why-youre-fat/ Sun, 04 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/3/born-to-lose/ There’s something about bands that come out of the noise and refuse to sand down their edges. Weed, that grinding sludge, the kind of thing that plays basement clubs to maybe thirty people who actually get it. Born to Lose—the whole Johnny Thunders philosophy, the punk refusal to become digestible. These aren’t bands trying to break through. They’re doing the opposite, making music that actively repels the casual listener, that demands something from you. You show up because you know what you’re in for. Not to be entertained. Because this is real and it doesn’t care if you’re listening. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/3/born-to-lose/ Sat, 03 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/3/the-aviary/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/3/the-aviary/ Sat, 03 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/2/fran-allen-forever-unknown/ Fran Allen won the Turing Award—the Nobel Prize of computing—and you’ve never heard of her. She worked at IBM in the 1950s and 60s on compiler optimization, which sounds like nothing until you realize it’s the invisible machinery that made computers computers. By the time she actually won recognition in 2006, late in her life, the world had moved on to other names. It’s not malice exactly. It’s just how history works. The foundational stuff gets buried. The architecture disappears into the background. Allen’s legacy is something you use every day without knowing it, which might be the loneliest kind of impact. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/2/fran-allen-forever-unknown/ Fri, 02 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/2/ten-little-missions/ Weekend hits like a car with no brakes and suddenly it’s here. I’m in the bathroom with Solarium-Sonja and this guy Benny—don’t ask—getting ready for a kids club, which definitely sounds wrong when I say it out loud. There’s a Rihanna song on repeat, maybe with a Bieber remix, something that won’t die, and I’ve got one thought stuck: tits, tequila, ten little missions. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/2/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 02 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/1/soundcheck/ You get to a point where music is just everywhere, and most of it doesn’t stick. Friends forwarding things, labels dumping releases, YouTube rabbit holes at 2am. But every once in a while something actually lands. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/9/1/soundcheck/ Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/31/nicolas-sisto-paris-london-montréal/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/31/nicolas-sisto-paris-london-montréal/ Wed, 31 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/30/party-naked/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/30/party-naked/ Tue, 30 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/30/julia-marcells-matrioszka/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/30/julia-marcells-matrioszka/ Tue, 30 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/29/stealing-girlfriends/ I met Katha at one of those farmer parties at the edge of my hometown. She was tall, beautiful, long black hair blowing in wind that smelled like cheap beer and puke in corners. Obviously she had a boyfriend. Three years with Ferdinand. He was in the military somewhere, in a barracks or deployed or whatever—the point is he wasn’t here with her. His loss. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/29/stealing-girlfriends/ Mon, 29 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/29/television-by-committee/ ZDFneo set up this thing called TVLab where viewers vote on which pilots get to continue. I spent an evening watching the ten episodes because I was bored and curious what a network nobody can actually watch was planning to make. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/29/television-by-committee/ Mon, 29 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/29/little-jinder-without-you/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/29/little-jinder-without-you/ Mon, 29 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/27/losers/ I’ve always had a weakness for cartoons that completely lose their minds in the best way. Shows that demolish every convention and somehow stay brilliant doing it. “Ren & Stimpy” scrambled my brain for years. “Adventure Time” has episodes I’m genuinely going to read to my kids someday. “Rocko’s Modern Life” created an entire generation of weird, relentlessly creative people. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/27/losers/ Sat, 27 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/27/keeping-tokyopunk-alive/ I started TOKYOPUNK with Asumi because Japan is constantly producing these wild things—music, art, videos, street style, pure cultural weirdness—that die the moment they don’t leave the border. Someone should be translating that into German. Someone should be showing people. That someone was us. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/27/keeping-tokyopunk-alive/ Sat, 27 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/27/lägga-dörtschn/ The day after karaoke we were heading to Hamburg for some corporate event, Jägermeister sponsoring the chaos. Seven of us on a train—Nike, the two Wuschelköpfe, Josh, Ladyboy, the Audiofreak, and me. We spent the hours talking about nothing in particular. By the time we got to the hotel we’d managed to destroy a remote control and a hair dryer. This is what happens when you give a group of people a free room. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/27/lägga-dörtschn/ Sat, 27 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/26/ten-little-missions/ Summer arrived the moment I bought neon green yarn for a project I’ll never finish. That’s how it always goes—you buy materials, full of hope, and the season turns against you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/26/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 26 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/25/he-stepped-away/ I didn’t have many role models growing up. There was Sandy Cohen from The O.C., that surfing single dad who actually listened—to his kids, his friends, his enemies, everyone. And there was Mian Mian, that Shanghai writer who didn’t flinch from anything—the heroin, the men, the chaos—and wrote about it in a way that made you unable to tell what was real and what she was inventing. But mostly there was Steve Jobs. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/25/he-stepped-away/ Thu, 25 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/25/ellen-von-unwerth-after-after-party/ Von Unwerth photographs people caught in the moments right after—makeup smudged, defenses down, that strange transparency that comes when you think no one’s watching anymore. There’s an intimacy to her work that never feels like violation, more like she’s noticed something true about you that was already there. ’After After Party’ probably documents exactly that: the exhaustion and desire underneath the performance, the moment when the facade really does slip. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/25/ellen-von-unwerth-after-after-party/ Thu, 25 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/25/this-weeks-albums/ It’s been ten years since Aaliyah died, and I spent the day listening through her catalog. Three albums is all she left, and they still feel untouchable—the production so clean it almost sounds conversational, her voice carrying this confidence that’s impossible to duplicate. You hear her everywhere in what came after, but there’s a distance between influence and the genuine article. Nothing that’s tried to follow has quite hit the same. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/25/this-weeks-albums/ Thu, 25 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/24/broadcast-ended/ Television had a monopoly for forty years because literally nothing else existed. You could choose between five channels or go outside. That’s it. The networks knew this. They carved out their territory and defended it by being the only thing to turn on. Quality? Irrelevant. Change? Risky. They’d found the minimum viable effort and they were going to do it forever. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/24/broadcast-ended/ Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/24/the-same-argument/ Cameras. Turntables. Synthesizers. Microphones. For thirty years at least, we’ve been fighting the same fight—digital or analog, and both sides convinced they’re right. Photography went digital and never looked back, except the people who insisted film would never die turned out to be right about something. Music production is mostly software now, but you still hear about the warmth of analog tape like it’s a myth you have to protect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/24/the-same-argument/ Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/24/merlin-bronques/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/24/merlin-bronques/ Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/23/like-smoke/ Still Corners moves through your apartment like smoke. You don’t notice it’s playing until you do, and by then the whole room’s changed temperature. “Cuckoo” has that same weightless quality—soft electronics and breathing vocals that feel less like a song and more like someone’s decided to share what’s inside their head. Not trying to convince you of anything. Just existing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/23/like-smoke/ Tue, 23 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/23/rene-vailes-afternoon/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/23/rene-vailes-afternoon/ Tue, 23 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/23/pretty-in-pink/ Jana doesn’t wear pants. Twenty-two, from Osnabrück, and she just… doesn’t. I watched her in photos wearing a Minkpink blouse, Primark jeans if the moment called for it, Ash shoes she’d talked down to fifty euros. She says her style is as changeable as the weather, and looking at the photos that checks out. She told me about picking berries in the woods and then panicking about foxworms after eating one straight off the branch, which has nothing to do with fashion but explains everything about how she exists. Not calculating. Not trying. Just there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/23/pretty-in-pink/ Tue, 23 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/22/mixtape-chill-until-you-die/ You can’t just bail on your job or degree or the people bleeding you dry every day. Quit and the consequences somehow multiply the stress you were running from in the first place. So you keep grinding because stopping costs more than staying, and eventually you’re just dead inside, running on fumes, watching it all happen to someone else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/22/mixtape-chill-until-you-die/ Mon, 22 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/21/oh-land-white-nights/ Oh Land has that thing where she sounds effortlessly cool even when she’s being sincere, which is harder than it looks. There’s space in her production, and her voice sits in it like she’s not trying to convince you of anything. You either get it or you don’t, and she’s fine either way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/21/oh-land-white-nights/ Sun, 21 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/21/the-accidental-cure/ You go to clubs in German cities and it’s always the same. Overpriced drinks, a sticky bathroom, someone passing around a bag of MDMA that looks like dirty snow and smells worse. Depends what the dealer felt like that day, how white or yellow the crystals are. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/21/the-accidental-cure/ Sun, 21 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/19/hairy-pits-club/ My first real girlfriend was fourteen, blonde, and had enough dark hair under her arms that it made you understand people had to work to keep it off. She didn’t shave. Not as a statement—she just hadn’t started. Had the money for razors, had soap, had no reason yet to think her body needed editing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/19/hairy-pits-club/ Fri, 19 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/19/bad-weather-weekend/ The weather’s this bad - there’s no winning. You’re wet or you’re cold or you’re both. So the weekend has to become something else entirely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/19/bad-weather-weekend/ Fri, 19 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/19/in-the-scale/ There’s a moment in “Holocene” where the instrumentation just opens up. The space becomes obvious. It’s the kind of track that reveals why Bon Iver recorded in a cabin—the room is audible in it, all that cold air. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/19/in-the-scale/ Fri, 19 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/18/kids-clothes-and-the-panic/ A French fashion label called Jours Après Lunes put out a children’s underwear collection, and the American internet decided it was a pedophile conspiracy. Basic stuff—cotton underwear with designs, the kind of thing that’s been in catalogs for decades—suddenly became evidence that civilization was collapsing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/18/kids-clothes-and-the-panic/ Thu, 18 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/17/the-sun-wheres-my-head/ The Naked and Famous make the kind of indie pop that gets into your head and stays there, all bright synthesizers and these driving rhythms that make you feel like something’s about to happen. “The Sun (Where’s My Head)” has that quality—restless, a little dreamy, the vocals sitting back in the mix like someone thinking out loud over coffee at three in the afternoon. New Zealand does this particular flavor of pop really well, caught between cerebral and bodily, and this song lives right there in that middle ground. It’s the kind of thing that makes sense when you’re moving through a city, or driving somewhere you don’t especially want to go. Not transcendent, but real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/17/the-sun-wheres-my-head/ Wed, 17 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/17/tavi-gevinson-creepy-little-girl/ There’s something strange about being young and opinionated in public. Tavi Gevinson knew this before anyone else did—or at least before anyone was paying attention. She started a fashion blog as a middle schooler, then somehow became an actual voice in a world of adults who usually just talk at teenagers, not with them. The title probably references that uncanniness: a girl too smart, too articulate, too sure of herself. The kind of kid that makes people uncomfortable because she refused to perform humility. I’ve always respected that. There’s no worse curse for a young person than being exactly what they are without apology, and she seemed fundamentally uninterested in being palatable. That’s rarer than people pretend it is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/17/tavi-gevinson-creepy-little-girl/ Wed, 17 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/17/i-could-love-you-so-exquisitely/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/17/i-could-love-you-so-exquisitely/ Wed, 17 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/16/all-bass/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/16/all-bass/ Tue, 16 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/16/ruby-mercier-sixteen/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/16/ruby-mercier-sixteen/ Tue, 16 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/16/year-two/ There was a morning after a long night, sun coming through the window, my favorite song playing, and for a moment it felt perfect. Like I’d figured something out. Like Berlin was finally worth the price of admission. Then my phone buzzed and the feeling evaporated. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/16/year-two/ Tue, 16 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/15/trash-teen/ I took an old blog that was dying—suffocating under the weight of Nyan Cat memes and viral covers—and demolished it from the inside out. Put the rubble through a transformation so complete it had no recognizable features left. What came out the other end was TRASHTEEN: a dedicated archive of internet garbage. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/15/trash-teen/ Mon, 15 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/12/ten-little-missions/ I should spend my weekend doing something meaningful, but I’m broke as hell—no cash for drinks, so I’ll probably just sprint into walls a few times. Before I do that, here are ten things I think you should actually do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/12/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 12 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/12/mr-little-jeans-the-suburbs/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/12/mr-little-jeans-the-suburbs/ Fri, 12 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/11/charlotte-free-model-buys-toilet-paper/ Charlotte Free buying toilet paper somewhere in public—it’s the kind of moment that makes the rounds because it’s so mundane. Here’s this model, known for glamour and aesthetic perfection, just doing something as ordinary and necessary as anyone else. What made it funny was how it punctures the fantasy, that separate reality we imagine these people inhabiting until a photo like this surfaces and suddenly they’re just human. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/11/charlotte-free-model-buys-toilet-paper/ Thu, 11 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/10/angela-boatwright-suicide-practice/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/10/angela-boatwright-suicide-practice/ Wed, 10 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/10/daisy-lowe-playboy-summer/ Daisy Lowe had that look—sharp cheekbones, dark eyes, the kind of face that belonged in high fashion but somehow ended up in Playboy, which was already trying everything to stay relevant. There was something poignant about it, using a model from the real world to prop up a magazine that had become a ghost of itself. You could feel the end coming, but it looked good anyway. The whole thing felt like the last moment of that particular kind of glamour, calculated and beautiful and completely beside the point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/10/daisy-lowe-playboy-summer/ Wed, 10 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/9/terror-tower/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/9/terror-tower/ Tue, 09 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/7/geometry/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/7/geometry/ Sun, 07 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/6/eriko-nakao/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/6/eriko-nakao/ Sat, 06 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/6/august/ August is still the best month, genuinely. Summer break, pools, grilling outside, riding everywhere, looking for someone to fuck in the open air—the entire month is basically permission to want things. We’re supposed to grow up and forget how that felt, but I never quite do, and August reminds me I’m right. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/6/august/ Sat, 06 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/5/this-week-never-happened/ Looking back at the last seven days is pointless, but I’m doing it anyway. Monday was nothing but rain. Tuesday I think Two and a Half Men was on somewhere. Wednesday the bathroom light died. Thursday is basically gone. And now it’s Friday, which means I need to come up with reasons to forget any of it happened. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/5/this-week-never-happened/ Fri, 05 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/5/rachel-lynch-and-the-milshire-motel/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/5/rachel-lynch-and-the-milshire-motel/ Fri, 05 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/4/jerry-hsu-nazi-gold/ Jerry Hsu’s work—his videos, photographs, graphics—all come from the same place. He doesn’t perform or gesture at meaning. He just watches what’s there and figures out how to show it. That’s a skater’s understanding of space and light and timing: you learn to track movement and see where things work. Once that’s in you, it colors everything. His work has that quality—clean attention, no showing off, just the thinking made visible. You get the sense he’s always working something out rather than explaining something he’s already solved. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/4/jerry-hsu-nazi-gold/ Thu, 04 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/4/katy-b-witches-brew/ Katy B makes electronic music that sits somewhere between UK garage and grime, all twitchy synths and vocal loops that burrow into your head. Witches Brew captures that restless energy—her voice floating over beats that never quite settle, never quite give you what you’re expecting. There’s something about the way she uses space in her production that feels like watching someone move through a crowd. You catch glimpses, lose them, catch them again. Not quite pop, not quite underground. Just Katy B being Katy B, which is enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/4/katy-b-witches-brew/ Thu, 04 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/4/soundcheck/ I hadn’t felt that snap from an album in a long time until SBTRKT. Aaron Jerome, masked guy, made this debut that grabbed hold of you. Breakbeats and melodic dubstep and these sparse minimal touches that shouldn’t have worked but did. He’d pulled in Jessie Ware, Little Dragon, Sampha—people who got what he was trying to do. “Hold On,” “Wildfire,” “Trials Of The Past.” The whole thing felt necessary in a way that most albums don’t. Usually you get some good songs and some filler. This one felt like every move mattered. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/4/soundcheck/ Thu, 04 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/3/cushman-in-color/ Cushman shot New York in color during the 1940s, which is wild because most photographs from that era are black and white. His work doesn’t have that faded, nostalgic feeling—the colors are just there, immediate and clear. He wasn’t making art, just documenting the city. Corner storefronts, people in their coats, light hitting a building facade. No self-consciousness in it, no attempt to prove anything. Just recording what he saw, and now we get to look at it exactly as it appeared to him. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/3/cushman-in-color/ Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/3/pretty-in-pink/ Saskia was twenty-one, heading to design school in Florence, already refusing to nail down her style. She wore what felt right that day—chic, mixed, rockish, whatever. American Apparel, vintage Levi’s, Prada shoes, a linen jacket. Not a cohesive philosophy, just a collection of pieces she liked. When asked to describe her aesthetic, she said there wasn’t one. She loved all of it equally and wouldn’t be locked in. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/3/pretty-in-pink/ Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/3/toro-y-moi-how-i-know/ Chaz Bear’s been making music so specific to something I can’t quite name that I keep coming back to it. There’s this clarity underneath the electronics, a warmth that doesn’t apologize for itself. When something hits like that—when you know it immediately, without needing to decide whether it’s cool—that’s the moment you realize what you actually like. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/3/toro-y-moi-how-i-know/ Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/2/lykke-li-jerome/ There’s something about the way Lykke Li builds a mood that makes you feel like you’re witnessing something private. Jerome sits there quietly, patient, the kind of song that doesn’t announce itself but slowly fills the room until you realize you’ve been holding your breath. It’s sparse enough that every sound matters—her voice layered soft against itself, space between the notes doing as much work as the notes themselves. She has this way of making vulnerability sound like a decision rather than an accident, like she’s choosing exactly how much to let you see. The song doesn’t try to convince you of anything. It just exists, and you either meet it there or you don’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/2/lykke-li-jerome/ Tue, 02 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/2/tokyo-tower/ Standing in front of Tokyo Tower, all that red steel and confident geometry, I understood what the designer was after. It’s technically obsolete—shouldered aside by endless glass towers—but there’s craft in it, proportion, an understanding of how to make something matter without needing to be the tallest. A tower that knows what it wants to be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/2/tokyo-tower/ Tue, 02 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/1/how-you-want-to-go/ Vikings and samurai wouldn’t die of old age. Neither would Amy Winehouse. There’s something about going out young and hard that makes you a story worth telling. Growing old and disappearing is just what happens. There’s no narrative in it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/1/how-you-want-to-go/ Mon, 01 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/1/she-was-a-vision/ Nina Zivkovic was one of those people whose presence just registered differently. Not because she was performing or trying, but because some people have this thing—a kind of visual and personal confidence you can’t fake. The way she carried herself, everything she chose to be, it all felt deliberate without looking like effort. That’s what made her stick in your mind. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/8/1/she-was-a-vision/ Mon, 01 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/31/baby-monster-charlie-sunrises-fear/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/31/baby-monster-charlie-sunrises-fear/ Sun, 31 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/29/mixed-signals/ The parties worth going to are the ones built on friction. Elegant next to raw. High design bumping against total indifference. That creates actual energy. Everyone’s slightly unmoored. Nothing feels predetermined. That’s when something real might happen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/29/mixed-signals/ Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/29/killing-time/ Every weekend tips column is the same. Ten missions. Be kind to yourself. Do something stupid. Here’s what actually happens: you get home Friday and immediately don’t know what to do with yourself. You take a bath with wine. You pull on clothes you haven’t worn in years. You spend three hours searching the internet for photos of yourself, and around the time your neighbors might be wondering why you’ve been in front of a screen this long, you stop caring. You cry at a song you know is bad. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/29/killing-time/ Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/27/the-pose/ The flannel shirts, the vintage band tees, the carefully curated record collections—everyone at NYU seemed to have gotten the same memo about what cool looked like that year. The funny part was how self-aware everyone was about it, how intentional every choice was, how much thought went into looking like you didn’t care. A reality show documenting it just made the whole thing more explicit, but the feedback loop was already there, everyone already performing for invisible cameras. It wasn’t fake exactly, but it wasn’t not-fake either. That’s probably what made the whole thing interesting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/27/the-pose/ Wed, 27 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/26/björk-crystalline/ “Crystalline” is austere but never cold. Björk’s voice carries all the warmth while the production stays precise and minimal, building gradually from almost nothing into something intricate. It’s from Biophilia, probably her most deliberately designed album, and the precision shows in every placement. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/26/björk-crystalline/ Tue, 26 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/25/same-cycle/ Spend half your life online—actually spend it, more hours in the browser than with people who matter—and you start seeing something obvious: the internet doesn’t do new things. It repeats. The technology shifts but the patterns hold. Same cycle, every few months, forever. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/25/same-cycle/ Mon, 25 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/25/broken-summer/ There’s something pathetic about starting a conversation about the weather. Everyone does it. But this summer the weather was just bad—gray, cold, refusing to arrive—and the whole season never showed up. You know it won’t come back either. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/25/broken-summer/ Mon, 25 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/25/pills-on-my-tongue/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/25/pills-on-my-tongue/ Mon, 25 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/23/killing-english/ Readers hitting scrambled prose so mangled it looped back to being almost beautiful—that’s how I knew the Google Translate thing was a disaster. But I’m getting ahead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/23/killing-english/ Sat, 23 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/22/valerie-phillips-dont-be-pretty/ There’s something resistant about Valerie Phillips’ sculptures—the way they seem designed to reject easy consumption, to push back against being turned into decoration. Aluminum and steel and awkward angles, nothing soft, nothing that lets you rest your eye on it for long. The title says it plainly: this isn’t about seduction or elegance. It’s about making something that doesn’t apologize for taking up space in an ugly way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/22/valerie-phillips-dont-be-pretty/ Fri, 22 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/22/ten-little-missions/ That weekend was rain, properly—thunder and gray everything, the kind of weather that makes you want to disappear. I had this old list called Ten Little Missions, made for exactly this kind of day, so I decided to work through it while the sky fell. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/22/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 22 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/21/that-kind-of-commitment/ Incest. Betrayal. A kid gets thrown out a tower. This is how Game of Thrones introduces itself, and it’s nothing like the medieval fantasy I thought I was signing up for. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/21/that-kind-of-commitment/ Thu, 21 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/21/bread-butter/ Bread & Butter in summer was that gathering where fashion and music and interesting people all converged. You’d walk through and see the risks people took with clothes, the small choices that made them stand out. The whole thing was as much about watching each other as whatever was on stage. You’d leave tired with a stack of useless flyers, but feeling like you’d seen something worth seeing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/21/bread-butter/ Thu, 21 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/21/in-rotation/ This week scattered across different moods. Jazzy Jeff and Ayah’s “Back For More” is soulful and frictionless—the kind of album that Ayah’s voice carries without anyone noticing she’s doing the work. It’s free, which feels right. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/21/in-rotation/ Thu, 21 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/20/mona-kuhn-home-on-the-sun/ Mona Kuhn’s color photography has this warmth to it that’s almost unsettling—there’s comfort in the framing but something else underneath, a private quality that feels invasive to look at. Home on the Sun probably does what her best work does: treats light as a kind of mood rather than a technique. I’ve always been interested in photographers who understand that distinction. Her compositions suggest a quiet confidence, like she’s not trying to convince you of anything, just showing you what’s there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/20/mona-kuhn-home-on-the-sun/ Wed, 20 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/20/pon-pon-pon/ That video was everywhere around 2011, the kind of thing you’d see on Tumblr and wonder if it was real. Kyary Pamyu Pamyu in that candy-colored nightmare of a room, the song itself almost childlike in its simplicity—just that one repeated phrase, a melody that doesn’t try to be anything it isn’t. The genius of it is how unconcerned it all felt, like she knew exactly how stupid it looked and didn’t care. That visual sense, the way she understood that pop music could be deliberately ugly and weird and still work—it was design thinking applied to pop. The costume, the prop work, the aesthetic chaos of it all. She made something that looked like it could only exist on the internet, and it did. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/20/pon-pon-pon/ Wed, 20 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/20/they-always-won/ Three kids from New York who figured out how to make hip-hop sound like the opposite of everything hip-hop was supposed to be—aggressive and stupid and funny all at once. Mike D, MCA, Ad-Rock. They’d take a sample, chop it to nothing, rap over it like they were barely awake, and somehow it’d hit harder than things people actually put thought into. The thing about the Beastie Boys was they never cared if you got the joke or if there even was a joke. It didn’t matter. The attitude was the subject. They were just better at being themselves than anyone else around, which is probably the only real rule in music that ever actually mattered. By the time they figured out how to make something genuinely beautiful—and they did, later, when nobody expected it—they’d already proven that you didn’t need to prove anything at all. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/20/they-always-won/ Wed, 20 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/19/ilze-vanaga-a-kids-life/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/19/ilze-vanaga-a-kids-life/ Tue, 19 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/19/properly-hooked/ Something I need: endless distraction. Spend enough hours on the internet doing whatever it is I do, and you crack if something isn’t running on the other screen. Films work sometimes. What you really want is a series—animated, preferably. Something funny. Something you don’t have to work at. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/19/properly-hooked/ Tue, 19 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/18/handsome-furs-what-about-us/ Handsome Furs sounds like what happens when synth-pop and punk-rock refuse to stop fighting. Dan Smith’s voice cutting through everything like he can’t wait to get to the next sentence, drums and synths piling up behind him. ’What About Us’ is them operating at full force—pure hooks and momentum, every song knows where it’s going. There’s this thing about the record where it feels both desperate and completely in control, and that’s the whole equation. You could put it on alone or at a party and it hits the same, which I guess is why it stays with you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/18/handsome-furs-what-about-us/ Mon, 18 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/15/ten-little-missions/ Friday night and I’m at my computer instead of at some festival. No money, no friends, the weather’s being shit—whatever the reason. But it’s fine. I’m genuinely fine with it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/15/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 15 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/15/icona-pop-manners/ Icona Pop makes pop music that doesn’t perform. “Manners” is two minutes of efficient melody—bright synths, a solid hook, nothing grasping for your attention. There’s a deadpan quality to it, a refusal to blow things up or manufacture drama. The production does its job. The melody stays in place. It is what it is. There’s something cool about a song that knows its limits and doesn’t pretend otherwise. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/15/icona-pop-manners/ Fri, 15 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/14/somewhere-and-nowhere/ Fernando Tsuchiya exists in that strange space between myth and memory. He’s a real person who did actual things on actual roads—drifting a black AE86 through Tokyo in the ’80s, learning to drive sideways when nobody else understood why you’d want to—but by now he’s become something else. An idea. A ghost story that Japanese teenagers tell each other. The original. The legend that got filtered through anime and manga and video games until the boundary between the man and the myth collapsed completely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/14/somewhere-and-nowhere/ Thu, 14 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/13/july-works/ July hits because you’re either in it or out. Festival season, pond-dredging season, the nights where you throw your arms around whoever’s next to you at three in the morning and it feels necessary. You should be watching for monthly trend lists, but you’re too busy living, so here’s what actually works in July and what absolutely doesn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/13/july-works/ Wed, 13 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/8/high-in-berlin/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/8/high-in-berlin/ Fri, 08 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/8/kicking-and-screaming/ There’s something about resistance that doesn’t require a reason to keep going. You can be dragged into something kicking and screaming, the whole way down, and still find yourself sitting there afterwards, not sure when you stopped fighting. Maybe that’s the thing about being pulled toward something—eventually your body relaxes into it, even if your mouth stays shut. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/8/kicking-and-screaming/ Fri, 08 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/7/document-everything/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/7/document-everything/ Thu, 07 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/7/vampire-blow-i-really-think-youll-let-me-go/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/7/vampire-blow-i-really-think-youll-let-me-go/ Thu, 07 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/6/small-talk/ Standing at a hotel bar with Irina and Erik. Irina’s the kind of woman magazines were invented to feature. Erik’s the kind of man who speaks with his hands. I’m there because money requires it, which means I can’t tell Irina what I’m actually thinking, and I can’t tell Erik what I think of his business plans. First we have to do the small talk. The exchange of words that mean nothing, performed by people who mean nothing to each other, in service to an obligation that costs us more than it’s worth. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/6/small-talk/ Wed, 06 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/4/walnutwax/ Stuart Mitchell’s photographs have this quality of being taken in rooms you recognize but can’t quite place—somewhere between a friend’s apartment and a memory of it. The Walnutwax series feels like watching someone arrange their life in front of a camera, domestic scenes lit so cleanly they almost seem staged, except nothing about them feels performed. There’s a particular eye at work here, someone who understands how light falls on skin and fabric, how a small gesture reads across a frame. You look at the images and you’re thinking about texture—the nap of a sweater, the finish on an old table—and about color in the way you only do when you’re paying attention. It’s the kind of work that makes you want to slow down when you’re moving through a room, noticing the actual world instead of just walking through it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/4/walnutwax/ Mon, 04 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/4/mixtape-road-of-happiness/ The weather was shit, but we went out anyway. Not to demonstrate or escape—just to be in the street together, to move, to celebrate what was left of summer or what we imagined it could be. The music was Bon Iver, The Go! Team, Nneka. The kind of soundtrack that lands at exactly the right time and feels like a secret everyone already knows. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/4/mixtape-road-of-happiness/ Mon, 04 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/1/always-online/ It was one of those days again. Up early, grabbed a cold Starbucks from the fridge, sat down, opened the laptop. Connection established. The first article from yesterday is still broken somewhere—some system error eating at me since six. Emails from PR people in five time zones. A translation needing work. Image research. Corrections. Another article. Chats. Social media. Some guy asking if I can write about his band by Friday. Meanwhile I ordered food from the Greek place, jerked off, took a call, and by the time I looked up the sun was gone. I hadn’t been outside. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/7/1/always-online/ Fri, 01 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/30/alexandra-tunnard/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/30/alexandra-tunnard/ Thu, 30 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/30/wirtshaus-electric/ The Wirtshaus Tour didn’t apologize for mixing tradition and modernity—it was just a traveling beer hall that would set up in different cities with electronic music and DJs instead of polka bands. Someone figured out that you didn’t have to choose, that you could have both in the same room, getting drunk together. The concept feels obvious once it exists, which is usually how you know it’s good. There’s something right about a subwoofer rattling the wood and brass of a beer hall. It’s the kind of collision that shouldn’t work but does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/30/wirtshaus-electric/ Thu, 30 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/30/heavy-rotation/ The Alexis Taylor mix is eighty minutes of pure hits. Bohannon, Jay-Z, Aphex Twin, Shit Robot—names that shouldn’t work together but do. It’s the kind of mixtape you find on a random Tuesday and think: this is exactly what I needed without knowing it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/30/heavy-rotation/ Thu, 30 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/29/google-plus/ Google spent years trying to crack social media and never quite got there. Orkut worked in certain countries but not the ones that mattered. Wave was supposed to replace email but nobody knew what it was for. Then came Google+ in 2011, this whole big attempt at building something that could actually compete with Facebook. I remember it feeling important somehow. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/29/google-plus/ Wed, 29 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/29/mamy-rocks/ There’s something genuinely funny about the idea that you can’t fully party when your parents are watching. The epileptic strobes, the bass that liquifies your organs, the beer-sticky floors—they’re all fine until you spot your mother at the bar, then suddenly you’re performing your own enjoyment instead of actually having it. That gap between generations at a club is real, and I think everyone who’s ever been to a rave knows exactly what that moment feels like. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/29/mamy-rocks/ Wed, 29 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/28/vintage-smackdown/ Berlin runs constant vintage styling competitions, which is either the most Berlin thing or the most ridiculous thing depending on your mood. This one had two contestants, Helen and Isabelle, each presenting three outfits for internet judgment. Winner gets a catwalk slot somewhere. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/28/vintage-smackdown/ Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/26/wastin-time/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/26/wastin-time/ Sun, 26 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/24/luana-teifke/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/24/luana-teifke/ Fri, 24 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/24/ten-little-missions/ Wear something nice, bring a tablecloth and wine glasses to McDonald’s, have dinner there like it’s an actual restaurant. The people around you won’t know what to do with it. Download a CSS song and dance—for hours, for days, whatever. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/24/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 24 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/24/wildfire/ SBTRKT makes music that exists in the margins between precision and dreaminess, every element placed with purpose but arranged in a way that lets it dissolve into something larger. There’s control in the production—you can hear the discipline, the design work—but it never feels rigid. The space between the sounds is as important as what’s making noise. Wildfire carries that forward, patient and intensifying, the kind of track that rewards attention but doesn’t demand it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/24/wildfire/ Fri, 24 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/23/whats-spinning/ D’Angelo’s Voodoo is the kind of album that makes everything else sound thin. It’s not complicated—just this thick, warm production and D’Angelo’s voice doing exactly what it needs to do. Brown Sugar got him noticed, but Voodoo is where he became unreachable. I keep coming back to it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/23/whats-spinning/ Thu, 23 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/23/brent-stirton-rotting-souls/ Stirton’s photography doesn’t flinch. He photographs what breaks down—ecosystems collapsing, bodies marked by disease and conflict, the raw material of documentary that most outlets won’t run or want to see. The title itself, Rotting Souls, suggests something theological in the grimness, but it’s really just what happens when you point a camera at the parts of the world that profit from invisibility. He works for National Geographic and other publications, but the pictures don’t feel corporate—they feel like the only honest thing in a room full of polite lies. I’ve always respected photographers who know that clarity requires unflinching proximity. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/23/brent-stirton-rotting-souls/ Thu, 23 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/22/carpark-north-everything-starts-again/ Carpark North were the kind of band you could trust not to oversell what they were doing. Danish, straightforward, naming themselves after a parking lot like it was nothing. They made rock music that felt lived-in rather than performed, which meant their records had this quality where nothing needed to grab you—it just sat there being true. That’s harder to pull off than it sounds. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/22/carpark-north-everything-starts-again/ Wed, 22 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/22/alien-eyeball/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/22/alien-eyeball/ Wed, 22 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/21/yuck-shook-down/ Put on Yuck and you’re not waiting for them to show up with some big idea. They’re just there, making songs that fit into your day without demanding attention. Shook Down’s the same way—honest stuff that doesn’t oversell itself. The kind of record you forget you’re playing until you realize you’ve heard it three times this week. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/21/yuck-shook-down/ Tue, 21 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/21/ting-cheng-one-and-two-and-up-and-down/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/21/ting-cheng-one-and-two-and-up-and-down/ Tue, 21 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/20/mixtape-clean-your-mind/ Your head fills up every day. Thoughts about people you can’t have, money you’ll never see, the constant hunt for something to feel alive on. It’s genuinely remarkable nobody loses it completely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/20/mixtape-clean-your-mind/ Mon, 20 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/20/soaked-at-hurricane/ Four stages blasting alternative rock for three days straight, mud, beer, crowds thick enough to lose people in, and that weird electricity that happens when thousands of drunk humans compress themselves into a field. That was Hurricane Festival 2011. I went with a group—Sara, Isa, Thang, Flo, Alex, Christoph, Thomas—all of us there with press passes that made us simultaneously invisible and enemies of the actual festival-goers. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/20/soaked-at-hurricane/ Mon, 20 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/16/on-rotation/ Battles finally put out Gloss Drop after the wait. They’ve added more vocals this time, and it sounds strange until you realize it works—everything still feels off-kilter in the best way, the kind of thing where you remember that instruments are doing something. It’s still their experimental, fractured style, just with voices in there now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/16/on-rotation/ Thu, 16 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/16/the-interrogation-room/ Donald Weber photographed interrogation rooms in Ukraine—the same institutional space, fluorescent and blank, where people end up after arrest. He spent years getting access, building this archive of the moment right after someone’s been picked up. No names, just a list of what they did: theft, prostitution, smuggling, drugs, rape. You see the face and you know which crime belongs to that person. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/16/the-interrogation-room/ Thu, 16 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/15/sit-down-first/ It was actually a nice evening. We were staying with a friend, shoving warm wraps into our mouths, streaming terrible movies from the internet. Big bed, plenty of space. Then someone mentioned HIV. The thing about it is it starts like the flu—you hear nothing about it for ten years—then it hits you all at once. I’ve heard the story a thousand times. But this time the thought just kept circling in my head all night long. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/15/sit-down-first/ Wed, 15 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/15/the-blue-dot/ I owned an iPhone for a few years. I know all about the consumer hysteria around it, the calculated need, the way it accumulates. I had enough friends with regular phones to see the distance, and yeah, I’d heard the jokes about Apple disciples. But you use an iPhone for a while and you stop questioning why people get hooked. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/15/the-blue-dot/ Wed, 15 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/15/blue-sneakers-and-other-fashion-crimes/ I’ve been watching street fashion for long enough to know that everyone’s got an opinion and most of them are wrong. The white sneakers thing has gone on too long—endless parade of the same unblemished Adidas clones, or neon abominations that hurt to look at. What nobody’s doing is blue with stripes. Just blue. Simple blue with a stripe. That should be the move this summer but I know it won’t be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/15/blue-sneakers-and-other-fashion-crimes/ Wed, 15 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/14/scared-of-the-dark/ Adam Tensta makes music that doesn’t pretend to have answers. ’Scared of the Dark’ sounds like the kind of track that sits in discomfort instead of trying to escape it—naming something you can’t quite articulate, the particular loneliness of nighttime thoughts. That’s harder to do than it seems. Most people want to fix it or make it beautiful. He just lets it exist. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/14/scared-of-the-dark/ Tue, 14 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/14/looking-again/ Red Bull buried treasure chests across German cities one year. More than sixty of them scattered across more than sixty cities, each one hidden according to coordinates released online. Inside: event tickets to their sports spectaculars, limited-edition refrigerators, codes that unlocked more prizes. Transparent marketing machinery, obviously. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/14/looking-again/ Tue, 14 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/13/mixtape-untitled/ Some songs hit you somewhere you can’t point to. They work on you without asking permission. That’s why I make playlists—to catch that feeling before it dissolves. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/13/mixtape-untitled/ Mon, 13 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/11/gone-again/ Best Coast doesn’t make a huge deal about anything. Bethany Cosentino’s voice is there—dreamy but solid, never reaching for something it doesn’t have. The guitars sit underneath like they’re thinking about something else. It’s the kind of indie rock that gets prettier the more you listen, not in a technical sense but in a way that feels accidental, like she stumbled into the production rather than built it. The band appears and disappears on its own clock, which is fine. You don’t need constant news from people you care about. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/11/gone-again/ Sat, 11 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/10/better-times/ There was this moment, maybe 2006 or 2010, where everything new that showed up felt like a gift. Not everything, but enough to make you mixtapes, enough to build a taste that stuck. Certain names became essential. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/10/better-times/ Fri, 10 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/10/the-privacy-panic/ I never cared much about data privacy. Ran a blog where I posted everything—relationship drama, school stress, family bullshit, whatever. Left my settings wide open on every service I touched. I’m the type who’d throw a selfie with my dick out on some porn forum if the moment felt right, keep my phone tracking my location constantly, and feel something like satisfaction knowing Google has my entire life mapped out. Google Knows Me, So I Exist—that phrase hit different when the web felt new. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/10/the-privacy-panic/ Fri, 10 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/9/burn-down-the-city/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/9/burn-down-the-city/ Thu, 09 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/9/greetings-from-beyond/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/9/greetings-from-beyond/ Thu, 09 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/8/the-double-standard/ The site was garbage. Pop-ups that spawned pop-ups, sketchy links that looked like they came from a 2004 forum, design that hurt to look at. Kino.to was the place you went when you were desperate and broke, with no other options. When they raided it a few years back, shut it down with some kind of police operation, my first thought wasn’t sadness or anger. It was relief. Finally, one less place to feel ashamed about. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/8/the-double-standard/ Wed, 08 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/7/cayal-ungers-fade/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/7/cayal-ungers-fade/ Tue, 07 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/6/the-shelf-life-of-panic/ It’s Monday again. Bin Laden’s still dead, which is somehow supposed to relieve something, but it doesn’t really. There’s always going to be some apocalypse on the news—the variables change, the panic stays the same. Today it’s EHEC, which I already know about because my email homepage deemed it important. I’m eating lunch without cucumber or tomato, very deliberately safe, watching Punkt 12 with the sound on. Katja Burkhard is doing the concerned face again. I’ve watched her do this same face for swine flu, bird flu, whatever three-letter plague the news decides to fear this week. She doesn’t have to practice it anymore—it’s built in. That seriousness, that “something terrible is happening” expression. It’s the same one every journalist in Germany uses. It’s the family-tragedy-in-provincial-town face. It’s not actually different from the others. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/6/the-shelf-life-of-panic/ Mon, 06 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/6/easy-marks/ Every day brings another wave of PR garbage. Agencies worldwide flooding inboxes with warm, nauseating prose about bands nobody wants to hear, products designed to fail, videos that exist solely because someone’s job depends on them existing. They ask you to publish it for free, as if they’re doing you a favor just by asking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/6/easy-marks/ Mon, 06 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/5/summer-girls/ That LFO song keeps ending up in my head years later and I’m still not sure why it works. It’s just a relentless catalog of late-90s pop culture—New Kids on the Block, Spice Girls, Mariah Carey, whatever was on MTV that week, crammed into the opening seconds. There’s nothing clever about it, no distance, no irony, just a song that commits completely to being exactly what it is. You laugh at how dumb it is and by the third listen you’re singing along, genuinely liking it. Which might actually be the whole point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/5/summer-girls/ Sun, 05 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/3/soundcheck/ K.I.Z.’s back with “Urlaub fürs Gehirn” and they haven’t softened at all. Tarek, Maxim, Nico, and DJ Craft are making crude, funny, aggressive music—there’s literally a track called “In Your Mother”—but the provocation isn’t the whole thing. The musicianship is there too, it’s just not what anyone would call respectable. That’s kind of the entire point. Songs like “Abteilungsleiter der Liebe” show they can do romance if they feel like it, but that’s never going to be their lane. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/3/soundcheck/ Fri, 03 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/1/the-boy/ I keep thinking about the video. Two and a half minutes of a body—thirteen years old, face purple, covered in cuts and burns and bullet holes, genitals mutilated—with someone describing each wound. His name was Hamza Ali al-Khateeb. He was arrested at a protest in southern Syria in April 2011 and disappeared for a month. When his family got him back, he was like that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/1/the-boy/ Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/1/barefoot-season/ Summer comes and everyone wants their feet out. No shoes, no socks, just skin on concrete and dirt and whatever else gets stepped on. There’s something honest about it—the pretense stripped away—though you notice it’s usually the people whose feet don’t look like crime scenes who actually do it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/6/1/barefoot-season/ Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/31/girl-at-home/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/31/girl-at-home/ Tue, 31 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/30/a-good-month/ It’s just after four in the morning. Night. I’m the only living person in this unwieldy office complex, apart from the black shadow that drifts across the bare walls and makes me question my sanity. Empty Red Bull cans scattered around me. Fast-food wrappers. Magazines. My eyes stay fixed on the monitor. I’m not going home tonight. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/30/a-good-month/ Mon, 30 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/28/paranoid-android/ That song sits at the exact center of what guitar music figured out in the 90s and then mostly gave up on. The shift from the pixelated synth opening into the actual riff is the technical equivalent of a door opening. It’s controlled, architectural, nothing wasted. Thom’s voice carries something wrecked in it even when the lyrics are oblique—you hear the nerves underneath. I put it on less often than I should because it’s so completely itself that there’s something almost confrontational about it. Most songs let you in. This one makes you come to it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/28/paranoid-android/ Sat, 28 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/27/weekend-missions/ You’re sitting in a parking lot during a storm, chai getting cold, and someone asks what you’re doing this weekend. You don’t know, so you start making a list. Ten ridiculous things. Not because you’ll actually do them. Just to have a plan. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/27/weekend-missions/ Fri, 27 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/27/soundcheck/ Joy Denalane’s been back in my ears. Maureen came five years after Born & Raised, and her voice has that quality where it settles into a room and makes you hear what you’re already feeling—clarifying rather than amplifying. Soul in its simplest form: just a voice and whatever it touches. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/27/soundcheck/ Fri, 27 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/26/oh-canada/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/26/oh-canada/ Thu, 26 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/25/the-outside-pressure/ Beer gets warm in five minutes. That’s the main thing I notice about summer—everyone’s in the park like it’s freedom itself, and maybe it is, but there’s always this undertone that if you’re not there, you’re wasting the season. The media pushes it relentlessly. TV stations basically check out in the afternoons, radio fills the silence with festival listings and cinema schedules, and the whole culture tells you the same thing: outside is where life happens. Inside is where failures live. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/25/the-outside-pressure/ Wed, 25 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/25/boris-mikhailov-case-history/ Mikhailov’s Case History is brutal in a way that most photography isn’t—it doesn’t court your sympathy or frame its subjects as victims. He’s documenting the homeless in Kharkiv, the body’s slow surrender to living on the street, and he does it with a directness that feels almost callous until you realize there’s nothing condescending about it. He’s not using them to make a point. He’s just looking. The photographs are ugly and unglamorous, sometimes barely composed, but that’s the whole thing—no artifice, no distance, just what happens when you point a camera at someone the world has decided doesn’t matter. It’s the kind of work that stays in your head not because it’s beautiful but because it refuses to let you feel noble for looking at it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/25/boris-mikhailov-case-history/ Wed, 25 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/24/richard-kern-face-to-panty-ratio/ Kern’s been shooting explicit photographs since the eighties, and the work doesn’t apologize for itself or for the women in it. There’s a directness to his stuff that makes most art photography look precious by comparison—he’s interested in what people actually look like, how they actually move, not some mediated version of sexuality. The ratio in the title is his own joke: how much face, how much body, what’s the right proportion for the picture to work. It’s funny and it’s honest, which is rarer than it should be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/24/richard-kern-face-to-panty-ratio/ Tue, 24 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/24/jj-made-in-sweden/ JJ’s work sits somewhere between visual art and music production, which is the kind of boundary-blurring that usually annoys me but somehow doesn’t here. There’s something about the restraint in what they do—the refusal to explain or perform—that feels distinctly Swedish, or at least what I imagine Swedish restraint to be. Clean lines, careful color, deliberate silence where noise could fit. I keep coming back to it because it doesn’t demand anything from you, which in a creative landscape where everything is screaming for your attention feels almost radical. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/24/jj-made-in-sweden/ Tue, 24 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/23/summer-in-the-city/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/23/summer-in-the-city/ Mon, 23 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/22/easy-please-me/ Katy B stripped “Easy Please Me” down to almost nothing—just her voice and minimal production, which was a strange move after building her reputation in the UK garage and grime world. I remember the first time hearing it, waiting for some elaborate flourish or a second voice to arrive, but it never did. There’s something genuinely stubborn about it, refusing to be exactly what people expect even after you’ve proven you can nail that formula. Quieter than you’d think, which somehow feels more honest than anything that’s trying to prove something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/22/easy-please-me/ Sun, 22 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/20/two-designs/ Xzibit’s “Pimp My Ride” is what happens when someone with money decides to decorate a car with every impulse at once. LEDs, subwoofers, custom paint, whatever. The result looks like a vision board threw up on a Cadillac. It’s not taste failing—it’s the complete absence of any framework for taste at all. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/20/two-designs/ Fri, 20 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/20/those-who-came/ Sasha Kurmaz’s work sits in that space between documentation and dream. “Those Who Came” carries the weight of a title that asks you to imagine who, from where, under what circumstances. There’s something about the restraint in that—the refusal to explain itself immediately—that pulls you in. I don’t know if it’s a film or a series or something harder to categorize, but that uncertainty is part of what makes it work. It asks questions without pestering you for answers. You finish it and you’re left with the specific texture of something, not a lesson. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/20/those-who-came/ Fri, 20 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/19/james-blake-lindisfarne/ Blake’s always been chasing something—that space between beats where the emptiness matters more than the sound. Lindisfarne, the island, is all that in geographic form: isolated, austere, historically sacred but actually just stone and grass and the weight of time. The album feels like that too. Not harsh, just spare. He strips things down to what actually moves you, which turns out to be very little—a voice, a synth line, the space between notes. I keep coming back to how patient it is, how willing to breathe. There’s no urgency here, no trying to convince you of anything. Just someone working through something quietly, and you’re allowed to listen if you want to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/19/james-blake-lindisfarne/ Thu, 19 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/19/late-night-records/ Moby’s Destroyed showed up in my week made of hotel rooms and airports. Fifteen songs, each one sitting in its own quiet space. You don’t notice it’s playing until you’re twenty minutes in and realize you’ve been listening instead of doing whatever else you were supposed to be doing. Recorded on analog gear—doesn’t matter, just sounds right. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/19/late-night-records/ Thu, 19 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/18/when-charity-events-dont-suck/ The Rifles played an unplugged set at Cookies in Berlin, this little indie band from London, and it was actually good. It was a charity thing—all the proceeds going to Trekstock, which works with young people dealing with cancer—and usually those feel like obligations, like you’re being voluntold to have a nice time for a cause. But this one landed different. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/18/when-charity-events-dont-suck/ Wed, 18 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/17/cant-find-entrance/ Those Dancing Days was a Swedish band doing that kind of indie pop that sneaks up on you—melodic, a little precious, but sincere about it. I can’t remember where I first heard them, probably some music blog from the mid-2000s when that was still how you discovered things. The song stuck around in the back of my head the way good pop does, light and specific at the same time. Their records had this optimism to them, this belief in the potential of a three-minute song to be enough, to matter. They’re not household names and they’re not supposed to be. Sometimes the best thing a band can do is make something beautiful that finds exactly the people it was meant to find, and everyone else walks past without noticing. That’s its own kind of gift. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/17/cant-find-entrance/ Tue, 17 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/17/aizawa/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/17/aizawa/ Tue, 17 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/16/everythings-shifting/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/16/everythings-shifting/ Mon, 16 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/16/the-fourth-one/ I watched the first Pirates in 2003 and remember being surprised by how weird Johnny Depp was allowed to be. The whole thing moved like something half-sunk, all excess and randomness, and it shouldn’t have worked but it did. Two more sequels followed and by 2007 it felt like the series had reached its natural stopping point. Then Disney made another one. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/16/the-fourth-one/ Mon, 16 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/14/jjs-angels/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/14/jjs-angels/ Sat, 14 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/14/ryoichi-maeda/ Ryoichi Maeda makes work that stays with you in quiet ways. His digital pieces and installations have this quality of being both extremely deliberate and somehow half-accidental—like he’s discovered something and is showing you the edges of it without explanation. You look at them once and they register. You think about them later and they register differently. There’s a precision to how he builds space, whether through video or sound or light, that suggests he understands something most of us are still learning. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/14/ryoichi-maeda/ Sat, 14 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/12/boys-and-girls/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/12/boys-and-girls/ Thu, 12 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/10/the-maritim/ We were at the Maritim for some event I’ve half-forgotten. The lobby was all brass railings and glass—the kind of hotel that made you feel like you should be doing something important just by standing there. Wenke was better at that than I was. We found a quiet corner somewhere and sat without much to say, which was fine. I remember her face in the light from one of those big windows, and thinking how right she was in that space, like the hotel had been designed with her in mind. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/10/the-maritim/ Tue, 10 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/10/berlin-café-kotti/ Café Kotti is where you end up when you’re in Kreuzberg and the afternoon stretches out with nowhere to go. The coffee is correct, the crowd is familiar and strange at once, the walls are covered in layers of stickers that have become their own kind of wallpaper. It’s the kind of place that stopped trying to mean anything and became essential by accident. You can sit there for hours and nobody minds. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/10/berlin-café-kotti/ Tue, 10 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/6/austra-lose-it/ Austra’s music did something to me years ago—this electronic precision combined with a kind of emotional distance, like observing your own disintegration from the outside. The arrangements are so controlled, so careful, but the songs themselves are about things falling apart. ’Lose It’ sits right in that tension. I’m not entirely sure where the production ends and the songwriting begins, but the effect is clear: this work doesn’t let go. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/6/austra-lose-it/ Fri, 06 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/6/hasisi-park-like-a-dirty-dog/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/6/hasisi-park-like-a-dirty-dog/ Fri, 06 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/5/current-rotation/ I can’t stop playing Burial’s “Untrue.” There’s something about the sound—dirty like basement floors, drugged and beautiful, the kind of record that feels like aftermath or anticipation. It’s the record that defined dubstep and probably always will. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/5/current-rotation/ Thu, 05 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/4/emily-jane-robinsons-dreamland-stories/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/4/emily-jane-robinsons-dreamland-stories/ Wed, 04 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/4/may-watch/ Every month was like a new life. That’s what the Incas knew before they predicted the end of the world and got it completely wrong. So one May I went hunting trends with the tools of someone operating on instinct—butterfly nets and broken bottles, which was as good a method as any. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/4/may-watch/ Wed, 04 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/3/light-search/ A Swarovski film with no dialogue, no plot, just light and crystal. Bruno Aveillan directed, which meant the brand wasn’t cutting corners. Yiqing Yin designed the world. Two figures searching through it without ever explaining what they’re searching for. Three minutes, and every second is composed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/3/light-search/ Tue, 03 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/3/she-went-along-with-him/ Amadou & Mariam sound like two people who’ve been in the same room so long they stopped keeping score of whose voice is whose. He sings, she sings, they’re from Mali, they’re both blind, and after decades making music together their voices fit without thinking about it. The title says she went along with him, but listening to them, you’d think they just agreed on something once and never had to agree again. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/3/she-went-along-with-him/ Tue, 03 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/2/above-görli/ The vantage point from the café above Görlitzer Park is the right distance from the chaos. Close enough to watch it happen—the dealers, the kids on the grass, the old men at the picnic tables, everyone pretending they’re not watching everyone else—but removed enough that it feels like you’re observing a machine, not getting ground up in it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/2/above-görli/ Mon, 02 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/2/palladium-boots/ Palladium boots don’t ask for anything. They’re solid canvas and rubber, military-born, no fashion angle. In L.A. you see them on skaters and photographers and people who actually work in their clothes. They’re not trying to be cool, and that’s what makes them work. I’ve worn through a few pairs without thinking twice about why. Some things just make sense. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/5/2/palladium-boots/ Mon, 02 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/29/thor-no-apologies/ Chris Hemsworth’s Thor gets thrown down to Earth depowered and furious, and the moment he walks into a diner and breaks everything trying to order coffee, you know exactly what kind of movie this is going to be. A god with all the wrong instincts. Natalie Portman finds him, plays it cool for about thirty seconds, and then they’re investigating this mythology together. Kenneth Branagh’s directing, and he seems to understand that the whole thing works better if you don’t take it seriously. If it tried to be epic and tragic, it would crater. Better to just let it be what it is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/29/thor-no-apologies/ Fri, 29 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/29/im-a-happy-girl/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/29/im-a-happy-girl/ Fri, 29 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/29/ten-things/ There’s a royal wedding this weekend. All over television. All anyone’s talking about. Ignore it. It’ll end in divorce, they always do. Get outside instead, find something good to eat, let yourself sweat a little. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/29/ten-things/ Fri, 29 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/29/hurts-illuminated/ Hurts are one of those bands that made you feel less alone in the dark. Their whole thing—the synths, the reverb, Theo Hutchcraft’s voice drifting through all that neon melancholy—it was perfect for late nights and the kind of thinking you don’t do in the daytime. They never got huge, which feels right somehow. The biggest bands are rarely the ones that actually matter to you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/29/hurts-illuminated/ Fri, 29 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/28/recent-records/ The Weeknd’s House of Balloons is authentic R&B, the kind that doesn’t dress up what it’s about. Abel Tesfaye knows the music is there to make you feel what you’re already feeling, and he’s efficient about it—just voice and beat and whatever you’re thinking about someone specific. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/28/recent-records/ Thu, 28 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/28/the-parties-i-dont-go-to/ Frankfurt had a Jägermeister tour stop in 2011 with Frittenbude and Tom Deluxx. I saw it through someone else’s camera—photos and video from colleagues who were there. That’s how you know you weren’t. Everyone else gets the memory. You get the documentation, which is its own thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/28/the-parties-i-dont-go-to/ Thu, 28 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/28/sadness-is-a-blessing/ Lykke Li’s sadness doesn’t perform. There’s no redemption arc in her work, no healing narrative or lesson learned—she just moves through heartbreak with the kind of honesty that most artists spend their whole careers avoiding. Listen to the albums where she leans all the way into sorrow and you notice she’s not interested in making you feel better, only in being true to what she actually feels. That’s rarer than it should be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/28/sadness-is-a-blessing/ Thu, 28 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/27/gag/ The most effective provocation is something that genuinely makes you uncomfortable. Vomit as art, the body turning itself inside out—it’s the opposite of what celebrity is supposed to perform. Millie Bobby Brown getting involved with work like this gets at something real: your image, your brand, your carefully maintained surface mean nothing to your body. It will reject everything when it needs to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/27/gag/ Wed, 27 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/26/fashion-against-aids/ You want to dismiss corporate charity—H&M using AIDS awareness to polish their brand feels like the textbook play. But the company has reach that most nonprofits would kill for. They’ve got stores in every city, young audiences streaming through them constantly. Point that infrastructure at a public health message and things actually happen. The self-interest is obvious. And the awareness still builds. I stopped trying to separate the motives a while ago. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/26/fashion-against-aids/ Tue, 26 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/26/lou-o-bedlam-girls-portraits/ Lou O’ Bedlam’s Girls Portraits sit in this uncomfortable space between technical mastery and deliberate wrongness. The faces are rendered with almost photographic precision, but there’s something off about every one—the proportions aren’t quite right, the expressions feel both familiar and alien, the color choices are deliberately unsettling. It’s the work of someone who understands beauty well enough to know how to break it. There’s a dark humor underneath, not the kind that announces itself—more like a private joke, or maybe an insult wrapped in a compliment. I keep coming back to them because they refuse to be likable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/26/lou-o-bedlam-girls-portraits/ Tue, 26 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/26/kate-bush-deeper-understanding/ Kate Bush made records that sounded like nothing else, and then she’d disappear for a decade and come back stranger. The production, the voice, the refusal to let anything stay simple—it all still holds up. You listen to her work now and it doesn’t feel dated because it was never chasing what was current. Just following where the idea went. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/26/kate-bush-deeper-understanding/ Tue, 26 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/25/mixtape-after-party/ The best part of any night out is the morning after, when you step outside and the sunrise hits you directly in the face. Everything’s quiet. No one else on the street. You’ve moved through the night into this—from drunk to hungover, from clubs to sunrise, headphones on, whatever playlist you threw together at 3 a.m. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/25/mixtape-after-party/ Mon, 25 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/22/betahaus/ Found it after a day of searching—one illegal tour and everything was clear. Betahaus. This was the place. The best desk in the best room, and I claimed it immediately. Decorated it with whatever was lying around: magazines, pen holders, cola bottles. That’s how you stake territory in a shared workspace. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/22/betahaus/ Fri, 22 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/22/weekend-missions/ I’m in the office with beer and sun coming through the windows. We’ve got maybe fifteen minutes before someone—probably me—jumps into the flooded conference room. We know we should be professional about it. We never are. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/22/weekend-missions/ Fri, 22 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/21/ellis-scott-actually/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/21/ellis-scott-actually/ Thu, 21 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/20/countdown-tv/ I’d catch these Japanese countdown shows late at night, flipping through channels, and suddenly forty-five minutes have gone by and I’m waiting to find out what’s actually number one. There’s something stupidly effective about the format—the suspense, the performances, idols looking like they were designed in a computer somewhere, the glittery set that’s been the same since maybe 2010. You don’t need to know the songs to get hooked by the structure itself, the way they drag it out, the climax they’re building toward. Once you start watching, you’re committed to seeing it through. It’s probably the most efficient music delivery system ever invented. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/20/countdown-tv/ Wed, 20 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/20/summer-ride/ There’s a specific quality to summer rides—the heat radiating off the asphalt, the way the air tastes like dust and cut grass even on the freeway. You’re moving through it all at speed, window down, some song on repeat that you’ll remember for years not because it was great but because it was there. The landscape blurs into a general impression of green and sky. Your arm rests on the door. You’re not thinking about anything in particular, which is maybe the whole point. By evening you’re somewhere else, and the day has that quality of small adventure—nothing actually happened, but you got there however you wanted, and the getting was the thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/20/summer-ride/ Wed, 20 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/18/rafale-everglades/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/18/rafale-everglades/ Mon, 18 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/18/mixtape-hula-hoop-hysteria/ Turn off the heater, turn up something good. The sun’s actually warm now. I grab the fixie, text everyone I know is free, pull the hula hoop from whatever closet’s been holding it since last summer. Craft Spells starts playing. Wolf Gang next, then Yuksek. This is the summer playlist, the one that makes me believe this summer’s actually mine instead of just something that happens to people in nice places. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/18/mixtape-hula-hoop-hysteria/ Mon, 18 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/17/berlin-karo-janos-and-paul/ Berlin with these three felt like wasting time in the best way. We’d walk around with no plan, stopping for coffee that somehow always tasted wrong, then beer that was better. Karo had an opinion on everything we passed. Janos laughed at jokes that weren’t funny. Paul didn’t say much. I remember being in some basement bar—I don’t even know which one anymore—and the light was all wrong for the time of day, and everyone looked good in it anyway. That’s the kind of thing you forget but can’t quite shake. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/17/berlin-karo-janos-and-paul/ Sun, 17 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/17/gamers-heart-japan/ I remember when Gamers Heart Japan happened—this campaign where the gaming community just showed up with money. No grand gestures, no morality plays, just people with enough disposable income deciding it mattered and giving. The donations added up. There’s something I like about that: straightforward, quiet, no need to turn it into content or virtue. Just people helping. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/17/gamers-heart-japan/ Sun, 17 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/16/berlin-on-air/ We were on ZDF one afternoon. Wenke and I talked about something—Berlin, our work, whatever they’d asked us to talk about—while the crew adjusted our microphones and checked the lights. Between takes she made me laugh so hard I nearly fell off the stool, which the producer did not appreciate. When it was done, we walked back out into Berlin like regular people, and nobody on the street knew or cared that we’d been on national television five minutes earlier. That distance between being on camera and being forgotten felt like the whole story. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/16/berlin-on-air/ Sat, 16 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/16/orgy-of-irrelevance/ The way I’d describe re:publica 2011: take the two biggest nerds from every high school graduating class, the ones even teachers won’t talk to, hand them each an iPhone and iPad, and lock them in a hall with beer and Club Mate for three days. Except it’s real and it costs money to get in. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/16/orgy-of-irrelevance/ Sat, 16 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/15/the-end-of-the-world/ I’d accepted the numbness by then. Months of it—couldn’t laugh, couldn’t cry, just this hollow thing moving through Berlin from party to party, person to person, never really present. Everything had flattened into gray. I looked everywhere for something to break it and found nothing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/15/the-end-of-the-world/ Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/15/simple-math/ There’s something about Manchester Orchestra that gets under your skin without asking permission. Not flashy, not trying to be clever—just these raw, wound-up songs about doubt and desire and the way your life can feel like it’s collapsing while you’re standing still. Simple Math was the album that did it for me, that moment when a band stops holding back and just writes what’s actually happening in their chest. The mathematics of it is brutal: you add up all the small failures and betrayals and lost moments, and you get yourself at three in the morning wondering what it was all for. That’s what this record is. No answers, no neat resolution. Just the shape of that question. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/15/simple-math/ Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/15/no-acid-until-youve-cleaned-your-room/ Ran into this somewhere online and had to sit with it for a minute. The idea that you need to get your life in order, sort yourself out, do the responsible thing—and then maybe, only then, you’re allowed to lose your mind chemically. As if the clean room is the entry fee. As if discipline and dissolution are on a timeline. The whole thing is funny in a way that actually stings a little. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/15/no-acid-until-youve-cleaned-your-room/ Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/14/ulrike-biets/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/14/ulrike-biets/ Thu, 14 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/13/out-clean/ No Jesus, no redemption arc. She was done at twenty-three after five years in porn and just said it plainly: no regrets. That was what made Sasha Grey actually different. She didn’t need to reframe what she’d done as something it wasn’t, didn’t need to pretend she’d been damaged by it or saved from it. She just did it, and then she stopped. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/13/out-clean/ Wed, 13 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/13/fatboy-at-the-summit/ Somewhere in the Austrian mountains during Volvo Snowbombing 2011, Fatboy Slim played a set in an actual igloo. I got to talk to him afterwards on a sunny terrace, asking the kinds of questions you ask someone who’s been on the road forever and has somehow found a way to keep making it work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/13/fatboy-at-the-summit/ Wed, 13 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/12/pretty-is-everywhere/ Cintia Dicker photographs the materials of beauty: light, fabric, bodies in motion, the texture of ordinary life. The title sounds like a motivational poster—’Pretty Is Everywhere’—but her work is the opposite. She’s just looking carefully at what’s already there, things most people walk past every day. There’s no trying in it, no attempt to make the mundane precious. Just attention. Just clear seeing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/12/pretty-is-everywhere/ Tue, 12 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/12/meat-monster/ Burger King’s selling something in Japan now called the Meat Monster. Two beef patties, two slices of cheese, three strips of bacon, chicken, and a sprawl of lettuce, tomato, onion, sauce. Just kept stacking protein until it stopped being food and became pure provocation. I want it badly—want to bite into it and feel nothing but grease and salt and the specific pleasure of eating something excessive and pointless and unnecessary. Part of me knows wanting it this much is stupid. I don’t spend much time with that part. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/12/meat-monster/ Tue, 12 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/12/bare-facts/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/12/bare-facts/ Tue, 12 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/12/republica-2011/ Berlin. Three days in the Friedrichstadtpalast talking about the internet. The usual crowd showed up—social media consultants packaging their opinions as expertise, actual Twitter personalities, bloggers wondering if they’d become irrelevant, company people in polo shirts trying to look interested. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/12/republica-2011/ Tue, 12 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/11/a-girl-and-her-room/ Rania Matar’s photographs of teenage girls in their bedrooms are the kind of intimate documentation that feels almost invasive until you realize how much permission is embedded in each frame. These are spaces people have shaped for themselves when they think no one’s looking—the posters, the clutter, the careful arrangements that make a small room feel like the entire world. There’s something both vulnerable and defiant about letting someone photograph your private space, and Matar captures that contradiction. You’re seeing what someone needs around them to feel less alone, the small details that say more about a person than any posed portrait ever could. The work reminds me that the rooms we make are the first draft of who we want to be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/11/a-girl-and-her-room/ Mon, 11 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/11/links-death/ He dies without a word, the way he lived. Link was never meant for speeches or goodbyes—just a boy with a sword in a world that needed saving. No fanfare, no final stand, just the simple arithmetic of heroism: you go in, you finish it, you don’t come out the same. Or you don’t come out at all. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/11/links-death/ Mon, 11 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/11/peter-vs-mr-washee-washee/ There’s a bit where Peter gets into a fight that’s shot like a Street Fighter II arcade game—health bars, fight music, the whole thing. It’s pure Family Guy, which means they take a reference and just hold it until it loops back from unfunny to funny. The joke isn’t that it’s a clever mashup; it’s that they’re completely committed to this stupid premise. Watching his health bar tick down while cartoon violence plays out, there’s something about that extra layer of game mechanics that makes it feel more satisfying than a regular animated fight ever could. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/11/peter-vs-mr-washee-washee/ Mon, 11 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/11/alone-with-it/ The best listening happens alone. And I mean alone—no one else in the room, and ideally not much on you either. Not in some scientific way, though the obvious reading is just that: sound without barriers hits different. It’s more that being alone is when you stop managing how you feel. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/11/alone-with-it/ Mon, 11 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/10/god-shave-the-queen/ Saturday, 3 a.m. We’re in a shuttle to Munich, all half-dead, each of us holding four beers because at that hour the logic was that we couldn’t let them go to waste. My stuff is still in the hotel room. Not getting that back. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/10/god-shave-the-queen/ Sun, 10 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/10/adam-green-the-wrong-ferrari/ Adam Green makes horror movies and music like he’s the only person in the room who actually gets the joke. His stuff has this cheap, scrappy energy—low budget but high conviction. You watch a Hatchet film and it feels like he’s daring you to admit you’re having fun with something that doesn’t pretend to be important. There’s a clarity to his taste that’s hard to fake. He knows what he likes and he keeps making it. Most people don’t have that kind of confidence about what bores or thrills them. He does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/10/adam-green-the-wrong-ferrari/ Sun, 10 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/9/charon/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/9/charon/ Sat, 09 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/8/talking-to-mark-ronson-at-the-top-of-a-mountain/ We bumped into Mark Ronson at Snowbombing, somewhere around 2,500 meters up, that weird altitude where everything feels slightly surreal. He was about to DJ for a crowd of young people who would treat him like a god, and he seemed relaxed about the whole thing. I asked if he had a few minutes to talk, and he did. We’d been listening to Record Collection obsessively since it came out, so the timing felt lucky. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/8/talking-to-mark-ronson-at-the-top-of-a-mountain/ Fri, 08 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/8/the-wirtshaus/ The Jägermeister Wirtshaus Tour is designed around a simple inversion: instead of building a venue that directs all attention toward the stage, they built a space where you can sit down, play cards with the musicians, have an actual conversation. The infrastructure serves community instead of spectacle. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/8/the-wirtshaus/ Fri, 08 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/7/birdy-skinny-love/ There’s a moment in Birdy’s cover of “Skinny Love” where her voice just disappears into itself, all breath and fragility, and you realize she’s not trying to match Bon Iver’s falsetto or own the song in some younger artist way. She’s just following the melody wherever it goes, pulling you with her. The whole album sits in that space—pale and hushed, full of covers that sound less like interpretations and more like she’s overhearing something private. It’s the kind of thing that feels almost uncomfortable to listen to, like you’re intruding on somebody’s morning. That was the whole appeal, I think. Not mastery or reinvention, just someone very young making these songs feel even more exposed than they already were. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/7/birdy-skinny-love/ Thu, 07 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/7/snowbombing-2011/ I went to Mayrhofen with a bunch of media people and hangers-on under the pretense of covering the Volvo Snowbombing Festival, but it felt more like a school trip someone had spiked with speed. On the bus from Munich we were already drinking. The crew was this strange mix—music editors, winter sports guys, PR managers. Wilson Gonzalez Ochsenknecht was there, and his fiancée Bonnie Strange, who was the kind of person who made everything louder just by existing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/7/snowbombing-2011/ Thu, 07 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/6/ecstatic-hobos/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/6/ecstatic-hobos/ Wed, 06 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/5/cocknbullkid-breathless/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/5/cocknbullkid-breathless/ Tue, 05 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/5/aprils-rough-draft/ There’s this thing that happens in April where everything feels provisional. The weather can’t decide. People half-commit to new versions of themselves—short hair, pink hair, whatever. The culture starts moving in directions it’s not sure about yet. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/5/aprils-rough-draft/ Tue, 05 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/5/countdown/ I used to watch those Japanese countdown shows and just zone out. The format was so clean—songs ranked, performances live in the studio, no filler. There was something satisfying about seeing what people were actually listening to that week, no algorithm tampering with it. And the performances had that live edge where artists would either nail it or look uncomfortable in real time. That tension kept me watching. Just the numbers and the music, week after week. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/5/countdown/ Tue, 05 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/4/nudy-kitty/ No one around to shake the day off—no friend, no dog, not even a massage stick. The stuffed animals are what you’ve got. Pull the dusty things out, light some candles, and work with it. Silly, but it does the job. Like being five, except deliberate this time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/4/nudy-kitty/ Mon, 04 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/4/mountains-calling/ Wenke dragged me through Berlin on Saturday so I wouldn’t completely fall apart heading to a week in the Austrian mountains. Snowbombing festival. Cold, snow, mountains—that’s the whole thing. We basically just drank the entire afternoon and called it shopping, which is ridiculous but somehow I ended up with sunscreen, so maybe it counted. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/4/mountains-calling/ Mon, 04 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/2/bryan-mays-restless-legs/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/2/bryan-mays-restless-legs/ Sat, 02 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/2/thieve-nailed-it/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/2/thieve-nailed-it/ Sat, 02 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/1/estranged-sex/ Torralba’s work does something most artists are too polite to attempt—she sits with the awkwardness of bodies, the wrongness of proximity, the way desire and revulsion can occupy the same frame. Her photographs don’t seduce or apologize. They just watch. There’s a coolness to it, a refusal to make the body into something noble or transcendent. Just flesh, just texture, just the gap between what we want and what we’ll actually do. It’s uncomfortable in the way that matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/1/estranged-sex/ Fri, 01 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/1/in-print/ This is a memory now, but at the time it felt almost impossible. Burda wanted to make a magazine out of the website. Real paper, real copies, real newsstands. The whole thing had been locked down so completely that I couldn’t mention it to anyone. My parents had no idea. My friends had no idea. It was this secret sitting in my chest for months. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/4/1/in-print/ Fri, 01 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/31/the-dø-keep-pushing/ Their synth-pop doesn’t let you coast. Everything about it pushes forward—layers building, the beat relentless, no space to zone out. There’s something exhausting about how insistent they are, this refusal to step back or simplify. But that’s the whole thing. The Dø aren’t interested in making background music. They want to be all you’re listening to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/31/the-dø-keep-pushing/ Thu, 31 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/31/born-with-it/ I fell down a Reddit rabbit hole about desire—specifically the kind you can never act on. Thousands of people working through the same uncomfortable question: if gay people didn’t choose their sexuality, and pedophiles and zoophiles didn’t choose theirs, what’s the difference? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/31/born-with-it/ Thu, 31 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/31/the-megalizer/ Adidas made a shoe once with sensors built into the soles that would transmit your movements to a laptop and generate beats. The Megalizer. Designed for breakdancers, rappers, hip-hop dancers—basically anyone who needed their footwork to do double duty as production equipment. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/31/the-megalizer/ Thu, 31 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/30/mary-robinsons-sister/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/30/mary-robinsons-sister/ Wed, 30 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/30/iamx-does-its-thing/ Chris Corner makes music that doesn’t fit neatly into anything. IAMX pulls from industrial and pop and electronic sources, but what actually sticks is how direct the songs are. “Kiss & Swallow” is properly catchy. “Missile” works in a club or alone at night. He isn’t coy about the subject matter—sex, death, desire, obsession, the stuff that matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/30/iamx-does-its-thing/ Wed, 30 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/29/do-the-mario/ There’s something strange about how Mario became the thing that defined video games—just a little guy in red, no story, no character beyond the movement. The design’s so clean it barely registers as design, just a figure that responds exactly the way you want, a jump that lands when you think it should land. I spend a lot of time thinking about how things feel to control, how that immediate feedback between your hand and the screen is almost the entire point. Maybe that’s why it stuck around when everything else got complicated and forgot what made it fun in the first place. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/29/do-the-mario/ Tue, 29 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/29/three-laws/ Three laws of electronic music: You can always have one more beer, no matter how many you’ve already had. Electro is Techno, or maybe the other way around. Everyone wants Marteria. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/29/three-laws/ Tue, 29 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/29/fat-montana-grows-up/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/29/fat-montana-grows-up/ Tue, 29 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/28/ordinary-evening/ Good music’s nearly impossible to find anymore. The labels don’t care, the radio has shit taste, and your friends are useless. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/28/ordinary-evening/ Mon, 28 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/28/countdown-tv/ Japanese countdown shows are weirdly compelling for something so straightforward. You watch songs ranked backward from wherever the count starts, and the format itself generates all the suspense—who climbs to number one, what’s actually connecting with people, whether the rankings surprise you or confirm what you already thought. The shows have this clean, no-fuss aesthetic and the hosts seem genuinely interested in the songs. There’s no manufactured enthusiasm here, just people discussing what’s popular and what resonates. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/28/countdown-tv/ Mon, 28 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/27/dying-in-games/ You die all the time in games and stop noticing after a while. Reload, respawn, back to the checkpoint. The repetition strips death of any weight. You stop flinching after the hundredth time. It’s just a mechanic, as routine as walking or jumping. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/27/dying-in-games/ Sun, 27 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/26/the-zombie-guy/ Rick Genest was sixteen when he decided to cover his entire body in zombie tattoos. Not partially, not as a statement that could be walked back—completely. Skull cap peeled away, jaw rotting, every visible inch committed to the vision. By his mid-twenties he’d spent over seven thousand dollars on it, mostly with Frank Lewis, a tattoo artist in Montreal who got what he was building. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/26/the-zombie-guy/ Sat, 26 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/25/the-breast-map/ Someone made a world map of average breast sizes by country. Russia and Scandinavia at the top, Asia and Africa at the bottom, Europe hanging around the comfortable middle with C and D cups. It’s dumb enough that you can’t look away from it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/25/the-breast-map/ Fri, 25 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/25/sunflower-guerrilla/ You meet all kinds of people. Some make you ashamed you’re the same species. Others you just want to respect—the kind who go out and make their city slightly better without anyone paying them or asking. Knitting around lamp posts. Cleaning public bathrooms. Planting flowers in places nobody told them to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/25/sunflower-guerrilla/ Fri, 25 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/25/steve-aoki-wake-up-call/ Steve Aoki’s one of those figures in electronic music you can’t quite pin down. He’s been running Dim Mak forever, he plays everywhere, and there’s something genuinely committed about the way he approaches his sets—that all-in energy that makes you think he actually cares. His music is solid enough, the label has released real records, but something about him has become so commercial, so much the face of a certain version of electronic music, that I find it hard to take seriously. The cake throwing bit lost its charm years ago. Still, I can’t fault the work ethic or his actual presence in the scene. I just don’t think about him much when I’m not hearing his name. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/25/steve-aoki-wake-up-call/ Fri, 25 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/24/the-right-song/ I’ve noticed there’s a specific song for every substance and every stupid decision that leads you there. Not like I’m recommending anything - I’m just saying what I watched happen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/24/the-right-song/ Thu, 24 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/24/shanghai-my-love/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/24/shanghai-my-love/ Thu, 24 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/24/james-blake-lupe-fiasco-get-honest/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/24/james-blake-lupe-fiasco-get-honest/ Thu, 24 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/23/something-on-the-internet/ In Berlin-Mitte, you’re basically invisible if you’re not working on the internet. Working in a digital agency, freelancing, consulting on social media with that particular flavor of hipster obsession. Your Mac and iPhone out at all times, refreshing Twitter, watching your digital dashboard. The more money you’re making from this network of systems, the more you matter in this closed world of mutant nerds. A construction worker would just laugh. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/23/something-on-the-internet/ Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/23/tv-on-the-radio/ There’s something about the way they build a song that makes you feel less alone. TV On The Radio doesn’t try to be straightforward—their sound is this restless thing, always shifting under you, like they’re working something out in real time. The music moves between tenderness and noise, between control and something breaking apart. You can hear the care in it, the intelligence, but also a kind of raw need. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/23/tv-on-the-radio/ Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/22/cant-concentrate/ Porn actors apparently train for three core competencies over their two-year career. Stay hard. No acne. Moan like the neighbors should hear it. That’s the entire skill set. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/22/cant-concentrate/ Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/22/sonic-for-hire/ Sonic was cooler than Mario, and I believed it. He had the attitude, the speed, the whole vibe. But he couldn’t sustain it. The games got worse, the character got weirder, and I moved on. Now he just shows up in whatever they throw at him, a childhood icon reduced to a brand. Even now, there’s something deflating about that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/22/sonic-for-hire/ Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/22/karl/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/22/karl/ Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/21/nuclear-boy/ Everything suddenly makes sense, and what it makes is garbage. This is just bad. Nothing else to it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/21/nuclear-boy/ Mon, 21 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/21/horse-party/ I wanted a horse as a kid. Not in that gentle, nurturing way—the actual desire for speed and control, something untamed that was yours to command. Money was tight, so I lived it differently: Wendy reruns, cartoons, afternoons at riding stables where I felt like I was getting closer to something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/21/horse-party/ Mon, 21 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/21/breathing-room/ You get emails asking where everyone went. Where’s Ines, where’s Hannah. The easy answer is people change, things end, that’s life. But nobody really wants that answer. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/21/breathing-room/ Mon, 21 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/21/manglo/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/21/manglo/ Mon, 21 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/21/skins-5-a-dwindling-love/ I loved Skins. No show has ever gotten to me like this one did—a bunch of Bristol teenagers wrecking themselves in every direction. What the producers created was beyond love, almost worship. It fucked me up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/21/skins-5-a-dwindling-love/ Mon, 21 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/20/how-it-goes/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/20/how-it-goes/ Sun, 20 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/19/disasteradio-gravy-rainbow/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/19/disasteradio-gravy-rainbow/ Sat, 19 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/19/morning-twice/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/19/morning-twice/ Sat, 19 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/17/stevie-stevie-stevie/ Stevie’s one of those characters from Malcolm in the Middle that you suddenly remember years later and want to know what happened to. You know it won’t change anything, but you look it up anyway—what does he look like now, where did he end up, is he still acting or did he step away. That’s the thing about growing up with a character: they stay with you in this low-key way, and sometime around 2 AM you find yourself checking in on him like an old friend you haven’t thought about in years. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/17/stevie-stevie-stevie/ Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/17/nathanael-turner-bloody-brooklyn/ What stays with me is how it doesn’t flinch. Nathanael Turner and Bloody Brooklyn—a person and a place. The story commits fully to what happens between them. No softening, no distance. That kind of unflinching narrative does something to you. You finish it and it’s still there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/17/nathanael-turner-bloody-brooklyn/ Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/17/umshini-wam/ Die Antwoord and Harmony Korine on Umshini Wam: that’s provocation without the irony. Ninja and Yo-Landi just being themselves—crude, sexual, violent—and Korine filming it straight with no softening, no apology, no frame to make it respectable. It works because nobody’s managing your reaction. They’re just committed. That’s rarer than shock. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/17/umshini-wam/ Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/16/three-stripes/ There’s something perfect about a shoe that’s been the same for sixty years. The three stripes, the court aesthetic, that specific kind of leather. Adidas did something most brands can’t manage—made something so clearly itself that knockoffs just prove the point. I wore Superstars in the nineties when they weren’t cool yet, back when everyone else was buying Jordans and Dunks. There’s a kind of confidence in wearing something that’s just sitting there, not trying, not talking. The shoe doesn’t perform coolness because it already is cool, and coolness is just what happens when you leave something alone long enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/16/three-stripes/ Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/16/still-keha/ Ke$ha in a bikini is a reminder that the party-girl persona was never the point. The point was the shamelessness, the refusal to apologize, the complete comfort with being excessive and ridiculous. That’s the thing about genuine swagger—it doesn’t really age. She’s gotten older, the tabloid machine moved on, and now there’s just the person underneath. Still interesting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/16/still-keha/ Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/16/television-raised-me/ Television raised me. Not father figures, not real people—just the glow of a screen, American families, cartoon characters pushed to absurdity, and the dream of living inside that flickering world. While my mother worked and my friends were grounded, the TV was my teacher, telling me what was good and evil, how to break my life into neat episodes with resolvable problems, always ending with something fixed as the credits rolled. That was the deal. It worked. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/16/television-raised-me/ Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/15/mayrhofen/ Mayrhofen’s a ski village in Austria that becomes a festival site for one week every April. Snowbombing runs the 4th to the 9th this year, and they’ve stacked the lineup with actual acts—The Prodigy, Fatboy Slim, Jamie Woon, Ms Dynamite, Yasmin. The idea is you get mountains, music, snowboarding, après-ski, all of it packed into one week at altitude. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/15/mayrhofen/ Tue, 15 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/15/jenna-rose-my-jeans/ When ’My Jeans’ showed up, Jenna Rose committed to it completely. No irony, no winking at the camera. Just a kid absolutely certain that a song about her jeans needed to exist. The internet demolished it almost immediately—the mocking, the remixes, the inevitable death spiral. But I think about how sure of herself she must have been. That kind of unironic confidence in something this stupid is almost admirable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/15/jenna-rose-my-jeans/ Tue, 15 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/15/lovely-monotony/ Linda’s drunk again, singing some half-remembered song, the kind of offkey that makes Bob’s customers pretend not to hear. Gene’s making noise at the counter. Louise is watching everyone with the contempt of a preteen who’s already seen through all of this. Bob’s looking tired in that specific way a man looks when he’s gambled everything on a burger restaurant and is slowly losing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/15/lovely-monotony/ Tue, 15 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/15/something-sweet/ Sometimes you just need it. Not for any reason. Not because you’re celebrating or because you deserve it or because some wellness influencer said it’s fine to indulge. You just need the feeling of something dissolving on your tongue, the shock of sugar, the way your brain lights up for a second and everything else gets quiet. It’s the most honest appetite there is—no story attached, no justification required. Just that moment before you eat it and the moment after, when the sweetness is still there and you’re not thinking about anything else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/15/something-sweet/ Tue, 15 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/15/friedhelm-ernst-for-laughs/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/15/friedhelm-ernst-for-laughs/ Tue, 15 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/15/jamie-woon-lady-luck/ There’s this moment in the song where everything drops away except his voice and a single string line, and it feels like he’s singing directly into your ear in a dark room. Jamie Woon had this gift for making R&B feel intimate without being small—even when the production swells around him, there’s something nakedly honest in how he phrases things, how he sits just slightly behind the beat. Lady Luck was one of those songs that soundtracked a particular kind of late night, the kind where you’re alone but not lonely, where everything feels possible and impossible at the same time. His voice has this weathered quality, like he’s lived through something, and the song moves like he’s trying to remember what hope felt like. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/15/jamie-woon-lady-luck/ Tue, 15 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/15/shaunte-denee/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/15/shaunte-denee/ Tue, 15 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/14/night-will-be-forever/ That space between leaving a party and sunrise is its own kind of hell. The city’s abandoned, or feels it anyway. Everyone else is asleep like they have sense. You’re still buzzing, or were ten minutes ago, now just tired but can’t settle into it. The sky’s that color right before light takes over—red and dark at once. Your brain’s doing laps with conversations you’ll forget by noon. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/14/night-will-be-forever/ Mon, 14 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/14/spend-it-wisely/ I laughed going through my closet at all the stuff I’d convinced myself I’d wear. Expensive intentions everywhere, tags still attached. The things I actually reach for are cheap and worn through. I think spending wisely just means paying attention to that gap—between what you buy and what you use. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/14/spend-it-wisely/ Mon, 14 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/14/anja-konstantinovas-boring-afternoon/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/14/anja-konstantinovas-boring-afternoon/ Mon, 14 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/14/unfinished-business/ Some games were so locked to their moment—the controls, the rendering, the tiny screen—that getting them out of that context actually feels necessary. But most remakes just sand down the edges without understanding why those edges existed in the first place. The games I keep thinking about are the ones with a real idea that nobody’s quite finished exploring. Not nostalgia. Just actual unfinished business. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/14/unfinished-business/ Mon, 14 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/14/bouncing-balls/ Russia’s Sesame Street has a character named Bouncing Balls—Pryzhki Shary. It’s a weird choice, the kind of name that leaves you wondering what the thinking was, but there’s something honest about it. These international variants pop up and remind you how differently each country approaches the same thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/14/bouncing-balls/ Mon, 14 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/14/et-phase/ There’s something about a Kanye-Katy Perry collision in 2011 that felt like the pop world briefly deciding to get weirder. The whole alien angle—not subtle, but committed. Kanye on a Katy Perry track felt like an odd-couple thing at the time, his deadpan flow against her synth-pop shine. The song sat somewhere between earnest and absurd, which is maybe the only place a track about extraterrestrial attraction can actually land without embarrassing itself. It wasn’t revolutionary, but there was something confident about it, the willingness to lean fully into a dumb premise and just stay there. That era of pop had a different energy entirely—less careful, more willing to sound like nothing had to make sense as long as it felt right. I still remember the production having this glassy, synthetic quality, everything perfectly buffed and deliberate. It was the kind of collaboration that made sense only to the people making it, which is usually when something is worth paying attention to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/14/et-phase/ Mon, 14 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/14/femen/ Femen shows up bare-chested with marker slogans, makes chaos at an embassy or parliament, gets photographed and arrested. You see the images and sometimes catch what’s written across their ribs, sometimes don’t. I usually didn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/14/femen/ Mon, 14 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/13/ponycraft-2/ Someone took the StarCraft 2 trailer and swapped in My Little Pony characters. It’s the kind of thing that should be obnoxious—smash two unrelated things together and call it a joke—but it works because the original trailer is so overwrought. All that grim sci-fi intensity, the dramatic music, the portentous narration about interstellar war, and then you’ve got ponies doing the same poses with the same dead-serious delivery. The contrast is everything. I watched it twice. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/13/ponycraft-2/ Sun, 13 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/13/eating-it-anyway/ The food industry pumps our meals with chemicals that are classified as actual poisons. Pesticides that cause cancer. Aspartame—marketed as NutraSweet—only got into the food supply because its manufacturer faked the safety studies. Bisphenol A in plastic bottles. They tested all this on animals. The animals developed cancer and died. We know this. We eat it anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/13/eating-it-anyway/ Sun, 13 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/13/which-one/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/13/which-one/ Sun, 13 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/12/then-we-can-begin/ Saturday night is when everything from the week stops mattering. Whatever was supposed to happen either did or it didn’t, and now there’s just the night itself—no obligations, no guilt, no waiting. The Germans have this phrase: Dann kann’s ja losgehen. Then we can get started. You feel it happening around nine o’clock, when the air shifts and people move a little faster, a little looser, like something’s finally been released. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/12/then-we-can-begin/ Sat, 12 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/12/young-zelda/ There’s something disarming about seeing Zelda like this—before all the crown, before the prophecies and the kingdom, just a kid. The design captures that sweetness without making her a baby, which is its own trick. You get why artists gravitate toward this version of her. There’s a gentleness there that the games rarely let her have. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/12/young-zelda/ Sat, 12 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/12/rebecca-black-friday/ The song is exactly as bad as you remember. Tinny, rhythmically confused, lyrics that sound like they were workshopped by someone who’d never actually talked to a teenager. But here’s what gets me: a thirteen-year-old girl hired a producer, dropped a single, and became the most mocked person on the internet for the crime of not being good. The internet decided she was the thing to hate that week, and it was vicious. Everyone had a bit, a meme, a reason to pile on. The song is forgettable; what lingers is the cruelty of it, how quickly we turn on something unfamiliar just because we can. She can’t even hear the song the way we do—she’ll never have that clean first listen that most artists get. It’s already been poisoned. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/12/rebecca-black-friday/ Sat, 12 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/11/takeshita/ Asumi was in Takeshita with a friend when the ground started moving. Not unusual for Tokyo, but this was different. Longer. Harder. The earth and trees were shaking and people were running out of buildings, and she and her friend stood there not saying anything, just watching everyone else realize what was happening. A man near them said it wasn’t normal. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/11/takeshita/ Fri, 11 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/11/super-8/ The trailer hits different when you’re someone who makes things. Abrams framing it around these kids in the seventies shooting their own film, the whole thing filtered through that warm blown-out Super 8 stock—it’s not subtle, but it works. There’s something about watching people actually *create* on screen, even fictional people, that gets to you in a way normal hero’s journey stuff doesn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/11/super-8/ Fri, 11 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/11/those-dancing-days-reaching-forward/ Those Dancing Days were a Swedish indie pop band from the late 2000s who made these intricate, strange records. Weird production, melodies that didn’t give themselves up easy, all this care underneath the prettiness. They never got huge, staying mostly in certain internet corners, and they’ve kind of scattered and reformed a few times over the years. But I still think about their albums more than seems reasonable for a band that never broke through in any obvious way. The kind of thing you find at exactly the right moment and can’t shake. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/11/those-dancing-days-reaching-forward/ Fri, 11 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/11/the-same/ Bavaria never changes, and I recognize it instantly. The low hills, the particular quality of the afternoon light, the way the streets and gardens just sit there being themselves—exactly as I remember them. I’ve been gone long enough that it should feel foreign, but the moment I see a photo or video, I’m back there. It hasn’t shifted at all. There’s something reassuring about that, I guess, and something unsettling too. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/11/the-same/ Fri, 11 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/11/peter-and-kerry/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/11/peter-and-kerry/ Fri, 11 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/11/robyn-live/ Swedish pop from the 2000s sits in a strange place for me now—too close to clubland to feel like rock, too willing to be sincere for pure dance production. Robyn was the singer who made that intersection matter. Body Talk came out and it was intricate: synths underneath, her voice somewhere between intimacy and announcement, the whole thing designed for dancing but never stupid about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/11/robyn-live/ Fri, 11 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/10/bieber-slayer/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/10/bieber-slayer/ Thu, 10 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/10/summer-clothes/ Fixies kill people. Stephanie’s wearing a Where’s Waldo shirt and blue shorts like that’s the notable part, not that she’s somehow alive. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/10/summer-clothes/ Thu, 10 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/10/arctic-monkeys-brick-by-brick/ Arctic Monkeys hit at the right time for me, when I still believed being clever about music made you better. Their early records had that nervous energy, all Sheffield wit and wordplay, the kind of thing you could feel smart liking. They’ve evolved far beyond those songs since, which is what good bands do, but something about the tension in those first albums works on me—not nostalgia exactly, just the reminder that I once thought a guitar band could change everything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/10/arctic-monkeys-brick-by-brick/ Thu, 10 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/9/the-charney-problem/ I’ve always liked men who created something entirely their own through sheer narcissism and actual talent, then blew apart whatever conventions were standing in their way. Jobs. Lagerfeld. Dov Charney. The ones who clearly never asked permission. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/9/the-charney-problem/ Wed, 09 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/9/the-charts/ Japanese countdown shows have this specific texture that makes sense once you understand the country’s relationship with ranking and order. Everything gets counted down, measured against itself, and that’s not neurotic—it’s just how information feels best. The format is almost meditative: host, graphic, clip, song, repeat. You’re not learning anything except what people are listening to right now, which turns out to be enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/9/the-charts/ Wed, 09 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/8/happy-bunny-pussy/ A cat in the sun has figured out something the rest of us are still chasing. It doesn’t try to impress anyone, and it doesn’t wonder whether it’s doing this right—it’s just completely at ease in its own existence. You watch one for hours, barely moving, unbothered, and you see what contentment actually looks like. No performance, no strategy, no overthinking. The cat doesn’t need to understand itself to be happy. The cat doesn’t worry. The cat doesn’t scroll. The cat just exists and that’s enough. Meanwhile, I’m over here making everything complicated while the cat’s just fine with everything. The cat wins. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/8/happy-bunny-pussy/ Tue, 08 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/8/war-talk/ Dominique Young Unique doesn’t try very hard and that’s the whole point. ’War Talk’ is him just talking, production stripped back, saying shit plainly and trusting that the weight is already there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/8/war-talk/ Tue, 08 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/8/i-love-my-neighbors/ Wedding, Berlin smells like dog shit and döner. The homeless are friendlier here than anywhere else. Mobile phone shops and betting parlors line the street like some commercial joke. I’m on the second floor of a pseudo-old building near the ghetto center, and my neighbors make sure I’m never bored. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/8/i-love-my-neighbors/ Tue, 08 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/7/power-rangers-overkill/ Every Power Ranger ever made, fighting drunk aliens. I was Red, third row back on the left. The kind of stupid that somehow works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/7/power-rangers-overkill/ Mon, 07 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/7/mixtape-the-face-tracks/ I needed something to disappear into, and this mixtape showed up at the right moment. Gold Panda opens it up with all those details, production that feels generous and warm. The Go! Team brings this restless energy, keeps everything moving. Neon Hitch cuts through when it needs to. Three artists that don’t demand anything of each other, just make space. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/7/mixtape-the-face-tracks/ Mon, 07 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/7/the-flying-inn/ The Jägermeister Wirtshaus Tour was a converted space that traveled from city to city with live bands and decent beer—basically a refusal of the standard basement-club model. The appeal was obvious if you’ve ever spent an hour wedged in a sweating crowd while the sound system distorts and the only exit is a six-foot climb over three rows of people. The Wirtshaus just… had room. Air. A place to actually stand or sit without working for it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/7/the-flying-inn/ Mon, 07 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/7/casting-couch/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/7/casting-couch/ Mon, 07 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/7/ally-sheedy/ The original ’85 trailer. Yeah, I know—I was supposed to want Molly Ringwald. But Ally Sheedy got me more. There was something about the way she carried herself in that film, like she actually didn’t give a shit about any of it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/7/ally-sheedy/ Mon, 07 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/6/attack-the-block/ Aliens land in South London and the teenagers already there—gang members, dealers, kids with their own problems—decide they’re the only defense. The film never hedges. No speeches, no montages, just teenagers with whatever they can grab against something that clearly didn’t plan for this. The humor works because everyone plays it straight. You remember it because it never apologizes for itself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/6/attack-the-block/ Sun, 06 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/6/soup-for-sluts/ Soup is survival on the cheap. You take whatever’s rotting in your fridge, throw it in a pot with water and salt, and in twenty minutes you’ve got something that’ll keep you fed for days. No skill required, no expense. I’ve been poor enough to know this by heart—soup is what you make when you’ve got nothing, and it’s still better than takeout. It doesn’t ask for anything. No technique, no presentation, no pretending. Just heat, water, and time. The kind of meal you can make wrecked, half-conscious, or when you’re too busy to care. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/6/soup-for-sluts/ Sun, 06 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/6/cokehead-hipsters-we-will-rock-you/ You see them at every show and party—some guy convinced that coke and attitude are currency, that being loud and reckless makes him important. The music scene’s been full of this type forever. He’ll be relevant for a few months, alienate everyone around him, and then disappear into something normal. And nobody will think about him again. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/6/cokehead-hipsters-we-will-rock-you/ Sun, 06 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/5/shiny-toy-guns/ Shiny Toy Guns reunited with Carah Faye. It’s been long enough that I’m curious what they sound like now, though the kind of synthpunk they made doesn’t really fade. It was one of those bands that felt both stupid and necessary at the time, which basically sums up the 2000s. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/5/shiny-toy-guns/ Sat, 05 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/5/wu-tang-clan-super-game-boy/ I remember wanting both—Wu-Tang Clan on headphones, the Game Boy in my pocket. Two completely separate impulses, no connection except they occupied the same moment in the 90s. The clan had the swagger, the Game Boy had the games. They didn’t need to be related. That’s what I miss about that era, I think: you could have totally different obsessions and they’d all feel equally important, equally cool, without any of them needing to justify themselves by referring to the others. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/5/wu-tang-clan-super-game-boy/ Sat, 05 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/5/which-ones/ Charlie Sheen’s personal life during the mid-2000s and early 2010s was essentially a full-time content stream—the kind of reliable chaos you could check on like weather. The question ’which ones’ is basically the entire discourse. There were the actresses (plural), the escorts, the women from parties and rehab clinics and legal depositions. The tabloids kept score like he was a living leaderboard. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/5/which-ones/ Sat, 05 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/5/stopped-asking/ I was drinking red wine and half-watching old Bored to Death episodes when the message came from Facebook. Another picture flagged. Violation of community standards. One more incident and they’d delete the whole account. As always, no explanation of which image or what specifically was wrong, just the threat. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/5/stopped-asking/ Sat, 05 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/4/learning-german/ Everyone tries learning German through an app and quits after a week. The grammar is brutal and there’s no real incentive to keep going. But the language sounds right somehow, sounds like it means what it says. I’ve never actually learned it, just picked up fragments from travel and watching untranslated films, enough to stumble through a menu or understand what’s happening. That’s probably all anyone actually wants anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/4/learning-german/ Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/4/japanese-countdown/ I stumbled into Japanese countdown shows and got stuck there. Same format every time—the hosts, the transitions between artists, the drama of rankings—and something about that repetition works. The way performances get their slot based on where they land in the charts, the clarity of it all. It’s completely disposable but it teaches you something about how Japanese pop works, what matters in that industry. I’ve watched way too many of these at weird hours, but the predictability is hypnotic in a way I don’t fully understand. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/4/japanese-countdown/ Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/3/katy-b/ She was everywhere briefly in the early 2010s, that particular moment when UK dance music felt like someone actually wanted you to dance and feel something at the same time. Katy B had this brightness over the dubstep and garage tracks—a voice that didn’t disappear into the production but pushed against it, made you listen. The thing about that era is how fast it dated and how little it matters now, except when it suddenly does. The music still lands in a particular way when it comes up, not corny the way you’d expect something that trendy to age, but instead kind of genuine in how it wanted you to move. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/3/katy-b/ Thu, 03 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/3/vanessa-at-home/ Photography that stays in domestic space has a different weight than anything shot in public. There’s nowhere to hide when you’re photographed in the place you actually live—the light comes from the lamp you chose, the walls hold the color you picked, everything is a choice made over time. Akila Berjaoui’s work with Vanessa catches that kind of presence, the ordinary weight of someone in their own rooms. It’s the opposite of a photoshoot. It’s just someone existing where they exist, and that contradiction—being looked at while being nowhere but home—is what makes it matter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/3/vanessa-at-home/ Thu, 03 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/3/more-sq/ I’m a total mess about Nintendo and Japanese game music. Yasunori Mitsuda, Nobuo Uematsu, Yoko Kanno—those names mean something to me. The soundtracks from Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy, Napple Tale, those immaculate 16-bit and 32-bit compositions—they’re in my bloodstream. It makes sense if you think about it. While other kids were outside or learning what bodies could do, I was at a console, burning through RPGs, just one shitty game after another, but the music kept pulling me deeper. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/3/3/more-sq/ Thu, 03 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/28/burned-down/ I’m thinking back to February 28, 2011, the morning everything shifted. Hannah and Ines left, and the whole structure of the thing that had kept us together just… dissolved. Everyone else went with them. We’d started this as rebellion against loneliness, just putting our thoughts somewhere because we didn’t know what else to do with them, but it had rotted from the inside into this service provider mentality. Rules everywhere. Obligations. The complete opposite of what we’d actually wanted. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/28/burned-down/ Mon, 28 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/22/the-fashion-blog-wars/ There was this thread, or maybe a whole community—some space online where people went to destroy fashion bloggers. I’d drift in sometimes, never quite sure why. Mostly young women. Someone would post a photo and the pile-on would start: your body’s wrong, your face is wrong, you’re pathetic. And everyone did it like they were righteous. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/22/the-fashion-blog-wars/ Tue, 22 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/21/friedrichshain-2011/ Udo and I went to one of those Jägermeister-branded tour events in Friedrichshain back in 2011. They ran these things everywhere that year—basically an excuse to get people drunk on cheap liqueur and film whatever stupid things happened next. We Have Band played, then Yuksek. I didn’t know them and didn’t care much. The draw was the free drinks, which arrived in unlimited quantities and were the entire point of being there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/21/friedrichshain-2011/ Mon, 21 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/21/mixtape-sister-love/ I never made a mixtape for my sister. We weren’t the type. But I’ve made them for people who felt like sisters—the ones you see without planning to, who show up when things go bad, who you’d wreck yourself for without thinking about it. You build the playlist slowly over months, songs that mean something specific about what they mean to you. By the time it’s done, it’s less a mixtape and more a confession. That’s the weird part: the music says what you never would out loud, and they get that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/21/mixtape-sister-love/ Mon, 21 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/20/all-of-the-lights/ Kanye’s “All of the Lights” does something rare—it sounds like overwhelming sensory input the way life actually is, not the way songs usually pretend it isn’t. First time I heard it, I was in a car probably doing something dumb, and the track just seized the whole experience. Everything compressed and bright at once. The song doesn’t apologize for being maximalist; it commits to the excess like that’s the point. Hard to listen to casually. Harder to forget. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/20/all-of-the-lights/ Sun, 20 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/20/nothing-came-of-it/ Libya in 2011 was phone videos, shaky footage where a cleric describes watching a tank roll over a car with two people inside. Just flattened them. Gaddafi had ruled for forty years and apparently his answer to protest was mechanized. Soldiers, helicopters, his own son’s unit. Some cities seemed to fall to rebels. Other reports said they were holding. You never knew what was actually happening, just fragments coming through before the internet got cut. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/20/nothing-came-of-it/ Sun, 20 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/19/johnny-b/ I know a photographer named Johnnie. Don’t know his last name—doesn’t matter. He photographs dogs that don’t know what’s happening to them. Black men in bathtubs. Girls with dark, heavy forearms. There’s something compelling about his work, even though I have no idea who he actually is. That’s kind of the whole thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/19/johnny-b/ Sat, 19 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/18/ten-little-missions/ A friend sent a list at 2am. Ten little missions. Not serious, or not entirely. It was the thing people text when they’ve run out of actual advice—so you list impossible things instead, half-joking, half-genuine. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/18/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 18 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/18/lotus-flower/ “Lotus Flower” does something different from the rest of The King of Limbs. That driving beat, everything else stripped down—it pushes forward like it doesn’t need your permission. The real pull is the video though, Thom’s body moving without self-consciousness, like it’s the only true thing in the frame. Not a performance, just presence. I watched that more times than I listened to the song. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/18/lotus-flower/ Fri, 18 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/18/flowers-chocolate-dildos/ Valentine’s Day is the perfect con. Flowers and chocolate and whatever those double dildos are supposed to do—it drains couples of their money while it drains singles of their sanity. Couples feel obligated to buy love. Singles feel broken for not having anyone to buy love for, so we buy extra ice cream and get pets and fantasize about violence. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/18/flowers-chocolate-dildos/ Fri, 18 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/17/driver/ Felix Cartal builds sets like he has all night. Progressive house mostly, though the lines blur. The appeal isn’t drama or novelty—it’s patience. You follow him through a long arc and somewhere in the second hour you stop thinking about anything else. That’s the skill. Not the peak moment but the sustained movement. Most DJs want to be remembered for a drop. Cartal seems more interested in making you forget what time it is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/17/driver/ Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/17/los-angeles-rules/ Gregory Bojorquez shoots where he lives. East Los Angeles, the neighborhood people have opinions about but rarely see clearly. He started photographing his neighbors in black and white, work that doesn’t announce itself but stays with you. LA Weekly noticed, and it felt inevitable—the kind of specificity that only comes from actually being somewhere, living in it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/17/los-angeles-rules/ Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/17/trash-tuesday-robo-geisha/ Noboru Iguchi’s Robo Geisha is the kind of film that exists to prove that cinema can be whatever the hell you want it to be. A geisha gets her limbs amputated and replaced with machine guns, swords, and flamethrowers, and the movie treats this as a logical plot development rather than the premise for a joke. The action sequences are genuinely skilled—practical effects, creative camera work—applied to the most deranged concept imaginable. It’s not ironic; Iguchi is dead serious about the absurdity. You watch it and realize that sometimes the difference between a masterpiece and garbage is just whether the person making it cares about the work. He clearly did, even if the work is a woman who ejaculates acid and explodes. There’s something honest about that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/17/trash-tuesday-robo-geisha/ Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/17/kickers-vs-tsubasa/ Back when toy companies hadn’t figured out how to bleed us dry with trading cards and plastic shit, you could just sit down in the afternoon and watch anime about soccer without feeling like you were participating in some grand marketing machine. Just kids on a field, spinning stories, figuring out who they were. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/17/kickers-vs-tsubasa/ Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/16/the-solo-problem/ I boot up the computer, pull down my pants, and fire up the internet at full speed. “Russian Teenagers Gangbang In Summer Camp” or “Black Girl Choky Loses Virginity To Four Strangers.” Pick one, download it, settle in. I don’t have forever—I’ve got a doctor’s appointment later. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/16/the-solo-problem/ Wed, 16 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/16/pretty-in-pink/ You look at these styled photos and what gets to you isn’t the coordination. White top, gold chain, the expensive sneaker—nice to look at, but that’s not it. It’s the face. Eyes, mouth, the specific shape of their features, how the light falls. That’s what you can’t unsee. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/16/pretty-in-pink/ Wed, 16 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/15/wheres-my-better-life/ Six weeks into 2011 and I’m already wondering where my better life went. When January first rolled around, I had plans. Real ones. Ambitious ones. Lists on paper, lists in my head, all stacked in the drawer by my nightstand. The kind of thing that gets crumpled by March, except I didn’t even make it that far. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/15/wheres-my-better-life/ Tue, 15 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/15/mirror-dance/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/15/mirror-dance/ Tue, 15 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/14/thirty-thousand/ You get about thirty thousand days if you don’t spend them eating garbage and staring into nothing. Thirty thousand orbits to actually make something happen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/14/thirty-thousand/ Mon, 14 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/14/what-if-this-is-it/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/14/what-if-this-is-it/ Mon, 14 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/14/company/ Bloc Party at three in the morning because the quiet has become too loud. James Blake next—something about the way he makes space inside sound fits how things feel right now. Hercules and Love Affair after that, which breaks the mood except it doesn’t. A mixtape is just songs arranged in an order, but sometimes the arrangement matters more than what’s being arranged. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/14/company/ Mon, 14 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/12/while-you-were-sleeping/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/12/while-you-were-sleeping/ Sat, 12 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/11/sout-al-horeya/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/11/sout-al-horeya/ Fri, 11 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/11/raphael-saadiq-im-a-good-man/ Raphael Saadiq’s music exists in that particular pocket of soul and R&B where everything feels both inevitable and hard-won. I’m A Good Man carries that same quality—there’s no striving in it, no reaching for validation. It’s the sound of someone who’s made peace with the kind of person he is, or at least the kind he wants to be. His voice does something specific when he gets there—it settles, goes quiet, lets you in. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/11/raphael-saadiq-im-a-good-man/ Fri, 11 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/11/ten-little-missions/ I came up with this idea for weekends: ten pointless missions to trick myself into thinking I’d accomplished something by Monday. Like a checklist would matter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/11/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 11 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/10/girls-i-know-from-twitter/ Twitter had this stable of women who showed up in the replies—good photos, the kind of thing that made you stare, that made you want to say something. I’d scroll through their tweets and timelines like I was learning who they were, but really I was just looking at them. There was a weird distance in it, close enough to feel like knowing, far enough that I could pretend it meant something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/10/girls-i-know-from-twitter/ Thu, 10 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/9/living-in-the-cracks/ Karin Amamiya was a freeter—one of Japan’s disposable workers, replaceable at any time, living paycheck to irregular paycheck. She was also the singer of a punk rock band, The Revolutionary Truth, and at twenty-five she wrote a book about suicide, not as abstraction but as the logical endpoint of a society that has no use for people who won’t conform. She’d seen too many people she knew choose that way out. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/9/living-in-the-cracks/ Wed, 09 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/9/the-tide-pulls-from-the-moon/ William Fitzsimmons has that rare quality where his voice alone can make you feel like you’re intruding on something private. The fingerpicking guitars are modest, almost apologetic, and the songs move at their own pace—no production tricks, no rushing to the chorus. There’s something about his music that doesn’t ask for anything from you except to listen the way you’d listen to someone confess something true in a quiet room. I keep coming back to these records because they ask nothing and somehow that’s everything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/9/the-tide-pulls-from-the-moon/ Wed, 09 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/9/alex-guiry-farts-then-pukes/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/9/alex-guiry-farts-then-pukes/ Wed, 09 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/9/tabi-bonney-ft-lykke-li-where-we-gonna-go/ Two artists who exist in their own registers—Bonney with that precise, almost conversational flow, and Li with her ability to make a voice feel like it’s folding in on itself—somehow find the exact pocket together where everything lands. The song moves without rushing. You listen and it’s the kind of track that makes you realize how rare it is to hear two musicians actually talking to each other instead of just taking turns. There’s space in it, and restraint, and something genuinely unhurried in the way it unfolds. That’s harder to pull off than it sounds. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/9/tabi-bonney-ft-lykke-li-where-we-gonna-go/ Wed, 09 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/8/some-accident/ My friend told me his girlfriend’s pregnant. Wasn’t planned—condom broke or she missed pills, one of those accidents. And hearing him describe it, caught between excitement and panic, I realized I don’t actually have an answer for myself. If that happened to me, would I keep it? Push for an abortion? Honestly, I have no fucking clue. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/8/some-accident/ Tue, 08 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/8/broken-soul-journey/ I made a mixtape called “Broken Soul Journey.” Twenty tracks that fell into place as I was building them—no master plan, just a sequence that worked. Ups and downs and weirdness in the middle. Remixes next to originals where the remix was the right call. The kind of listening that takes you somewhere without explaining where. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/8/broken-soul-journey/ Tue, 08 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/5/wildfox-gets-french/ Wildfox’s always made graphic tees and playful references, the kind of stuff that’s deliberately uncool in a cool way. A French collection plays into that perfectly because it’s exactly the kind of thing they’d normally make fun of, so doing it straight is the smartest move. The designs probably lean into every cliché—berets, wine, the whole bit—which is the only way that works. Actual fashion would find a clever angle and kill it. Wildfox doesn’t care about clever. There’s something solid about a brand that understands irony and sincerity have collapsed into each other now, and you can’t separate them anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/5/wildfox-gets-french/ Sat, 05 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/4/friends-still/ I’ll prove it simply: there are exactly three things that matter in this life. Double cheese on a pizza is always better than single. Any decent party needs Ladyhawke playing at least once an hour. And Friends is unquestionably the greatest TV show ever made—still, forever. Or at least it ties with Skins and The OC. You know what I mean. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/4/friends-still/ Fri, 04 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/4/ex-girlfriend/ There’s that moment in a song where you recognize yourself in someone else’s regret, and suddenly you’re remembering someone you hadn’t thought about in months. Emilio Rojas has that pull—the way he sits into a melody about wanting back what he lost, not because he’s particularly clever about it, but because he sounds like he actually means it. It’s the kind of track that plays in a car late enough that you don’t immediately skip it, and by the second verse you’re just sitting with it, thinking about who this is really for. The specificity of the title—not just a song about missing someone, but specifically about an ex, about that particular flavor of regret—is honest in a way that a lot of music isn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/4/ex-girlfriend/ Fri, 04 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/3/toro-y-moi-new-beat/ I’ve been following Chaz Bear’s work for long enough that I’m not sure when he stopped being a discovery and became just someone I listen to when he puts something out. That shift happens gradually—you start checking in, then you’re just there. Toro Y Moi’s always been restless, jumping between moods and textures like he can’t sit still in any one sound, and that’s part of what keeps me coming back. There’s no arrogance in it, just genuine curiosity about what the instruments can do when you push them sideways. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/3/toro-y-moi-new-beat/ Thu, 03 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/3/donkey-kong-country-returns/ I remember the supermarket fluorescent lights, the sticky floors, the Super Nintendo in the corner where parents abandoned their kids for twenty minutes while shopping. One day they put Donkey Kong Country in the machine. We went absolutely feral. The colors, the animation—nothing we’d ever seen looked like that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/3/donkey-kong-country-returns/ Thu, 03 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/2/cold-war-kids/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/2/cold-war-kids/ Wed, 02 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/2/always-coming-back/ I found Those Dancing Days sometime in the mid-2000s and never moved on from them. Swedish indie pop, the kind that doesn’t announce itself—just plays, and you realize somewhere in the second or third listen that the melodies are perfectly constructed, every note in the right place. There’s no effort in it, or maybe all the effort is invisible, which is the same thing. You play their records and something unclenches. You’ll play them forever not because you’re trying to feel something specific, but because they’re already how your brain works now. Some music just sticks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/2/always-coming-back/ Wed, 02 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/2/the-tavern-tour/ Underground clubs in Berlin had all become the same extraction mechanism by 2011—packed basements, chemical drinks, the entire operation designed to cram in as many bodies as possible and call it culture. Authenticity was just the marketing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/2/the-tavern-tour/ Wed, 02 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/1/dead-earnest/ Zombie hunters—the underdog with a weapon against the undead, taking the ridiculous dead seriously. There’s something about that premise that works even when everything else falls apart. No irony, no self-awareness, just the practical work of survival. I’ve always liked that energy in these stories, even the bad ones. Especially the bad ones. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/2/1/dead-earnest/ Tue, 01 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/31/what-actually-happened/ During those first weeks of the Egyptian protests I kept hunting for actual news and kept ending up on Al Jazeera, which shouldn’t have been surprising but was. The American networks were all kind of there but not really there—CNN doing CNN things, MSNBC with some okay segments, Fox News somehow unclear on where Egypt was located—and then you’d flip to Al Jazeera and just find… reporting. Real reporting. Sometimes from a hotel room when their offices got raided. Sometimes over the phone. But actual journalism happening. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/31/what-actually-happened/ Mon, 31 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/31/love-will-find-you/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/31/love-will-find-you/ Mon, 31 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/31/brave-pirate/ I met this girl with a body that made thinking impossible. Dark, no kids, and she actually laughed at my jokes—the full Charlie Harper bit, all of it. We talked about this German actress for like an hour, hypothesizing what she’d be like in bed. That passed for seduction. She wanted to come over, and I’d actually cleaned up—thrown out the trash, dealt with the dishes before they evolved. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/31/brave-pirate/ Mon, 31 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/31/ghetto-sisters/ Late Friday night or early Saturday morning—the timeline gets blurry at fast food places—I bought a mixtape from a group of girls hanging around McDonald’s. They had that ghetto-hipster thing going. The transaction was straightforward: a couple of greasy cheeseburgers and a large Coke with something poured into it. They handed me back a handwritten note decorated with hearts, dicks, and skulls, listing the favorite songs of Lauren, Nesrin, Daria, and this blonde girl who was fat and had neither style nor any voice to speak of. That was the whole deal. That was the mixtape. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/31/ghetto-sisters/ Mon, 31 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/28/wacko-maria-pussy-hole-gang/ Wacko Maria doesn’t give a shit what you think the name should be. A Japanese brand that treats provocation like a design principle—not shock for shock’s sake, but an actual refusal to perform respectability. The clothes are good, the cuts are solid, the fabrics feel expensive, and then the tag or the hang tag just says something completely stupid and unapologetic. It’s the kind of thing that would get a brand meeting full of nervous notes in most places. Here it’s just the baseline. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/28/wacko-maria-pussy-hole-gang/ Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/28/lykke-li-i-follow-rivers/ Lykke Li’s “I Follow Rivers” works with almost nothing—just her voice caught against some sparse synth that doubles back on itself. There’s something both fragile and cold about it. The song became inescapable for a while, everywhere at once, which usually kills anything dead, but this one survived it. Maybe because it never tried to be anything more than what it was—just a simple thing repeated until it starts to mean something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/28/lykke-li-i-follow-rivers/ Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/28/ten-little-missions/ I keep getting emails from people saying the missions are too hard. “Nobody can do that,” they say. “You’d have to be superhuman.” They’re right. So I decided to lower the difficulty this time. Make it fair. Just kidding. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/28/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/28/when-they-pulled-the-plug/ The Egyptian government switched off the internet. All of it. January 2011, Cairo burning, the government decided communications were a problem and they solved it the only way that would actually work—they killed the whole network. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/28/when-they-pulled-the-plug/ Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/27/patrick-wolf-the-city/ Patrick Wolf’s music sounds like late nights in cramped apartments, all goth theatricality and glitchy synths, the kind of thing you play when you’re too young to understand why you’re depressed but old enough to want to feel it anyway. His albums are dense—layers of strings and electronic noise that feel almost overwhelming on first listen, then somehow intimate after the tenth. There’s something about how he structures his melodies, this minor-key vulnerability wrapped in production that feels expensive and strange, that made sense to me when I was figuring out what taste was. You either get it or you don’t, and for a while there, getting it felt like proof that I understood something true about the world that other people didn’t. Which is stupid, obviously, but that’s what good music does at a certain age. It makes you feel like you’re the only one paying attention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/27/patrick-wolf-the-city/ Thu, 27 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/27/the-silence-clause/ A hundred German blogs got caught taking money to write about Tenerife vacations and Paris hotels. The payments were small—thirty to seventy euros per affiliate link—but they came with non-disclosure agreements that threatened 5,000 euros if you talked about the deal. Sascha Pallenberg, a writer who actually investigates these things, exposed the scheme, and the bloggers involved started emailing him to say they regretted it. They knew it felt wrong. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/27/the-silence-clause/ Thu, 27 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/26/should-have/ Cloud Nothings make songs that feel like they’re drowning in their own feedback—walls of distorted guitar and Dylan’s voice barely pushing through, like he’s singing from inside the noise. There’s something almost suffocating about it, the production so heavy it becomes the whole point. You listen and you’re not sure if you’re supposed to be moved by it or just endure it, and maybe that’s the appeal—everything they do feels like too much by design. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/26/should-have/ Wed, 26 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/26/black-glasses-and-yellow-pants/ Half of Berlin’s walking around like this and I still don’t know where to start. The pants, the earrings, the knit stuff, the hats, the chains—even some blue bag somehow got in on it. Why? I have no clue. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/26/black-glasses-and-yellow-pants/ Wed, 26 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/26/people-are-dying/ I learned about Egypt’s revolution through a Reddit post from some anonymous guy begging people to spread the word. Twitter was already blocked. Facebook would be next. “Here people are dying,” he wrote. I checked CNN and Al Jazeera and found nothing. It was strange—the only place the news existed was this scattered thread of desperate pleas. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/26/people-are-dying/ Wed, 26 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/25/sam-hiscox-shoot-me-in-the-face/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/25/sam-hiscox-shoot-me-in-the-face/ Tue, 25 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/25/she-knew/ M.I.A. said her third album was shit. Not diplomatically, not with caveats about artistic vision or misunderstood intentions—just, directly, that ///Y/// was bad. She had listened to it again and finally agreed with everyone else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/25/she-knew/ Tue, 25 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/25/massive-attack-live-with-me/ Massive Attack live is nothing like the records. The studio versions have space, room to breathe—every synth and drum hit sitting in its own pocket of air. But live, with the band onstage and the sound filling the whole room, it all compresses into something heavier, more immediate. You feel the bass in your chest. The samples land harder. There’s this moment in the middle of a song where everything stops except a single vocal loop repeating, and the crowd holds its breath, and you realize how much of what made you love these records in the first place was the space between the sounds, the negative space, and live they’re filling it all in. It’s not worse—it’s just different, more visceral, more now. By the end your ears are ringing and you’re soaked through and you’re already thinking about the next time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/25/massive-attack-live-with-me/ Tue, 25 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/25/always-younger/ I’ve never been with a woman older than me. I’m 27, so that’s over a decade of dating, and somehow it never goes that direction. I wasn’t tracking it as a rule—it just happened that way. And I’m pretty sure I’m not unusual in this. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/25/always-younger/ Tue, 25 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/24/back-to-summer/ Summer disappeared this year in what felt like a couple of weeks. Heat, light, the whole lazy stretching of it—gone before you could actually settle into it. Now winter’s coming back around. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/24/back-to-summer/ Mon, 24 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/24/one-day/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/24/one-day/ Mon, 24 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/24/the-thing-about-uniqueness/ Berlin has three things to see: the TV Tower, the Brandenburg Gate, and a guy on a bike who sells drugs. When you finally settle into the city mentally instead of just renting an apartment there, it takes about two weeks before someone introduces you to him. He knows someone who knows someone. Before long you’re standing in a bar somewhere and this guy shows up with kind eyes, you talk about life and love and death, he hands you some bags, he disappears. Until next time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/24/the-thing-about-uniqueness/ Mon, 24 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/22/the-naked-and-famous-all-of-this-forever/ The Naked and Famous make the kind of synth-pop that sounds like it’s trying to escape from inside your own head. There’s something about their production—clean, mechanical, but never cold—that gets under your skin. All of This Forever has that same restless energy they’ve always had, the sense that they’re chasing something they can’t quite name. I’ve never been able to shake them once they’re in rotation, which is both the appeal and the problem. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/22/the-naked-and-famous-all-of-this-forever/ Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/21/ten-little-missions/ Saturday night, cheap wine and bad pizza in a second-floor apartment while Berlin’s Fashion Week happens somewhere else without us. Ghostbusters on the screen, the weather channel after that, and the specific paralysis of knowing we could do literally anything tonight and yet here we are. At some point—wine-drunk, maybe around 11—I start thinking about what an actually good weekend would look like. Not aspirational. Not the kind of thing you’d post. Just… what would make this feel like something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/21/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 21 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/20/back-to-nintendo/ Before I cared about anything else, Nintendo was the only company I trusted. I remember the sound of Kangaskhan in the backyard. The fury when the power went out before I killed Koopa. The pure joy of sending my best friends off cliffs with Sheik. Nothing deep about it. Nintendo made the best things, and that mattered more than whatever our ethics teacher wanted us to talk about. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/20/back-to-nintendo/ Thu, 20 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/20/dont-look-back/ She & Him sound like they’re recording in the same room as you, and that closeness—the space they leave, the way M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel listen to each other without pushing—just works. Their Christmas albums especially have this oddly comforting quality, the shelter you find in something deliberately modest and warm. It’s one of those things where the more you listen the more you notice how much precision goes into sounding that relaxed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/20/dont-look-back/ Thu, 20 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/19/three-things/ After a few years running a site, I got asked the same things over and over. How do you build something that actually works. How do you make money. What’s the secret. The honest answer is there’s no secret—just three things that kept everything alive for me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/19/three-things/ Wed, 19 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/19/jogger-nephicide/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/19/jogger-nephicide/ Wed, 19 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/19/last-try/ Nokia was doing this campaign thing around Berlin Fashion Week—pop-up cafe, models, shooting for the C7. You could smell the panic dressed up as strategy. Partner with fashion, collaborate with photographers, put beautiful young people in your ads. It’s what you do when you know something’s wrong but you’re not ready to admit it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/19/last-try/ Wed, 19 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/19/yorick-nube/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/19/yorick-nube/ Wed, 19 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/18/mtvs-skins/ MTV announced an American version of Skins—the British cult series about teenagers navigating parties, sex, drugs, and all the shit that comes with growing up. Same first season, same basic story, different characters. It had already aired on BBC America, but apparently that wasn’t American enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/18/mtvs-skins/ Tue, 18 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/18/domain-wars/ Nerdcore’s gone. Euroweb took it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/18/domain-wars/ Tue, 18 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/17/amanda-palmer-no-apologies/ Amanda Palmer’s the kind of artist who decided early on that being uncomfortable was more interesting than being liked. The performances, the refusal to apologize for sex or weirdness or taking up space exactly as she wanted it. That commitment to exist without apology, without the edit button. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/17/amanda-palmer-no-apologies/ Mon, 17 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/17/never-wake-up/ Monday and you’re supposed to be somewhere. You could do anything else—wash a dog, kick a traffic light, fight Scientology, drink vodka at dawn, smoke shisha until nothing matters, organize years of computer files you’ve ignored, play Wii at an embarrassing age, burn down your kitchen trying to cook something ambitious, kiss someone because, make beds you’ll destroy in hours, go swimming clothed, water plants, quit your job, have sex, actually have an adventure. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/17/never-wake-up/ Mon, 17 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/14/radioactive-city/ I used to write things like this when the blog was all chaos and provocation. The year is 2076 in my head, there’s a war over the last can of Red Bull, and me and Udo are in some pink-unicorn rebellion in Radioactive City. We send a message to the past with ten missions that don’t make sense—report your ex’s new boyfriend, hand out condoms at nursing homes, get naked, send love letters to teachers, show up at Jehovah’s Witnesses with magazines about German Idol. If you complete all ten, maybe the apocalypse won’t happen. Which is stupid. Which was the point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/14/radioactive-city/ Fri, 14 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/14/one-virgin-less/ Some internet genius at Kink.com had an idea: get a performer who’s technically still a virgin, let people vote on who deflowers her, film the whole thing, and put a camera inside her so you can watch the membrane break. It’s the kind of idea that would never make it past the first pitch if anyone involved had any sense, but that’s not how things work anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/14/one-virgin-less/ Fri, 14 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/14/back-to-the-future/ Marty McFly exists in this perfect pocket where nothing about the movie feels dated—not because it’s timeless in the way people say that about good work, but because the whole thing is so clearly from its moment that it became its own world. Michael J. Fox had this hyperkinetic energy, all twitching restlessness and smart-aleck timing, that made Marty feel like an actual person rather than a teenager in a movie. The performance works because Fox never played it cool; he let Marty be anxious and funny and out of his depth, scrambling to fix things instead of knowing what he was doing. There’s something about that uncertainty—the way his face changes when he realizes something’s gone wrong, the little physical comedy that never feels calculated—that’s stayed with me longer than the plot itself. It’s one of those films that works for so many reasons that you can watch it at any age and find something different to hold onto. When you’re a kid it’s adventure, when you’re older it’s about your parents being actual people, and somewhere along the way it becomes about time itself and how you can’t fix anything no matter how fast you run. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/14/back-to-the-future/ Fri, 14 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/13/dirty-vegas-electric-love/ Dirty Vegas understood restraint in a way a lot of electronic acts didn’t. Every synth line had purpose, nothing was decoration, and underneath the clean production there was this ache—something genuine searching to get out. For a band built on loops and programming, they felt surprisingly human. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/13/dirty-vegas-electric-love/ Thu, 13 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/13/whats-cheating-for-you/ I kissed Tina at fifteen in the concrete stairwell of her apartment building on some hot summer day. Nothing complicated about it—we wanted to, we did it, she went inside. Walking home I knew I’d just ended things with Jasmine, and I was right. Jasmine never forgave me for it, like one kiss somehow negated everything else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/13/whats-cheating-for-you/ Thu, 13 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/12/six-records/ Went back to “The Best Of” N.E.R.D. this week, which is never a good sign. Pharrell and the crew had this thing figured out—looked untouchable, surrounded by beautiful women, more fun than seemed legal. Listening now it’s just competent. Nothing wrong with it, nothing that makes you feel alive. That’s the worst thing an album can be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/12/six-records/ Wed, 12 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/12/simpsons-porn/ There’s a corner of the internet where people with actual drawing skills have spent thousands of hours rendering the Simpson family in every conceivable sexual scenario. I found some of it once while going down a rabbit hole, and what got me wasn’t the existence of it—of course it exists, everything exists if enough people want it badly enough—but the craft involved. Someone animated Marge with the same meticulous attention to light and shadow they’d use on paying work. The dedication to such completely unhinged subject matter is almost impressive. Almost. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/12/simpsons-porn/ Wed, 12 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/11/deerhoof-super-duper-rescue-heads/ When you hear a Deerhoof song, it sounds like someone’s playing multiple songs at once—instruments all pushing against each other, nothing lining up, but it works anyway. There’s a commitment there to the genuinely strange, to following every impulse even when it gets uncomfortable. Every record feels like they’re chasing the next weird idea rather than repeating what worked before. That restlessness is what makes them work. You know they’re not trying to impress anyone. They’re just making something they actually believe in, and that kind of belief carries. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/11/deerhoof-super-duper-rescue-heads/ Tue, 11 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/11/gotham-high/ Bruce Wayne shows up at Gotham High with acne, insomnia, and an obsession with technology that makes him exactly the kind of kid nobody wants to sit with at lunch. Alfred’s watching from the sidelines, knows what this teenager’s supposed to become, but for now there’s just high school, just survival, just the ordinary crisis of fitting in before anything else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/11/gotham-high/ Tue, 11 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/10/facebook-dies-in-march/ A satirical magazine famous for running stories about aliens invading Earth and Megan Fox being secretly male published a fake interview where Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook was spiraling out of control, that running it had destroyed his life, and that he was shutting the entire thing down on March 15, 2011. Everything deleted. All the photos, videos, messages—gone forever. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/10/facebook-dies-in-march/ Mon, 10 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/10/vicious-satellite/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/10/vicious-satellite/ Mon, 10 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/10/mixtape-fire-in-my-hand/ The blue sky over Berlin is making you sick. Literally—there’s that feeling in your chest where you want to throw it all up, the weekend, the wine, the conversations you shouldn’t have had. You’ve spent three days picking up books and putting them down, drinking something that expired months ago, absorbing other people’s histories like they matter. Everyone here has a lesbian past or something close to it. The city’s full of people carrying stories that don’t belong to them. It all ends quietly, without announcement, just fades the way weekends do when you’ve spent them thinking instead of living. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/10/mixtape-fire-in-my-hand/ Mon, 10 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/8/eudes-de-santana-when-the-fat-years-end/ There’s something about work that exists between disciplines—not quite art, not quite design, just someone thinking through materials and time. Eudes de Santana does that. His pieces sit in that space where the conceptual weight is real but nothing feels labored. You look at them and something lands that wasn’t obvious at first glance. The title here—all that German phrasing about lean years—suggests a shift, a threshold, maybe a period where resources thinned out and something different had to be made from what was left. I’m drawn to artists who work through constraint rather than around it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/8/eudes-de-santana-when-the-fat-years-end/ Sat, 08 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/7/vinnie-luck-or-choice/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/7/vinnie-luck-or-choice/ Fri, 07 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/7/weekend-missions/ Finally, the holidays are over. Christmas, New Year’s, birthdays—all those celebration days that pile up at once and devour your calendar. Gone. Now it’s just work, routine, the long stretch of nothing until summer. You’re stuck in it for months. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/7/weekend-missions/ Fri, 07 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/6/ines-turns-21/ I never thought Ines would actually make it to 21. Not in a dark way—just that she always seemed like she’d stay seventeen forever, permanently wrecked from some village party, reeking of cheap vodka and bad decisions. The kind of person you figured time would just pass over. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/6/ines-turns-21/ Thu, 06 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/6/kaputt/ Dan Bejar’s 2011 pivot toward sleek synth-pop felt calculated until you realized it wasn’t—it was just him at a different angle, all the melodicism and anxiety he’d always had now wrapped in drum machines and those gorgeous plastic horns. The album moves like someone moving through a party where nothing’s quite connecting, smooth on the surface but you can feel the distance in every song. I keep coming back to it because there’s something about the way it’s distant and immediate at once, like watching something happen behind glass that somehow makes you feel the ache anyway. It’s not warm. It doesn’t want to be. And that’s exactly why it works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/6/kaputt/ Thu, 06 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/5/new-rotation/ Robyn finally corralled those three EPs she scattered out over the year into one album, “Body Talk,” and I’ve had it running on repeat. If Robyn’s never landed for you, this won’t change that, but if you already live there, it’s the kind of clean electro-pop that doesn’t need to announce itself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/5/new-rotation/ Wed, 05 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/4/street-dress/ I don’t understand expensive designer clothes. Wrap shopping bags around your body, grow a hipster beard, throw on some chunky shoes, and boom—you’re setting trends. That’s the whole game right there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/4/street-dress/ Tue, 04 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/4/discodeine-synchronize/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/4/discodeine-synchronize/ Tue, 04 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/4/three-days/ Most people will tell you Ocarina of Time is the best Zelda. Or A Link to the Past. Maybe Link’s Awakening if they’re feeling different. Majora’s Mask is the one that actually got to me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/4/three-days/ Tue, 04 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/3/set-yourself-on-colors/ You’re in traffic on a Monday morning, or sitting at a desk watching your coffee get cold, or standing on a platform waiting for a train that’s running late. That specific heaviness is all the moment has to offer. The weekend is completely gone now, already turning into fiction in your head, and there’s still the whole rest of the week ahead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/3/set-yourself-on-colors/ Mon, 03 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/3/young-blood-forever/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/3/young-blood-forever/ Mon, 03 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/3/they-love-men-for-money/ I’ve never paid for sex. Either I always thought it was wrong, or I didn’t have the money—probably both. Sure, I’d scrape together cash for drinks and movies and whatever. But paying straight up, no cover story? It never happened. No pimps, no red-light windows, no hourly rooms. Not very rock star. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/3/they-love-men-for-money/ Mon, 03 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/3/with-your-eyes-closed/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2011/1/3/with-your-eyes-closed/ Mon, 03 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/30/one-good-intention/ 2010 was shit. Not in any way I need to explain, just the weight of a whole year where nothing felt right. Not enough of anything that matters: not enough sex, not enough magic moments you’d actually tell someone about, not enough evidence that any of this is worth the energy it takes. The job had been destroying me for so long I couldn’t remember what not being angry felt like. My relationship had either broken or I’d just stopped noticing. Every night was the same as every other night. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/30/one-good-intention/ Thu, 30 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/29/skins-again/ I keep coming back to Skins even though I know what I’m walking into. The show doesn’t apologize—it’ll spend an entire episode on someone getting high, or failing at sex, or just falling apart, and that’s just what the episode is. No lesson, no arc. Most television won’t do that. Season 5 is a new cast, same chaos, and I’m curious enough to watch. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/29/skins-again/ Wed, 29 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/28/best-of-2010/ Looking back at a year of writing is always strange. You get worked up about something—a film, an idea, a moment you want to preserve—and it feels urgent at the time. Months later, you can’t quite remember why. But some pieces hold. Some still feel like I got close to something true, or honest enough that I don’t feel stupid rereading them. This is the work from 2010 I’d actually want to keep. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/28/best-of-2010/ Tue, 28 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/28/japayork-teenagers/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/28/japayork-teenagers/ Tue, 28 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/27/the-end-of-everything-is-near/ I made this mixtape at the end of 2010, called it “The End Of Everything Is Near” because I needed something playing while I worked and studied and sat in the dark thinking about what came next. Most of the songs came from friends scattered around Berlin, people who’d drifted out of the center looking for quieter blocks. It’s the kind of playlist that sits under your thoughts without demanding anything—just transition music, the sound of closing off on something you can’t quite name. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/27/the-end-of-everything-is-near/ Mon, 27 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/27/what-meisel-saw/ Steven Meisel photographed supermodels in the places fashion doesn’t show you—recovery clinics, psychiatric wards, the spaces where the industry’s casualties end up. He finds them stripped of mythology, the face that sold a million products now just a person in a hospital gown. His work doesn’t redeem them or make it a story of triumph. It just looks, without turning away. The clinical light, the vulnerability, the evidence of what these women survived to become beautiful. That’s what interested him—not the fantasy, but the cost. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/27/what-meisel-saw/ Mon, 27 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/26/smith-westerns-weekend-forever/ There’s this particular Saturday morning feeling in their sound—the kind of restless optimism that comes from not knowing what you’re doing yet but being sure something’s about to happen. Weekend Forever captures that moment before the plan gets ruined or actually works out, before you figure out if this is growing up or just treading water. The production is clean enough that you can hear every decision, every moment where they decide to push or hold back. It’s a band that understood that indie rock doesn’t have to apologize for sounding like it matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/26/smith-westerns-weekend-forever/ Sun, 26 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/25/bag-raiders-sunlight/ Bag Raiders’ ’Sunlight’ is the kind of track that sounds like it’s been in your head longer than it’s actually been playing. There’s this warm inevitability to it, the synths moving with a lazy precision that feels deliberate and effortless at the same time. It sits somewhere between morning light and that moment right before everything gets complicated, a pocket of certainty that shouldn’t exist but does. The whole thing has this confidence—nothing wasted, nothing forced. Once it gets in your rotation it doesn’t really leave. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/25/bag-raiders-sunlight/ Sat, 25 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/24/early-internet/ Even a hardened asshole like me gets sentimental around this time of year, thinking about how we all started with this internet thing. 2003 maybe, I don’t remember exactly. None of us knew each other. We just did our own shit with stolen code snippets and no real idea what we were doing or what you’d even call it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/24/early-internet/ Fri, 24 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/23/megan-dead-girls/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/23/megan-dead-girls/ Thu, 23 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/22/sasha-borodinova/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/22/sasha-borodinova/ Wed, 22 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/22/what-a-woman/ I unbutton her pants after enough red wine and the kind of late-night talk that goes nowhere good—her brother, her roommate’s lasagna—and my hand slides between her legs into this thick mass of pubic hair. Curled, stubborn, unshaved for years. I like it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/22/what-a-woman/ Wed, 22 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/22/let-them/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/22/let-them/ Wed, 22 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/21/borrowed/ I don’t mark my life in years or school classes. I mark it in girls—the ones I chased, the ones who took something from me, the ones who ripped me open. Female creatures, each one a season, months or years of overlap and then the exit. Sacred or sloppy, doesn’t matter. They all proved the same thing: I need someone nearby who inspires me or calls me on my bullshit, regardless of whether we’re together. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/21/borrowed/ Tue, 21 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/21/nocturnal/ Jamie Woon makes music that sits in the space between presence and dissolving—that 3 a.m. feeling where the world gets quiet enough that you can hear yourself think. Night Air is exactly that texture: minimal, nocturnal, built from restraint. The production has this almost forensic quality to it, every element placed with care, nothing wasted. It’s the kind of work that rewards headphones and insomnia. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/21/nocturnal/ Tue, 21 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/19/milk-honey/ Beatsteaks have been making the kind of rock that doesn’t apologize for itself since the ’90s. They’re from Berlin, they’re competent in a way that feels earned rather than studied, and they’ve never been interested in trends or drama. Milk & Honey is just them doing what they do—straightforward songs built to last, the kind of album that doesn’t demand anything from you but rewards paying attention anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/19/milk-honey/ Sun, 19 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/17/some-boy/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/17/some-boy/ Fri, 17 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/17/everything-disappears/ The internet eats its own. Delicious just proved it again. Yahoo’s bookmark service—which somehow became important to people—is getting shut down. Cue the panic. Suddenly everyone’s running scripts to export their links, hunting for alternatives, signing petitions like a petition is going to matter. It won’t. But I get it. You build something on someone else’s server for years and then one day they decide it’s not worth it anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/17/everything-disappears/ Fri, 17 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/17/new-blood/ The morning they announced the new Skins generation, I felt like someone had kicked over a shelf. Four seasons of building characters, watching them break and rebuild, and now E4 had eight new faces ready to pretend none of it mattered. That’s the format—two generations per cast, then hand it over and start again. I knew it was coming. That didn’t make it suck less. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/17/new-blood/ Fri, 17 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/16/the-grid/ There’s this moment early on where you step into the blue and everything is geometry and light—neon cutting through black, surfaces catching reflection. It feels deliberate. Someone spent real time making sure this digital world looks a certain way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/16/the-grid/ Thu, 16 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/15/the-dø-slippery-slope/ The Dø are one of those bands that sound deceptively simple until you’re a few listens deep and suddenly everything clicks into place. Krystal and Jotta build these tight electronic and acoustic arrangements that sit somewhere between pop and experimental without quite committing to either. There’s something disarming about how unadorned it all is—a voice, a drum machine, maybe a synth—and yet it sounds more considered than most pop music out there. I fell into their music the way you fall into a good habit, not thinking about it until you realize you’ve been listening to the same album on repeat for two weeks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/15/the-dø-slippery-slope/ Wed, 15 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/15/together-were-nothing/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/15/together-were-nothing/ Wed, 15 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/15/hattie-watson/ The freckles are the first thing. Red hair helps, but it’s the freckles that make you keep looking. She’s known this since school when people gave her shit about them, and she knows it now that they’re the first thing you notice in her photographs. More advantage than disadvantage, she told me. The diplomatic answer, which really means: yes, I know exactly what I have. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/15/hattie-watson/ Wed, 15 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/14/julian-39/ I found this old satire recently—a fake dating profile someone made of Julian Assange, back when he was still something people could joke about. A German design blog used to run this column called “Hardcore Contact Ads” where they’d write famous people’s personal ads in their own voice, barely touched. The satire was just in the presentation. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/14/julian-39/ Tue, 14 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/13/scissor-sisters-invisible-light/ There’s something about Scissor Sisters that feels like permission. Not permission in the sense of being allowed—more like watching someone live so completely in their own excess that you stop wondering if you’re supposed to. The theatricality, the sex, the refusal to make it palatable. Jake Shears doesn’t care if you think it’s too much. That energy carries through everything they touch. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/13/scissor-sisters-invisible-light/ Mon, 13 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/9/dragon-ball/ Goku’s just a kid with a monkey tail, flying around on a cloud with a staff while an old pervert in a turtle shell teaches him magic. That’s Dragon Ball. First season. Someone had a world in their head and wanted to show it to you without trying to convince you it mattered. The dialogue is sharp. The characters are genuinely strange and appealing—Bulma doesn’t think twice about grabbing Goku’s crotch. The mysteries feel real. You could believe something was going to happen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/9/dragon-ball/ Thu, 09 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/8/kelsey-reckling-never-still/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/8/kelsey-reckling-never-still/ Wed, 08 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/7/seacoal/ Seacoal on a beach is leftover from somewhere else—dark fragments in the sand, chunks tumbling down from cliffs, things that don’t belong and got carried there anyway. I think about moths the same way. Creatures that look like the night has grown wings. Drawn to the light that kills them. Both dark, both remnants, both pulled toward something they shouldn’t want. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/7/seacoal/ Tue, 07 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/3/ten-missions/ Weekends are when your body remembers it’s not just a delivery system. Friday hits and the pattern breaks, and you’ve got two days to either fill them with something real or spend the whole time scrolling and feeling hollow about it. That’s the binary—act or rot. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/3/ten-missions/ Fri, 03 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/2/boots-for-christmas/ The Killers have always understood that gap between fantasy and what’s actually solid. Boots aren’t the shiny gift, just something real you can walk in. Brandon Flowers makes songs that sound like opening credits to something huge, but they’re really about small true moments. A pair of boots is more honest than most Christmas presents. That’s exactly their territory—the space between what you want to feel and what actually sustains you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/2/boots-for-christmas/ Thu, 02 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/2/cataclysm/ I can still feel it sometimes, that pull. Walking past the game store in December, seeing the Cataclysm box with its red fire and broken world. A notification in an email about the expansion release. Nothing desperate, nothing urgent—just a low frequency hum that’s never quite gone away, even after all these years. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/2/cataclysm/ Thu, 02 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/1/the-streets-too-numb/ I keep coming back to The Streets because they made numbness feel like something real, like it deserved to be documented in the same way you’d document joy or heartbreak. All those songs about nothing in particular—waiting for a mate, riding the night bus, being too tired to care—they worked because Mike Skinner never pretended these moments meant more than they did. He just watched them. And now when I listen, I get why that mattered. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/1/the-streets-too-numb/ Wed, 01 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/1/just-looking/ Swedish girl with red hair standing in front of an aggressively colored wall, purple from Gina Tricot and a few other places. She’d already figured out how the hair and the purple and the wall would all work against each other. The colors didn’t fight. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/12/1/just-looking/ Wed, 01 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/30/on-film/ Alexander Alekseenko shoots analog in a world that moved on. Film is slow, expensive, unforgiving—you think before the shutter clicks and trust what you actually made. There’s nothing revolutionary about that choice anymore, but there’s something necessary about it. His photographs don’t announce themselves as vintage or cool. They’re just images made with actual intention, which apparently is rare enough to feel like rebellion. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/30/on-film/ Tue, 30 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/30/the-minefield/ The blogsphere is in panic mode. Next year the new youth protection treaty kicks in, and it’s clear that the government has written some truly spectacular rules for something it fundamentally doesn’t understand. The regulations are vague as hell—basically cost-traps disguised as policy, written by people who have no idea how the internet actually works. The whole thing seems designed to kill cultural diversity online. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/30/the-minefield/ Tue, 30 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/29/small/ You spend months building someone up before you get them naked. Fantasy is a specific thing—you imagine them in detail, construct the perfect version based on what you’ve seen clothed and what they’ve told you and how they move through space. Then the day comes when you actually get to look and it’s almost never what you were expecting. There’s always something. A cock too small or too crooked. Breasts that hang different than you thought. A pussy that’s too loose or too tight or smells too strong. Small aesthetic disasters that weren’t in the version you’d been carrying around. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/29/small/ Mon, 29 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/29/problem-children/ I have a real gift for picking the wrong person. The ones already in relationships, already leaving, already broken in ways that should be obvious red flags. But there’s something seductive about that kind of damage - it reads as depth, as something you might actually reach if you try hard enough. So I pour myself in. The meals at strange hours, the discretion, not making scenes, pretending I don’t see what everyone else sees immediately. Then it ends. Tears. Another sheet set destroyed. The same cycle again. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/29/problem-children/ Mon, 29 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/27/going-somewhere/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/27/going-somewhere/ Sat, 27 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/26/ten-little-missions/ Snow outside. The weekend’s here and I have no fucking idea what to do with it. I could ski, could sled, could do normal things. Instead I think about all the stupid shit I’ve been putting off—the half-serious missions that would actually feel like something if I committed hard enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/26/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 26 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/26/princess-mononoke/ At AnimagiC in ’99—Germany’s first real anime convention—someone handed me a ticket. “Mononoke-hime,” they said. Original with German subtitles. I had no idea what I was walking into, just knew the crowd around me felt like the first place I’d ever belonged. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/26/princess-mononoke/ Fri, 26 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/25/europes-erotic-panic/ The European Union decided that the best way to protect children is to criminalize eroticism itself. Not just real child abuse material—that’s reasonable. But drawings of people who look young. Photographs of adults who happen to have boyish faces. Simulated sex acts. All of it banned now, and if you make it or look at it, you’re a criminal. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/25/europes-erotic-panic/ Thu, 25 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/25/wir-sind-helden/ Wir sind Helden played some small venue in Würzburg that December—the Landgasthof Zum Alten Gut, eighty people if that. The kind of show that only exists for the people in the room. I don’t know if the intimacy made them better or worse; it didn’t matter. Four guys from Berlin, clever lyrics, a band that didn’t need anything except to actually play for an audience. These shows disappear. You hear about them years later and wish you’d been paying attention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/25/wir-sind-helden/ Thu, 25 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/25/girls-in-the-bath/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/25/girls-in-the-bath/ Thu, 25 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/24/the-streets/ Mike Skinner made documentation look effortless. Just observations, small London details, the specific things nobody thinks are worth rapping about, over production that knew when to stay quiet. There’s a lesson in that for anything you’re making—stop reaching, just describe clearly, and people will see what you see. The Streets never felt like they were trying, and that’s what made them work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/24/the-streets/ Wed, 24 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/23/temporary/ I watched my friend dissolve on her best friend’s couch three hours after getting dumped. The snot and the gasping and the fragments—bigger boobs, never loved her, just used her. One of those breakups that hollows you out for a while. The thing that struck me was how completely she treated it like the end of the world, like something fundamental had failed, when really she was just watching a thing that had its time finish having its time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/23/temporary/ Tue, 23 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/23/winter-simplifies/ Winter does something to how you dress. You can’t hide anything—everything either keeps you warm or it doesn’t, and you look equally stupid in both situations. Watching people in cold cities, from Vancouver to Moscow, they all figure this out the same way. Once they’ve got a coat that works, boots that work, something on their head that works, they stop thinking about clothes for the next six months. Everything else falls away. You see people from totally different places looking basically the same because the cold has erased all the choices that seemed to matter in the summer. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/23/winter-simplifies/ Tue, 23 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/23/november/ The nuts are gathered. The cave is prepared. By November you’re out of summer’s pretense and completely into winter mode—thinking less about the world and more about what you actually want around you for the next few months. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/23/november/ Tue, 23 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/21/misfits/ I came to Misfits skeptical because everyone was comparing it to Skins, and I was tired of British teen dramas that promised darkness and delivered mostly just pretty kids being pretty and sad. Skepticism plus some drinking means eventually you watch the first season anyway, waiting to be vindicated or surprised. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/21/misfits/ Sun, 21 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/20/married-to-the-mob/ Watched Married to the Mob during the holidays. Michelle Pfeiffer trying to escape a mob family, and something about that desperation hits different when you’re stuck with your own. The film treats it all as light comedy—chaos, nobody listening, everybody scheming—but underneath there’s this panic about being trapped in a situation you can’t control. Basically what the holidays feel like. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/20/married-to-the-mob/ Sat, 20 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/19/the-weekend-list/ Friday. Everyone’s got their list of what makes a weekend matter—the whole stupid machinery of lifestyle advice and optimization and ways to turn your two days off into something other than a waiting period. Sleep until your brain stops working. Do something you’ll regret Monday. Wake up not remembering why you’re grinning. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/19/the-weekend-list/ Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/18/paradise-didnt-work/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/18/paradise-didnt-work/ Thu, 18 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/17/love-hina/ The pitch is stupid. Shy guy with a bad hair cut and clearly untouched genitals gets assigned to run a boarding house and immediately finds himself surrounded by girls. It’s the setup for every bad anime that ever existed, the kind of thing you know is leading somewhere predictable before you hit play. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/17/love-hina/ Wed, 17 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/17/jj/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/17/jj/ Wed, 17 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/16/asos-landed/ ASOS finally opened in Germany and something just snapped. Fashion blogs exploded. People were buying constantly. The postmen were drowning in packages. Within weeks it felt like it had always been there, like some essential piece of the world had just been plugged in. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/16/asos-landed/ Tue, 16 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/16/nastya-k/ Ran across her work somewhere and kept thinking about it after. Anastasia Kochetkova’s digital illustrations have this quality where they don’t demand anything from you, but if you look they give something back. Not flashy—there’s no real effort spent on flash. Just clarity and care in how she builds an image. The character work especially feels like it comes from someone who understands something specific about how people actually sit or stand or feel, and translates it into the work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/16/nastya-k/ Tue, 16 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/16/something-in-your-face/ There’s a moment near the end where you get maybe thirty seconds of clarity. Some guys pull out and don’t think about it. Some have it planned. Some just push toward the face and let gravity and instinct do the work, loud about it, and then comes that particular quiet - not awkwardness, just the silence after something physical actually happened. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/16/something-in-your-face/ Tue, 16 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/15/ride-in-peace-brett/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/15/ride-in-peace-brett/ Mon, 15 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/13/over-it/ Someone asked if I was doing “A Heart For Blogs” again and I had to figure out why I wasn’t into it anymore. The original concept was fine—everyone nominate the blogs you actually read. No algorithm in between. A genuine recommendation network. That idea appealed to me when it first started. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/13/over-it/ Sat, 13 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/12/stupid-distractions/ November in Germany is relentless. Cold, wet, the sky the color of old dishwater—the kind of weather that makes you understand why people used to just go dormant for months and wait for spring like bears in a cave. The darkness starts eating at you around day three. By day seven you’re calculating the survival probability of jumping from a low enough height that you’d just walk away with regrets and mobility issues. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/12/stupid-distractions/ Fri, 12 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/11/new-innocence/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/11/new-innocence/ Thu, 11 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/11/florrie-give-me-your-love/ There’s something about Florrie’s synth-pop that catches you off guard—it’s pretty and electronic, but there’s something almost desperate underneath it, like she’s reaching for something just out of frame. “Give Me Your Love” is clean and bright, the kind of track that plays while you’re driving somewhere at night, and you’re thinking about someone you shouldn’t be thinking about. She has that gift for making vulnerability sound effortless, which is the hardest thing to do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/11/florrie-give-me-your-love/ Thu, 11 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/11/my-dumb-role-model/ I didn’t expect my role model to be a four-year-old cartoon character. Especially not one who was basically a walking advertisement for being inappropriate. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/11/my-dumb-role-model/ Thu, 11 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/10/geisha/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/10/geisha/ Wed, 10 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/9/shit-robot-take-em-up/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/9/shit-robot-take-em-up/ Tue, 09 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/9/i-hate-school/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/9/i-hate-school/ Tue, 09 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/7/room-to-breathe/ There’s a particular suffocation that happens when your personal project scales into something professional. The magazine I was building with people became real—multiple writers, real readers, actual clients—and I’m genuinely proud of it. But the cost is that you start filtering your own thinking before you write. You wonder what’s on-brand. You consider the advertisers. You can’t just post something crude and specific and half-formed because it might not fit the image. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/7/room-to-breathe/ Sun, 07 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/5/ten-little-missions/ Cold, gray, wet. That’s the whole fucking weekend. The metro’s packed with sick people breathing on each other, the flu’s making the rounds, there’s nothing to do but stare at the ceiling or go out and do something stupid. I made a list to get through Saturday and Sunday. Ten ways. Some of it’s a joke. Some of it’s just dark. All of it beats lying around. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/5/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 05 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/5/who-do-you-want-to-be-today/ Someone ran over a hedgehog. Posted about it on Twitter. Cried about it there. Asked their followers what to do next—should they still go to their friend’s birthday party? What should they get at Starbucks to feel okay? And everyone weighed in. Hot chocolate or coffee with milk? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/5/who-do-you-want-to-be-today/ Fri, 05 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/4/steven-meisel-organized-robots/ Meisel’s fashion photographs are arrangements first, moments never. You can feel the studio around every frame—the precision, the careful spacing, the models positioned like they’re part of an installation rather than people. It’s not cold exactly, but it’s controlled in a way that feels almost architectural. He’s been shooting for Italian Vogue forever, building this language of composition and staging that everyone else seems to be copying. The geometry of it appeals to me, honestly—that sense that if you get everything perfectly placed, perfectly lit, perfectly proportioned, something true might emerge from all that artifice. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/4/steven-meisel-organized-robots/ Thu, 04 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/3/dirty-little-rainbow/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/3/dirty-little-rainbow/ Wed, 03 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/2/city-cow/ I grew up in the country down south, hours from anything. I mean actual hours—walking across fields and through forests just to reach some party in a rusted trailer where we drank homemade schnapps and had no real idea what to do with ourselves. Farm life. Calves in the stable. Sunflower fields that went on forever. I watched animals get slaughtered and it stuck with me. Everyone knew everyone in that small universe. Either you were related or you had what we called a deep friendship—the kind where there’s nowhere to hide because you’re too tangled up in each other. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/2/city-cow/ Tue, 02 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/2/slash-fergie/ There’s something wild about hearing Slash’s guitar alongside Fergie’s vocals—two people from completely different decades and genres forced into the same room. He’s the riff master from the Guns N’ Roses era, all swagger and technical precision. She came up through the electronic pop machine of the Black Eyed Peas. On paper it shouldn’t work, but there’s something defiant about that mismatch that feels right. Like watching someone from the old guard acknowledge that the new world isn’t a threat, it’s just different. The song lives in that tension—his sound never quite domesticated, her voice never quite tamed by the production. It’s not a perfect fit. But it doesn’t need to be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/2/slash-fergie/ Tue, 02 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/1/right-now/ The thing about always having someone around is that you never actually have to make a choice. There’s just… someone. And then someone else. And you start to wonder if you’re the problem or if you’re just looking for something that doesn’t actually exist. I’m tired of wondering. I want to know what it feels like to stay, even if it doesn’t last forever. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/11/1/right-now/ Mon, 01 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/29/johnny-knoxville-detroit-lives/ There’s a film floating around called Detroit Lives where Johnny Knoxville walks through the city documenting what’s actually happening there—the artists, the builders, the people who never left. It’s a Palladium Boots production, probably still online somewhere, though these things have a way of disappearing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/29/johnny-knoxville-detroit-lives/ Fri, 29 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/29/october-itch/ October hits and you realize the year’s almost gone. You haven’t done anything real, just lived the default existence. Halloween comes around and people want to talk costumes, but what you’re feeling is that itch—the need to do something that doesn’t fit, that the normal version of you would never touch. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/29/october-itch/ Fri, 29 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/29/robyn-indestructible/ Robyn’s voice comes out of nowhere and it’s already the best thing happening. That particular kind of clarity and precision she has, the way she shapes a syllable like it’s the only syllable worth hearing—you can’t unhear it once you’ve heard it. Even on the most radio-friendly hooks, there’s something that feels uncomfortably sharp about her, like she’s at risk of cutting through the whole production and directly into whatever room you’re sitting in. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/29/robyn-indestructible/ Fri, 29 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/28/juli/ Somewhere in the late 2000s, German rock broke through. Bands like Juli filled festivals, wrote good songs, and drew real crowds. They didn’t need English radio to matter. When Telekom Street Gigs put them in Erfurt in 2009, it felt like confirmation of something already shifting: German bands weren’t underdogs anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/28/juli/ Thu, 28 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/28/violent-love/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/28/violent-love/ Thu, 28 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/28/king-of-the-pirates/ The ocean’s huge. Every episode reminds you of that—the sky, the water, the horizon. And there’s this crew sailing around on what amounts to a joke of a boat, and you want to be on it. Not like a wish, more like an actual pull. Just leave everything and go become a pirate and get into weird fights and find weird islands. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/28/king-of-the-pirates/ Thu, 28 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/26/out-of-depth/ I’ll say it plainly: I don’t understand fashion. Ask me about a collection, a cut, a color trend, and I’m useless. Genuinely embarrassed. I know enough to move through those spaces without looking like a complete outsider, but the moment it turns technical, I’m out. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/26/out-of-depth/ Tue, 26 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/26/lykke-li-get-some/ There’s this moment on ’Gunfire’ where everything gets loose and urgent at once, and you feel her just saying fuck it to the precision of her earlier albums. That’s the whole thing with Get Some—she was tired of being pretty and controlled. The songs still have that ache in them, that Lykke Li DNA of wanting something you can’t have, but now she’s loose with it. Letting it get messy. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/26/lykke-li-get-some/ Tue, 26 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/25/naughty-kids/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/25/naughty-kids/ Mon, 25 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/25/sari-safari/ I know someone like this. She’s 21, studies law and math (don’t ask how, I didn’t even know those went together), and she can’t sit still. Eight months a year she’s somewhere else. The other four she splits between two towns. She has three dogs, two cats, a chinchilla, a snake, a spider, and a hamster. One of her cats is named Henry Kissinger. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/25/sari-safari/ Mon, 25 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/22/sailor-moon/ I’d come home from school and the Sailor Scouts would be there waiting. That’s what it felt like, anyway—like they were just sitting around in some other dimension, ready to transform the moment I hit play. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/22/sailor-moon/ Fri, 22 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/22/my-little-diary/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/22/my-little-diary/ Fri, 22 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/22/skins-usa/ I gave up on the MTV Skins after a few episodes. Not because it was bad, exactly, but because it was neutered in every way that mattered. The British show had this raw, ugly honesty—the sex and self-destruction felt like genuine despair. The American version looked identical but felt like someone kept their hand on the off switch the whole time. Everything dangerous got smoothed down, every real moment got a lesson attached to it. You could feel the network’s fear. In the end you’re just staring at the skeleton of something that was alive. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/22/skins-usa/ Fri, 22 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/21/hannah-holman/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/21/hannah-holman/ Thu, 21 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/21/three-albums/ Three albums came through this week. Mark Ronson’s got a new one out. Deine Jugend, a German club-pop band, dropped their debut. And Die Antwoord did Die Antwoord things again. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/21/three-albums/ Thu, 21 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/21/when-we-stopped-talking/ We stopped talking somewhere between winter and spring. I can’t pin down when—there’s no moment you can point to. It was gradual, the way things rot. We used to be the kind of people who’d stay up all night doing nothing in particular, your head against my shoulder, cheap wine going warm in our glasses. We had this thing where the world made sense because we had each other, or at least that’s how it felt. Everything outside the two of us seemed small. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/21/when-we-stopped-talking/ Thu, 21 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/19/game-one/ Game One was just these guys playing games and talking shit for hours. Nils, Eddy, Etienne, Budi, Simon. Nobody performing, nobody trying to be anything they weren’t. They’d mess up, laugh at the right moments, mock each other relentlessly. That was the whole show. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/19/game-one/ Tue, 19 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/19/wenke/ Wenke was the kind of person who’d tell you exactly what she thought, which is rarer than you’d expect. Red wine helped, and she could talk for hours without needing much back—just someone willing to sit there while she figured things out. She couldn’t sit still in one direction, though. Social to her core, needed people, needed company, needed noise, but then suddenly had to disappear into complete silence like her life depended on it. The contradiction never bothered her because she was too busy living to worry about making sense of herself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/19/wenke/ Tue, 19 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/19/ibis-cerimagic-messing-with-my-head/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/19/ibis-cerimagic-messing-with-my-head/ Tue, 19 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/18/the-ting-tings/ Katie and Jules were in Berlin for a Tommy Hilfiger campaign thing, playing E-Werk. I met them at Soho House a few days before the show, and Jules immediately started talking about sunglasses—not as a metaphor, just the actual collection she’d been building. She bought cheap ones because the expensive ones disappeared, got stolen at restaurants, broke randomly. Someone had once given her a box of broken sunglasses while she was standing alone behind a factory in winter, which is the kind of detail that tells you what following The Ting Tings meant to some people. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/18/the-ting-tings/ Mon, 18 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/18/boyfriend/ Best Coast’s ’Boyfriend’ doesn’t try. It’s just Bethany Cosentino wanting someone, her voice floating over guitars that know they don’t need to prove anything. The whole song moves like an afternoon where nothing happens and you’re fine with it. When you play it, something settles into you—not because it’s profound but because it’s specific, the exact feeling of wanting someone who maybe isn’t thinking about you. Which, fine. We’ve all been there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/18/boyfriend/ Mon, 18 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/18/still-eating/ Jonathan Safran Foer wrote a book about why we eat animals, and I read it while eating a tortellini with ham and cream sauce. That should tell you something about how these things go. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/18/still-eating/ Mon, 18 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/15/marie-keeler/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/15/marie-keeler/ Fri, 15 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/15/the-missions/ There’s a flu hitting and the plan is to let it take you down, then drag everyone you know down with you. Be methodical about it. Throw a proper sick party—everyone in bed, everyone miserable, the apartment smelling like medicine and sweat. It’s honest work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/15/the-missions/ Fri, 15 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/14/ériver-hijano-the-end-of-a-chapter/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/14/ériver-hijano-the-end-of-a-chapter/ Thu, 14 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/14/the-sibling-question/ I was an only child, which basically meant I was a spoiled brat. No one to share anything with—the cookies, the Nintendo, my own room, all of it was mine. My friends were always complaining about their siblings, about not having space to themselves. But even as kids you could tell there was something underneath the complaints. A connection. Someone who understood you just because they’d lived in the same house, dealt with the same parents, got the inside jokes without needing explanation. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/14/the-sibling-question/ Thu, 14 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/13/hurts-stay/ Hurts make sadness feel beautiful. Theo Hutchcraft’s voice and all those synths create this space where heartbreak doesn’t feel degrading—it feels like the only honest thing. Stay is exactly that: accepting that sometimes you don’t leave, you just sit in the darkness together and let the machines turn it into something worth hearing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/13/hurts-stay/ Wed, 13 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/13/three-label-designs/ Beck’s ran a label design competition and picked three winners: Marie Schacht from Dresden, Thomas Gnahm from Weimar, and Franz Stämmele from Stuttgart. Francesca Gavin from Dazed & Confused and Simon Beckerman from PIG helped judge. They got money and the thing that actually matters—their designs on real bottles. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/13/three-label-designs/ Wed, 13 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/13/hundreds-of-miles/ You finally find someone who gets under your skin, who makes you feel alive and horny and like maybe something’s actually happening. And then they live hundreds of kilometers away. Long-distance is a special kind of hell—all compromise and denial and the constant ache of missing someone. There’s no falling into each other at the end of the day. No sex on your friend’s kitchen floor or tangled up on a couch. Just the rare video call, their face pixelated, their voice cutting out. No smell. No touch. Just screens. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/13/hundreds-of-miles/ Wed, 13 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/12/sinikka-konttinen-drawing-with-light/ Konttinen’s photographs let people just exist. There’s a patience to them, a kind of invisibility, that makes the camera feel like an afterthought rather than an intrusion. She documented working-class British communities for years, especially around Byker in Newcastle, and the work never announces itself or demands anything from you. The light is just there, catching moments that feel completely ordinary and somehow whole. What matters is the quietness of it, the way drawing with light becomes something different when you’re not trying to convince anyone of anything—just attention, and the trust that that’s enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/12/sinikka-konttinen-drawing-with-light/ Tue, 12 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/11/crystal-castles-made-beauty-hurt/ Alice Glass’s voice—crystalline, almost innocent—pushed through walls of distorted synths that sounded like machinery breaking in a cathedral. You’d hear a track and it felt like watching something fragile get destroyed in real time, which was the whole point. There’s something specific about electronic music that commits to harshness instead of hiding behind production, and they never apologized for it. Not many bands made discomfort feel this necessary. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/11/crystal-castles-made-beauty-hurt/ Mon, 11 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/11/mariam-sitchinava-ethereal-teenager/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/11/mariam-sitchinava-ethereal-teenager/ Mon, 11 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/8/yelle-la-musique/ When “Je t’aime… moi non plus” showed up on the radio, it sounded like someone had actually figured out how to make pop music that was entirely at ease with being ridiculous. Yelle’s whole thing was that electroclash sound from the early 2000s—songs built on synths and loops and samples with a deadpan delivery that made the camp feel intentional. There’s a design sense in how they put things together, a confidence about embracing the kitsch, that meant you didn’t have to choose between enjoying it and taking it seriously. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/8/yelle-la-musique/ Fri, 08 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/8/glorious-california/ California hits different when you’re not from there. The light is relentless, the food tastes like someone actually cared, and the bad ideas are prettier than anywhere else. You see why people chase it. You see why they stay. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/8/glorious-california/ Fri, 08 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/7/arjuna/ A sixteen-year-old girl dies in a motorcycle accident and wakes up in some kind of void where a cosmic being tells her the planet is dying and she’s the only one who can save it. That’s Earth Maiden Arjuna in a nutshell, and it’s exactly as bleak as it sounds. The forests are gone, the oceans are poison, every system we’ve built is complicit in the destruction. By the time the opening credits end you understand this isn’t a magical-girl fantasy about hope and triumph. It’s a show about inheriting a dead world at seventeen and being told you can still fix it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/7/arjuna/ Thu, 07 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/7/die-antwoord-evil-boy/ The evil-boy thing is just Die Antwoord being Die Antwoord—making something ugly and strange and compelling. It’s hard to take seriously because they’re clearly not serious, but there’s something underneath the shock that actually matters. Or maybe that’s just what they want you to think. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/7/die-antwoord-evil-boy/ Thu, 07 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/7/a-place-i-call-home/ What makes a place yours has nothing to do with paperwork or keys. It’s something smaller and slower—the way your body remembers a room, how a street you hated at first becomes something you can’t imagine leaving. Sophie Van der Perre makes work about that kind of belonging, that slow accumulation of habit that turns a space into something that holds you. I think about it too much, honestly. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/7/a-place-i-call-home/ Thu, 07 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/6/mom-goes-hard/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/6/mom-goes-hard/ Wed, 06 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/6/uffie-difficult/ Uffie was the bratty electro voice of the mid-2000s—childish vocals and deliberate provocation, the kind of artist who made you uncomfortable in the best way. She worked with Justice, showed up on tracks that felt dangerous and exhilarating and slightly stupid all at once. Then she basically vanished, which somehow felt right. The difficulty wasn’t her music or her image; it was the refusal to explain herself or soften for anyone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/6/uffie-difficult/ Wed, 06 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/6/we-can-stay-friends/ You break up with someone and the first thing you want to do—even before the crying, the drunk texting, the replaying of conversations—is erase them from every corner of the internet. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, email, Discord, that app you both had for finding restaurants. Delete the friendship, block them, unfollow, mute, block again on a different platform you forgot you both used. The impulse is pure and immediate: if I can’t have you, you don’t get to see me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/6/we-can-stay-friends/ Wed, 06 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/5/who-killed-my-mtv/ There were always two kinds of people. The ones happy with VIVA pumping them full of Blümchen and Tokio Hotel and whatever was popular in Cologne that week. And then the rest of us—the ones for whom MTV and a bottle of Jack at three in the morning meant something. The ones who at least pretended to have standards. Guitar noise versus manufactured sugar. The whole dumb war between what felt real and what was obviously built in a boardroom. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/5/who-killed-my-mtv/ Tue, 05 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/5/when-it-matters/ Last week I covered Stuttgart 21—the police action at the station, the protests, the kids getting hurt. The backlash came fast. Readers wanted the old version of this place back, the one about photography and music and the sex stuff. One person told me to stick to writing about tits and Lindsay Lohan’s rehab. The message was clear: stay in your lane. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/5/when-it-matters/ Tue, 05 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/5/nackt/ Janine Henkes works in this space where vulnerability stops being a performance and becomes architectural. Her practice—drawing, sculpture, installation, the usual polymathy—keeps coming back to exposure, to the body and its refusal to be anything other than itself. There’s no coyness in it. No rhetorical nakedness. Just the thing as it is, stripped of whatever narrative you wanted to hang on it. It’s the kind of work that makes you aware of how much you’re used to art keeping its clothes on, how much distance we’ve trained ourselves to expect. She doesn’t give you that distance. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/5/nackt/ Tue, 05 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/4/be-my-animal/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/4/be-my-animal/ Mon, 04 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/4/boobs-drugs-and-a-cavy/ Collected a bunch of photos over the past few months—theme park trips, pranks on unsuspecting tourists, some nudity. Nothing precious about it, just whatever seemed worth keeping at the time. I’m throwing them here if you’re bored enough to look through someone else’s dumb memories. There’s a Wizard of Oz poster hidden in there somewhere. Find it and you win something. I haven’t decided what yet. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/4/boobs-drugs-and-a-cavy/ Mon, 04 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/4/chrono-trigger/ There’s something locked-in about Chrono Trigger that most games from that era have lost. The plot about time travel is fine, but it’s not what you remember. It’s the design—the way every system respects your time. Battles don’t drag. Characters matter without endless justification. Moving through the world feels right. As someone who spends time thinking about design, I’m acutely aware of how rare that is, how easy it becomes to add systems that sound good on paper but break the pacing, demand grinding, waste attention on bullshit. Chrono Trigger doesn’t do that. It just knows what it’s doing. I replay it every few years to remember what that felt like—not nostalgia, but the specific pleasure of a game that trusts you and doesn’t waste a second. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/4/chrono-trigger/ Mon, 04 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/1/it-gets-better/ I watched one of the “It Gets Better” videos not long after it started, after a kid in New Jersey jumped off a bridge. The story was everywhere—he’d been outed online, humiliated, and he saw no way through it. So other gay people, older ones, started filming themselves. Just sitting there saying: I made it out. This part is survivable. It gets better. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/1/it-gets-better/ Fri, 01 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/1/alone-in-berlin/ Jules and Katie, the two constant members of The Ting Tings, went to Berlin and locked themselves in a room. No outside producers, no label oversight, no one else in the room. Just the work. That’s how they made Kraft. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/10/1/alone-in-berlin/ Fri, 01 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/30/before-it-starts/ I show up to parties wanting one good night—real conversation, some drinks. Anyone can manage that. But it gets late and all the couples are fused together in the corners and I’m forced to celebrate for them when I’m actually furious about it. So I grab my friend and we spend the ride home picking apart what I did wrong, which guy I should have actually talked to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/30/before-it-starts/ Thu, 30 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/30/ruth-swansons-boozy-years/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/30/ruth-swansons-boozy-years/ Thu, 30 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/30/wolf-parade-yulia/ There’s something about the way Dan Smith’s voice sits on that sparse guitar in Yulia—the way it just hangs there, almost fragile, like he’s asking a question nobody’s going to answer. Wolf Parade could’ve made it bigger, busier, but instead they let it breathe, let it be this small quiet thing. I keep coming back to it when I need to remember that a song doesn’t have to do much to do everything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/30/wolf-parade-yulia/ Thu, 30 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/30/the-space-closes/ Sunday at Schlossgarten started ordinary. Students with signs about Stuttgart 21, the massive railway project that had bled money and still somehow solved nothing. Families came to object, some just trying to keep the old trees from getting bulldozed. The kind of thing you see in any city—people using public space to speak, the expected friction between those and authority. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/30/the-space-closes/ Thu, 30 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/30/deleted/ I woke up to an email from Facebook saying they’d deleted my account. Just like that. No warning, no explanation, no appeal. Terms of service violation, they said, like that was all I needed to know. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/30/deleted/ Thu, 30 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/29/street-style/ I used to read street style blogs like they were reportage from the real world. People in Prague with Fixies, people in New York with vintage Nirvana shirts, everyone in their city trying to look right with whatever they had—thrift finds, new brands, expensive basics. It felt like documentation before fashion became content, before every outfit needed to be a statement. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/29/street-style/ Wed, 29 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/29/3d-hands/ Nintendo was done making excuses about what it made. No more of the “we only do cute games with red mushrooms” line. They showed up and announced a 3DS—basically a Game Boy designed for another dimension. Three-dimensional gaming, portable, no glasses. They showed Street Fighter IV running on it, Zelda Ocarina of Time, Mario Kart. Anyone who held one had the same reaction: the thing actually worked. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/29/3d-hands/ Wed, 29 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/29/nobodys-friends/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/29/nobodys-friends/ Wed, 29 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/28/under-evangelion/ Ten years ago I’d record Neon Genesis Evangelion every Tuesday night straight from television because I had to be up early for school. I was taking some language class at the time, so the routine became: get home, hit record on the VCR, sit completely still for twenty minutes. The opening credits hit the same way every single episode and I never got tired of them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/28/under-evangelion/ Tue, 28 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/28/brick-house/ Ben Sherman and i-ref threw a party they called the Brick House at the tail end of that week. The appeal was transparent: free beer, free vodka, free shirts. The kind of math that gets Berlin’s chronically underemployed creative class in the door—evening, unlimited booze, something new to wear on the way out. I wasn’t above it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/28/brick-house/ Tue, 28 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/28/chelsea-and-kelley-ash/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/28/chelsea-and-kelley-ash/ Tue, 28 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/27/balthazar-the-fury/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/27/balthazar-the-fury/ Mon, 27 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/27/tulinens-pussycats/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/27/tulinens-pussycats/ Mon, 27 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/27/the-copy-party/ In 1991 I was the proud owner of an Amiga 500+ with a Philips color monitor and an external drive. I had plenty of games. Maybe ten of them were legitimate copies. The rest—and there were hundreds—came from friends, from the schoolyard, from the mail. That’s how it worked. You didn’t buy games; you swapped and copied. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/27/the-copy-party/ Mon, 27 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/27/raquel-zimmermann/ The planes of her face were severe, mathematically precise—architecture that the camera understood immediately. She moved through early-2000s fashion with this quality of perfect indifference, eyes always looking past you or through you, never at you. Most models had learned the choreography of seduction, how to give the lens something to work with. She gave it nothing, which is why it worked. That distance, that refusal to meet the camera halfway—it made you do all the heavy lifting, made every campaign feel like an image you had to earn your way into. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/27/raquel-zimmermann/ Mon, 27 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/24/bombay/ El Guincho has this way of making pop songs that feel like they’re happening inside your head while you’re staring out a window. Bombay is that—bright and winding, the production so clean it almost disappears, and then a moment hits where you realize how carefully constructed the whole thing is. The kind of record that makes you want to move without demanding it, that catches you off guard with a synth line or a vocal turn you didn’t see coming. It’s the sound of someone who knows exactly what he’s doing, which is somehow rarer than it should be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/24/bombay/ Fri, 24 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/23/the-world-is-mine/ Dominique Young Unique makes music that doesn’t apologize for what it wants. There’s a directness to it, a refusal to soften the edges or perform humility—just pure ambition stated plainly. That kind of confidence is rare, especially in a landscape that keeps trying to sand down the rough parts of hip-hop into something safer. It’s refreshing to encounter an artist who understands that the swagger isn’t a mask; it’s the whole point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/23/the-world-is-mine/ Thu, 23 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/23/goodbye-sara/ She had a way of actually listening when you talked to her. Most people are half-asleep, but she was there, paying attention. That was the thing about her—she paid attention to people, to the city itself, to what was actually happening instead of what you were supposed to say about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/23/goodbye-sara/ Thu, 23 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/23/dirty-bitch/ I met up with Sarah for coffee. She wanted to talk about women—what they actually are under the surface, about sex and desire and all the lies we tell. Blond, pretty in an unremarkable way, student, blue eyes. She smoked between sips of her cold coffee and chewed her fingernails. If you passed her on the street you wouldn’t think twice. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/23/dirty-bitch/ Thu, 23 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/22/just-hair/ Charlie Le Mindu sent his models down a London runway completely naked. The girls looked like they wanted to evaporate. The crowd was entertained. He looked pleased with himself. Can’t really fault the logic—he’s a 24-year-old French hairdresser who decided to be a fashion designer, which means he makes wigs and hats and hair pieces, not clothes. So sending women out there with nothing but his hair work kind of makes sense. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/22/just-hair/ Wed, 22 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/22/in-and-out-september/ September felt mixed that year. Skype had stopped being about calling people and had turned into something else. Sauerkraut. Nachos with actual cheese and ground beef, not the half-measures. Someone was watching the new season of Two and a Half Men—it meant something then. Shin Chan in the morning was the right way to start a day. Trampolines. Animals that happened to look like Hitler. Pixel art. Leather jackets. That stretch where you actually finished projects instead of abandoning them halfway. Ayumi Hamasaki. Trees to plant. The crude jokes and constant sexual reference—that was just how we talked. More breasts seemed necessary. Virtual Console. Dreams of becoming your grandfather. The whole mess of it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/22/in-and-out-september/ Wed, 22 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/22/the-watching/ I spent hours scrolling through blogs in the early 2000s. There were these women - photographers, models, fashion writers - and I’d move from page to page the way you do when you have nothing better to do and some quiet pull keeps you looking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/22/the-watching/ Wed, 22 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/22/owen-pallett-lewis-takes-off-his-shirt/ Owen Pallett makes music that feels like it’s trying to escape the page—all those violins spiraling over electronic glitches, like chamber pop colliding with the future. There’s something both meticulous and reckless about his work, the way he’ll spend months on an arrangement only to mess it up on purpose. He cares about beauty but refuses to be precious about it, which is probably why his stuff lands the way it does—no apology in it, just the work itself, visible and strange. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/22/owen-pallett-lewis-takes-off-his-shirt/ Wed, 22 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/21/glass/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/21/glass/ Tue, 21 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/21/eliza-doolittle-rollerblades/ There’s something about early Doolittle—that moment when British pop radio had space for actual personality, not just manufactured cool. Rollerblades is exactly the kind of hook-driven, conversational pop song that lived in your head for weeks once it got in there. She had this way of making the everyday sound like it mattered, which is harder than it sounds. Most artists try to convince you their life is interesting. She just talked about hers like you were already listening anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/21/eliza-doolittle-rollerblades/ Tue, 21 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/20/the-desperation-prayer/ There’s this survey showing what you already knew: the poorer you are, the more you believe in God. Bangladesh, Niger, Yemen—places that are completely fucked—people there pray like their lives depend on it, because they do. Meanwhile in Sweden and Japan, God is what you mention at dinner parties if you want to sound thoughtful, something you do on Sundays when you’re bored enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/20/the-desperation-prayer/ Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/20/secret-of-mana/ The magic system in Secret of Mana was permission to break the rules. You’d find these floating orbs scattered through forests and caves—Salamander, Undine, Sylphs—and suddenly you could summon a thing the game hadn’t explicitly told you was possible. Fire, water, wind. The first time you cast one, the screen fills with this overwhelming amount of geometry and color, the Mode 7 effects warping the world, and everything on screen stops mattering. It’s just you and the spell. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/20/secret-of-mana/ Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/20/mk-ultra/ The paranoia lands different in 2026 than it did in 2012. Back then MK Ultra was speculative fiction—a song about government surveillance as conceptual threat. Now it sounds like documentation. The processed vocals, the static, the way the synth buries everything—it’s anxiety made physical, and it turns out they were just describing what was already here. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/20/mk-ultra/ Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/19/lost-in-blogs/ You get stuck in someone’s archive and three hours disappear. Reading posts from years back, you realize how different the internet felt when people wrote like they were thinking out loud for themselves, not performing for algorithms. One post leads to another, and it’s not a feed designed to keep you scrolling—it’s just the shape of genuine curiosity. By the time you surface, the afternoon’s gone, but something’s stuck with you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/19/lost-in-blogs/ Sun, 19 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/16/the-sonnets-new-fire-in-the-city/ Shakespeare’s sonnets sit in that weird space where they’re famous enough to be invisible. You know they’re about love and time and loss, but you don’t actually think about them until you read one and get hit by how immediate it is—how the specific exhaustion of wanting someone or watching something fade just lives there in the language without any distance at all. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/16/the-sonnets-new-fire-in-the-city/ Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/16/johanna-sticker-girl/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/16/johanna-sticker-girl/ Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/16/lari/ What grabbed me was the pretzel thing. Lari dunks them in soft drinks until they’re completely soggy, then eats them. Not a joke, just a fact about how she actually is—the kind of specific, stupid detail that tells you more than any confession. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/16/lari/ Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/15/last-light/ Summer doesn’t care what you want from it. I could beg it to stay through the end of Grey’s Anatomy—did beg, actually, kind of stupidly—and it would still just vanish without a goodbye one morning. By October you’re already resigned to the dark, shopping for sweaters. But there’s this moment right before the full collapse where people show up in their best clothes like they might argue the season into staying, like looking good is a kind of negotiation. I’ve been noticing them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/15/last-light/ Wed, 15 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/15/hands/ The Ting Tings were everywhere around 2008, that bratty electronic duo with “That’s Not My Name” on constant rotation. “Hands” came a couple years later, and it had that same propulsive synth-pop energy, all brightness and attitude. It was the kind of song that sounded perfect in a car with the windows down, made you want to drive somewhere pointless just to hear it again. They didn’t last long in the public eye—the novelty-hit machine always moves on—but for a moment they felt like what pop music could be if it let itself be a little bit weird and didn’t care if you thought it was cool. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/15/hands/ Wed, 15 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/15/stuck-on-misty/ Found a Game Boy at a flea market in Munich—gray, beat to hell, Pokémon Blue still in the cartridge. I paid almost nothing for it. Carried it around for three weeks before the drive back to Berlin, just holding it, remembering. Somewhere around Saxony it clicked back into my hands the way it used to, and I was ten years old again. Not nostalgia, just the game. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/15/stuck-on-misty/ Wed, 15 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/14/blog-babes/ Around 2005, fashion blogs became a thing, and if you were online enough to notice, you’d start seeing the same handful of girls everywhere. Not celebrities yet—the machine hadn’t kicked in yet. You just found them through links, sometimes by accident, and suddenly you’re looking at someone’s life in a way that feels almost intimate. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/14/blog-babes/ Tue, 14 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/14/gravitonas-got-religion/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/14/gravitonas-got-religion/ Tue, 14 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/14/ren-hang-bound/ The bodies in Ren Hang’s photographs don’t perform. They exist in a kind of vulnerable refusal, stripped down and exposed in landscapes that offered no shelter for that vulnerability. There’s a defiance in the work—not the performative kind, but the kind that comes from looking straight at what everyone else looks away from. His photographs were erotic without trying to seduce you, intimate without trying to comfort you. They were a refusal to hide, in a place where hiding was the safest option. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/14/ren-hang-bound/ Tue, 14 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/14/the-solid-ones/ Most German bands don’t hold my interest for long. Madsen’s different—they’ve been at it since 2004 and never got worse. From this nothing town called Clenze, they just keep playing festival after festival, and somehow they still sound like they’re thinking about their songs instead of just filling time. Smart writing, decent melodies. There’s something about watching a band stay solid like that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/14/the-solid-ones/ Tue, 14 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/13/seasons-light-lost/ Summer ends fast. You’re still wearing the same clothes, the sun’s still up late, and then one morning the light hits the kitchen at a different angle and you realize you’ve already lost it. The long days don’t fade gradually—they just stop. By October you’re leaving work in the dark, and the whole rhythm of the day has compressed into a smaller window. It’s not sad exactly. It’s just the weight of it, how quickly the year turns cold and the hours go thin. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/13/seasons-light-lost/ Mon, 13 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/13/the-game-that-lasted/ I’ve never cared about cars. Don’t have a license, probably never will get one. If I did somehow find myself driving, I’d be a menace—throwing shells at other drivers, dropping banana peels, shooting balloons off kids’ hands. Basically I’d be playing Super Mario Kart on actual highways, which I think explains something fundamental about me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/13/the-game-that-lasted/ Mon, 13 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/13/getting-clear/ Your head fills up. Thoughts circling, problems turning in your mind, big ideas that won’t die, small anxieties that jolt you awake at 3 in the morning. The kind of mental static that makes straight thinking impossible. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/13/getting-clear/ Mon, 13 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/13/magazines-and-t-shirts/ I keep noticing work that cares about details. Not in a precious way, just… you can tell when someone spent time thinking about how something should feel when you touch it, when you open it, when you wear it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/13/magazines-and-t-shirts/ Mon, 13 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/13/the-thinker-and-the-girls/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/13/the-thinker-and-the-girls/ Mon, 13 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/9/bosom-buddies/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/9/bosom-buddies/ Thu, 09 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/9/three-albums/ Been living with three albums lately. Robyn’s Body Talk Pt. 2 first—bright electropop that actually sounds like she’s having fun with it. I know the three-part release was supposed to be cynical, and maybe it was, but the songs don’t feel that way. “Hang With Me” and “In My Eyes” are the ones that stick, the rest holds up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/9/three-albums/ Thu, 09 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/8/non-tiq-quiet/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/8/non-tiq-quiet/ Wed, 08 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/8/pretty-in-pink/ You watch people get strategic about the cold. Summer’s backing away and half of everyone’s buying blacks and grays for November. The other half isn’t convinced yet—still reaching for what worked in July. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/8/pretty-in-pink/ Wed, 08 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/8/nineteen/ The schoolyard was a war zone. You had to be hard, had to seem cool, had to know all the filthy words—tits, fuck, blowjob—or you’d spend the next ten years with a target on your back. We were small and vicious. At home we were soft enough: Power Rangers bedding, Saturday night baths, that pure hit of dopamine when you caught a new Pokémon. But outside, in the real world, we were tiny killing machines with oversized dicks in our heads. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/8/nineteen/ Wed, 08 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/8/japanese-tv-no-filter/ A girl in a bikini wraps an octopus around herself and laughs. Space pirates do a television bit. A pop star does choreography in jello. Somewhere a network executive signed off on all of this the same week, probably without a second thought. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/8/japanese-tv-no-filter/ Wed, 08 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/7/blog-snapshots/ I was reading through old internet stuff and found this feature from a German blog in the early 2000s—just a list of women who had audiences on the internet back then. Shelley, Luise, Alex, Luca, Laura. The piece itself is crude, all focus on appearance, but underneath that is something more interesting: a snapshot of what the web was like when I was actively blogging. You had an audience because you had something to say, not because the algorithm decided you did. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/7/blog-snapshots/ Tue, 07 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/7/johnnys-bird-punk-candy/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/7/johnnys-bird-punk-candy/ Tue, 07 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/7/shampain/ Marina and the Diamonds came on midway through something else and I remembered why she mattered so much during the Electra Heart era. There’s a specificity to how she writes pop hooks—the chords land where you don’t quite expect them, and her voice has this built-in irony that makes even the sweetest melodies feel slightly off. She was never trying to be accessible in the way most pop singers chase it. Just made what interested her and trusted that some people would get it. The production is where she lives, all these small details stacked together until it becomes this complete world. Shampain has that quality—casual on the surface, but constructed so carefully you could trace every decision if you listened close enough. That’s the thing about her work that still holds: it doesn’t ask for permission to be strange. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/7/shampain/ Tue, 07 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/6/still-riding/ I got hooked on video games at six and have been watching them evolve since then. Used to try to imagine what they’d look like in the future and always landed on the same thing: perfect cartoons, slicker, more intricate, basically animation you could control. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/6/still-riding/ Mon, 06 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/5/alone-with-my-game-boy/ Found an old Game Boy with Pokémon Blue at a flea market. The plastic was gray and weathered, buttons worn smooth, but the cartridge fired right up. I chose Charmander and fell back into that world immediately—catching things in tall grass, talking to NPCs, the whole ritual coming back without effort. For a couple hours I was completely absorbed. Then I hit the wall of playing entirely alone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/5/alone-with-my-game-boy/ Sun, 05 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/4/röyksopp-the-drug/ Röyksopp makes music that works like a drug in the best way—you listen once and know you’ll need to hear it again soon. Their production is meticulous without being fussy, electronic without sounding cold. Melody A.M. and The Understanding are the kind of albums that reward headphones and an empty afternoon. I’ve spent more time with them than I should probably admit, not because they’re complicated, but because something in the way they’re made just stays with you. The synths, the space between things, the refusal to rush. You keep coming back. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/4/röyksopp-the-drug/ Sat, 04 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/3/friday-arithmetic/ It’s Friday and my brain stops working in the normal way. There’s a specific logic to Friday nights, though it’s not logic that survives until Saturday morning—it’s the logic of escalation, where each stupid idea leads to the next one and somehow it all makes sense. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/3/friday-arithmetic/ Fri, 03 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/2/what-ping-was-for/ Steve Jobs announced Ping at the 2010 iTunes keynote like it was the second coming of Christ—a new social network built into iTunes where you could follow friends, see what they were buying, and feel like you were part of something exclusive. Except there was no community. There was just iTunes finding another way to make shopping feel like belonging. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/2/what-ping-was-for/ Thu, 02 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/2/the-bike-song/ Mark Ronson has never needed to overthink it. The Bike Song is him doing what he does best—getting a room full of people together and letting them play. Nothing forced, just some groove that feels like it rolled out of an afternoon where everyone showed up knowing what they were doing. That’s all it is, and all it needs to be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/2/the-bike-song/ Thu, 02 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/2/viva-italia/ Hannah and I grabbed a couple others and headed south, no plan except to disappear for a bit. Just driving, sitting in the heat, long afternoons where you forget what day it is. When you travel with people you actually like, the destination barely matters. Could’ve been anywhere warm and distant enough to make ordinary life feel like fiction. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/2/viva-italia/ Thu, 02 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/1/pretty-in-pink/ Willabelle’s sixteen from Australia with this effortless thing going—blue blazer over a floral dress, silver chain. You see a lot of teenagers trying to construct a look, performing fashion, and then you see someone like her and it’s just there. No labor in it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/9/1/pretty-in-pink/ Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/31/blog-girls/ The mid-2000s internet had this incredible ecosystem of people just putting their lives and work into these little web spaces. Not for metrics, not for some algorithm that didn’t exist yet—just because they had something to say. I spent a lot of time hunting through blogs back then, following links, finding people whose aesthetic or thinking actually mattered to me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/31/blog-girls/ Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/31/wavves-post-acid/ Wavves understood something about imperfection that a lot of people miss. Lo-fi production, vocals dissolving into distortion, songs barely holding together—it wasn’t a choice, it was the point. There’s more honesty in that mess than in a hundred pristine takes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/31/wavves-post-acid/ Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/30/mr-neumeister/ Took a trip to Munich with Ines and somehow acquired Mr. Neumeister—still not sure what that was about. We ate a lot of veggie burgers, pranked some half-frozen kids outside a school, which probably makes us terrible people but was funny. The whole weekend felt like the kind of thing that shouldn’t add up to much but did anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/30/mr-neumeister/ Mon, 30 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/30/yoshis-story/ Yoshi’s Story got written off when it came out—too cute, too simple, made for kids. But all the care went into the visuals. Those painted backgrounds, the color handling, the restraint in every frame. As a designer, that’s what brings me back. It’s the kind of game that doesn’t feel like much until you understand what it took to make it look and feel exactly like this. Then you realize you’re playing something genuinely smart, and you understand that was always the whole point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/30/yoshis-story/ Mon, 30 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/28/corinne-day/ I keep coming back to the photographs because they catch something true—not posed, not prettified, just real texture and real moments. Kate Moss in those early pictures was just a kid, not yet a brand. There’s something ruthless about the refusal to soften anything, and it makes everything else look like it’s lying. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/28/corinne-day/ Sat, 28 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/27/blame-coco/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/27/blame-coco/ Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/26/down-the-twitter-hole/ I open it for five minutes and it’s three hours later. The feed never stops—every tweet links to three more, and I’m deep in debates about movies I haven’t seen or music I don’t like. It’s built to keep me there and it works perfectly. By the time I look up, the whole evening is gone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/26/down-the-twitter-hole/ Thu, 26 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/26/pretty-in-pink/ Summer in Munich, thirty degrees, and I’m watching people move through the streets looking like they woke up knowing exactly what works. Five of them stuck with me—the way style, when it’s real, doesn’t announce itself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/26/pretty-in-pink/ Thu, 26 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/25/arctic-monkeys-the-view-from-the-afternoon/ There’s something about how Arctic Monkeys moved from Sheffield scrappiness to Los Angeles slickness that feels like watching a friend get famous and realizing you don’t quite know them anymore. But AM is the album where that distance stopped bothering me—where the sleekness became the point. That synth-heavy, R&B-influenced production shouldn’t have worked for a band built on guitar distortion, but Alex Turner found something in it: a new way to write about want and emptiness. The songs don’t sound like anyone else trying to be cool; they sound like someone who already is, not bothering to prove it. I come back to it when I’m working late, something about that hazy nocturnal energy matching the feeling of a design problem that won’t solve itself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/25/arctic-monkeys-the-view-from-the-afternoon/ Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/25/the-sun-above-munich/ I’m in a café at Odeon Platz in Munich and something’s happened that I didn’t want to happen. The guilt came first, then the happiness. I fell for this city. The light, the old weight of it, streets that don’t demand anything from you. The whole thing. And I knew the whole time I drove down here exactly why I was coming. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/25/the-sun-above-munich/ Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/23/august-inventory/ Late August is when the light changes and you start noticing what’s actually clicking and what’s dead weight. Summer’s still officially here but everyone’s mentally already packing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/23/august-inventory/ Mon, 23 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/23/buddy-bradley-forever/ Adam Green created something that didn’t need to be reinvented every few years or chased for relevance. Buddy Bradley just existed in his comics—awkward, horny, broke, trying to figure out what living was supposed to feel like. The strips didn’t lecture or perform. Green drew the same mundane crisis over and over, and each time it hit different because the feeling was true. That’s the kind of work that actually survives, that gets passed around, that people come back to decades later. Not because it was flashy or important, but because it caught something real about being stuck and messy and human. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/23/buddy-bradley-forever/ Mon, 23 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/21/delphics-doubt-forever/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/21/delphics-doubt-forever/ Sat, 21 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/20/ten-little-missions/ These were weekly challenges on some blog I followed. Ten ridiculous things to do by Sunday, half of them actual recommendations and half complete fever dreams. Buy a grey Game Boy with Pokémon Blue at the flea market and pick Charmander - that one could work. But also: dive your head into liquid cheese at Pizza Hut and die a beautiful death, get forced into marriage with your first girlfriend, yell “First!” while jamming sushi rolls into your best friend’s mouth, don’t congratulate the redhead unless she actually deserves it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/20/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 20 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/20/still-the-best-film/ Lost in Translation still feels like the best film ever made, though I’ve stopped trying to defend the claim. The film makes the argument for itself—quietly, without insistence, which is kind of the whole point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/20/still-the-best-film/ Fri, 20 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/20/the-sexism-question/ Got called out for sexism the other day. Sneaker Girls said the site was using women’s bodies to seem provocative while basically just demeaning them. First I didn’t care—that’s what happens when you make provocative stuff. Then I couldn’t stop thinking about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/20/the-sexism-question/ Fri, 20 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/19/the-ting-tings-again/ I loved The Ting Tings from the start, which I probably shouldn’t admit. Katie and Jules made “We Started Nothing” and I was instantly hooked—”Be The One,” “Shut Up And Let Me Go,” “We Walk.” I played those songs relentlessly, even as critics were tearing the album to pieces. Most people wouldn’t fight for it, but I never needed anyone else to get it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/19/the-ting-tings-again/ Thu, 19 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/19/no-looking-back/ Walking those dark streets with her at night, I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. Wasn’t trying to fix myself or understand my life better. It just made everything better. That’s all. When she was around I felt the kind of happiness I’d only known from cheap sex or good wine—one or the other, doesn’t really matter. Something about the way she moved through the world, the bite in her voice, made me feel things I thought I’d stopped being capable of feeling. I started wanting things again. Started liking myself. That scared me more than I wanted to admit. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/19/no-looking-back/ Thu, 19 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/19/sticker-girl/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/19/sticker-girl/ Thu, 19 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/18/everything-weighs-nothing/ My childhood bedroom was packed—every inch of it—with stuff that mattered more than family or money. Cassettes, game cartridges, action figures, Lego bricks that you’d step on barefoot at 3 AM. If the house caught fire, I couldn’t decide what to grab first. That kind of paralysis could actually kill you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/18/everything-weighs-nothing/ Wed, 18 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/16/backstage/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/16/backstage/ Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/13/design-your-own-beer/ Beck’s ran a design competition where you could submit a beer label and win money, a trip to Berlin, concert tickets. The appeal is obvious—your design on actual bottles in stores, maybe in someone’s hand. That’s different from portfolio work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/13/design-your-own-beer/ Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/13/mia-xxxo/ The relief of quiet after all that maximalist noise. M.I.A.’s tracks are usually crowded with production and samples and energy layered densely, but “XXXO” strips back to almost nothing—just her voice and a minimal beat and something skeletal that could vanish at any moment. There’s real confidence in that restraint. As someone who makes things, that kind of control, that willingness to leave space instead of filling every inch—that matters. It’s the kind of choice that reveals what a producer actually values. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/13/mia-xxxo/ Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/11/night-is-our-witness/ I was the first one on the street that morning, trying to say goodbye to a city that had taken hold of me for three years. My skin was torn open by it, my soul was loved there, my grief was cared for. I kept coming back to that moment three years ago when everything shifted, and where we’ve ended up now. I’m passionate about the past, greedy for the future, and I barely visit the present at all. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/11/night-is-our-witness/ Wed, 11 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/9/songs-i-keep/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/9/songs-i-keep/ Mon, 09 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/9/avril-never-left/ I put on “Let Go” sometimes and it still lands. Not because it’s perfect—the production feels thin in places, some lyrics are obvious—but there was something genuine underneath, this energy that felt like the opposite of everything pop was supposed to be. She looked like she didn’t care what anyone thought, and in your teenage bedroom that was everything. She didn’t become a parody of herself. That’s enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/9/avril-never-left/ Mon, 09 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/7/school-of-seven-bells-windstorm/ School of Seven Bells fills the air with pressure and space. Windstorm doesn’t announce itself—it builds from almost nothing, these thin layers of sound that somehow register like weather moving in. Most ambient music just fades into the background. This is different. There’s all this room between the notes, stretches that carry more weight than the moments something actually happens. I come back to it when I need to think, and that’s probably the whole design. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/7/school-of-seven-bells-windstorm/ Sat, 07 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/7/no-reason-not-to/ I wanted people to see these videos. Lykke Li, Robyn, Bat for Lashes—the usual stuff I was into. And it felt dumb to keep them locked on my site. Some reader pointed out that people should be able to embed them, share them wherever. He was right. There was no reason not to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/7/no-reason-not-to/ Sat, 07 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/6/surviving-the-weekend/ Who turned the clock? It’s the weekend again—another step toward the end we all know is coming. The car, the cancer, the slow burn or the quick one, doesn’t matter. You know what’s waiting. Nobody sleeps easy anymore when you know that. So you fill the days with anything but the thought, and here are ten things I could do instead. Some borrowed, some insane, all of them better than sitting with it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/6/surviving-the-weekend/ Fri, 06 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/6/lykke-li-little-bit-forever/ Her records have this quality where they feel like you’re eavesdropping on something private. The production is sparse enough that her voice becomes the centerpiece, and there’s a fragility to it that could feel manipulative in someone else’s hands but doesn’t with her. She’s not performing vulnerability; it’s just there, like she forgot to turn off the tape. That’s why I keep listening—because it’s impossible to look away once you’re in. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/6/lykke-li-little-bit-forever/ Fri, 06 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/5/katy-b-louder/ There’s something about how they’ve threaded Katy B’s voice through the production on this—straight through walls of bass and synth that should bury everything else. It sits precise and clean on top, mechanical almost, which makes the whole thing feel colder, more direct. The songs don’t ask for anything from you. The vocals are just there, delivered like she’s stating something and doesn’t care much whether you’re listening or not. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/5/katy-b-louder/ Thu, 05 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/5/music-television/ I spend these days listening to music, which is pretty much all I do around here. My neighbor next door—Stockmeier, wooden leg, hammers the wall during Sturm der Liebe because she’s convinced each episode might be her last—she got talking about television one day. The kind that used to exist. Just music videos, all the time. None of the cheap dating shows, none of the ringtone garbage, just videos. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/5/music-television/ Thu, 05 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/5/björk-all-is-full-of-love-forever/ Björk’s been making work for thirty years that sounds like nobody else, and she’s never cared if people understood it. There’s something honest about that—refusing to simplify yourself, refusing to be digestible. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/5/björk-all-is-full-of-love-forever/ Thu, 05 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/4/cant-look-away/ The thing about watching someone’s heart break online is that you can’t look away. It’s Paris, of all places, and Olivier Zahm is posting about Natacha Ramsay again—confessions, videos of sad songs, the occasional nude of her mixed in. He’s not protecting himself. He’s completely open about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/4/cant-look-away/ Wed, 04 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/4/jónsi-animal-arithmetic/ Jónsi’s voice does something that shouldn’t work. That sustained falsetto, the phrasing that ignores every rule for how a song is supposed to unfold—it just bypasses language and hits somewhere else entirely. Whether it’s Sigur Rós or his solo work, there’s always this quality of reaching for something that words can’t grab. The arithmetic underneath it all is strange, both cold and completely alive, like he found the grammar that sits below speech. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/4/jónsi-animal-arithmetic/ Wed, 04 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/4/pretty-in-pink/ I found myself noticing style that week in the way you notice things when you’re thinking about design. Not fashion-magazine style, but actual people in actual clothes, and what made it work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/4/pretty-in-pink/ Wed, 04 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/3/saving-the-world/ I overslept. Completely passed out, woke up confused about what was real and what I’d dreamed in the game. Bought this specifically to drag my brain somewhere new—away from Pokémon, away from anime, all that basement stuff. Now I need to warn you before I become completely useless: don’t buy this. It will destroy you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/3/saving-the-world/ Tue, 03 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/3/the-garbage-dump-and-the-fan-shrine/ Time moves fast when you’re surrounded by people making things. There’s this moment where the little network stops being yours alone and suddenly there are new projects spinning off, new people joining in, and you realize something’s actually happening. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/8/3/the-garbage-dump-and-the-fan-shrine/ Tue, 03 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/31/britta-and-the-bear/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/31/britta-and-the-bear/ Sat, 31 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/30/the-hundreds-in-the-hands/ Pigeons made something with this video that I couldn’t stop thinking about. I can’t explain what it does or why it works, but it stuck with me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/30/the-hundreds-in-the-hands/ Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/30/that-august/ Highfield had one of those lineups that year. Placebo, Billy Talent, NOFX, Blink-182 mixed with German bands like Fettes Brot, Unheilig, and Wir sind Helden. It was the kind of festival bill that came out every summer—significant enough to pay attention to if you followed the scene, but not so massive that it demanded the kind of pilgrimage a major festival would. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/30/that-august/ Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/30/weekend-missions/ Friday night and you realize you have zero obligations for forty-eight hours, and then you inevitably waste them all. I got tired of that, so I actually thought about what it would take to feel alive over a weekend. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/30/weekend-missions/ Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/29/kiss-the-pain-away/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/29/kiss-the-pain-away/ Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/29/dressed/ We were supposed to publish something about fashion this week, but the actual fashion police showed up at the office. I’m not exaggerating—they came through, made it clear we don’t know what we’re talking about, and that was that. So here we are running this a day late. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/29/dressed/ Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/28/tegan-and-sara-direct/ I’ve always found it interesting when musicians take control of the frame around their own work. Tegan and Sara directing their own videos makes perfect sense—they’ve spent twenty years refining a visual identity that’s unmistakable, and handing that off to someone else would be like asking a stranger to finish your sentences. The thing about them as directors is that there’s no distance between the aesthetic and the song. It’s not decoration layered over the music; it’s the same thought expressed two ways at once. The imagery is stark and direct, sometimes deliberately awkward, rarely trying to be beautiful in the traditional sense. That matters, especially for queer artists who’ve built their whole career on refusing to soften themselves for anyone. Their videos aren’t afraid to sit in discomfort, to let the frame hold too long on a feeling that makes you slightly nervous. It’s the same thing they do in a song. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/28/tegan-and-sara-direct/ Wed, 28 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/27/dont-feed-the-dead-animals/ Luc Braquet gets at something real with that title—the futility of tenderness toward what’s finished, the way we pour care into nothing because we can’t help ourselves. There’s a cruelty in the instruction, or maybe a mercy. Either way, it sits with you wrong, which is probably exactly where Braquet wants it. I’ve always been drawn to work that refuses to be comfortable, that makes you feel slightly foolish for your instincts. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/27/dont-feed-the-dead-animals/ Tue, 27 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/27/ines-and-mischa/ Ines Kuchlerin appeared on Twitter saying the things everyone thinks but nobody says. Crude about sex and desire, unflinching about wanting, already at twenty knowing how to speak without waiting for permission. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/27/ines-and-mischa/ Tue, 27 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/26/saveris-marta/ There’s something about portrait work that demands patience—the kind where you’re stuck in a room with one person and a camera, waiting for the distance between observer and observed to dissolve into something honest. Lele Saveri’s practice has always moved in that direction, stripping away the noise to find what’s left when you stop performing. A portrait called “Alone With Marta” suggests exactly that: two people, minimal setup, time doing its slow work. It’s the kind of film that probably feels longer than it is, but in the way that matters—where duration becomes part of the meaning. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/26/saveris-marta/ Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/26/kele/ I got into Bloc Party around 2005, which means I spent the next few years with Silent Alarm on constant rotation. Kele’s voice had this quality that made you feel like you were hearing something he wasn’t supposed to let you hear—all that trembling intensity, the way anxiety could sound like melody. It confirmed what you already knew about yourself: that you were thinking too much, that other people were drowning in the same unnamed dread. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/26/kele/ Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/26/hang-with-me/ There’s nothing flashy about ’Hang With Me.’ Robyn just showed up with a pop song that didn’t need to prove anything—bright enough to stick with you, patient enough that you don’t feel rushed. Four minutes that could have been forgettable but aren’t, with no tricks or desperation underneath, just an offer. That kind of thing is rarer than it should be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/26/hang-with-me/ Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/26/hugo-needs-a-home/ Hugo was a phone—a Sony Ericsson, black, the kind that looked sleek around 2005. He showed up needing a home, and we did what made sense at the time: invented a backstory where he came by with brandy and did a striptease to pay rent. This was 2010. This was how you made a giveaway post something someone might actually care about. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/26/hugo-needs-a-home/ Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/25/the-tunnel/ Dustin was seventeen when a girl died next to him at the Loveparade in Duisburg. He told the press: “Next to me a girl died,” and I can’t stop thinking about that sentence. The festival was supposed to be about music and joy and moving together. Nineteen people died in a tunnel. Over a hundred were crushed badly enough to need hospitals. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/25/the-tunnel/ Sun, 25 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/25/mind-game-colors-breasts-and-a-dead-god/ I was trying to get high on cocoa, and when that didn’t work, I figured I’d assault my brain another way. Pulled up Mind Game around midnight. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/25/mind-game-colors-breasts-and-a-dead-god/ Sun, 25 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/23/ten-little-missions/ Saturday and nobody’s coming over, you’re somewhere you didn’t want to be, stuck with thoughts that don’t lead anywhere. So you make a list. Not the kind that’s supposed to change your life—just dumb weekend shit, ten things that don’t matter but at least they’re something to do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/23/ten-little-missions/ Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/23/blood-red-shoes-heartsink/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/23/blood-red-shoes-heartsink/ Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/23/robertas-dream/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/23/robertas-dream/ Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/22/lara-stone-is-my-drug/ Lara Stone’s face does something I can’t fully name. That gap in her teeth, the shape of her mouth, the way her eyes sit—it all just works. I know I’m not alone in this. Playboy made sure of that. But looking at her still feels private somehow, which is the real trick with beauty like that. It manages to feel personal even though it’s everywhere. I’ve definitely spent more hours with her photographs than I probably should. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/22/lara-stone-is-my-drug/ Thu, 22 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/21/the-small-rebellions/ Most people dress like default settings—the same safe combinations from the same stores. But every once in a while someone walks by in something that actually means something. A choice that makes sense only to them. Doc Martens mixed with something unexpected. A gray sweater with a wolf on it. The expression of someone who picked what they wore and meant it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/21/the-small-rebellions/ Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/21/when-the-nerds-won/ You ever notice how Zuckerberg moves like he’s surprised his own body exists? Like his consciousness lives somewhere else entirely and his body is just… there. That’s every tech billionaire. Guys who learned to build things before they learned how to actually be around people. Mark, Bill, Steve—same type. Spent their formative years alone, became obsessed with solving problems through code, and then one day woke up running systems that billions of people depend on. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/21/when-the-nerds-won/ Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/21/renata-raksha/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/21/renata-raksha/ Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/20/bunny-love/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/20/bunny-love/ Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/20/making-it-pink/ There’s something elegant about a sticker campaign. You’re not spray-painting or claiming walls—just small, intentional marks accumulating on poles and signage. One sticker is a note. A dozen is a pattern. By the time there are fifty, you’ve quietly shifted how the street looks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/20/making-it-pink/ Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/20/justin-bieber-and-spaghetti-cat/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/20/justin-bieber-and-spaghetti-cat/ Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/19/waypoint/ My whole life I’ve basically mapped out the exits: out of Bavaria first, then Berlin, and eventually Tokyo for real. I know that sounds like something you plan when you’re twelve and haven’t learned better yet, but the chaos between those checkpoints—the unreliable loves, the half-finished projects, the not knowing what comes next—that’s actually the only part that keeps me functional. A life without friction, without risk, without the possibility of fucking it up completely, would kill me. I’d rather take a few hits for chasing something stupid than live a decade in perfect, bloodless comfort. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/19/waypoint/ Mon, 19 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/19/klaxons-echoes/ There’s something about Klaxons that feels frozen in a specific moment—not in a bad way, but like they caught something electric in early 2006 and got stuck there, deliberately. The neon synths, the breathless vocals, that collision between new-rave keyboard lines and whatever was happening in UK garage rock. You put on a track like ’Golden Skans’ and it’s all scrambled, hyperactive, almost giddy—like they couldn’t believe how loud the synthesizers could get. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/19/klaxons-echoes/ Mon, 19 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/19/the-gap/ Lara Stone has a gap between her front teeth. So do a bunch of other famous women—Ashley Smith, Jessica Hart, others you see in magazines. For a long time, gaps were the opposite of fashionable. They were orthodontic problems, things you paid money to fix. The dream was perfect alignment, smooth and featureless. But somewhere in the 2010s that flipped. The gap became interesting instead of broken. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/19/the-gap/ Mon, 19 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/16/what-we-decided/ The thing about losing someone from a project you care about is that it forces you to ask the question you’ve been avoiding—does this actually matter to me? Caro’s departure wasn’t surprising, but it made everything else—the late-night conversations, the half-formed ideas, the constant uncertainty—suddenly unavoidable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/16/what-we-decided/ Fri, 16 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/16/weekend-missions/ Everyone worth knowing is at the festival right now. The rest of us are stuck here, wandering around the city like I own the place, looking for something that justifies the time. I’ve been thinking about what would actually make a weekend feel different. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/16/weekend-missions/ Fri, 16 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/16/my-united-states-of-fuckever/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/16/my-united-states-of-fuckever/ Fri, 16 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/15/crossfire/ Flowers doing the synth-rock thing with so much confidence that you forget he’s singing about relationships or whatever, just locked into that groove. It’s the kind of song that works best blasting in a car at night, when you’re alone and the road’s empty and nothing else matters. There’s something about the production—all those bright, crystalline synths cutting through the mix—that makes it feel both present and like it’s from some imagined 80s you never actually lived through. I remember hearing it years later and being struck by how much of his solo work was about finding permission to just sound like this, without the weight of a band behind him. Not as studied as The Killers, not as ambitious. Just happy to be big and dumb and pretty. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/15/crossfire/ Thu, 15 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/15/writing-without-permission/ There was a time when a personal blog was actually personal. Some obscure URL that only the people you told could find. A place where you could write whatever was in your head—breakups, rage, shame, desire—because the audience was small and self-selected. The internet felt like a big empty room where you and maybe ten other people were just talking to yourselves. No algorithm. No data broker. No boss checking your search history. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/15/writing-without-permission/ Thu, 15 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/14/in-rotation/ M.I.A.’s ///Y/ is a specific kind of failure. After Arular and Kala, the anticipation was almost unbearable—this was supposed to be the record where she turned experimental sounds into something inevitable, like she’d been heading there all along. Instead she disappears into her own production. The sounds are intricate and strange but untethered, like watching someone get lost in synths and forget they’re supposed to be making songs that land. “Born Free” still works, and “XXXO” has something, but the album overall feels like she’s obsessed with texture at the expense of impact. I keep giving it another listen, waiting for it to click, and it doesn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/14/in-rotation/ Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/14/noot-seear-home-alone/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/14/noot-seear-home-alone/ Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/14/pretty-in-pink/ Fashion Week in Berlin just wrapped. Feed’s suddenly full of teenagers in whatever caught their eye on some Swedish style blog months ago. Most of it’s garbage. But there are always a few worth looking at. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/14/pretty-in-pink/ Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/12/die-fantastischen-vier/ Die Fantastischen Vier at a broadcast center’s parking lot is exactly the kind of place they could get away with by 2009. Not because it was anything special as a venue—the whole thing was basically corporate sponsorship dressed up as a street festival. But they’d spent twenty years being smart and funny and stubbornly popular, the kind of band that made people who normally ignored hip-hop start paying attention. They’d won every argument about what German hip-hop could be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/12/die-fantastischen-vier/ Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/12/evan-baden-at-home/ Evan Baden takes self-portraits in his child’s room—not vanity, something else entirely. He’s not looking at the camera, just at something off-frame in ordinary light, and the act becomes about presence, evidence that he was there, visible in a space not quite his own. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/12/evan-baden-at-home/ Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/12/no-love-in-summer/ The heat makes thinking harder. These past weeks have been thick and heavy, the kind that presses down until caring about feelings seems pointless. So I don’t. I look for people to share the weight with—nothing meant to last, just presence, someone else sweating through the same unbearable stretch. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/12/no-love-in-summer/ Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/9/weekend-missions/ The weekend had arrived and I was already done with the heat, done with whatever the week had thrown around, so I made a list of stupid missions—the kind that require zero ambition and zero shame. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/9/weekend-missions/ Fri, 09 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/8/not-first/ I posted a Cee-Lo music video a couple weeks after it came out, and people wrote to tell me I was late. Not just late—behind. Like I’d failed at some implicit speed requirement. The video was beautiful. That was the only reason I posted it. But apparently beauty wasn’t enough if it came with a timestamp that didn’t align with the moment it dropped. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/8/not-first/ Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/8/redheads/ Gold reserves on your head—that’s what Teresa Buecker called it when she was writing about redheads as a trend at Fashion Week. Or rather, she was writing about what happens when people constantly reduce you to one physical feature, keep noticing it, keep making it the first thing they see about you. Eventually the feature stops being incidental and becomes your whole identity, your obsession. You resist it for a while but it doesn’t stick. Somewhere along the way you’ve made it yours. “This feature, which I am constantly reduced to, has become my personal obsession,” she said. That’s what stuck with me—not the trend itself but what the trend does to you once you’re in it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/8/redheads/ Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/8/bartosz-ludwinski/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/8/bartosz-ludwinski/ Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/7/fever-dream/ The opening show made it clear right away this would be a fever dream of a season. Everything was chaos—pink clashing with orange, skin tones mixed in, no sense of harmony or line, just colors and shapes that felt intentional somehow even though they had no business being together. It looked like someone had decided we weren’t doing restraint this year. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/7/fever-dream/ Wed, 07 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/7/death-and-all-his-friends/ One moment you’re alive—dancing hard, throwing yourself into the lake, making love in places that were never made for it. The next day it’s just gone. Forever. The glow, the push-back, the rush. Death moves quietly these days—sometimes fast as a reckless moment, sometimes slow as the weight you felt coming. Nobody thinks about it enough, how much time anyone actually gets. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/7/death-and-all-his-friends/ Wed, 07 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/7/no-ones-gonna-love-you/ Cee-Lo released “Fuck You” as this gleeful breakup anthem, and when it got big, he went ahead and recorded “No One’s Gonna Love You” as the unfiltered version. The video was Cee-Lo at his most unhinged—beautiful and petty simultaneously, draped in gold while being completely shameless about a girl who didn’t want him. There’s something kind of perfect about that kind of rage, the kind that doesn’t need your approval. Just pure spite and aesthetics. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/7/no-ones-gonna-love-you/ Wed, 07 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/7/pretty-in-pink/ Berlin Fashion Week throws up these moments where you see someone and you get it immediately—there’s something there that photographs, that reads, that matters in the moment. This particular time I found myself tracking five people, all of them doing it differently. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/7/pretty-in-pink/ Wed, 07 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/7/keha/ She was the glitter girl who didn’t pretend to be anything else, which made her briefly significant in pop music. The songs were forgettable, but the complete lack of apology was not. You either got why that mattered or you didn’t, and if you didn’t you weren’t the audience anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/7/keha/ Wed, 07 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/6/jens-ingvarsson-and-a-banana/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/6/jens-ingvarsson-and-a-banana/ Tue, 06 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/6/fixed-time/ Every half hour I swapped families. Joey’s apartment, Bel-Air, the OC—I didn’t watch these shows so much as inhabit them, rotating through lives like a visitor in a series of rooms that opened exactly when the cable box said they would. By my teens I knew the Tanners better than my own relatives, had learned more about the world from laugh tracks and commercial breaks than from anything an actual adult had tried to teach me. The television raised me. It gave me values, a vocabulary, a sense of what love and friendship looked like when they actually worked. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/6/fixed-time/ Tue, 06 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/6/celebrity-snapshots/ I remember Lourdes Leon starting a fashion blog and getting hundreds of comments because her mother was Madonna. Megan Fox married Brian Austin Green in Hawaii. Katy Perry was doing those magazine shoots with less clothing each time. Emma Watson appeared in a music video and people were still bringing up Harry Potter. That was celebrity blogging then. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/6/celebrity-snapshots/ Tue, 06 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/6/the-girl-and-the-fish-mutant-sperm/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/6/the-girl-and-the-fish-mutant-sperm/ Tue, 06 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/6/fashion-week-mode/ Every couple of years Berlin’s fashion week rolls back into town and the whole city gets that specific energy—the bars fill with a different crowd, the sidewalks suddenly matter in a different way, people are thinking about how they look. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/6/fashion-week-mode/ Tue, 06 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/5/sky-ferreira/ Sky Ferreira’s music has always had this quality where she’s not asking anything from you—no reaching, no softening, no performance. She places herself in a track with a kind of deadpan clarity, fully in control of what the thing is, and whatever happens next is just what happens. I like that. There’s no compromise, no begging for approval. Just an artist who knows exactly what she wants and gets it done. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/5/sky-ferreira/ Mon, 05 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/5/when-your-brand-becomes-a-cage/ The better a blog does, the more its audience expects from it. Not explicitly—it’s never that crude. But you feel it in the comments, the links people share, which posts get traction. Over the years, you build an image. You become known for something. Music blogs get known for music, design blogs for design, weird blogs for weirdness. People come back because they know what they’re getting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/5/when-your-brand-becomes-a-cage/ Mon, 05 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/5/three-records/ There was this basement, or maybe someone’s bedroom, I can’t remember. Someone had thrown on Wavves—“King of the Beach,” their third album, the one that sounds like it was recorded through a wall at a party and came out sounding right. You know that feeling when a song doesn’t announce itself, just exists in the room like it was always there? That was this. “Post Acid” too. Just there, casual, not trying. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/5/three-records/ Mon, 05 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/1/welt-kompakt-scroll-edition/ Walking into the Axel Springer building, I expected something worse. We’d complained about this place online for years, built it up as some kind of evil empire, but it was just an office—fluorescent lights, people at desks, normal. Caro, Hannah, and I went with Claudio and Suz from iHeartBerlin, Sandra, Rose, Dani. We were there to make something called Welt Kompakt, a Scroll Edition created entirely by bloggers, by people who lived online. A test. An experiment. Something new. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/7/1/welt-kompakt-scroll-edition/ Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/30/tumblr-festival/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/30/tumblr-festival/ Wed, 30 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/30/lisas-last-stand/ There’s something weirdly unsettling about The Simpsons when you think about it too hard—a show so domesticated and yellow and safe that people forget it started in the dark corners of The Tracey Ullman Show. Lisa’s vegetarianism became this weird marker of sophistication in a family that lives on donuts and Duff beer, something almost defiant in how specific it was. The show’s been on so long that the horror angle isn’t in some jump-scare adaptation but in watching it calcify, episode after episode, the Simpsons refusing to age or change in any way that matters. The comics that lean into the creepy stuff—the Treehouse of Horror episodes, the fan art that imagines them as grotesque and wrong—maybe they’re just making visible what’s always been true about American entertainment: that anything left running long enough starts to look like a haunting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/30/lisas-last-stand/ Wed, 30 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/30/pretty-in-pink/ Taylin from Montreal wore an “I Love New York” shirt at eighteen. Those shirts died decades ago. But showing up in something that dead for that long and wearing it straight, no irony, just a person in a dead shirt - that takes either confidence or zero self-consciousness. Maybe they’re the same thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/30/pretty-in-pink/ Wed, 30 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/30/one-guys-pokémon/ One person doing all the parts of the Pokémon theme. You know how the original goes—that theme song that somehow survives thirty years in your head even when everything else about Pokémon has faded. Hearing it layered out from one voice is ridiculous in the most honest way. No winking at the camera, no elaborate concept. Just someone who sat down with a mic and decided to do the whole thing himself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/30/one-guys-pokémon/ Wed, 30 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/29/damn-oh-no/ Marina and The Diamonds makes pop music that sounds like someone’s been awake too long, thinking about the wrong things at 3 AM. There’s no guile in it—just theatrical arrangements wrapped around observations that land harder than they probably should. The songs don’t announce themselves; they arrive quietly at something raw, and by the time you’ve noticed it’s happened, you’re already there with her, looking at whatever it was from the same angle. That directness is rare in pop. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/29/damn-oh-no/ Tue, 29 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/29/mark-ronson-the-business-intl-bang-bang-bang/ Mark Ronson’s thing has always been about catching lightning in a bottle—finding the exact moment when a beat clicks into place, when production becomes invisible because it’s so right. Bang Bang Bang had that snap to it, that three-word simplicity that sticks to your ribs. The Business INTL thing was him chasing that same restless energy, moving through sounds without apologizing for the shift. You listen to something like that and you understand why he keeps reaching for collaborators instead of settling into a sound. There’s no museum in it. It’s all forward motion. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/29/mark-ronson-the-business-intl-bang-bang-bang/ Tue, 29 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/28/lets-get-lost/ Natasha Khan’s voice on Let’s Get Lost sounds like it’s coming from underwater—intimate and muffled, like you’re hearing it through heavy glass. She did this with Beck for the Twilight: Eclipse soundtrack, which shouldn’t work, which sounds ridiculous until you actually listen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/28/lets-get-lost/ Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/28/the-american-apparel-type/ If you’re broke and looking for a job, American Apparel seemed doable. The pay was probably okay, the staff discount on basics was a perk, and they were hiring. But Dov Charney had very specific requirements for what his employees needed to look like. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/28/the-american-apparel-type/ Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/25/mia-on-games/ I used to care what M.I.A. thought. Her music had this edge to it, this sense that she was actually aware of things. Then somewhere she started sounding like every other celebrity with a half-formed opinion about what’s wrong with kids today. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/25/mia-on-games/ Fri, 25 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/25/he-was-a-sk8er-boi/ I’m buying a skateboard. Quarter-life crisis, midlife crisis, whatever taxonomy you want to use for sitting around feeling purposeless. But I don’t think of it that way. It’s just: there’s a thing I thought about doing as a kid, couldn’t pull off, forgot about it for decades, and now I’m back at it. No deeper meaning. Just impulse. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/25/he-was-a-sk8er-boi/ Fri, 25 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/23/flea-market/ Berlin’s flea markets are where you go to shed what you don’t need anymore. Sunday mornings, someone’s rack of vintage clothes next to someone else’s old CDs, everyone broke or downsizing or just done with their closets. There’s something honest about the setup—you can’t pretend your clothes are special when they’re hanging next to a hundred other people’s mistakes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/23/flea-market/ Wed, 23 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/23/we-said-yes/ Welt Kompakt asked us to help edit their first July issue. Hannah and Caro got flown to Berlin, we got paid, and access to a newsroom that actually mattered - people like Robert Basic and Julia Stelzner who’d built real careers in this space. The kind of thing you don’t think about twice. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/23/we-said-yes/ Wed, 23 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/22/satellite/ Lena Meyer-Landrut won Eurovision in 2010 with a song that didn’t try to be anything other than itself. Stefan Raab, her mentor on the competition show, had put her in position to win. When the votes came in, she’d done it—become something bigger than before. The ballad was straightforward, she sang it like she meant it, and that simplicity worked against all the usual Eurovision machinery. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/22/satellite/ Tue, 22 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/22/soko-at-one/ Soko is an Argentine magazine that started about a year ago because two people—Adrián Carlos Grygierzcyk and Pampa García Peña—wanted their own space to make things without anyone else’s permission. They called it an experiment: just photographs and text and drawings and whatever else caught their eye. No business model, no theoretical framework, just the simple decision to make something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/22/soko-at-one/ Tue, 22 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/22/diddy-blogs/ Diddy’s blogging now. I have no idea when this happened or why it mattered, but there it is—a blog where he posts about Muhammad Ali and surfing kids and whatever catches his attention. The design is rough. It looks like he put it together in an afternoon and moved on. Which I kind of respect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/22/diddy-blogs/ Tue, 22 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/22/the-roots-dear-god-20/ New York at night through a taxi window is a specific kind of view - not the postcard version, just the city and the people waiting at corners, the side of things only someone driving those streets gets to see. That’s the lens for The Roots’ “Dear God 2.0” video. Everything shot from the backseat, watching the city pass. It’s intimate and unsettling at once, the distance and closeness together. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/22/the-roots-dear-god-20/ Tue, 22 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/22/what-nettie-harris-said/ Nettie Harris gave an interview defending Terry Richardson after all the assault allegations came out. She’d modeled for him and said her experience was nothing like what people accused him of. He was careful about boundaries, asked permission before each move, and when she felt uncomfortable with something, he backed off. No pressure. She actually respected him for it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/22/what-nettie-harris-said/ Tue, 22 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/21/good-enough/ Uffie’s Sex Dreams and Denim Jeans doesn’t pretend to be anything but noise and beats engineered to work on your body. No subtlety, no point, just sound. There’s something honest about giving up on meaning entirely and going for the dance floor. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/21/good-enough/ Mon, 21 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/21/adam-green-and-his-penis/ Adam Green’s always been the kind of guy who doesn’t give a shit what anyone thinks. His blog, The Lake Room, is full of blurry photographs of drunk friends, stoned relatives, weird museum moments where he’s gotten hard—the stuff you’d never actually post but somehow think about. So when he started uploading explicit photographs of himself, just casual shots of his dick, it felt less like a shock and more like the inevitable next step. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/21/adam-green-and-his-penis/ Mon, 21 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/20/futurama-is-back/ Comedy Central bought the rights from Fox and is airing new episodes. This is the kind of news that shouldn’t matter but kind of does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/20/futurama-is-back/ Sun, 20 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/20/icelands-gambit/ Iceland was broke and Wikileaks had a solution. Become a digital haven—pass laws protecting publishers and whistleblowers, make it impossible to sue people for what they published, promise absolute anonymity—and watch the servers and companies migrate there like it was salvation. Money problem solved. A small country full of musicians and geothermal energy gets to be the internet’s sanctuary. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/20/icelands-gambit/ Sun, 20 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/19/just-another-model/ Tom Nicon died in Milan and now he’s part of the list. Daul Kim, Isabella Blow, Alexander McQueen—the fashion world goes through people like that. You see the name in the news, you think about how young he was, you move on. The industry understands what it does to people and does it anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/19/just-another-model/ Sat, 19 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/19/richard-kern-in-berlin/ Richard Kern doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what he is. For 30 years he’s been photographing naked women and he’s never once explained or justified it. The girls barely old enough to legally do it. He just points the camera and shoots. That directness is rare. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/19/richard-kern-in-berlin/ Sat, 19 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/19/finding-berlin/ The smell hits you first—currywurst and dog shit, warm and sharp. Berlin doesn’t bother covering its own tracks. That’s the whole point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/19/finding-berlin/ Sat, 19 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/19/there-are-children-here/ Heard about Suck Shaft through Atlantis, this Stockholm club where all the interesting musicians seem to rotate through. They’ve got “There Are Children Here”—electronic, weirdly catchy, confusing in a way that works. It’s the kind of track that ambushes you in a club even when you’re deliberately not paying attention. I don’t know if this means I’m actually into the electro-hype thing or just another person who hears something made with taste and goes along with it. Probably doesn’t matter which. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/19/there-are-children-here/ Sat, 19 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/18/add-suv/ The video for Add SUV is nothing special—Uffie and Pharrell cruising the city at night, cops at the end. Standard stuff. But what stuck with me is this: Uffie can’t sing. She never could. And I’ve never cared. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/18/add-suv/ Fri, 18 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/18/yana-kedrina/ Yana Kedrina showed up online at some point—this Moscow girl with the kind of chaos that makes sense once you understand the place. She hunts dicks on Chatroulette, dances her ass to Cyndi Lauper, draws these deeply unsettling pieces where Jewish people become crab creatures. Completely unhinged and weirdly good-looking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/18/yana-kedrina/ Fri, 18 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/18/the-kill-switch/ So you’re in the middle of something stupid—buying a textbook on eBay, messaging your cousin in Italy, running a raid in World of Warcraft—and somewhere in a government building, someone decides it’s time. The button gets pressed. The whole internet just stops. Everything goes dark. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/18/the-kill-switch/ Fri, 18 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/17/yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah/ Found this website that just displays photos. Massive, full-screen, no navigation or categories, no way to control what comes next. No one knows where the images actually come from—there’s mystery around it, which is part of the appeal. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/17/yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah/ Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/17/wolfgang-amadeus/ Phoenix in 2009—”1901,” “Lisztomania,” everywhere at once, and you could feel why immediately. A French band that sounded like they’d spent serious time in a studio getting every sound exactly right, but without sacrificing the fun. The funk was genuine, the hooks hit, and you could listen alone or at a party and it worked either way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/17/wolfgang-amadeus/ Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/16/go-back-in-time/ There’s this photo from Calgary Zoo—a kid making the face you make when a dinosaur with a ridiculous stitched beard gets inches from your nose. She’s squinting, totally committed to whatever she’s experiencing. I can’t stop looking at it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/16/go-back-in-time/ Wed, 16 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/16/the-app-doesnt-matter/ Steve Jobs killed the SuicideGirls app because the breasts bothered him. Missy announced they’d just build an iPhone-optimized website instead—same naked bodies, no app store, no way to stop them. His authority evaporated. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/16/the-app-doesnt-matter/ Wed, 16 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/16/the-vuvuzela/ That photo of Maradona losing it at a vuvuzela in the stands is one of the perfect things from 2010. Not because it’s deep, just because it’s a man completely done with a plastic horn. You can see the exact moment he realizes what’s happening and that he can’t do anything about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/16/the-vuvuzela/ Wed, 16 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/14/redheads/ Around 2009 I became obsessed with fashion blogs, which sounds shallow until you realize this was when the form actually mattered—when interesting people could make something online without needing permission or a record deal. And I kept running into redheads. Not because the internet had developed some shared fantasy, but because they were everywhere in that specific moment, and they weren’t trying to be what the industry wanted. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/14/redheads/ Mon, 14 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/14/peaches/ She was the thing that happened when being famous for being famous actually meant something. Peaches Geldof, born into it, lived in it, got consumed by it the way those machines do. The nude photos, the scandals, the tabloid churn—it was all just the apparatus grinding on, and she was caught in the gears like everything else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/14/peaches/ Mon, 14 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/14/the-big-tits-zombie-3d/ Takao Nakano made a film called ’The Big Tits Zombie 3D’—strippers read a cursed book, summon a zombie apocalypse, and one becomes the undead queen who saves the world. It actually exists. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/14/the-big-tits-zombie-3d/ Mon, 14 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/13/shake-it/ Found this video of a mom teaching her kids to dance, or at least moving through a routine while they watched and imitated. Classical music in the background. No instruction really, just movement. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/13/shake-it/ Sun, 13 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/12/the-hacksteak/ We were a study group loose in Paris for a week—sympathetic nerds, daredevils, a couple of redheads who probably shouldn’t have been trusted with a train ticket. The gay quarter smelled like life fermenting in summer heat, the Jewish district like old money and older stories, the intellectual neighborhoods like someone’s cluttered apartment where you weren’t sure if you were welcome but you went in anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/12/the-hacksteak/ Sat, 12 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/11/cansei-de-ser-sexy/ “Let’s Make Love And Listen To Death From Above” is a song title that knows exactly what it’s doing - promising everything and delivering something completely sideways. This is CSS, Cansei de Ser Sexy, a Brazilian synth-pop band from 2006 that didn’t sound like anything else. Lovefoxxx had this voice that never committed to anything, hovering between playful and mean, between joke and confession. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/11/cansei-de-ser-sexy/ Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/8/i-ref/ Norman and Isabelle launched a publication called I-Ref. The pitch is to write about the people doing the writing - treat the voices themselves as interesting. They pulled together twenty-eight contributors, some already established, some from the half-visible edges of Berlin’s culture and design scenes. I know a few of them - Deniz and Dori from lil.bit, Clemens from iGNANT, Luise. People I’ve crossed paths with enough times to care what they’re working on. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/8/i-ref/ Tue, 08 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/7/839-friends/ I wouldn’t be who I am if I’d been born somewhere else, at some other moment. All these people—I’d have missed them entirely, and that would have meant missing out on the mess of actually knowing human beings. Some of them opened up to me, some fucked me over, all of them left marks. That’s what I’m thinking about now: how many different characters move through your life, burning bright and then disappearing into memory forever. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/7/839-friends/ Mon, 07 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/7/im-in-love-with-a-dead-squirrel/ I came across Michael J. DeMeo’s photography recently and got why he refuses to leave film. Everything about his work feels intentional—not in that performative Instagram way, but in the sense that shooting film requires actual knowledge. You burn through a roll fast enough that each frame matters. You can’t fake it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/6/7/im-in-love-with-a-dead-squirrel/ Mon, 07 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/29/the-4th-star/ The whole country stops working when the World Cup arrives. Neighbors hang flags, drunk uncles howl patriotic nonsense into the street, and even people like me—who don’t actually care that much about soccer—suddenly have opinions about penalties and shirt swaps. When it’s South Africa, when it’s summer, when the whole thing is happening on this distant continent, the fever just takes over. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/29/the-4th-star/ Sat, 29 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/28/shock-doctrine/ Found an old post from 2004 or so, just a list of absurd weekend missions. Pure shock-humor - every line trying to offend, nothing clever about it, just loud. Reading it now it’s completely dated. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/28/shock-doctrine/ Fri, 28 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/27/almost-met-her/ I was seconds away from going to meet Nora Tschirner. There was this whole event in Berlin with her and Christian Ulmen, and for a moment it seemed possible. Then work and logistics got in the way, and I didn’t go. You meet certain people only through their work, which is usually how it goes. No tragedy in it. Just one more thing that almost happened and didn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/27/almost-met-her/ Thu, 27 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/26/cant-stay-awake/ I’m tired. No, that’s not even the word for it. Exhaustion doesn’t cover it. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing—walking the streets, dancing at some party, having sex—I could collapse asleep right now without warning. Just go under. And what drives me insane is watching my actual life happen while I’m not there. It’s passing by and I’m missing it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/26/cant-stay-awake/ Wed, 26 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/26/pretty-in-pink/ Shelley was on a railing, 19, Swedish, in Lee and Converse. I took a second look at her legs, the kind that make you question what you’re seeing. Boys Noize shirt she’d made. She looked fragile enough that a breeze could finish it. Sad and perfect at once, and I couldn’t look away. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/26/pretty-in-pink/ Wed, 26 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/25/still-reading-blogs/ Most blogs are unreadable. Every random person thinks they have something urgent to say about nothing, and they publish it into the void hoping someone shows up to validate them. It’s all background noise. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/25/still-reading-blogs/ Tue, 25 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/24/analog-heat/ The light in Houston doesn’t forgive. Summer there is just absolute—flat, bleaching, relentless. Tamara Lichtenstein shoots through it anyway, analog film, because digital bores her. She’s 20 and already committed to the slower path. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/24/analog-heat/ Mon, 24 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/23/god-save-american-apparel/ There was a moment, probably mid-2000s, when American Apparel became the uniform of a certain kind of person. Not fashion people exactly, but people who’d decided plainness was its own statement. A good blank tee, a fitted cut, nothing else. That was enough. That meant something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/23/god-save-american-apparel/ Sun, 23 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/22/ten-little-missions/ The notebook used to run lists like this—absurdist weekend missions, jokes with no point at all. Sleep with famous people you’ll never meet, swap your roommate’s salt, get free underwear from American Apparel and resell it, download obscure songs. The appeal was purely the pointlessness. You could post something with no purpose, no outcome, no meaning, and that was enough. That’s what blogging actually was for a moment. You can’t really do it anymore. It worked then. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/22/ten-little-missions/ Sat, 22 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/22/robyn-alone-again/ Robyn’s got a new video for “Dancing On My Own,” and it’s the kind of thing you watch alone, maybe more than once. Dark visuals, that sharp beat that makes you want to move even though the song is about standing still and being invisible. “There’s a big black sky over my city. I’m standing in the corner watching you kiss her. I’m right over here - why can’t you see me?” https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/22/robyn-alone-again/ Sat, 22 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/20/pretty-in-pink/ I’ve been looking at how people dress when they’re not trying. Not the obvious fashion people—just people moving through their lives with some taste and no self-consciousness about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/20/pretty-in-pink/ Thu, 20 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/19/sasha-grey-a-fucks-life/ Sasha Grey wrote a memoir called Neu Sex. If you don’t know her, she was the most recognizable pornographic actress of the 2000s—the kind of famous that bled into mainstream pop culture for a minute. The title doesn’t fuck around; it’s exactly what it says. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/19/sasha-grey-a-fucks-life/ Wed, 19 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/17/in-my-head/ I have this constant feed of scenarios and ideas and half-formed stories running through my head that would suffocate me if I didn’t push them out regularly—writing them, saying them, singing them, just getting them out somehow. The method changes, but the need doesn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/17/in-my-head/ Mon, 17 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/15/sleigh-bells/ Derek E. Miller used to play guitar in a post-hardcore band called Poison the Well. Everything about that band was deliberately hostile—broken, aggressive, and loud. Then he decided to start a new project and needed a singer. He found Alexis Krauss, who’d been in some teenybopper pop band. On paper it makes no sense. In practice it makes perfect sense for what Sleigh Bells actually sounds like, which is supposed to be that wrong. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/15/sleigh-bells/ Sat, 15 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/14/the-through-line/ Faye Reagan did hardcore porn when she was 21—titles like “Teenage Whores 4” and “Cock Pigs,” where she’d take it rough and make it look genuine. She was also the face of American Apparel for a minute. Later, Faye got photographed for Married To The Mob by Brooke Nipa, wearing clothes with slogans like “Sexy Bitch” and “Boys Ain’t Shit But Hoes & Tricks.” https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/14/the-through-line/ Fri, 14 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/14/weekend-missions/ The weather’s going to be terrible and complaining about it is just small talk anyway, so better to have actual stupid things to do instead. Here’s the plan if you’re desperate for a weekend. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/14/weekend-missions/ Fri, 14 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/12/pretty-in-pink/ The fashion world has a million rules about what you’re not supposed to wear, and I’ve never understood a single one. Pink leggings after you’ve had kids? Banned. Hawaiian shirts this summer? Apparently they died. Anything that looks like it came from a thrift store instead of a boutique? Burn it immediately and never speak of it again. But the people who actually look interesting are always the ones who just ignore the whole system. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/12/pretty-in-pink/ Wed, 12 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/10/why-cleveland-worked/ The Cleveland Show wasn’t supposed to work. Spinning off Cleveland Brown—the straightest guy in Family Guy, basically just the setup to other people’s jokes—to a new city with a wife and stepkids felt engineered to fail. And the original show was already coasting by that point anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/10/why-cleveland-worked/ Mon, 10 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/7/weekend-missions/ Winter’s back, which means chocolate Santas and everyone singing Jingle Bells like we didn’t just hear it a million times already. But I’ve got this feeling I should do something with the weekend. Make it count. Here’s what’s been bouncing around my head. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/7/weekend-missions/ Fri, 07 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/6/heaven-was-near/ April 2011, the single “17,” Sky Ferreira at seventeen years old with a chaotic half-spoken-half-sung thing that sounded like someone refusing to perform. Not in the conscious-experimental way, just in the I’m-not-trying way. American, wired, and immediately interesting because she didn’t sound like anything else coming out of the machine that year. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/6/heaven-was-near/ Thu, 06 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/5/everything-for-the-children/ Got a letter from the German youth protection authority. Guy named Wahl, very polite, explaining that the explicit content on this website—the erect penises, the wide-open everything, the various sex acts people had posted—that was illegal, or close enough. He made it sound almost sympathetic while explaining how he’d have to shut the whole thing down if I didn’t clean it up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/5/everything-for-the-children/ Wed, 05 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/5/pretty-in-pink/ Olivia from LA, seventeen, wearing Pixie Market like dressing well was the last thing on her mind. She’d pull off anything—that’s the unfair part—and knowing it seems to have freed her from thinking about clothes at all. A Cadillac in the photo doesn’t hurt. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/5/5/pretty-in-pink/ Wed, 05 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/25/lindsay-lohans-gravity/ I keep coming across new photos of her and there’s this moment every time where I have to mentally adjust. The image I’m carrying—the one that stuck from twenty years ago—doesn’t match the actual body in the frame. Gravity’s been working. Time’s been working. She’s aged in the way everything does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/25/lindsay-lohans-gravity/ Sun, 25 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/24/magazine-run/ I still go back to the corner kiosk every month even though I know it’s kind of pointless. This time Front Mag was doing the Glee thing—those two actors in school uniforms, which is exactly what a magazine like that goes for. Some interviews with Lostprophets, gaming coverage, British festivals. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/24/magazine-run/ Sat, 24 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/23/reasons-to-waste-your-weekend/ There’s a specific dead zone of Sunday afternoon—too late to matter, too early to start dinner prep, no energy left for anything real. That’s when you’d come across those lists, the kind where someone’s compiled ten stupid things you could do instead of whatever you’re actually supposed to be doing. The first one’s usually manageable—trim your toenails, call someone you’ve been meaning to call. By the tenth you’re supposed to be committing actual crimes, and the whole thing’s obviously a joke, but there’s something appealing about the permission structure anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/23/reasons-to-waste-your-weekend/ Fri, 23 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/23/glee/ I spent the entire first season of Glee last night instead of studying. The show is exactly what you’d imagine: a high school glee club of misfits—stuttering kid, wheelchair-bound nerd, cheerleader queen—singing their feelings through an absurd world of rapping Spanish teachers, inexplicable phobias, and soft drinks that appear for no reason. It’s ridiculous. It shouldn’t work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/23/glee/ Fri, 23 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/22/chew-lips-everybody-loves-the-unicorn/ Chew Lips makes me want to move around my room in a way I haven’t in a while. Three people from London—Tigs singing, Will Sanderson and James Watkins on everything else—and you can hear where they’re coming from immediately. Prince, LCD Soundsystem, the electropop that kept flowing out of Britain in the 2000s. It all landed in Unicorn, their January album, and it works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/22/chew-lips-everybody-loves-the-unicorn/ Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/22/youve-got-stars-on-your-face/ Jule had 173 freckles on her face. I counted them one morning—actually stood there tracing my fingertips across her cheeks, her forehead, unable to stop touching them. She didn’t pull away, just let me study them like I was reading something. ’You’ve got stars on your face,’ I said, which is exactly as corny as it sounds, and she was fine with that. She smiled and kissed my hand before pushing it aside gently, then padded into the kitchen wearing nothing but a hair clip to make toast with jam. I remember thinking I was happy. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/22/youve-got-stars-on-your-face/ Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/21/jamie-cullum/ Jamie Cullum does covers and improvisation. Takes familiar songs and reworks them, finds what’s actually in them rather than just playing them straight. You can feel the thinking—not just reciting, but genuinely working through the material. That’s what matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/21/jamie-cullum/ Wed, 21 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/21/pretty-in-pink/ Most fashion blogs feel like someone explaining a math problem. Here’s the jacket, here are the proportions, here’s why this works. Useless. All I ever want to know is whether someone looks like they know what they’re doing, and most people don’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/21/pretty-in-pink/ Wed, 21 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/21/summer-in-the-city/ Eleni Mettyear’s summer photographs have the quality of not having been thought about. She’s 18, English, and she documents summer in the city the way memory does—grass, water, the faces of friends, a particular light that exists for a few months and then vanishes. No self-consciousness in the composition, just the thing itself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/21/summer-in-the-city/ Wed, 21 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/20/what-was-cool/ Fresh orange juice was in. That was the kind of thing you had to know. Laura Jansen’s cover of “Use Somebody” was playing everywhere. The new iPhone if you could actually get one—the waiting was the real experience, not the having. Someone published a list, officially, of what was in and what was out. I read it. Everyone read it. You weren’t supposed to care but you did. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/20/what-was-cool/ Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/19/kate-nash-again/ I heard “Foundations” again the other day, and it stopped me cold. Kate Nash’s voice cutting through that synth-pop production, all brittleness and want. That song did something to me when it came out, and it still does—the way she could make being desperate for someone sound like an observation about weather. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/19/kate-nash-again/ Mon, 19 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/18/how-and-not-why/ Went to re:publica in Berlin. Fourth time. Took Malte, Paulchen, Sara—three days of finally seeing faces attached to Twitter handles, mostly just trying not to think about how circular the whole thing was. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/18/how-and-not-why/ Sun, 18 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/17/natural/ I got properly obsessed with a girl on Abby Winters years back. You know—the Australian site. Looked her up, tried to track her down somehow, the whole amateur detective thing online. Came up with nothing. She had no idea I existed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/17/natural/ Sat, 17 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/16/surviving-the-weekend/ Every Friday your brain panics about the sixty hours ahead—convinced you’ll waste them—so you write a list. Ten things. Some basic: new music, change your hair. Some obviously impossible: sleep with Lady Gaga, buy something random from the Asian supermarket’s freezer and give it to your grandmother for her birthday, answer every question with a Back to the Future reference. All of it specific. Half-serious. Half-joke. Written down like it’s actually going to structure your time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/16/surviving-the-weekend/ Fri, 16 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/14/i-like-my-style/ The user-generated fashion magazine “I Like My Style Quarterly” exists now, which means someone at a printing press finally connected the obvious dots: fashion is in, users can make anything, print is fashionable again. The result is a 270-page book that costs twelve euros and somehow works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/14/i-like-my-style/ Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/13/zach-singh-a-kid-with-a-camera/ When I was fifteen I wasn’t doing much except getting drunk in parks with whatever we could steal from the gas station, trying to get my hands down someone’s pants, throwing Dragon Ball moves around like we invented them. Nothing remotely purposeful. Just the usual waste of youth. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/13/zach-singh-a-kid-with-a-camera/ Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/12/electronic-beats/ Electronic Beats moved the festival from Berlin that year, took it to Cologne for May 20th at the E-Werk. Seemed odd at first—Berlin was where these things lived. But the lineup they sent was solid enough to justify the trip: Moderat, Major Lazer still in that phase where they felt new and a little dangerous, Kele separating himself from Bloc Party, Little Dragon doing their thing, Miike Snow. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/12/electronic-beats/ Mon, 12 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/9/jump-in-my-car/ Who lives in Berlin doesn’t need a car. The cramped streets, packed transit, and impossible parking make sure of that. Some drives you could walk faster. But nearly three years in the city and there’s nothing like hitting the Autobahn with the music loud and the throttle all the way down. Mercedes invited me to Stuttgart to drive their new cars and see how they work. I wasn’t about to say no. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/9/jump-in-my-car/ Fri, 09 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/7/sonics-last-chance/ Mario’s a short guy with a terrible job. His girlfriend keeps getting kidnapped by mohawked turtles, he self-medicates with magic mushrooms just to get through his day, and he crawls through filthy pipes scrounging for coins. What kind of existence is that? Sonic was supposed to be different—blue, fast, those red shoes that actually meant something. A hedgehog that didn’t need to apologize. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/7/sonics-last-chance/ Wed, 07 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/6/deine-maske/ Encountered this promotion for a debut single from a musician named Laura. She’s from Mannheim, twenty-three, caught in the standard underground positioning—edgy, provocative, direct electronic beats. The usual story you see in a hundred music scenes. What actually stood out to me was the collaboration: she brought in visual artist Katja Hentschel to work on the video, which suggests someone thinking about the complete image, not just slapping a pretty face on a song. Most of these moments vanish without a trace. But at least there’s intention there, and that’s worth acknowledging. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/6/deine-maske/ Tue, 06 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/5/just-looking/ I love looking at photographs. All of them—professional work, terrible phone shots, fashion, explicit imagery, random beautiful accidents. There’s nothing words can do that an image can’t do better. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/5/just-looking/ Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/4/the-look/ Margaux Lonnberg appeared on everyone’s feeds in that particular moment when fashion discovers a new silhouette to obsess over. Bleached eyebrows, that blank stare, the kind of thinness that reads as commitment. Twenty-four, from Paris. What struck people wasn’t any single photo but the cumulative effect: here was someone who looked like she’d removed everything extraneous from her body. No excess. No softness. No apology. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/4/the-look/ Sun, 04 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/3/the-tall-grass/ We must have sung that Pokérap a thousand times, screamed it through the neighborhood like idiots. Link cable battles until someone threw the controller in anger. And yeah, the first time Misty appeared on screen, I felt something I wasn’t supposed to feel yet—not about a cartoon character, not in a kid’s game, but there it was. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/3/the-tall-grass/ Sat, 03 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/2/insuh-yoon/ Insuh Yoon was 24, already shooting in New York, and had that thing young photographers dream about: a voice people recognized instantly. The light in his photographs is unmistakable. Pale and soft, almost luminous. He knew how to compose a frame. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/2/insuh-yoon/ Fri, 02 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/1/the-fall/ I turned eighteen at Bar 25. The photographer and I were grinding against each other, both high, moving to the endless beat. When we opened our eyes he headed to the bathroom and two girls followed. My world was full of noise and colors and chaos, so I followed them. I pushed the door open and saw him there, his pants undone, his face twisted, the girls laughing and grabbing at him. When he came back to the dance floor I looked at him straight and said, “Can we go home? I’m tired.” https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/4/1/the-fall/ Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/29/general-fiasco/ Rock still wins. I keep coming back to this watching people in clubs nod their heads in unison to some minimal electronic track, everyone in black, everyone trying to look contemplative when they’re really just waiting for the drop. Guitar and drums and a voice hit different. They always have. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/29/general-fiasco/ Mon, 29 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/27/what-stuck/ You build a list of what matters—checkered shirts, Sonic, summer in Stockholm, cheap cola on a hot afternoon. You explain why Final Fantasy is essential and Gossip Girl is just pretty lighting over emptiness. You care about these distinctions like they prove something about you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/27/what-stuck/ Sat, 27 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/25/adeline-mai/ I found Adeline Mai’s work on Black Orchid and spent way too long looking at it. She’s French, twenty-one, studying photography in Paris, and there’s something about the way she shoots that makes you want to keep looking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/25/adeline-mai/ Thu, 25 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/22/ponyo/ Ponyo is basically The Little Mermaid again. I knew it the moment the credits started rolling. Fish girl wants to be human, falls for a boy, her father loses his mind trying to drag her back. Same story we’ve been told a hundred times. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/22/ponyo/ Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/22/hunger/ Anastasia flipped my entire world upside down. On hot summer nights with the windows open, we’d blast Muse and I’d want to somehow preserve the sweet smell of her breath in mason jars, save it for when things got bad. We’d talk breathlessly about our future as people who’d never become the dull citizens of some half-formed state. The promise of spiritual freedom, of starting fresh, of being reborn into something we thought the world had forgotten—it was all just one kiss away. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/22/hunger/ Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/19/skins-fell-apart/ Effy showed up and made the show feel dangerous again. That specific kind of beautiful where you know something’s going to break—gorgeous and brittle and completely sure of herself. Pandora caught in her gravity, Cook doing his thing, JJ, Naomi. They had the same raw energy as the first generation, that feeling of people already falling who’d just decided to stop fighting it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/19/skins-fell-apart/ Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/18/the-mercy-of-delusion/ You know from the first frame that something’s wrong inside Leonardo DiCaprio’s skull. Scorsese puts him on an island that doesn’t make sense, where nothing quite lines up, and the film becomes this sick spiral down into somebody’s psychological breakdown. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/18/the-mercy-of-delusion/ Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/18/yvan-in-berlin/ Street fashion photography was this weird democracy moment that happened around 2005 or so. Suddenly the people who mattered in fashion were the ones walking around ordinary cities in ordinary clothes, photographed by kids with cameras and blogs. No invitation required, no gallery representing you, just an eye for what people were actually wearing and the confidence to think that mattered more than a runway show. Yvan Rodic’s Facehunter was the clearest proof that the whole system had flipped. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/18/yvan-in-berlin/ Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/17/eighty-shoes/ Kathrine cycles through Copenhagen. Sophie befriends locals in Bangkok. Katja gets a new haircut in London. Eight women and a collaborative travel blog, documenting the life I’ve always fantasized about—the one where you pack a bag and leave, no second thoughts, no waiting for everything to be perfect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/17/eighty-shoes/ Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/16/rubbers/ Condoms solve a problem that nobody’s ever accepted. Growing up you just use them as toys—balloons, stretched over whatever you can find, laughing at the absurdity. Then you hit the age where it matters and you’ve already been flooded with every possible nightmare. Chlamydia. Gonorrhea. Herpes. By the time you’re sliding one on for real, you’ve been scared half to death about what happens if you don’t. I remember being maybe nine, getting absolutely shit-scared by some health class warning, spending weeks convinced I’d caught something terminal just from existing near another person. That kind of fear doesn’t really leave. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/16/rubbers/ Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/16/no-ones-coming/ Three in the morning and I’m sitting alone feeling like a ghost, replaying every mistake I ever made. Leaving her. Not going to college. The resolutions that made it until lunch. Deep in some old photos of a life that doesn’t exist anymore, and it felt like the ending of everything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/16/no-ones-coming/ Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/15/waffles-girls-dont-die/ Black leggings, boots, colored hair, the casual fuck-you of someone who knows what they look like and doesn’t need validation. That’s what these Waffles Girls are actually about, if they’re about anything at all. Not a band. Not a company. Not a modeling agency, though some of them model. Just three women scattered across the map who’ve figured out how to exist with intention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/15/waffles-girls-dont-die/ Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/12/permission-to-look/ There’s something addictive about celebrity gossip, even when you know what you’re doing is crude and a little pathetic. You see a photo of a famous woman—doesn’t matter who—and you start thinking about it more than you should. There’s the obvious part: the attraction. But there’s also something about the critique, the dissection, the feeling that you’ve figured something out the world missed. You catch them mid-mess and you feel clever for noticing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/12/permission-to-look/ Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/12/brother-sharp/ Fashion’s one of those things you can’t explain. Where does it come from? Who decides what’s in? Why does it all shift the moment you look away, like it was never meant to stick around? You can think about it forever with people who sound smart, and you’re still nowhere. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/12/brother-sharp/ Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/11/bethany-joy-girls-of-summer/ Gray nothing overhead. Clouds moving in slow circles, letting light through just long enough to prove they can take it back. I hate the patience of it. Clouds are assholes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/11/bethany-joy-girls-of-summer/ Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/10/the-quiet-kind/ Elisabeth Rank’s debut showed up when I was exhausted by books that had nothing to say. It’s about two young women, Lene and Tonia, moving through Berlin - the usual early-adulthood momentum, parties, half-formed futures. The shape you’d expect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/10/the-quiet-kind/ Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/10/haus-am-kollnischen-park/ There’s this specific desperation you feel in the days before throwing a party you actually care about. The 23rd was locked—Simian Mobile Disco, Metronomy, Boy 8-Bit, Les Gillettes at Haus am Kollnischen Park in Berlin. Somewhere in that week I was probably begging people to vote for us in some competition, throwing around whatever language felt urgent enough to make it stick. That’s what you do. You’ll say anything to get bodies in the room when the night happens, to make people understand why this matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/10/haus-am-kollnischen-park/ Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/9/the-future-was-html5/ HTML5 was the future. Everyone said so—the blogs, the conferences, the whole mythology around what was coming next. Flash was dying. Standards were enlightened. If you weren’t moving toward it, you were falling behind, and falling behind was the same as becoming irrelevant. I believed it because the alternative was admitting I was anxious about disappearing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/9/the-future-was-html5/ Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/8/thank-you-love-you-fuck-you/ The Oscars happened last night. Stars in expensive clothes, handlers keeping them away from anything unscripted, a few comedians telling jokes that landed nowhere. Everyone clapped anyway. You show up at the Oscars knowing how it works—you applaud on cue, you wipe your eyes at the memorial, you pretend the statuette means something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/8/thank-you-love-you-fuck-you/ Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/7/the-girl-and-the-mafia/ Holly Miranda had mafia show up at her door when she was sixteen, or so the story goes. Guys in suits, late at night, a contract they wanted her to sign. A lawyer talked her out of it, which is probably the only reason she’s still alive to make music instead of being another missing person case from the ’90s. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/7/the-girl-and-the-mafia/ Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/6/back-in-blue/ The industry spent years convinced everything needed to be 3D, bigger, some kind of franchise with a story nobody asked for. Then Mario came back in 2D and suddenly everyone remembered what fun actually felt like. Sonic 4 got announced. And now Mega Man shows up, the little blue robot, back in 8-bit like he never left. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/6/back-in-blue/ Sat, 06 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/6/the-book-of-husk-magazine/ Husk Magazine showed up in the mail. In the thank-you note, they mentioned that every photograph of a naked or half-naked person in the entire issue is dedicated to this blog. I read that twice. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/6/the-book-of-husk-magazine/ Sat, 06 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/5/that-night/ Sina and I stared at each other for what felt like forever, and my whole body went haywire. My head seemed to explode in colors, my breath caught somewhere behind my ribs. Adrenaline pumped through me like I was having a stroke—that was the only logical conclusion. Where had she come from? Why was she here? And why was she talking to me, after two years of silence, after she’d left me in a minefield of desperation and insomnia and thoughts I won’t name? “Hey,” I managed, my voice thick, and I cleared my throat and said it again like I was asking a question. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/5/that-night/ Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/4/the-jealous-photographer/ Alexandros Mastroyiannis was nineteen and had been shooting for four years—started the day before he took a photography course that helped. Athens, then Swansea, then Exeter. That age where the hunger shows in everything you make. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/4/the-jealous-photographer/ Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/2/spring-mixtape/ The sun’s been showing up again, breaking through the endless gray of winter. Pollen season’s here, allergies kicking in, people stocking up on their chemical defenses. But spring has an appeal even when it’s a mess. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/2/spring-mixtape/ Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/1/fresh-blood/ Finding new writers for this place turned into a weeks-long nightmare. Mountains of applications, most completely forgettable, mixed in with the ones where people decided we needed to know their bra size or dick length. Like that matters. Like anyone cares. But I kept going through the pile, and then suddenly there were two people worth paying attention to. Which created a different kind of problem. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/3/1/fresh-blood/ Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/27/christopher-little-your-bloody-face/ I’ve got a thing for girls with nosebleeds. The way it happens—vulnerability made visible, something inner breaking through. Maybe that’s weird. But I got there from somewhere: photographers like Richard Kern, Lesley Arfin, people who understood that blood and beauty were the same thing. They shaped what I was looking at back in those early days, when all that aesthetic was still forming. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/27/christopher-little-your-bloody-face/ Sat, 27 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/26/get-a-life/ I love that people actually engage. Comments, weird emails with photos, real responses—that’s the whole point. Most of you get it. You read, you respond, maybe you disagree, and there’s an actual exchange there. That’s why I do this. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/26/get-a-life/ Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/26/alice-in-excess/ I went to the Berlin premiere of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland when it came out—back when 3D screenings still felt like cultural events, cinemas showing premiere broadcasts as if they mattered. I’d grown up with the Disney version from 1951, that cartoon with the Caterpillar and the Mad Hatter, and it had become one of those reference points you used without examining. Weird. Strange. A template. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/26/alice-in-excess/ Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/25/magazine-stack/ Dazed & Confused landed with Karim Sadli’s photography—beautiful androgynous faces that don’t announce themselves. You just stop and look. It’s the kind of thing that makes you remember why you keep buying magazines instead of scrolling through filtered versions on a screen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/25/magazine-stack/ Thu, 25 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/25/fettes-brot-in-berlin/ Fettes Brot have been playing in the background of my life since high school—drunk parties, road trips, the whole stupid constellation of being young. The Hamburg hip-hop trio, three guys from up north who somehow never stopped mattering. You know how some bands just fit, not because they’re the best or because you’ve made some conscious choice about it, but because they’re just always there. That’s them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/25/fettes-brot-in-berlin/ Thu, 25 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/24/the-dictator-in-my-head/ I’ve always been drawn to big historical figures—men who seized power through charisma and intellect, who surrounded themselves with followers and yes-men, and who ended up killing thousands. Hitler. An asshole, a tyrant, a mass murderer. A repellent man whose dark world I sometimes can’t stop thinking about, not because I understand it but because I can’t. The full weight of it never lands. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/24/the-dictator-in-my-head/ Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/24/black-jersey/ A good black jersey top is almost invisible until you need it, then you wonder how you lived without it. Narciso Rodriguez built his name on pieces like this—nothing fancy, just proportion and restraint. The kind of thing that gets softer every time you wash it until it feels like a second skin. I’ve had enough mediocre basics to know the difference, and this is the kind of piece that earns the space in your closet just by existing quietly. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/24/black-jersey/ Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/23/jostein-wålengen/ Imperfection is this crazy thing that everyone says they love but nobody actually wants. We talk about authentic, flawed, real—but given the choice, we’d take the clean version every time. Except every now and then someone actually commits to the broken option, and it becomes weirdly heroic. Like your girlfriend leaving you for the entire Swedish national beach volleyball team. Devastating, sure, but there’s something almost admirable about the commitment. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/23/jostein-wålengen/ Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/23/suicidegirls-must-die/ So these girls thought they were going to a lake house for a calendar shoot. They showed up, they posed, they figured it was going to be the usual deal—look hot, get photographed, move on. Then an axe murderer showed up and started killing everyone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/23/suicidegirls-must-die/ Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/22/seabear/ I don’t like most bands. They’re everywhere—in clubs, on Spotify, in magazines—always seven people with bargain guitars and a singer who sounds like he’s still waiting for his voice to drop, convinced this is going to be the song that changes everything. Same setup, same songs about the same handful of subjects, year after year. Most of them should probably do something else. But every once in a while one actually gets to you. The melody lands. The words don’t sound like they came from a template. You stop reaching for your phone and actually listen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/22/seabear/ Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/19/nowhere/ I’ve been awake for a few nights now. Not insomnia—I’m awake on purpose, just choosing not to close my eyes and slip back into the regular world. There’s a zone you find yourself in when you do this, where time becomes this thick, patient thing. The dark stops being empty and starts being full. You find yourself in a place that wasn’t supposed to exist, a gap in the architecture of things, and you’re the only one who’s seen it. Like God looked away for a second and left the door open. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/19/nowhere/ Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/19/fuck-yeah-geek-girls/ I used to be into the obvious stuff. Pamela Anderson, Jenna Jameson, Carmen Electra—that trinity of blonde perfection everyone was supposed to want. Fake tits and empty heads, basically. The script I was handed before I knew I could write my own. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/19/fuck-yeah-geek-girls/ Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/17/clearing-out/ You accumulate things if you’re not careful. Guilt, numbness, small resentments that harden if you ignore them. The standard solutions are all garbage—religion, therapy, meditation retreats with overpriced juice. I made a mixtape instead. The Hundred in the Hands, Ellie Goulding, Sarah Jaffe. Artists who know how to move something through you that won’t budge on its own. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/17/clearing-out/ Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/16/julia-hafström/ There’s a particular type of beauty that comes out of Stockholm. Long legs, sharp cheekbones, the kind of symmetry that looks almost engineered. Hanna Håkansson, Lisa Olsson, Filippa Smed—you see their names in magazines and you think, right, of course she’s from Sweden. Julia Hafström fits the profile: discovered at fifteen with red hair and freckles, the kind of unusual detail that makes you marketable in an industry that usually wants you to look like everyone else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/16/julia-hafström/ Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/14/frankie-nazardo-end-of-the-world/ Frankie Nazardo, photographer out of London and Milan, spent a month in Kathmandu living with a street gang. Fifteen kids, all of them sniffing glue daily—enough that they’d stop recognizing each other, forgetting the names they’d been given. Kathmandu gets maybe eight hours of electricity a day before darkness takes over, and in that darkness is everything: the dealing, the sex work, the violence that doesn’t bother announcing itself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/14/frankie-nazardo-end-of-the-world/ Sun, 14 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/12/beckii-cruel-big-in-japan/ You used to need an actual industry to get famous. A manager, probably sleazy. You’d make a demo tape, send it to casting directors, presumably sleep with someone you shouldn’t. The whole machine. Now you need a cheap computer, a webcam, and an internet connection. If you’re a teenage girl with the right face, you can build a following before you’re old enough to vote. There’s a waiting audience of people with deeply specific interests, and the internet finally gave them a way to find each other. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/12/beckii-cruel-big-in-japan/ Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/9/that-party/ Berlin’s nightlife had become a collection of failures. Massive clubs where the air felt dead. Student nights that couldn’t hold a beat for more than two songs. Bars in courtyards masquerading as scenes. You’d walk in somewhere that used to matter and realize it was just gone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/9/that-party/ Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/8/donkeyboy-or-defending-pop/ Donkeyboy is a five-piece Norwegian pop band, and I feel compelled to say that plainly, without apology. Pop gets treated like it’s somehow beneath discussion, like anyone with actual taste would be elsewhere—guitar bands, electronic things, whatever the sanctioned sound is supposed to be this year. It’s reflexive now. The moment something becomes melodic and popular and refuses to hide about it, the entire apparatus of music criticism shows up to explain why it doesn’t matter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/8/donkeyboy-or-defending-pop/ Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/8/last-words/ You remember the exact phrasing when someone ends it. The way they stand or sit. The light in the room. Sometimes there’s a letter, sometimes it’s a phone call, sometimes they’re crying and sometimes they’re already moving on. This was early 2000s—you couldn’t just disappear, couldn’t ghost into silence. You had to actually tell someone it was over, which meant the words stuck with you for years. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/8/last-words/ Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/6/nerds-dont-party/ We went to Social Media Week in Berlin in 2010 thinking we’d see something important happening. What we actually found was what happens when people who are excellent at talking online try to exist in the same physical space. Turns out they don’t really know what to do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/6/nerds-dont-party/ Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/6/ella/ For twenty years I’ve been looking for someone who actually gets the chaos inside me, someone who can smoke through an entire plantation with me and then get wasted and stupid and reckless, someone who’ll make our first million with me and then just sit back multiplying the money, multiplying the DNA, multiplying the land. Found our own country. Evict Fox from his lake house. Watch the whole thing burn. That’s the fantasy anyway, and in theory it’s flawless, but in practice I haven’t found her yet, not unless you count that slightly off but still delicious cheeseburger, though every so often something happens that hits harder than any drug or chocolate bar could. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/6/ella/ Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/5/against-the-wall/ Fifteen hundred pieces or so across this notebook over the years, and what once felt like an endless supply of territory has started to look conspicuously thin. You write long enough and the pattern underneath becomes visible. The scaffolding shows. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/5/against-the-wall/ Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/4/jj/ JJ—Elin Kastlander and Joakim Benon—made bright synth pop at exactly the right moment in the late 2000s. Album “jj nº 3” with songs like “Into the Light.” Signed to Sincerely Yours and Secretly Canadian, toured with The xx. All the positioning correct: ABBA lineage, comparisons to La Roux, the whole apparatus of electronic pop working as designed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/4/jj/ Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/3/clean-split/ The obvious thing about forbidden drugs is how much sexier they become once they’re forbidden. You’re told in school that coke and LSD will destroy you, and somehow that makes them the most compelling thing in the world. Not because they’re actually good, but because the warning itself creates the wanting. That’s the structure of adolescence in any society that tries to prohibit things: the prohibition is the advertisement. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/3/clean-split/ Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/3/jasmin/ Jasmin was lightning. Shaved head and everywhere else, dressed like fury, the kind of punk who actually meant it—didn’t just listen to Slipknot and In Extremo and Knorkator but genuinely wanted to see the whole world burn in anarchist fire. She had a story about being raised by Romani, never got tired of telling it to anyone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/3/jasmin/ Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/1/summer-in-snow/ There’s something particularly grim about February Mondays. The snow stopped being interesting weeks ago—it’s accumulated, compacted, turned the color of concrete. You wake up and it’s still dark. The day ahead feels flat before it even starts. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/2/1/summer-in-snow/ Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/31/stadthunger-the-pretty-anger/ It was one of those summer days where the heat brands itself into your skin and the night doesn’t come. I was sitting with Eva somewhere near Prenzlauer Berg, working ice cubes to nothing with a straw while she watched the waiter move between tables, and she asked about Adam just to kill the silence. We hadn’t seen each other in years and honestly I didn’t care how his life was going. Then: “How’s Sina?” Something in me stopped. I knocked my cocktail to the floor. Not an accident—I watched it break on the concrete, the glass and fruit and liquid scatter, and I smiled. It felt necessary. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/31/stadthunger-the-pretty-anger/ Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/29/magazine-drift/ I still grab magazines. There’s something about it that screens don’t touch—the weight of them, the paper, the way you find things purely by accident because they’re right there on the page. You can’t stumble into anything on a laptop. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/29/magazine-drift/ Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/28/six-years-one-face/ Noah Kalina was the self-portrait guy. Six years of photographing himself every single day, same angle, same frame—watching his face age in video while everything else stays motionless. At some point the project circulated, became this thing everyone had seen. Celebrities wanted him to shoot them. The Simpsons made fun of it. That kind of moment happened. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/28/six-years-one-face/ Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/28/skins-turned-gray/ Met someone on a plane once who asked if I knew Skins. Three hours, and we barely came up for air—Tony and Michelle, Chris dying, then Effy and James and Freddie, this whole generation of kids who seemed ancient in their heads if not their faces. The show had this thing where it felt real, like you were watching actual teenagers in Bristol figure their lives out, but every so often it’d slip into something weirder, funnier, more impossible. A magic trick that worked because nobody was trying to sell it as magic. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/28/skins-turned-gray/ Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/27/still-works/ The Fettes Brot songs still work, years later. “Emanuela,” “Schwule Mädchen,” “Bettina, zieh dir bitte etwas an”—the kind that burrow into your head and don’t come out. Three guys from Hamburg made German hip-hop something crude and funny and alive, and they never stopped being good at it. Rektor Donz, König Boris, Schiffmeister. They sounded like friends talking to you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/27/still-works/ Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/27/its-an-ipad/ Apple’s figured out religion. Steve Jobs stands on a stage in his black turtleneck and speaks vaguely about changing everything, and it spreads through tech forums and Twitter like a virus that makes people give you money instead of making you sick. The remarkable thing is how little he actually has to say. What he doesn’t say works harder than what he does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/27/its-an-ipad/ Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/26/visible/ There’s a festival in Breda, Netherlands. Every October, people with red hair gather there—thousands of them, from everywhere. Bart Rouwenhorst started it because he believes they’re something special. Not just visually, though obviously that matters, but something deeper. They’re vulnerable, burn easily, got teased as kids. But they have this thing—intensity, will, something you can’t quite name. So he made a gathering for them. Four thousand people show up and stand in a room with others like them. People who otherwise feel like they’re the only one find out they’re not. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/26/visible/ Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/25/slowly-fading/ So the German government is working on some new internet law, and it’s basically going to kill everything about the German web that’s worth your time. At least that’s what happens if nobody stops them, which obviously nobody will. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/25/slowly-fading/ Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/22/when-it-clicks/ You find her on MySpace at some point in the middle of the night, probably scrolling past noise, and something catches. That synth, that voice. British, young, self-taught on guitar. The profile says Hereford, which means nothing, but it doesn’t matter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/22/when-it-clicks/ Fri, 22 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/21/fatale-femmes/ The photographs don’t try to seduce you. They just exist—bodies and dirt and light filtered through red glasses, everything shot with clarity and no apology. Petra Collins and Laura-Lynn Petrick work under Fatale Femmes and their images have this directness to them that comes from not caring much about what anyone thinks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/21/fatale-femmes/ Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/20/barely-anything-at-all/ Two weeks of Berlin gray and everyone looks like they’re about to ask for a blood donation. So naturally, Victoria’s Secret decides to sell a topless bikini—just two black straps and the rest of your hope that nobody’s mother is nearby. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/20/barely-anything-at-all/ Wed, 20 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/19/strawberry-blonde/ Some blog somewhere decided that “Redhead of the Week” was a format worth committing to, which is either the most specific taste or the most pointless thing anyone’s ever decided to do monthly. I think I respect it either way. One of the features was Anna Lutoskin, this Hungarian model born in Budapest in 1990. She had that strawberry-blonde thing going and these green-blue eyes that read immediately in photos, the kind of face that makes sense when you’re looking at it on a screen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/19/strawberry-blonde/ Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/16/kill-ugly-pop/ There’s a photographer named David Titlow whose work I keep coming back to. British guy, shoots fashion and culture—Vice, Elle Girl, those kinds of magazines. But the actual images are what matter. Everything in the frame coalesces into something completely imagined and simultaneously completely real: the styling, the atmosphere, the specific people who belong to that specific moment. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/16/kill-ugly-pop/ Sat, 16 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/15/first-time/ Larry Clark makes films by getting wrecked teenagers to destroy themselves on camera. Kids, his debut, is the one that cemented this approach—real kids, real sex, real cocaine, real collapse, with a script so thin it barely functions. Provocation as method, exploitation depending on who’s doing the judging, and I can’t unhear or unsee any of it, which I suspect was the entire point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/15/first-time/ Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/13/sympathy-for-the-hanged-man/ I was expecting The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus to be a beautiful wreck—the kind of film you watch out of curiosity after the actor dies before filming finishes. Heath Ledger was in the middle of it when he overdosed, and Gilliam somehow convinced Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law to rotate in and out to complete the role. By all logic it should have fallen apart. Instead, Gilliam made a film where reality shifts between actors in dream sequences, and it feels less like damage control than like the actual shape of the thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/13/sympathy-for-the-hanged-man/ Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/12/nataliya-pirozhkova/ I kept coming back to a Nataliya Pirozhkova photograph from Vanity Fair. Ukrainian model, early twenties, red hair in that copper shade that photographs differently than regular auburn. Blue eyes. There’s something about it that cameras seem to understand immediately, without needing explanation. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/12/nataliya-pirozhkova/ Tue, 12 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/11/feet/ I found personal ads in the newspaper as a kid—older guys advertising for young girls, offering money to lick their feet. Reading through those words did something to me. My eyes got wider, my stomach tighter. Where I guess some people were turned on, I just felt queasy. Threw the paper across the room and walked out. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/11/feet/ Mon, 11 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/6/everyday-is-like-sunday/ I was obsessed with photography as a kid and there were plenty of photographers I loved, but Terry Richardson’s work hit different. I was in New York at some point and decided I had to work with him, so I called his studio every single day for a year until he finally broke and said yes. Working with him taught me more than just how to light a face or frame a shot—it was how to actually be with someone when you’re photographing them, how to keep things loose and easy so the work can breathe. I owe him everything. We’re still friends. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/6/everyday-is-like-sunday/ Wed, 06 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/3/where-the-rich-kids-come-to-die/ Most songs you dismiss on first listen. You hear something and some instinct says not for you, and you’re gone. But then something shifts. You’re going through it—heartbreak, anger, 3 AM staring at the ceiling—and a song comes through your speakers that just gets it. You reach for it again and again. Before long it’s not just playing, it’s there with you, marking those moments with something that won’t leave. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/3/where-the-rich-kids-come-to-die/ Sun, 03 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/1/2010/ It’s New Year in 2010. You wake up with whatever’s left of your hangover and the realization that you’ve somehow made it into the future. The year itself has mythology attached to it—terrible predictions, secret prophecies, all the usual garbage people attach to dates. You start asking the big stupid questions: what’ll happen? What’ll break? Who are you going to ruin? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2010/1/1/2010/ Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/31/kiss-2009-away/ 2009 was the year I got drunk and ran through the city with a camera asking people stupid questions. Somehow nobody hit me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/31/kiss-2009-away/ Thu, 31 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/29/fuck-new-years-eve/ I’ve waited in bars at 11:59, certain this was the year—this was finally going to be it. Midnight hits, everyone screams, I feel the same as I did at 11:58. Hungrier for something to happen, but nothing does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/29/fuck-new-years-eve/ Tue, 29 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/25/kid-with-a-camera/ You hand a camera to a random teenager and the worst-case scenario writes itself: kids documenting each other’s violence, their cruelties, their stupidities, all rendered sharper and faster than anyone wants to see. That’s the thing people worry about. That’s what you’d expect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/25/kid-with-a-camera/ Fri, 25 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/24/when-every-company-wanted-to-be-vice/ There was a moment when every tech company thought becoming cool meant hiring VICE and building a platform with indie musicians. Vodafone 360 was theirs. They found their heroes: Lily Allen, La Roux, Peaches. In times of economic crisis and environmental collapse, obviously these were the figures who mattered. Not firefighters. Not nurses. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/24/when-every-company-wanted-to-be-vice/ Thu, 24 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/24/keeping-score/ Christmas with your family is basically a game where everyone acts out their worst impulses and you’re just sitting there watching it happen. You might as well score points for the carnage. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/24/keeping-score/ Thu, 24 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/20/worth-following/ The internet in 2009 was mostly garbage - endless blogs about nothing, lies, people posting about their shopping and TV shows like it mattered. But there were a few with actual substance going on. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/20/worth-following/ Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/16/born-into-it/ Coco Sumner’s got the look exactly—Sting’s face, 19 years old, the genetic download that makes the connection impossible to miss. She’s in a band called “I Blame Coco,” pursuing music and modeling and acting the way you can when you’re born into that kind of family. She and Robyn made a track called “Cesar” together and the video is genuinely hot, which is either a mark in her favor or just what happens when you have unlimited resources and collaborate with someone as good as Robyn. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/16/born-into-it/ Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/16/stop-time/ Envy is such a stupid habit. When the bald guy next door gets a car, suddenly I need one that’s shinier and faster and probably blue. Someone else’s girlfriend is prettier and I’m obsessed with finding someone thinner with bigger tits. You want what other people have—it’s automatic, it’s dumb, it never stops. I’m not usually that guy, honestly. I don’t lose sleep over it. Except for specific things. Someone takes the last sushi plate before I get there. The fat guy at the theater has a buttered jumbo popcorn while I’m stuck with small. Some other dude makes my girlfriend come when I haven’t managed it in months. That one actually gets under my skin. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/16/stop-time/ Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/15/sasha-grey/ For years the porn industry was drowning in a single template—blonde, vapid, surgically inflated, with the sexual authenticity of a doll. The audience was drifting to amateur sites where at least the pretense was dropped. The old guard was panicking. Then Sasha Grey arrived, and the entire machinery flipped. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/15/sasha-grey/ Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/15/what-spektor-does/ We showed up at Huxley’s Neue Welt with that typical Berlin crowd—money mixed with nothing, construction workers next to people in tech. Jenny Owen Youngs was opening, earnest guitar stuff, but everyone was there for Spektor. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/15/what-spektor-does/ Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/14/the-soundtrack-to-2009/ By the time 2009 wound down I had more albums I couldn’t stop playing than I had weeks to listen to them. The year had been full of that kind of music - the kind that grabs you and doesn’t let go. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/14/the-soundtrack-to-2009/ Mon, 14 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/13/one-night/ A long relationship wraps around you. You know how someone moves, what makes them come, where everything goes. There’s this ease to it because you actually know them—their body, what works, what doesn’t. Over years the sex gets better because there’s no mystery left, just trust and the ability to completely lose yourself. It’s warm. It’s deep. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/13/one-night/ Sun, 13 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/12/what-sticks/ Every year in late November, right before the full Christmas assault hits, you reach this point where your brain’s already half-checked out but everyone else is suddenly an expert on what’s in and what’s out. What matters right now, culturally speaking. What you should care about. The lists pile up—trend predictions, year-end roundups, hot takes—and somewhere in there you’re supposed to figure out what you actually think. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/12/what-sticks/ Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/11/how-to-destroy-a-blog/ You notice it everywhere—the ugliest websites are usually the most successful. MySpace, before they destroyed it. Facebook. YouTube. Google. Wikipedia. Something about an obscene design makes people invest more time in it, put more emotion into the space. The ugliness matches the person using it, maybe. Or maybe it just doesn’t matter what it looks like. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/11/how-to-destroy-a-blog/ Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/10/the-pull/ Started when I was thirteen, shooting black and white film at school. Nothing professional, just something to do. Then my grandfather died and left me his 35mm camera, and everything changed. I was obsessed—rolling through film, developing it in the darkroom, the whole ritual of it. I spent afternoons in there as a kid and loved every second. I haven’t been in a darkroom in years now and I don’t miss it, but something about that patience stuck with me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/10/the-pull/ Thu, 10 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/10/pig-seeking-cleaner/ I’m basically a pig. I mean that literally - I live like one. Beer bottles, dirty socks breeding under furniture, bananas rotting into something unidentifiable on the kitchen counter, dishes that have achieved sentience through sheer neglect. And I’m okay with it. The mess is comfortable. It’s the natural state when you live alone and don’t care. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/10/pig-seeking-cleaner/ Thu, 10 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/9/drowning-on-camera/ Pete Doherty got drunk in Berlin and smashed a parked car with a beer bottle. When nothing happened—when the car just stayed there dented and he stayed there stupid—passersby called the cops. He slept it off at the station. It’s a pretty perfect metaphor for what Pete’s been doing for the last decade. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/9/drowning-on-camera/ Wed, 09 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/9/in-frame/ Lindsay Lohan’s been absent long enough that when you actually see her again, it lands different. And when it’s in explicit work—a shoot for Muse Magazine with photographer Yu Tsai, full sex scenes, graphic and direct—the shock hits harder. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/9/in-frame/ Wed, 09 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/8/the-american-thing/ There’s something almost primal about the impulse to mock America. Before language, before tools, before we figured out fire, some ancestor was already sitting around complaining about whatever the American equivalent was back then—the fat, the excess, the inexplicable confidence, the way they’ll invade anyone for any reason. It’s a hobby that runs deep. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/8/the-american-thing/ Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/7/wrong-turn-at-the-velodrom/ We took a wrong turn somewhere near the Velodrom—Berlin, 2009, some T-Mobile skateboarding event. The elevator near Block 32 brought us backstage, and when security saw the camera they just decided we belonged there. No resistance, no checking, just let us through into somewhere we had no business being. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/7/wrong-turn-at-the-velodrom/ Mon, 07 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/6/making-art-together/ Jordan Carroll and Katie Cooper photograph each other, their friends, their corner of Manchester - the rainbows above the house, the spider in the bushes, the sleeping cat. They’re the kind of photographers who actually notice what’s around them. You can feel it in the images. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/6/making-art-together/ Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/6/speed-again/ There’s a specific high you get from a racing game where everything works. You nail the line, the car does what you tell it, and for a few seconds you’re perfect at something. I remembered that feeling recently after a boozy night with friends, after years of not caring much about racing games at all. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/6/speed-again/ Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/5/vogue-takes-a-selfie/ Vogue ran this editorial—Italian Vogue, December—with supermodels taking selfies. Steven Meisel shot it, but it’s staged to look like they’re just documenting their morning. Gisele Bündchen, Abbey Lee, Naomi Campbell in their underwear at the mirror, eating bananas, smoking, talking about their bodies the way you talk about yourself online. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/5/vogue-takes-a-selfie/ Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/5/wii-night-casualties/ My apartment smelled like the annual AA convention had just wrapped up. Looked like Ozzy Osbourne got bored one afternoon and decided to systematically destroy everything in it. That’s what happens when you invite a bunch of nerds, a few perpetual children, and somebody’s ex, hand them a stack of Wii games, and keep cracking fresh beers every time the conversation dies. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/5/wii-night-casualties/ Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/4/when-the-lights-fell/ I got invited to a record store music event in Berlin for some network’s big behind-the-scenes thing. The kind of invitation designed to make you feel like you’re part of something, with a logo printed on it that probably meant something to someone. All I remember is the free currywurst and the cameras. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/4/when-the-lights-fell/ Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/3/two-ear-chicks/ I went to the premiere of Zweiohrkuken—Til Schweiger’s sequel to Keinohrhasen—already knowing what I wanted to get out of it. Nora Tschirner gets naked in this one, and her breasts have gotten substantially larger than they were before. I’m not subtle about this and I won’t pretend otherwise. That detail alone would’ve been enough for me to show up, but I decided to actually pay attention to the rest of the film too. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/3/two-ear-chicks/ Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/3/merlin-in-berlin/ Merlin Bronques came through Berlin last weekend. Still a musician, still the way I remember him except darker, rougher. He made the underground rounds and pulled the hottest women, the craziest men, the smallest cocks—everything raw and explicit—straight into his camera. Three photo sets dropped: Undergrund, Kit Kat, Europeans Are Free. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/3/merlin-in-berlin/ Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/2/speed-dating/ Some nights you show up to talk about serious shit and end up wasted at a döner restaurant toasting to love and someone’s mom. This was one of those. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/12/2/speed-dating/ Wed, 02 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/30/back-on-the-wii/ I somehow got a Nintendo Wii. The details don’t matter much—some combination of bad impulses and dumb luck—but there it was, this white console on the shelf, a controller that looked like it should be turning channels on a television set. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/30/back-on-the-wii/ Mon, 30 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/30/kohei-yoshiyuki/ When I was maybe twelve, the neighbor across the street showered at seven every night with the curtains completely open. My uncle gave me binoculars for Christmas—nice ones—and for a couple years, seven o’clock was the only moment that made my days worth anything. Everything else was just background. I wasn’t thinking about what I was doing in any real way. It was just want, and proximity. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/30/kohei-yoshiyuki/ Mon, 30 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/29/effy/ The thing about watching Kaya Scodelario play Effy is that you see her do something most actors spend their whole careers learning. She’s just there—present in a way that feels natural, this cool distance that doesn’t perform itself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/29/effy/ Sun, 29 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/28/tegan-and-sara-at-astra/ You don’t say no to Tegan and Sara. Thursday night I grabbed Sara and headed to Astra Berlin. The place was packed—Tokyo Hotel haircuts, girls all over each other, the coat check line stretching forever. One thing was obvious right away: those two Canadian sisters aren’t indie weirdos anymore. The mainstream has them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/28/tegan-and-sara-at-astra/ Sat, 28 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/28/every-december/ Every December, AMY&PINK would do the awards. Man of the Year, Girl of the Year, Best Unique Design, and a few others. If you were blogging, you’d see the call. You could throw your name in if you wanted to. It felt ridiculous when I did it, but I did it anyway, because someone might notice what I’d made. That felt important. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/28/every-december/ Sat, 28 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/27/december-at-the-velodrome/ The velodrome in Berlin, December 2009 - some T-Mobile-sponsored extreme sports show that had no business working. Corporate money and street culture don’t usually mix well, but the lineup they put together was solid. Pierre-Luc Gagnon, some of the best European skateboarders, and for music they booked Deichkind and Blumentopf, which seemed completely incongruous until it actually didn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/27/december-at-the-velodrome/ Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/25/teenage-witchery/ The photographs I’m most interested in look like actual life happened in them. Not the polished stuff—no makeup, no practiced expressions, no distance. I want pictures that smell like smoke and bad decisions, where you can see exhaustion and recklessness competing on someone’s face. They work because nobody was trying. You can stare at them and disappear into the moment, convince yourself for a while that you were actually there instead of wherever you really are. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/25/teenage-witchery/ Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/24/chris-heads/ I somehow never wrote about Chris Heads here, and that’s a real gap. The guy is a photographer. Shot for Vanity Fair, Elle, Glamour. Photographed Kylie Minogue, Kelis, Devon Aoki. Works between Milan and Paris, represented by New Blood. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/24/chris-heads/ Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/23/the-drunk-mixtape/ The daily grind wears you down. Incompetent coworkers, some boss coming apart at the seams, the guy driving the bus just went through a divorce and stopped caring who he takes down with him. You’re fighting through it with whatever love and warmth you can still muster, and people are using it against you—misunderstanding you, resenting you, jealous that you still have some nerve, some directness, some ability to not completely fold. After enough of that, there’s only one reasonable response: get yourself properly, monumentally drunk. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/23/the-drunk-mixtape/ Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/22/hermann-i-have-the-power/ Running a blog long enough, you see what people actually search for. The queries come through your analytics like an unfiltered confession. Most of it is catastrophically horny. Some of it is broken in ways you don’t want to examine. All of it is real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/22/hermann-i-have-the-power/ Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/21/not-enough-hours/ I’m stressed enough that English doesn’t have a word for it anymore. Not that we need one—stress is stress, and I’ve got it in every possible concentration. The problem isn’t the stress itself. The problem is that a day is twenty-four hours and everything I need to do requires about forty-eight. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/21/not-enough-hours/ Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/21/the-lindsay-years/ I watched Mean Girls opening weekend and spent the next few years thinking about Lindsay Lohan in ways I probably shouldn’t admit. That face, the body, the confidence in how she moved through scenes—she was just doing her job, but something about her did the work on you. Every guy I knew felt it. It wasn’t complicated. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/21/the-lindsay-years/ Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/20/perfect-himmelblau-breit/ Three old guys in a nursing home, shuffling around in bathrobes. One’s dozing on the couch. You watch for a few seconds before the faces click—Rod, Farin, Bela B. The Ärzte. They’ve been Germany’s best punk band for forty years, and now they’re in a facility dealing with the basic logistics of aging: staff helping them move, meals on schedule, the strange peace that comes with not being anyone anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/20/perfect-himmelblau-breit/ Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/19/the-madness-of-your-voice/ A blonde girl asked me if I was satisfied with my life, holding my hand as we walked through dead Berlin streets. No wind, no sound, no one around. War had silenced everything, burned the houses to ash. I looked up at the sky. Couldn’t answer, couldn’t think. White clouds on blue drifting over the ruins like they’d won something. How alive these streets used to be. How no one survived the endless night. My body was buried somewhere under this rubble. Forever. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/19/the-madness-of-your-voice/ Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/19/i-like-to-fork-myself/ Daul Kim, 20, Korean model. Photographs in i-D, Dazed & Confused, Vogue, Russian Vogue—the real thing, not decoration. Then she jumped off a building in Paris. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/19/i-like-to-fork-myself/ Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/17/papier-mache/ Most children’s magazines are garbage. They fall into three categories, all of them bad. First are the commercial ones crammed with product placement—cards, toys, whatever gets kids begging their parents for money. Second are the ones pretending to educate while pushing some ideology the publisher believes in. Third, worst of all, aren’t even for kids—they’re instruction manuals for parents on how to raise children properly. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/17/papier-mache/ Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/17/not-about-tits/ Carlos Nunez is twenty-eight, lives in Los Angeles, and has organized his life around photographing nude women. That’s not a side project—it’s the through-line. Beach days, forest walks, drives through California. All of it serves the same purpose. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/17/not-about-tits/ Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/16/game-boy-musician/ Every kid in the ’90s knew that grey brick for what it was—a window into worlds that made no sense on first look. I’d sit by the pool with greasy fries, that Game Boy in my hands, and the rest of the world disappeared. “Super Mario Land,” “Link’s Awakening,” “Pokémon.” The graphics were barely pixels, the sound was more chirp than music, but somehow that’s what made it matter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/16/game-boy-musician/ Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/16/the-new-guy/ Opposite-sex friendships are a lie people keep telling themselves. Everyone wants to believe you can just be friends, that desire isn’t sitting underneath every moment, waiting. But it always is. One of you is always hoping the other will crack, and what starts as stupid wrestling around becomes lingering touches, what’s supposed to stay light gets heavy with meaning. When the guy finally tells her how he feels, she doesn’t want him back, and that’s it—the whole thing is wrecked and he gets to spend years trying to put himself back together. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/16/the-new-guy/ Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/15/anarchy-apartmento/ Mari Kojima’s photos show you things that don’t look polished. A friend’s bleeding nose. Naked bodies that aren’t in the business of being sexy. People at the end of a long night. There’s something fearless about it, or maybe just honest—the distinction gets thin when you’re pointing a camera at the actually-real instead of the made-for-camera. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/15/anarchy-apartmento/ Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/15/before-they-signed/ I found Freelance Whales by accident, clicking through something or other online, not even looking for them. One of those discoveries that only happens when you’re not searching for it, where you stumble into something and suddenly can’t imagine how you lived without hearing it. A song called Hannah started playing and I just stopped what I was doing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/15/before-they-signed/ Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/13/sleep-with-your-neighbor/ The thing nobody really talks about is that music matters for sex in a way that nothing else does. A good song becomes part of what’s happening—not background, fuel. A bad song destroys everything instantly. You can tell in the first thirty seconds. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/13/sleep-with-your-neighbor/ Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/12/never-edited/ Action figures crowded every surface. Sneakers in colors that shouldn’t exist. SpongeBob everywhere. I saw Yasumasa Yonehara’s apartment on The Selby and I wanted everything he had. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/12/never-edited/ Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/12/no-overlap/ Pikachu was cool when I was fifteen and so were my friends, and we truly believed it would last. We had something real under all the idiocy—Super Smash Bros marathons that went until dawn, group chats that felt important, the absolute certainty that someone would pick up the phone at three in the morning. You don’t question it at that age. You just know it’s permanent. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/12/no-overlap/ Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/11/bang-bang-berlin-goes-live/ I remember “Bang Bang Berlin” as words getting passed around at the Scala party—one of those concepts floating through the noise and cheap beer, mentioned in passing between stickers and whatever came next. It sounded like something that might exist someday, or might not. But it actually happened. The website launched recently, and it’s a guide to Berlin and all the different scenes moving through the city. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/11/bang-bang-berlin-goes-live/ Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/10/living-on-beer/ Can you actually live on nothing but beer? It’s the kind of stupid question that sticks with you once someone mentions it. I went down a rabbit hole trying to find the answer. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/10/living-on-beer/ Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/10/bad-romance/ The “Bad Romance” video is burning white rooms and unsettling makeup and Gaga refusing to blink or break character for a single second. The song is mostly “Oh-oh-oh” and “Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah” with some nonsense about wanting drama and kisses in the sand. It’s the kind of hook that shouldn’t work but does, because she commits so hard to it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/10/bad-romance/ Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/10/not-mainstream/ I’ve never been mainstream. It goes back to kindergarten—I was doing things in the doll corner that belonged after midnight, things my three friends weren’t doing. If I could make people from scratch, I’d make everyone even more different from each other, at least in character and taste. I believe in world peace and in helping mean-spirited people learn to relax. Men who think they can’t wear purple because they’re men irritate me. I hate those man-woman clichés. Women drive Formula 1 cars, men love shoes, men can be as creative as women. Football does nothing for me. I love kissing on park benches and watching stuffy mustache guys get uncomfortable. Really I’m just trying to show people a better way to live. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/10/not-mainstream/ Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/9/the-darkroom/ There’s something funny about falling in love with photography in a darkroom while making out with a crush. Sarah Small was 13 at some art camp in Washington D.C. when this happened—the kiss was forgettable, the medium wasn’t. She got a Pentax K1000 not long after and started wandering the city with it, shooting everything. Her sister Rachel, red-haired and freckled, became her first real subject, whether she wanted to be or not. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/9/the-darkroom/ Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/9/the-right-collision/ Most women bore me inside five minutes. I don’t know what it is—maybe it’s that they’re not thinking about anything worth thinking about, or maybe I’m just impossible. But I can’t do the conversation where someone’s talking about their hair or their breakup or wherever they live, and you’re sitting there wondering if jumping out the window would be rude. I need someone smart enough to be interesting and crude enough to be honest about what’s going on between us. Or at minimum, someone who knows what they’re doing physically. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/9/the-right-collision/ Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/7/winter-mixtape-burn-down-the-snow/ Winter’s coming on fast. The temperature’s dropping by the day, the first snow’s already fallen, and you can feel the season shifting into something cold and tight. There’s this strange energy when the world locks down like this—new people show up, new decisions get made, everything feels urgent because it’s getting dark earlier. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/7/winter-mixtape-burn-down-the-snow/ Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/6/the-afterparty/ Katy Perry in impossible clothes, Foo Fighters shaking the O2 in Berlin, Green Day setting the stage on fire—that was the MTV Europe Music Awards last night, and I was in the crowd. The Hoff wandered out and mumbled something weighty into the microphone. Miranda Cosgrove handed an award to Beyoncé, which apparently Kanye West deserved some credit for. The whole thing had this odd momentum where some moments actually landed and others died right in front of you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/6/the-afterparty/ Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/5/free-watches/ Showed up to some G-Shock thing at the Admiralspalast because free drinks and celebrities sounded reasonable. The wristbands they handed out were white plastic and absurd, but everyone wore one, so I grabbed mine and headed straight for the vodka. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/11/5/free-watches/ Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/31/raised-on-everything/ I grew up saying goodbye in Spanish and Italian, waking up to Japanese pop music. My closest friends were kids of immigrants, refugee families, Germans who’d thought beyond their own borders. Their food on the table, their holidays in my calendar, their entire way of seeing the world bleeding into how I understood things. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/31/raised-on-everything/ Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/30/like-an-indie-song/ I fall for people like this: free in ways that feel like they don’t need anything from anyone, moving through the world like they’re floating above it. And I tell myself they’ll stay for me, that I’ll be different, that I’m the one who finally anchors them. It never works. One of you always wants more. One of you is always waiting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/30/like-an-indie-song/ Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/29/hannah-at-22/ I’d been running this blog for years before Hannah showed up, and the difference was immediate. Not because the blog was bad before—it wasn’t—but because she had this thing where she could pull music and feeling out of nowhere and make you care about it. She’d send something over and it would be exactly right, smart and weird and funny all at once. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/29/hannah-at-22/ Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/29/natasha-khan-in-a-box/ There’s that moment in the middle of a concert where you stop thinking about yourself entirely. It happened somewhere in the middle of Bat for Lashes’ set at Fritz Club last night, when I realized that Natasha Khan—all five feet of her, moving across the stage like someone conducting a séance—had managed to make me feel like I was the only person in the room. Not in a flattering way. In a way that made me understand why people do stupid things. Why they write letters they never send. Why they imagine scenarios that would definitely be crimes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/29/natasha-khan-in-a-box/ Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/28/that-november-in-berlin/ There was this moment in 2009 when MTV was still enough of a thing that they’d fly everyone to Berlin for the Europe Music Awards and somehow manage to book Katy Perry, Green Day, and Shakira on the same stage at the O2 World. Looking back, it feels like a specific collision of pop culture moments that could only have happened then—not early enough to be retro, not recent enough to matter, but exactly at the point where everything felt possible if you were paying attention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/28/that-november-in-berlin/ Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/23/green-hair/ VICE knows exactly what I need, and they nail it every month. Prostitutes, good music, breathtaking photography—not as separate things, but as one system that only works because they’re inseparable. They get that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/23/green-hair/ Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/22/whod-have-known/ Lily Allen comes back with a video where she kidnaps Elton John because apparently she’s in love with him. The song is “Who’d Have Known?” and it’s actually good, which is better than I expected. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/22/whod-have-known/ Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/22/nerd-dreams/ Japan keeps firing on all cylinders and I’m here for it. This week alone there’s enough weird, brilliant stuff to make heads spin. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/22/nerd-dreams/ Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/21/marina-and-the-diamonds-mowglis-road/ I kept mixing up Florence and the Machine with Marina and the Diamonds. My friend wouldn’t stop talking about catching Florence at the Berlin show, and I’d nod along picturing the wrong band—one I actually liked more, if I’m being honest. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/21/marina-and-the-diamonds-mowglis-road/ Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/21/mtv-berlin/ I got to the MTV Europe Music Awards in Berlin that November. Shakira, The Veronicas, Tokio Hotel—decent lineup for that moment. It’s one of those events where the spectacle matters more than the music, where the whole point is just being in the room and watching the industry do its thing. Cold night, crowded venue, everyone trying to look important. I remember feeling like I was watching something that meant everything for a few hours and nothing the day after. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/21/mtv-berlin/ Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/18/lykke-li-returns/ Youth Novels got under my skin. I can’t fully explain it—the album understood what I was going through, made sense of the wanting and the restlessness. I wore it out. That record still shapes how I hear everything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/18/lykke-li-returns/ Sun, 18 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/18/what-you-dont-know/ The people around you would be half as interesting if you knew everything about them. Why does Bjorn never talk about his mother? Where does Annika disappear to every Wednesday night? Why does Peter lose his mind every time someone says “flashlight”—just walks out of the room, mad? You ask and you get nothing. A shrug, subject change. Nice weather, huh. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/18/what-you-dont-know/ Sun, 18 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/17/icarly-gets-it/ I could watch iCarly constantly and never get tired of it, which is weird to say about a children’s show but it’s the most honest thing on television about how the internet actually works. Every self-appointed guru selling the secret to online fame is full of shit. Three teenagers on Nickelodeon figured it out better than any consultant with a publishing deal ever will. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/17/icarly-gets-it/ Sat, 17 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/17/all-children-of-this-earth/ I didn’t know Bruce Berger until I read about this song. German pop music doesn’t typically reach me—there’s usually something about the earnestness that puts distance between us. But looking into “Alle Kinder dieser Erde,” I found out he’s made a completely straightforward global anthem about protecting the planet and the kids on it, about corruption and hatred and environmental collapse. No clever angles, no irony buffer. He’s just trying. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/17/all-children-of-this-earth/ Sat, 17 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/16/the-ones-worth-reading/ You’d be scrolling at two in the morning, falling into some random blog about fashion or hip-hop or art, and then suddenly you’re three hours deep in a stranger’s obsession. They cared about this one thing—the way clothes draped, some lyric that moved them, how to build something that hadn’t existed before. They’d written about it like it mattered because to them it did. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/16/the-ones-worth-reading/ Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/15/berlin-november/ Amanda Blank, Lady Sovereign, and Bugati Force came through the Admiralspalast in November 2009 for the G-Shock Shock The World Tour. Sara and I were planning to go. Berlin had these events if you paid attention—electronic and hip-hop acts that actually mattered. The kind of cold night where you wanted to be moving, dancing, anywhere but standing still. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/15/berlin-november/ Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/14/the-only-thing-that-works/ Everything’s broken in ways that don’t need explaining anymore. I keep reaching for the belief that things will work out, that I’m just telling myself lies in the worst direction, and then something happens that can’t be fixed and the belief cracks. I hit the ground. I bleed. I lose what’s left of the light I was holding onto. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/14/the-only-thing-that-works/ Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/14/sex-with-the-ex/ The weird thing about an ex is that your body remembers theirs. You’ve spent months, sometimes years, learning the exact angle and pressure and rhythm—the wordless communication that comes from being inside someone’s life and skin. You know what they want without asking. You know how to make them finish in three minutes or drag it out until they’re begging. That’s not nothing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/14/sex-with-the-ex/ Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/12/the-fountain-of-youth/ “The Fountain of Youth” hooks you immediately. That melody follows you through the day, shows up on the toilet at 6 a.m., probably invades your dreams at night too. Boy Crisis, the New York band, released it last week as the lead single from their debut album “Tulipomania.” The references are obvious: MGMT, Empire of the Sun, Klaxons, that whole nu-rave thing mixed with 80s and 90s energy. That’s the kind of stuff that had people dancing hard on Berlin floors all summer. Five guys—Tal, Alex, Victor, Lee, and Owen—figured out a formula that works, or at least how to make it feel familiar enough to stick. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/12/the-fountain-of-youth/ Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/12/dont-be-yesterday/ The fear isn’t missing what’s good—it’s being behind. Being the person who still cares about what everyone’s already moved past, who hasn’t updated their taste in time. That’s what drives lists like this. Monthly reports on what matters, what you should drop before someone notices you still care about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/12/dont-be-yesterday/ Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/11/veni-vidi-tumblr/ A week after we launched this Tumblr thing, it’s already number one in Germany. Rainy Sunday and I’m sitting here looking at the numbers trying to make sense of it. We filled it with crude content—mostly breasts, mostly things moving, mostly the kind of garbage that shouldn’t translate to any kind of success. But apparently it does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/11/veni-vidi-tumblr/ Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/11/i-want-a-mini-pig/ I used to think pet ownership was cruelty. Animals packed into tiny cages, aquariums barely bigger than a shoebox, fish bowls, birds with clipped wings, dogs chained in a space smaller than a closet. Instead of forests they got sofas. Instead of oceans they got someone’s arm. It was wrong. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/11/i-want-a-mini-pig/ Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/9/the-searches-vol-9/ We had an anniversary coming up, and apparently that’s when the search queries got genuinely feral. I’ve been running this search-log series long enough to develop a feel for baseline weird—the kind of thing where you see it and think “yeah, okay, that tracks.” But this batch, Vol. 9, felt like a departure. Someone searched for “sex with an amputated leg.” Someone wanted advice on bestiality. Someone was very interested in a German TV host naked. It was like the barrier had dropped. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/9/the-searches-vol-9/ Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/9/nothing-like-before/ I memorized every game that came my way as a kid. Sonic, Zelda, Final Fantasy—I had the pixel layouts down, the enemy patterns, the secret exits. I could hear any soundtrack and know exactly where in the game it belonged. The magazines helped, the guidebooks helped, calling a friend who’d gotten further helped. The internet didn’t exist, so you just had to live inside these games for weeks until you understood them completely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/9/nothing-like-before/ Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/9/three-minutes/ Prinz Pi—Friedrich Kautz from Berlin, also known as Prinz Porno—has never made apologies for what he makes music about. His video for “3 Minuten” is him doing exactly what you’d expect: scenes of drinking, fucking, partying, the whole crude machinery that feels like living when you’re young enough to believe it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/9/three-minutes/ Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/8/mickey/ Disney is evil. Not in a fun, exaggerated way—evil in the way that most large institutions are evil. NDAs that keep employees quiet. Control mechanisms. A business model built on conditioning people’s emotional expectations. It works especially well on girls. They absorb the princess narratives young enough that it becomes structural. Later, they expect their actual relationships to match what Disney taught them, which is impossible. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/8/mickey/ Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/6/death-and-its-friends/ Losing someone you love does something to you that you can’t prepare for, no matter how much you’ve thought about it or told yourself that you understand mortality is coming for everyone. Everyone who’s felt it knows that specific helplessness—the moment they’re just gone, the door they won’t walk through again, and suddenly you’re standing in this fast, indifferent world alone. It breaks something inside you. Grief doesn’t heal. It settles like a chronic illness that never quite leaves your body. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/6/death-and-its-friends/ Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/6/soko-magazine/ Found Soko Magazine online a few years back—a Buenos Aires digital publication with photography worth actually looking at. The second issue had Elly Jackson from La Roux just existing on the page in that way she does, like smiling would be beneath her. Nirrimi Joy Hakanson’s photographs, all natural light, no studio setup needed. Work from Jonathan Leder, Manolo Campion, other photographers with actual taste. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/6/soko-magazine/ Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/5/no-party-for-you/ Being sick means you get to stay in bed all day, which sounds perfect until you realize you’re completely trapped. You’re locked in your room while everyone else is out having an actual weekend—drinking, sleeping with people, feeling like something’s happening. I was stuck at home with tissues and bad television and a refrigerator that kept mocking me with its full shelves. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/5/no-party-for-you/ Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/4/what-matters/ Sex is the breeding algorithm nature designed—mechanical, optimized to produce healthy offspring through appearance and scent and social position. Nothing outside of food and sleep should theoretically matter more. But humans have never been content with what nature gives us, and we’ve taken this straightforward biological imperative and buried it under layers of fantasy and complication. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/4/what-matters/ Sun, 04 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/4/skin-in-the-game/ There’s something about seeing famous people completely naked that makes you stop and pay attention, which is probably exactly why Marc Jacobs got Milla Jovovich, Heidi Klum, and Dita Von Tease to pose this way for t-shirts. Thirty-five dollars a shirt. All the money goes to the NYU Cancer Institute. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/4/skin-in-the-game/ Sun, 04 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/3/pop-the-glock/ I was completely hung up on Uffie before I moved to Berlin. Just stupid with it, the kind of infatuation that makes you mishear lyrics—I thought “Pop The Glock” was literally about fucking a clock. The song stuck in my head, breathy and hypnotic, and I couldn’t shake it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/3/pop-the-glock/ Sat, 03 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/3/when-the-internet-ends/ I’m a junkie. Not for drugs or alcohol or cigarettes—got over all that years ago. My new and old addiction is the internet. The inspiration, information, the independence of it all. More addictive than everything else combined, and it puts me to sleep happy with my laptop in my arms. The real rush is getting inside people’s heads and somehow making money off it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/3/when-the-internet-ends/ Sat, 03 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/2/unfiltered/ You know what’s weird about taste? People compartmentalize it. There’s the stuff you’re supposed to like—the art, the photography, the “inspiring” things—and then there’s everything else you actually look at. The naked people. The crude jokes. The photographs that would get you fired if your boss saw them on your screen. So I thought, why separate them? Start a Tumblr and just dump it all in one place. The beautiful and the horny and the irreverent stuff mixed together, because that’s actually how taste works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/2/unfiltered/ Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/1/viktor-vauthier/ I was maybe thirteen when I decided the ideal career was photographing naked women. Found a Playboy with Nina Bott in it—I remember her, remember being eighteen inside my own body—and that was it. The plan seemed obvious: get a camera, get someone beautiful to remove their clothes, hit the button. Never happened. No money for equipment, hands too shaky around an attractive naked person, and nobody wanted to cooperate anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/1/viktor-vauthier/ Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/1/autumn-mixtape/ The window tells you what’s happened: summer’s gone south and left you with rain and cold creeping in quietly. I caught a flu from someone I mostly know through a phone now—that’s how viruses travel these days. Suddenly I’m stuck inside, fever and too much tea with honey, the kind of sick where hours move strange. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/10/1/autumn-mixtape/ Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/30/just-looking/ The internet only works because of pictures. Everyone knows that. Kittens, kids, Elvis—fine. But if you’re being honest, there’s one subject that’s moved through every culture, every generation, without any resistance: photographs of girls. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/30/just-looking/ Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/29/fever-dreams/ You wake up around three in the morning soaked through, heart hammering, and for a few seconds you don’t know where you are. Your brain has been making a film that breaks every rule of logic, and it always will. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/29/fever-dreams/ Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/29/lost-souls/ Some people seem to have gotten lucky at birth. They look good, they do work they actually care about, they’re in solid relationships, and they can pick whoever they want from their circle depending on the occasion—someone for sports, someone for going out, someone for a movie. You look closer and all you find is more luck: love for life, understanding, hope that barely dents under pressure. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/29/lost-souls/ Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/28/hanna-håkansson/ There’s something happening in Stockholm with teenagers who are making genuine work. Photographs, music, real things. Hedvig Boström, Carolina Engman, Lovisa Rantå—they didn’t wait for platforms or permission. They just started. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/28/hanna-håkansson/ Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/27/hail-to-our-new-masters/ People couldn’t be bothered to vote. Too drunk, too stoned, too lazy—take your pick. Everyone was begging them to show up, and most still couldn’t manage to shuffle into a voting booth. The turnout was pathetic. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/27/hail-to-our-new-masters/ Sun, 27 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/27/kabinenparty/ First time I heard “Kabinenparty,” I laughed at the premise—a whole song about a party in a swimming pool changing room—and then the music grabbed me. Skero’s an Austrian rapper and street artist who’s been making noise for a while, solo now after years in a group called Texta, and this track from Memoiren eines Riesen is exactly the kind of thing that works because someone decided to be completely specific about something dumb. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/27/kabinenparty/ Sun, 27 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/26/actually-voting/ Making a choice and sticking with it—there’s this moment after when everything gets easier. You’re in motion now, past the paralysis of all possibilities. You’ve picked something, committed to a direction. Most of the time, that feels better than standing still. Unless you’ve done something genuinely stupid, like hitting your teacher with your car. Then you’re just finished. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/26/actually-voting/ Sat, 26 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/26/petting-cats-at-the-weise-puff/ Woke up at Sara’s and pulled the curtains back on this ridiculous sunrise over Berlin. One of those mornings where you’re still drunk but the light makes everything feel like it’s mattering. Immediately had this irresistible urge to wash the dishes. Still don’t really know why. Talked to Carsten for a bit about the Beatles and his grandmother bowling and all this nonsense, and walking back home through those few blocks with my balance still off, still feeling everything from the night before, I couldn’t stop thinking about how sharp the city looks that early. You actually see it when the rest of the city’s asleep. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/26/petting-cats-at-the-weise-puff/ Sat, 26 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/25/unfiltered/ I spent my childhood glued to a Super Nintendo with manga magazines in one hand and a pencil in the other, filling blank pages with drawings of naked girls from Dragon Ball and Digimon. My Bravo collection didn’t survive. Satoshi Urushihara was my god—Plastic Little, Ragnarok City, the kind of work that proved you could draw exactly what you wanted without apology. I wasn’t bad at it either, which tells you everything about how I chose to spend those years. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/25/unfiltered/ Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/25/pomplamoose/ Simple usually wins. That’s what made Tetris work, and it’s why Pomplamoose stuck with me the second I found them on YouTube. Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn from California just sit there with a piano and guitar doing covers—Beyoncé, Nat King Cole, Simon and Garfunkel—and somewhere along the way the whole internet discovered them. No production, no layers, no image. Just the two of them playing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/25/pomplamoose/ Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/24/when-lily-quit/ Lily Allen posted one day that she was done. Out of music. She was going to do theater instead—some production called “Reasons To Be Pretty” in London’s West End. No more albums, no more tours, that was it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/24/when-lily-quit/ Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/24/love-my-chucks/ Clothes sort you before you speak. Everyone’s already judged based on shoes and a jacket—the fashion kid, the gang guy, the emo at the station—and it happens faster than you’d think. That’s how it works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/24/love-my-chucks/ Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/23/kids/ Every decent porno is basically about bodies fucking each other until fluids go everywhere. Not love—just sex. Tits and dicks in close-up. But what comes after the grand finale, what nature supposedly designed this whole thing for? You never see it. And when you do, it’s usually something you’re not allowed to talk about. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/23/kids/ Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/22/what-gets-searched/ Someone searched “I had sex with my sister” and Google sent them here. I don’t even know how the algorithm decided that was relevant, but the search log shows it happened, and once you see one like that, you can’t help but keep scrolling. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/22/what-gets-searched/ Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/22/sneeze-mag/ Everyone says print is dead, which is mostly true about the stuff that deserves to die—corporate newspapers filled with ads and garbage, local papers that don’t even pay their photographers. Good riddance. But at the edges, there are magazines that actually care, and Sneeze Mag is one of them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/22/sneeze-mag/ Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/21/sushi-mixtape/ Japanese lessons were supposed to be practical. What I actually got was six hours a week of legitimacy to spend scrolling through websites made entirely of pixel art and an endless rotation of smiling cats. I was already doing this anyway, but now I could call it self-improvement. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/21/sushi-mixtape/ Mon, 21 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/20/what-suicidegirls-figured-out/ SuicideGirls figured out something most porn sites miss. It’s not just naked women—you can find that anywhere. It’s the aesthetic. The tattoos, piercings, dyed hair, the styling. You’re not looking at generic bodies; you’re looking at people who visibly belong to a specific world. Yeah, it’s hot. But it’s also smarter design. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/20/what-suicidegirls-figured-out/ Sun, 20 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/20/what-shin-chan-knew/ I don’t really have role models, but if anyone gets to claim that title with me, it’s a small, crude Japanese kid with a big mouth who understood something essential about how to handle teachers, parents, and basically everyone else: Shin Chan. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/20/what-shin-chan-knew/ Sun, 20 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/19/why-i-spend-my-time-online/ I had one of those moments yesterday where I was laughing at something that happened on the internet, and then the laugh caught on something real underneath it. Some small act of coordination spiraled, became something larger, and suddenly it mattered. That’s when you feel why you do this—spend time scrolling, reading, watching things unfold in this space. Because real things happen here. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/19/why-i-spend-my-time-online/ Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/18/learning-japanese/ Gymnasiums have this particular smell - something between ambition and old carpet, the kind of scent that hits you the moment you walk in. I stepped back into mine last night for the first time in years and got instantly transported back to being seventeen, sitting in classrooms I hated, surrounded by people who cared way too much about grades. I couldn’t wait to leave. This time I was there by choice, for a specific reason: learn Japanese. Mostly so I could watch anime without the English dubbing stepping in and ruining everything, and also so that down the line I could understand what was actually happening in my favorite shows. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/18/learning-japanese/ Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/18/avril-lavigne-im-coming/ I’ve booked flights to America. Packed condoms and fresh underwear. Basically all I need now is my smile and the ability to comfort a heartbroken woman. After six years of voodoo spells and systematic bad luck directed at celebrity relationships, Avril Lavigne is finally single. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/18/avril-lavigne-im-coming/ Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/16/what-the-4chan/ I had a 4Chan account for a few years in the mid-2000s. Not bragging about it—just a thing I did. Mostly I was curious about where all the internet’s actual culture was coming from, since nothing about it was appearing on the mainstream sites yet. And yeah, there was a lot of depravity on there. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t see it or that it wasn’t shocking the first time. But that wasn’t what interested me about the place. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/16/what-the-4chan/ Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/16/uninvited/ He walks onto the stage at the 2009 VMAs while Taylor Swift is accepting Best Female Video. Takes the mic from her hands. Says Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time. Walks off. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/16/uninvited/ Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/14/losers-save-the-world/ Sara and I spent a weekend saving the world, which is somehow both harder and easier than it sounds, and in the end we failed anyway, but that’s not the point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/14/losers-save-the-world/ Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/12/ed-hardy/ I don’t understand what everyone’s problem is with Ed Hardy. The designs are genuinely good—wild animal patterns, intricate creatures, color work that actually takes skill. The branding is subtle. It’s not trying to look refined or signal anything about your taste. It’s just making something visible. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/12/ed-hardy/ Sat, 12 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/12/nothing-lasts-anymore/ Everything’s temporary now, or maybe it always was and I’m just paying attention. Trends disappear in weeks. People drift in and out. You find something you care about and it’s already gone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/12/nothing-lasts-anymore/ Sat, 12 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/10/wreckage/ Your world ends and nobody marks the calendar. Not the disasters that make the news—the private ones. A phone call at the wrong moment. Something you already suspected finally said out loud. Your best friend telling you he’s moving to Brazil, already halfway there in his head, and then two weeks later he’s just gone. The future he was describing doesn’t belong to anyone now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/10/wreckage/ Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/10/no-middle-ground/ I keep coming back to Bat for Lashes for the most basic reason: her music works regardless of what I’m doing or thinking when I put it on. Listening to “Daniel” while something real is happening with someone? Perfect. Listening alone, thinking too much? Also perfect. Just existing normally? Works. Most musicians can’t do that. They hedge, they find some middle ground they hope lands for everyone. Natasha Khan doesn’t. She goes all the way into whatever she’s exploring and you either meet her there or you don’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/10/no-middle-ground/ Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/8/pixie-lott-in-london/ I followed Pixie Lott around on her promo tour in London because Jessie needed company and the magazine wanted coverage. Johannes was there shooting for BLANK. We stayed at the Hilton after, which was fine, everything was the same press junket blur—handlers and drunk friends and interviews running together. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/8/pixie-lott-in-london/ Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/6/the-archive/ I was exactly the kind of guy who met women only on screens: coder, gamer, the type who’d rather spend fourteen hours optimizing someone else’s website than actually talk to people. So naturally my sexual education came from Tumblr, which back then was essentially an endless, meticulously organized library of pornography. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/6/the-archive/ Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/6/going-back/ Nobody talks about school like it was anything but purgatory. Five days a week before dawn, herded into rooms with hormonal teenagers and teachers who were clearly at the end of their rope—probably going home to divorces they never saw coming. The mythology was always bullshit. No magic, no heroic arc, just fluorescent lights and the smell of industrial floor polish and the specific deadness of being trapped in a building with people you’d actively avoid in any other context. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/6/going-back/ Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/5/watching-berlin/ They made a 24-hour documentary about Berlin and showed it everywhere at once—on screens around the city, television, streaming online. You know the type of ambitious thing that shouldn’t work but somehow does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/5/watching-berlin/ Sat, 05 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/5/lisa-mitchell-coin-laundry/ Lisa Mitchell’s living in a washing machine in the ’Coin Laundry’ video, asking for coins, stories, memories. It’s the kind of idea that could be precious, but there’s something genuine underneath. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/5/lisa-mitchell-coin-laundry/ Sat, 05 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/3/if-i-were-a-woman/ You’re born with these meat differences between your legs that basically decide your entire life before you’re old enough to argue. What color your room gets painted. What toys you’re supposed to want. The moment in puberty when you can’t go shirtless without getting stared at. And then the sex part. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/3/if-i-were-a-woman/ Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/1/can-i-get-that-in-ugly/ Fashion is marketing. That’s what I think every time I see a campaign. Some beautiful girl in some beautiful scenario photographed by someone brilliant, and the clothes are just sitting there, barely noticeable under all the styling and lighting and story they’re telling. The clothes aren’t the product. The image is the product. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/1/can-i-get-that-in-ugly/ Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/1/the-new-scala/ Some Berlin nightclubs become legendary simply by existing in the right time and place for the right people. Bar 25, White Trash, Scala—they don’t get that status through promotion; it just happens. You end up there and realize everyone around you is someone you recognize, someone like you, someone you’d actually want to spend a night with. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/9/1/the-new-scala/ Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/30/zombie-flashmob-berlin/ Yesterday was a good day to die. Sara, Till, and I joined a zombie flashmob through Berlin—a hundred of us stumbling from Potsdamer Platz through the Reichstag to Brandenburg Gate, covered in blood and rot, chasing screaming tourists. The choreography was simple: collapse, moan, shuffle, repeat. We crashed another flashmob along the way. The VIP zombies had “Thriller” memorized—Michael Jackson’s birthday made into this perfectly synchronized undead dance that shouldn’t have worked but did. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/30/zombie-flashmob-berlin/ Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/27/snow-leopard/ People have actual wars about operating systems now. Used to be religion, money, race—the basics. Now it’s which software you run, which somehow feels worse. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/27/snow-leopard/ Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/27/the-middle-one/ Yeah, I’ll admit it: I’m into pop acts that are obviously terrible but look good doing it. Pixie Lott, Lovers Electric, anyone who hit that exact spot where the music isn’t the point and nobody’s pretending it is. It’s not subtle. Some music exists purely to be watched. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/27/the-middle-one/ Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/26/what-i-keep/ I keep a lot of photographs. Not my own—images I find online and save without thinking too hard about why. The impulse has always been there, but the internet made it compulsive. You can spend hours scrolling through photographs by people you’ll never meet, of moments that have nothing to do with you, and they stick with you anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/26/what-i-keep/ Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/25/printed/ Chris from Pratschwitz—outside Dresden—printed the whole thing and took it to the lake. Sent me a photo. The story’s about Sina and Paula and this photographer everyone hates, and now people are printing it. Carrying it places. Every part comes from actual painful memory, dead dreams, that stubborn hope that keeps coming back. Wanted people to feel that weight. It’s working. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/25/printed/ Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/24/war-games/ Went paintballing yesterday and I’m covered in bruises. Shoulders, ribs, legs—all marked up. My elbow’s torn open from where I slipped in the mud, but that’s not really part of the war narrative. Pink paint everywhere. Burst gel balls scattered across the ground like actual casualties. My friend Pedder took a shot directly to the head. Guy went down confused. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/24/war-games/ Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/23/keiichi-nitta/ Keiichi Nitta works the way Richardson, Kern, and Snow work—these photographers who’ve made a single obsession into an entire practice. He’s been in Tokyo for years shooting film and Polaroid, mostly of the women around him, mostly nude. I’m not going to be coy about the appeal of that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/23/keiichi-nitta/ Sun, 23 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/22/wonderland/ Picked up Alice in Wonderland on DVD. Been a while since I’d sat with it, and the timing felt right—some drugs, a dark room, then head out to a party afterward. There’s something about that film’s spiral-descent logic that works when you’re in the right state of mind. Wonderland and your brain syncing up. One of those nights where the pacing just works out: get weird for a couple hours, then go be around people. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/22/wonderland/ Sat, 22 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/22/unflinching/ VICE never asked permission. While every other magazine was polishing things smooth, VICE ran photographs that made normal people uncomfortable. Richard Kern. Dash Snow. Real damage, real bodies, real waste as documentary evidence. Photography as testimony, not product. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/22/unflinching/ Sat, 22 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/22/two-years-in/ Surprise: I’m not actually a Berlin native. Weird, right. I know some people are having a complete meltdown about this, and others have already unfollowed. I get it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/22/two-years-in/ Sat, 22 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/20/bring-back-the-lyrics/ There’s this thing Sara used to do with September Rave—write lyrics that were intentionally disgusting, loaded with the filthiest expressions she could find, talking about vomit and fucking and all of it—but underneath all that obscenity there was something genuinely moving about love and friendship and the ways people destroy each other. It shouldn’t have worked. You don’t pull off beautiful poetry using basically the internet’s worst language as your foundation. Except she did. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/20/bring-back-the-lyrics/ Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/18/blumio/ Blumio’s been in heavy rotation the last few months. A 24-year-old rapper from Düsseldorf with Japanese heritage—the kind of specific background that usually doesn’t register in German hip-hop, which made me pay attention from the start. His video for “Hey Mr. Nazi” sealed it. The whole thing is packed with wordplay, him rapping about love, racism, Japanese culture, the importance of staying clean because women notice these things. It’s specific enough to feel real, unironic. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/18/blumio/ Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/18/the-tape/ Eric Dane, the guy everyone found attractive on Grey’s Anatomy, ended up in a private sex video with his wife Rebecca Gayheart and some actress, and America absolutely lost it. The video showed them having sex, using drugs, the standard stuff. The country treated it like the apocalypse. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/18/the-tape/ Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/17/city-hunger/ There was a club called 25, and Sina was turning 18. We danced close, bodies pressed into the bass, both high on something. In the bathroom, two girls wanted me to photograph them as they undressed. My head was splitting. There was an urge to vomit that I kept strangling down. The bigger one got on her knees while I counted white tiles on the wall, polished and endless. When she was done I went back to find Sina and picked up the dance where we’d left it. After a while she tugged my sleeve. “Can we go home? I’m tired.” https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/17/city-hunger/ Mon, 17 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/16/the-front/ I found The Front at one of those international newsstands—the kind of place where things nobody admits wanting somehow still get sold. I’d been deep in British culture for a while, mostly through Skins and its particular blend of cruelty and wit. So when this magazine showed up, crude and beautifully designed all at once, it felt like proof that real taste still had a home somewhere. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/16/the-front/ Sun, 16 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/16/tokyo-by-thirty/ My life plan has some pretty non-negotiable items written into it. Marrying Nora Tschirner, for one—she doesn’t know about this yet. Controlling the entire world. Flooding Berlin and moving to Tokyo by the time I’m thirty to spend my golden years there. Live fast, die young, right? But there’s a problem with retiring to a country whose language you can’t speak. You end up just standing around looking confused all the time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/16/tokyo-by-thirty/ Sun, 16 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/15/charge-plug/ I’ve gotten genuinely lazy. Not the cute kind—genuinely, embarrassingly lazy. Used to ride, swim, play football. That all stopped. Now there’s a spare tire and something has to give. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/15/charge-plug/ Sat, 15 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/13/nora/ I had this one stupid goal for years and today I actually achieved it, so I can officially stop now. I met Nora Tschirner. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/13/nora/ Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/12/amanda-blank-might-like-you-better/ Amanda Blank has more hair on her forearms than I have on my head, but that seems exactly right somehow. She’s got this thing—raw, unguarded sexuality that doesn’t feel performed. It just is. I can’t describe it without sounding crude, and maybe that’s the point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/12/amanda-blank-might-like-you-better/ Wed, 12 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/12/breaking-in/ The apprenticeship was the straightforward path into design. You found an agency that would take you, learned by working on real projects, emerged knowing what you were doing. There was no mystery to it, no romance—just the arithmetic of getting good: find someone better at the craft than you are, work in the same room, absorb what sticks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/12/breaking-in/ Wed, 12 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/11/back-in-berlin/ Just got back to Berlin last Sunday after two weeks down in Bavaria and, I don’t know, I actually missed it. Montana and I had eaten our way through the usual garbage and danced around with whoever showed up, that blur of a weekend, but yeah, the city was still calling me back. Bayern’s not nothing. Berlin’s the real place though. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/11/back-in-berlin/ Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/11/do-you-want-more/ The Aston Shuffle’s “Do You Want More” is interested in one thing: watching people descend into bodily chaos. They eat, they vomit, they get led through a door by an attractive person in underwear. That’s the entire structure. That’s the offer, and the title isn’t asking—it’s daring you to answer. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/11/do-you-want-more/ Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/11/the-farewell/ He crumpled in front of me, howling and gasping for breath. Paula cheered, her face bright with joy, and I felt something lift inside me. It was dark and cold, but I glowed from the inside out. So free. Such a victory. Johnny twisted his face in pain while his brain-dead friends stared at me like paralyzed rabbits. I had nothing left to lose and they knew it. He wailed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/11/the-farewell/ Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/8/growing-up-visible/ Tavi Gevinson is 13 and writes about fashion with the certainty of someone who’s figured something out. Her blog is called Style Rookie. She talks about Karl Lagerfeld and Twiggy and puts together outfits that look both too old for her and exactly right, and it’s gotten her onto magazine covers and into television interviews—the kind of platform that usually takes much longer to earn, if you earn it at all. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/8/growing-up-visible/ Sat, 08 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/8/how-to-become-a-god/ Drugs will wreck you. They’re addictive, they make you sick, they hollow everything out. Get deep enough into them and you end up at the station, trading your body for the next fix, and when that gets old you end it with a syringe in your vein and that’s your whole story. Everyone knows this. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/8/how-to-become-a-god/ Sat, 08 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/7/skins/ When O.C., California got cancelled, I felt it. Not like losing a person, but like having the thing you reached for every week just vanish. I was deep in that show—used it to survive bad days, something solid to grab onto while other stuff was falling apart. Then it ended and I was looking for the next thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/7/skins/ Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/7/hangover/ There’s this old movie everyone I know considers sacred—Eurotrip, the one with all the dumb kids drinking across Europe. We genuinely thought nothing would ever be that funny. Then we finally watched The Hangover. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/7/hangover/ Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/5/made-it/ The notification came this morning: position 55 on some blog ranking list. A year ago I’d been cocky enough to announce that once I made this particular chart, I’d arrive. Real importance. The kind that comes with invitations, parties, the doors that open. The upper five thousand. The people who matter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/5/made-it/ Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/4/rockie-nolan/ Rockie Nolan’s photographs are all golden hour. Sunset, a 50mm 1.8, and these small characters she creates in each frame—that’s how she describes her method. When I asked if there were techniques or secrets, she laughed it off. Sunset. Character. That’s it. The rest is just showing up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/4/rockie-nolan/ Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/3/adam-and-eva/ Dinner on Sina’s rooftop. She and Eva had cooked—lasagna, salad, pudding with chunks in it, exactly how I liked it. Adam talked about the business, the club, how hard it was to keep a place running with all the competition, customers getting weirder but funnier. I nodded and nodded but didn’t really hear him. I was one of the glittering figures in this business and it all passed right by me anyway. Sina caught me not listening and gave me this knowing look while she took a huge bite of lasagna, mouth full, and I liked that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/3/adam-and-eva/ Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/3/bat-for-lashes-sleep-alone/ Bat for Lashes has been on constant rotation since “Two Suns.” There’s something in the way Natasha Khan moves through those songs—the voice, the production, the way she builds a space and then just lets it exist. No excess. No need to prove anything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/3/bat-for-lashes-sleep-alone/ Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/3/make-it-count/ Element just dropped the first part of Make It Count, a documentary series about skateboarding history that Kirk Dian directed. Four parts structured around the elements, with Johnny Schillereff and all the people who were actually there in the good years talking about the brand’s growth and why skateboard culture has this gravity that nothing else really touches. It’s the kind of thing that usually gets murdered by marketing, but sometimes you get people who were there just telling you what it was like. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/3/make-it-count/ Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/2/wtf-vol-7/ ’I came home from school and saw my mother having sex with the postman.’ ’Little Lilly fucks her best friend’s father.’ ’Emma Watson with a cucumber in her vagina.’ These are real search queries from people who somehow found their way to this site. I went through the logs and collected them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/2/wtf-vol-7/ Sun, 02 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/2/muted/ The “Boys and Girls” video is sharp. Models that look like they came off the Kate Moss assembly line, guys doing things with disco balls, locations that could be Berlin’s best club—it’s visually perfect. Pixie looks hot. Really fucking hot. You think you know where this is going. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/2/muted/ Sun, 02 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/1/hannah-on-tv/ 2008 basically sucked, but one bright spot was Hannah getting on German television. Some reality show about roommate hunting on VOX, and she was trying to rent a room in her apartment. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/8/1/hannah-on-tv/ Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/31/better-in-my-head/ Sitting in a theater is one of the few places where you get to completely disappear into someone else’s world. For a couple hours you’re not yourself. You’re not thinking about rent or work or whatever’s broken at home. You’re just there, eyes forward, letting the screen do the work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/31/better-in-my-head/ Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/29/all-of-it/ I’m drawn to people who don’t fit neatly into categories—the kind who keep your imagination running on half-truths and mysteries. Nothing sexier than that. Besides cheesecake, maybe. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/29/all-of-it/ Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/28/my-name-is-sina/ My closest friends describe me as a stubborn little bastard who gets obsessed with things and people with this sudden, intense passion, then drops them just as fast when I get bored. That’s probably fair. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/28/my-name-is-sina/ Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/28/last-nights-party/ Merlin Bronques made party photography iconic. His website, LastNightsParty, documented the New York underground so precisely it became the template—photographers tried copying him, parties got wilder just to make his feed, the whole scene hyperaware of the lens. He published a book of the photos in 2006. Then he moved to video. LastNightsParty.tv started rolling films where you could actually see the wreckage move, opening with a short called “Ruff Night.” https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/28/last-nights-party/ Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/27/evan-rachel-wood/ Evan Rachel Wood is on her hands and knees in leather boots for Terry Richardson’s i-D shoot, completely nude, fingers in her mouth. This is the move now—you want to matter again, you take your clothes off for a magazine. Lily Allen did it. Lady Gaga did it. Now Wood. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/27/evan-rachel-wood/ Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/26/back-to-japan/ I haven’t been paying Japan nearly enough attention lately, which bothers me. It’s one of those countries that just hits different—unhinged in the best way, weird, stupidly creative, and entirely itself without apology. Somehow I let the obsession fade to nothing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/26/back-to-japan/ Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/24/treat-me-like-your-mother/ The Dead Weather announcement should’ve grabbed me. Jack White from the White Stripes, Dean Fertita from Queens of the Stone Age, Alison Mosshart from the Kills—all in one band. On paper, it made sense. But nothing happened. I didn’t care. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/24/treat-me-like-your-mother/ Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/23/the-cartman-principle/ I keep thinking about Eric Cartman, which is weird because he’s a murderous racist sociopath. But I can’t stop watching how he operates. He’s the only character in South Park who actually accomplishes anything. Everyone else is trapped in the same loop, constrained by the rules that keep them in place. Cartman doesn’t recognize that the rules exist. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/23/the-cartman-principle/ Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/22/voting-for-strangers/ Bebe Generation was one of those mid-2000s things that felt inevitable—stick some attractive young people in shared apartments, let viewers vote on who joins, offer prizes to people who participate. I probably would’ve watched it. The whole premise was utterly transparent about what it was: just the spectacle of watching other people’s lives, nothing more, nothing less. You got to vote, you might win a digicam, that was the deal. There was something almost respectable about that honesty, before reality television got anxious about its own existence and started insisting its spectacles actually meant something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/22/voting-for-strangers/ Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/21/blood-and-sex/ Everything we did came down to sex, basically. Not love, not dancing or anything else. When she let some junkie screw her in the bathroom at the Chan Shin opening, I was busy taking photos of the crowd—people I despised—and I told myself it didn’t bother me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/21/blood-and-sex/ Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/21/on-nick-gazin/ I’m a fan of Nicholas Gazin, though I honestly can’t say why. Maybe his sense of style—he’s 25, making art in New York’s underground, so he pretty much has to dress well. Or maybe because he mentioned in some VICE feature that he pulls naked pictures of ex-girlfriends off the internet and turns them into drawings. That tracks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/21/on-nick-gazin/ Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/18/watching/ I wasn’t really following Mischa Barton by the time the news broke. The O.C. had ended years before, and she’d drifted into that strange zone where actors you used to see everywhere just quietly disappear. Bad movies, failed pilots, that slow fade the industry does so well. Then the story landed—attempted suicide—and I felt that helpless sting you get when celebrity makes you aware of someone’s real suffering from a distance you can’t cross. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/18/watching/ Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/18/what-saves-you/ Music is the only thing that actually saves you. Not metaphorically—actually. When everything is falling apart, when you’ve fucked up or someone else has, when you’re lying in bed at three in the morning knowing nothing will fix what you broke, there’s this moment where a song comes on and it doesn’t fix anything but it changes how you’re sitting with the wreckage. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/18/what-saves-you/ Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/16/goodnight-travel-well/ Watching The Killers’ “Goodnight, Travel Well” video sits wrong with you. Made with MTV Exit and UNICEF, it doesn’t flinch away from human trafficking—young people trapped, degraded, forced into sex work. It’s all right there. The song repeats itself, resigned and mechanical, and everything about the visual registers as true in a way that makes you uncomfortable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/16/goodnight-travel-well/ Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/15/crazy-ones/ The ones who see things differently. That’s how it starts—noticing someone who doesn’t fit, who paints a wall at three in the morning because something inside them demanded color, who drives naked through dark streets with their best friends just to feel alive, who screams in an empty field until their lungs give out because joy or pain has to go somewhere. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/15/crazy-ones/ Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/14/its-too-hot/ Summer heat makes you stupid. All you want is cold water and something—anything—to keep your brain from running. Trashy photographs of beautiful women, celebrity gossip, weird internet stuff, doesn’t matter. The heat does that to you. Turns you into someone who needs entertainment the way you need ice water. Not because you suddenly have taste. Because you need to not think. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/14/its-too-hot/ Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/14/zweiohrküken/ Saw the trailer for Zweiohrküken and Nora Tschirner’s got this expression she carries through the whole thing—this specific look that gets to you. The kind of face that could hold an entire film, and if this sequel is just ninety minutes of her wearing that look, I’m completely fine with it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/14/zweiohrküken/ Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/13/tears-on-your-face/ She was sitting in the middle of Alexanderplatz when I first saw her—huddled and unwashed, her hair greasy and matted. Behind a cardboard sign with shaky handwriting was something that went straight into my chest: “I’m homesick. Please give me money for a ticket home.” I sat a few meters away on some steps and watched her. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/13/tears-on-your-face/ Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/12/still-there/ Watched Lost in Translation again the other night, and it hits the same way—that particular quality to her, the way Coppola caught something unguarded. Over the years I’d decided she’d gone full Hollywood, that whatever made her interesting had hardened into celebrity. You know how it goes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/12/still-there/ Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/12/still-going-out/ The video for “22” opens on someone who’s already done the math on their life. Almost thirty, getting ready to go out again, knowing exactly what won’t happen tonight but going anyway. Lily Allen made this when she understood that specific exhaustion—not about being young, just about the pointless motion of still trying. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/12/still-going-out/ Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/11/the-playboy-and-the-country-girl/ Found an old yearbook entry that describes me and Hannah from senior year, and it’s disorienting to see yourself rendered in that particular voice—earnest and cataloging, mixing affection with mockery the way teenage chroniclers do. They’ve captured the essentials. I was the guy with the Mac obsession, the iPod permanently attached, constantly disappearing into Japanese media and somehow managing to turn some of that into actual video work on our school trip. The apples thing is real—I apparently just carried them around and distributed them like some kind of edible hype man. The charm they mention about being popular with girls, that was happening, though I was aware of it happening, which probably means I was less charming than I thought. The distraction in class was real too. There was this guy next to me who made it impossible to focus, and I’d given up fighting it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/11/the-playboy-and-the-country-girl/ Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/10/dead-reckoning/ I’ve spent time imagining my own funeral. You picture the music—what would you want playing at yours? I imagine what people will wear, which of my exes will fall apart thinking they made a mistake, which ones won’t bother showing up. You construct this entire production in your head, direct it like a film, handle every detail. Then you remember: you’ll be dead. You won’t see any of it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/10/dead-reckoning/ Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/10/lily-allen-strips/ There was a magazine spread with Lily Allen naked in it, somewhere around the late 2000s. She did it because she wanted to, and that was the whole story. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/10/lily-allen-strips/ Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/9/the-boss/ Spent the day bouncing between German government offices—the trade office, the chamber of commerce, the tax office. Made phone calls that seemed to reach every corner of the world. Most of it was tedious, but the genuinely weird part was that everyone I talked to actually knew what they were doing and was helpful, which I wasn’t expecting at all. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/9/the-boss/ Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/9/palina-in-wonderland/ Palina Rojinski got put in a house with Joko and Klaas for MTV Home, basically tasked with keeping two TV personalities from disappearing entirely into their own egos. The show was the kind of premise that makes sense for exactly one season before everyone gets bored. She was there to document it, which meant she was also there to watch two men be endlessly fascinated with themselves. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/9/palina-in-wonderland/ Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/7/broke-in-berlin/ It’s mid-month and the account situation is what it always is. Starbucks isn’t happening. That concert everyone’s talking about isn’t happening. But this is Berlin, and somehow being broke here feels different than being broke anywhere else. The city doesn’t charge entry for most of what matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/7/broke-in-berlin/ Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/6/why-ill-end-up-with-smelly-thomas/ Thomas smells weird. Inge’s got a blemish. At a certain age you have standards about these things. You’re waiting for someone better, someone without the flaws, the baggage, the accumulated weight of another person’s damage. That someone doesn’t exist, but you don’t know it yet. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/6/why-ill-end-up-with-smelly-thomas/ Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/6/my-dream-your-escape/ I can’t stop breathing. In and out. Forever. Until you discover me buried in my own soul, finally feel how much I love you, how nobody else will ever matter, how you’ll send the vultures away. My nightmares shift and mutate—coughing trees, blonde girls, graceful horses. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/6/my-dream-your-escape/ Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/5/plastic-goblet/ The post frequency on this blog is basically just a meter for how bored I am. So I’m making today my personal YouTube memorial day, and because ColdMirror’s Harry Potter parodies absolutely wreck me, here’s part five of “Harry Potter and the Plastic Goblet.” I can’t help it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/5/plastic-goblet/ Sun, 05 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/5/stillness-is-the-move/ Fell asleep with this song playing and ended up in the most vivid dream because of it. All color and motion and light, the kind you can’t hold onto once you wake up. If I’d managed to remember any of it, that would be my next film. No luck. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/5/stillness-is-the-move/ Sun, 05 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/4/run-run/ It’s hot in Berlin right now—the kind of heat where everyone gets stupid and talks about nothing but the weather. Fruit flies. Headaches. Sweat through your clothes. I’m at breakfast convinced that sangria is the solution. It won’t be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/4/run-run/ Sat, 04 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/3/san-fernando/ Went to a premiere in Berlin last night for a documentary called 9to5: Days in Porn, shot by a Munich director named Jens Hoffmann. He spent a year and a half in San Fernando Valley following the industry—cameras rolling on porn sets, the work, the repetition, the money. Sasha Grey was in it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/3/san-fernando/ Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/3/was-i-ever-cute/ Everything was better back then. Better colors, better TV, those afternoons in the neighborhood before anybody got careful. The games with kids you knew when touching was just touching, no meaning to it yet. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/3/was-i-ever-cute/ Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/3/one-more-chance/ I loved Bloc Party. Not just liked—I was actually into them, played their records constantly. ’Two More Years,’ ’The Prayer,’ ’Blue Light.’ They had something that didn’t let go. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/3/one-more-chance/ Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/3/still-daria/ Beavis and Butt-Head had all the attention at school. Daria was the show for the kids who found that tedious. That voice making everything sound stupid, Quinn genuinely blank, Jane sketching in the background. It was all permission to not pretend. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/3/still-daria/ Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/3/not-yet/ Alone on a Friday night, green couch, beer warming in my hand while my Sims starved to death on screen. Outside, something was happening. Inside, I was watching television. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/3/not-yet/ Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/2/happy-birthday-lindsay-lohan/ I was out there defending you like crazy for months before your 23rd birthday, while everyone else had completely given up. All the scandals, the rehab, all those tabloid disasters—they were sure you were finished. I wasn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/2/happy-birthday-lindsay-lohan/ Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/1/the-poorest-city/ Berlin is genuinely great—dirty, charming, the kind of place where you feel like something could actually happen even though there’s no money and nobody’s hiring. The tourists started showing up, couldn’t quite believe there was an actual wall here, wandered through the Jewish Museum, spit from the TV tower, and got shuffled into whatever club their “alternative” tour guide had decided still counts as underground. Usually just something near the O’burger that can fit a group without collapsing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/1/the-poorest-city/ Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/1/fuck-me-im-famous/ I need to confess something dark and embarrassing. While everyone’s out here stealing clothes from celebrities they’re obsessed with, I’ve got my extremely cool love for Nora Tschirner on one side and this whole shadow collection of crushes on the other. Sometimes—okay, fine, often—I’m into people like Collien Fernandes, Sandy Meyer-Wölden, and occasionally even Gülcan, as long as she’s not talking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/7/1/fuck-me-im-famous/ Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/29/clean-about-it/ Berlin Fashion Week brings the same machinery every year—certain clubs become necessary places, photographers work the door with purpose, magazines throw parties where you get free drinks if you’re on the list. The setup is predictable and nobody pretends otherwise. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/29/clean-about-it/ Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/29/not-the-point/ We got Basti to the Charité hallucinating, after whatever happened—some thing we couldn’t explain to the cab driver, who helped anyway. The hospital had seen this before, wounds that don’t show up on machines. Hannah turned white as plaster. Caro the nurse had other intentions entirely. She was moving Basti through hallways like the rules didn’t apply, like the staff wasn’t even there, like she knew something we didn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/29/not-the-point/ Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/28/berlin-smells-like-cum/ Berlin smells like cum and stardust, at least according to Hannah, who wouldn’t shut up about it all weekend. She, Caro, Basti, and I tore through the city starting Saturday morning, and everything felt amplified, like someone had cranked all the dials at once. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/28/berlin-smells-like-cum/ Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/27/marina-and-the-diamonds-i-am-not-a-robot/ I was always terrible at accounting. Not just bad—genuinely, scientifically incompetent. I’d sit in class and feel this creeping dread, this almost animal panic at the thought of becoming one of those people, glued to a desk in a bank somewhere, running the same calculations day after day until the person and the job merged into one efficient, soulless thing. A robot. Nothing scared me more—maybe mutated green space spiders, but honestly I was probably just lazy. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/27/marina-and-the-diamonds-i-am-not-a-robot/ Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/27/just-let-them-win/ Daybreakers is about vampires finally taking over the world, and Ethan Hawke’s in it, and honestly—the vampires deserve it. For centuries they’ve been the bottom of the food chain. Dracula’s the villain, Blade hunts them, crosses and garlic and sunlight, priests with holy water. They got locked up, tortured, fed that watered-down blood bank garbage instead of the real thing. Humiliated. Hunted. Never catching a break. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/27/just-let-them-win/ Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/26/the-king-of-pop/ I remember hearing it on breakfast TV that morning, the anchor mentioning it casually, and not really taking it in at first. Michael Jackson had died. Cardiac arrest. His body just stopped. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/26/the-king-of-pop/ Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/24/guess-her/ I found this website once where you guess women’s pubic hair styles from photos. Brazil, Hollywood, or hairless. That’s the whole thing. Just that. Someone built it, someone hosted it, and presumably someone played it, which means there was an audience for this specific niche. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/24/guess-her/ Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/24/ponyo/ Anime were my religion for years. Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball, Neon Genesis Evangelion—didn’t matter how bad the dubbing was or how inconsistent the animation looked. Big eyes, transformation sequences, talking plushies. That’s basically where my whole thing with Japan started, before I even understood why. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/24/ponyo/ Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/24/sinking/ There’s something to be said for an artist who commits fully to an idea without hedging. The video for “Rabbit Heart” is Florence sinking into a river, pulled down by the people around her, and it has this whole pagan ritual quality that could tip into pure camp in less confident hands. It reminds me of Bat for Lashes’ work, though warmer somehow, less shrouded in dread. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/24/sinking/ Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/21/foot-fetishist/ There’s this moment in “Earthquake” where the synth comes in and you know you’re going to be listening to this album on repeat. Little Boots’ debut “Hands” is tearing through the UK right now, about to hit Germany, and it’s one of the best things I’ve heard in years. Her single “New In Town” has been everywhere for weeks, but the album is where the real depth is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/21/foot-fetishist/ Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/21/one-good-song/ Mpho Skeef’s “Box N Locks” came in fast—sharp beats, clever lyrics, this underground synth that shouldn’t have worked but did. She was on Parlophone in the mid-2000s, that moment when the label was signing artists who sounded like they’d discovered their influences by accident, like they weren’t trying. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/21/one-good-song/ Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/20/lily-allen-fuck-you/ Lily Allen’s “Fuck You” video doesn’t show Lily. You get the track—that precise synth line, her voice making each profanity cut clean—and you get the concept: Paris destroyed, strangers insulted, everything in its path wrecked. But the wrecking is handled by animation or claymation or whatever. The video just lets her voice sit there and work. No faces, no performance, just the song being lethal on its own. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/20/lily-allen-fuck-you/ Sat, 20 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/20/i-married-nora-tschirner/ I’m basically the reincarnation of an IKEA lamp—useful only as somebody else’s decoration, no real existence of my own. So I needed to build one somewhere. The Sims 3 seemed perfect. You can make anything in this game, so I made a version of myself with everything sorted: stable job, beautiful family, no consequences for anything. The life that only exists in games. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/20/i-married-nora-tschirner/ Sat, 20 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/19/what-berlin-does/ Zitadelle Spandau filled up in July for a benefit concert—Die Ärzte’s Bela B., Peter Fox, K.I.Z., Sido, all the people who actually matter in Berlin’s music scene, all of it going straight to Berlin Tafel. No hype, no sponsorship angle, just the straightforward math of a city taking care of its own for one night. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/19/what-berlin-does/ Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/19/what-feels-right/ Jennifer moved to Florida from Venezuela three years ago, which means she’s spent those years in a place that’s not quite home, watching how people dress, picking up pieces from different cultures all mixed together in the sun. When I asked if Florida was full of fashion-conscious people, she said not really. Most of the people around her don’t think much about style. Which is interesting coming from someone who clearly does. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/19/what-feels-right/ Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/19/three-moods/ Subways, Amanda Blank, and Crookers at Astra for the Levi’s Berlin Unbuttoned Tour. Britpop, Berlin electronics, beat production—three completely different moods in one room because Levi’s was throwing money at live music. Unusual enough to be worth noticing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/19/three-moods/ Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/19/delete-dont-block/ The government passed an internet censorship law yesterday. The justification is child protection—the only argument that ever works in these situations, because who’s going to vote against protecting children? But the law doesn’t actually protect anyone. It just gives the state legal authority to block websites whenever it wants. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/19/delete-dont-block/ Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/17/wearing-it/ The thing about a t-shirt slogan is how direct it is. You’re just telling people who you are without having to open your mouth. Band name, stupid joke, some observation that made you laugh—it’s all the same. You’re broadcasting it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/17/wearing-it/ Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/17/what-brings-you-here/ I wanted to write something different this time. Actually try, you know. Not just perverted nonsense and crude word-salad. But that’s not how this works. You’re all just little pigs. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/17/what-brings-you-here/ Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/16/the-deal/ Vany from Essen - I can’t stop looking at her picture. Reminds me of someone, which is probably why. She’s one of about forty girls applying for these bebe apartments, and right now the whole internet’s voting on whether they make the cut. Friday’s the deadline, final decision July 13th. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/16/the-deal/ Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/15/nora/ She’d talk about trying to look withdrawn and melancholic when she was out, trying to seem like someone turned inward. And then someone would speak to her and the whole thing would collapse. She’d talk. The woman was talkative, genuinely surprised by her own talkativeness, but unbothered by it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/15/nora/ Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/15/no-internet-just-red-bull/ The thing about Murphy’s Law is it doesn’t just happen to you once. It comes in waves. A lamp drops on your head. The stove catches your arm. You’re genuinely worried a toilet paper holder is going to finish what the lamp started. Household appliances just give up. The Hurricane Festival gets rained out. And then 1&1—the DSL provider, the people I supposedly paid to give me internet—decides they’re done trying. The technician came. I dropped 30 euros for a “service” call. Still nothing. They send emails about rescheduled appointments to an account with no internet. The kind of thing that would be funny if I wasn’t sitting here without a connection. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/15/no-internet-just-red-bull/ Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/7/the-social-media-grift/ There are words that make me want to throw something through a window. Used to be ’homework,’ ’series finale’—now it’s ’social media.’ Every mediocre kid from high school who used to bore people with calculus is suddenly a brilliant ’social media strategist.’ Working at some trendy agency, or from a home office full of Swedish minimalism, having these incredibly sincere conversations about Twitter and Facebook. It’s almost endearing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/7/the-social-media-grift/ Sun, 07 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/7/sorry-i-missed-your-party/ I turned the weekend into a deliberate refusal to do anything. No invitations to decline, no strategic excuses—just staying home, asking nothing of myself. And I found this Tumblr called Sorry I Missed Your Party that collects photos from parties, the ones that nobody stages. The tunnel starer, the person asleep against a wall with a smile, someone who’d apparently committed their entire being to being a whale in a bathtub. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/7/sorry-i-missed-your-party/ Sun, 07 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/6/i-want-my-putpat/ Ray Cokes and Dieter Gorny—MTV and VIVA guys from way back—decided to launch Putpat, some new music streaming site. The name was terrible, and I assumed the whole thing was a retro idea that had no business existing when YouTube and Spotify already killed that business model years ago. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/6/i-want-my-putpat/ Sat, 06 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/5/lenka-the-show/ I have no idea who Lenka is—some Australian pop artist living in LA who apparently hosted Cheez TV. She’s got a new song called “The Show” that does everything pop is supposed to do: bright, catchy, designed to stick with you on the first listen. It works perfectly at what it’s made for. Just not something I’d be looking for when I actually want to listen to music. Not sure why this landed in my feed, but here it is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/5/lenka-the-show/ Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/5/what-actually-lands/ Hannah got a boyfriend, which sent half the readership into mourning—our girl of endless self-doubt and comfort carbs finally decided to let someone in. The drama. The tragedy. Normal enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/5/what-actually-lands/ Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/4/in-out/ You make these lists to mark what stuck in a particular moment. Looking back, most of it’s dated—tangled up in German references and a year you can’t fully reconstruct. But that’s the point. It’s proof you were paying attention, alive in a specific way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/4/in-out/ Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/4/like-a-fading-rainbow/ Didn’t know Jenny Wilson until I watched ’Like a Fading Rainbow,’ which is probably some blind spot of mine or just how it works—music reaches you in random order. Swedish artist, been making it since the late nineties, runs her own label, couple albums out. The kind of presence that makes you feel like you should have paid attention sooner. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/4/like-a-fading-rainbow/ Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/3/paparazzi/ Gaga’s 2009 video for ’Paparazzi’ is basically a murder revenge fantasy stretched across five minutes of leather and blood. She’s a model caught between obsession and violence, and the whole thing is shot in this cold, sterile palette that makes the sex feel dangerous instead of fun. The concept doesn’t really matter—it’s an excuse to put her in increasingly minimal clothing and frame her body as both weapon and victim. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/3/paparazzi/ Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/3/celestine/ Celestine is 21, from DC, studies design, and models for SuicideGirls. She dislikes cheese for reasons unknown to me, loves Kill Hannah, is apparently fine with cheap vodka and casual sex. None of it seems to bother her much. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/3/celestine/ Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/3/the-virgin-suicides/ I found The Virgin Suicides at Media Markt for five marks in the remainder section. The kind of place you drift into on an afternoon with nowhere better to be. Sofia Coppola’s debut, and I’d been meaning to watch it again for years. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/3/the-virgin-suicides/ Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/3/warm/ There’s the moment your teeth hit the warm brownie and the ice cream melts directly into it, turning everything into this dark mud of chocolate and cold cream and not-quite-cold anymore. For thirty seconds it’s exactly what you want without having to explain why. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/3/warm/ Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/2/holly-miranda/ Followed Scott Matthews down a rabbit hole and found Holly Miranda. Band from Brooklyn, Detroit, Tennessee. Debut EP Sleep On Fire in March, no label behind them. I’ve been stuck on them ever since. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/2/holly-miranda/ Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/2/mian-mian/ Mian Mian is the only writer who’s ever really gotten into me the way she does. I keep her books within reach—“Your Night, My Day” and “La la la”—because I need to disappear into those rough, unflinching stories about sex and drugs and people trying to make sense of being alive. There’s no distance in her prose, no safety. It’s all exposed nerve. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/2/mian-mian/ Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/1/filippa-smeds-backstage/ I’ve got a thing for Filippa Smeds. Swedish redhead, something about it just works. She was in a backstage video shoot put together by photographer Emma Svensson—a whole lineup of models including Linn Gustafsson, Emma Elwin, Emma Nygren, Karoline Andersson, Sandra Hansson, Miriam Assai, Signe Siemsen, and Cissi Wallin. Quick behind-the-scenes thing, but worth watching. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/6/1/filippa-smeds-backstage/ Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/31/what-tumblr-was/ I spent hours on Tumblr looking for images I couldn’t name. Not Instagram’s algorithm, not Pinterest’s wellness aesthetic—just collections made by people with taste and nothing to do but archive it. Scrolling through tags, landing on blogs with names like “Fuck Yeah Skinny Bitch,” just clicking, collecting. These weren’t casual reblogs. They were shrines. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/31/what-tumblr-was/ Sun, 31 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/30/use-your-brain/ Went into Berlin today to actually buy some clothes, which after too long felt like something that needed doing. The city was a zoo. Every other person was either trying to sell you something, recruit you, or had faster hands than eyes. I just moved through it all with my head down. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/30/use-your-brain/ Sat, 30 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/29/bat-for-lashes-pearls-dream/ The smoke in Natasha Khan’s “Pearl’s Dream” video is so thick you could mistake it for the actual subject. She’s singing about finding a place, past oceans and kingdoms and the sun, voice staying light even when everything else in the frame is dark. The melody sticks without asking permission. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/29/bat-for-lashes-pearls-dream/ Fri, 29 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/28/bye-bye-scala/ Lisa Wassmann, a photographer and Scala regular, shot the last gasping moments of the place into something beautiful—a short film packed with flashes of the actual night, people saying goodbye, and stickers torn off the walls. The kind of footage that catches the sweat and the light and the specific animal energy of a room that’s about to stop existing. You watch it and your eyes burn a little. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/28/bye-bye-scala/ Thu, 28 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/28/signed/ Keiichi Nitta photographs nude women on Polaroid, develops the print in front of them, and hands it over. They write their name across their own body. That’s the work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/28/signed/ Thu, 28 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/27/wrong-hands/ I watch the postal truck and know before he even stops that my package isn’t making it to my apartment. The postman doesn’t actually look at addresses. He just buzzes, waits for any door to open, hands whatever he’s holding to whoever answers, and drives off. My building number is on the box. My apartment number is on the door. Doesn’t matter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/27/wrong-hands/ Wed, 27 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/26/otaku-play/ Been going through the latest Otaku Mag—the “Play” issue—and it’s the kind of thing that reminds you magazines can still matter. The whole thing converges around gaming and animation. Illustrations, comics, videos, fashion, tech, whatever the moment needs. Each page has actual design behind it, not just content shoved into a template. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/26/otaku-play/ Tue, 26 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/26/cianna/ Cianna’s 22 from Toronto. She’s into Coldplay and herbalism and boobs. Says she’s still a virgin. She doesn’t have the typical SuicideGirls look—smaller, subtler—and I think that’s the best part. The kind of girl who’d destroy you at Mortal Kombat and make it look easy. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/26/cianna/ Tue, 26 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/26/mykey-berlin-30c-in-the-shade/ Basti showed me this song by MyKey Berlin the other day—guy who looks like Sido’s little brother, or so I’m told. “30°C in the Shade” is the track, and it’s somehow new to me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/26/mykey-berlin-30c-in-the-shade/ Tue, 26 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/26/girls-in-sneakers/ Ballerinas flatten women’s feet, heels don’t suit most people, and flip-flops look cheap. So if you’re into sneakers on women—and I have been, specifically white Adidas—there’s really only one option. The difference is just enormous. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/26/girls-in-sneakers/ Tue, 26 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/25/fuck-love-wasted-youth/ That long weekend evaporated like it was never there. Banana Montana was somewhere down south pretending the sun mattered, I was doing my thing up northeast, and somehow it all collapsed into three days of hangovers and half-sentences anyway. There was supposed to be this colossal festival in Wedding—the kind of street fair that tries to be everything at once—but I barely noticed it. I was too busy being a worthless asshole in the Berlin nightlife circuit with Mr. New Hat and whoever else felt like showing up at 4 AM, and I spent a good portion of my time trying to physically force Anne into meeting someone, which worked or didn’t depending on how you count these things, and then I just completely fell apart because TRL was dead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/25/fuck-love-wasted-youth/ Mon, 25 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/25/like-brazil/ Richard Kern put out a photo series for VICE’s ’Brazilian Issue’—fashion work, if you want to call it that. Bruna Haas, bikinis, the whole thing. Look, it’s good. But it’s summer, it’s brutal, I’m already melting from heat, and he decides to add this to my brain. Thanks, Richard. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/25/like-brazil/ Mon, 25 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/22/the-girl-and-the-robot/ Röyksopp’s been one of those bands I keep coming back to—electronic music that doesn’t announce itself, just creates a space and lets you exist in it. Robyn, the Swedish pop artist, works the same way. She’s precise and confident without performing it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/22/the-girl-and-the-robot/ Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/22/hannahs-homepage/ Hannah’s old homepage still sits on Freenet, exactly as cute as I remembered—the kind of thing that stops you for a minute because it’s so perfectly preserved, like opening a time capsule someone forgot they buried. I found it stumbling down an internet rabbit hole, the way you do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/22/hannahs-homepage/ Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/21/dofus/ Dofus works because it doesn’t overthink itself. Cartoony isometric sprites, a color palette that feels right, a world that coheres. Turn-based combat means you’re never fighting the interface. It’s free, so there’s no guilt, just time spent in something charming that isn’t trying too hard. The game doesn’t announce how well designed it is - it just is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/21/dofus/ Thu, 21 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/20/goodbye-scala/ Scala shut down that weekend. Went out exactly how you’d want—Junior Boys, Shir Khan, Jack Tennis all playing, the kind of final lineup you can’t complain about. No real reason it needed to close. The place was always full, the sound was good, the room had that beautiful ugliness that real clubs have before they get renovated into oblivion. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/20/goodbye-scala/ Wed, 20 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/19/recent-findings/ Dodgeball’s one of the few sports I’m genuinely good at. The moment a friend blacks out, I snap sober instantly—some kind of curse. Philipp Poisel sings beautiful songs. Messages from Montana late at night still get me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/19/recent-findings/ Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/19/kish-mauve-matthew/ You watch enough YouTube videos and you stop noticing how compressed everything sounds until something comes along shot and mastered properly—no black bars, clean audio, the whole thing treated like it’s actually worth your time. This one reminded me why Vimeo exists, and why most artists don’t bother uploading to it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/19/kish-mauve-matthew/ Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/19/hezza/ Fell down a rabbit hole of old SuicideGirl stuff and found Hezza—25, from Uruguay, has the taste I’d want: QOTSA, Elvis, Doors. Started this label, MajoRey, making underwear and basics that actually look good. Into all the right terrible TV (Two and a Half Men, that whole 70s era). The piercings work for her. What interests me is she doesn’t perform confidence—doesn’t seem to question what she likes or how she looks. Just exists in it comfortably. That matters more than whatever physical appeal she’s got. Although yeah, the physical appeal is there too. Something about being straightforward erases the need to try. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/19/hezza/ Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/15/after-tokyo/ Hannah’s back from Tokyo and there’s this energy about her, five weeks away and suddenly she’s got strong opinions about everything—vending machines, the architecture, the food that doesn’t translate anywhere else. I was merciless with the teasing, all the standard jokes about people who come back from Asia too good for German bread, and she took it with a kind of grim determination, promised to become exactly that insufferable person just to spite me. I think she means it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/15/after-tokyo/ Fri, 15 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/15/shave-the-queen/ Package arrived this morning with no return address. First thought was bomb. I spent a solid ten minutes carefully unwrapping it, totally convinced my right hand was about to get shredded, which seemed bad. Felt stupid even as I was doing it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/15/shave-the-queen/ Fri, 15 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/14/always-cheesy/ Grey’s Anatomy is ridiculous, and it works completely when you’re alone with it. The sex, the gore, the perfectly timed soundtrack underneath someone getting cut open or people making out in a closet—I don’t know, something about it lands. I watch it without thinking about whether it’s stupid. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/14/always-cheesy/ Thu, 14 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/13/black-bars/ Every few years nudity cycles back as the easiest gesture in a music video, and Make the Girl Dance went full-throttle with it for ’Baby, Baby, Baby.’ They sent models running through Paris wearing nothing but geometric black censoring bars—bars that somehow stayed choreographed into the movement like they were part of the costume. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/13/black-bars/ Wed, 13 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/13/the-searches/ I used to check the search referrals on this website for entertainment. It’s a glimpse into what people are actually looking for online when they somehow end up here—not the polished stuff, the real desperate queries people type into Google at night. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/13/the-searches/ Wed, 13 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/13/too-many-distractions/ The Ting Tings are moving to Berlin to write their new album. When asked about it, they’re pretty honest: Berlin’s incredible, but they don’t think they’ll actually get much work done there. Too many distractions. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/13/too-many-distractions/ Wed, 13 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/12/vice/ The thing that lands is the specificity. Red hair, emo-gamer, into Johnny Cash and porn without any winking about it. You see that list and you know exactly who this person is—her taste, what she’d find funny, the whole vibe. That kind of clarity, that absolute comfort with just being exactly what you are, is worth noticing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/12/vice/ Tue, 12 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/12/la-roux-bulletproof/ Okay, I’ll admit it: I have a weakness for female artists. I don’t know why—maybe I just prefer listening to women sing, unless it’s that Peggy Bundy screech thing. But yeah, women musicians get to me easier. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/12/la-roux-bulletproof/ Tue, 12 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/11/everything-fell-apart/ Berlin rained all Sunday night—not the gentle kind, the kind that makes everything worse. I woke up already furious that the weekend had vanished, like it never actually happened. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/11/everything-fell-apart/ Mon, 11 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/11/sonya-twinklepop/ The professional Canon came first. Modeling school had been a detour, journalism a brief experiment, but the camera was what she actually wanted. Sonya started shooting the Moscow party circuit and her friends. That’s where the focus landed at seventeen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/11/sonya-twinklepop/ Mon, 11 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/11/better-before/ Plastiscines came back, and I don’t know why that hits so hard. Their debut LP1 with “Loser” and “Mr Driver” landed like a whisper—nobody heard it, I bought it twice—and I played it until the novelty should have worn off but didn’t. The thing is, the album was good. And Katty Besnard singing it, I can’t separate what I thought about the music from what I thought about her. I was into her. Still am, if I’m being honest. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/11/better-before/ Mon, 11 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/11/owney/ I was 29, a media designer in Dresden, and I’d stopped pretending to be the guy type. Football didn’t move me, cars were just transportation, and I was done with all that other stuff. What I wanted instead was romance tangled up with silliness—depth and realism and jokes all mixed together. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/11/owney/ Mon, 11 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/11/copier-games/ That moment when you’re at work, bored to death, and the copier’s just sitting there with its lid open and nobody’s around—yeah, you know what you’re doing. Pants down, glass cold against you, finger on the button, and suddenly there’s a print that proves you did something that stupid. It’s a specific kind of office madness that only happens when you’ve been staring at beige walls long enough to lose your mind. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/11/copier-games/ Mon, 11 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/8/the-code-still-works/ Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A. If you had a Super Nintendo your fingers probably remember this sequence without thinking. Thirty button presses and suddenly you’re invincible, you’ve got infinite lives, you can access whatever the developers hid behind the cheat. It never felt like cheating—more like you’d discovered a password the designers accidentally left in plain sight. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/8/the-code-still-works/ Fri, 08 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/8/both-on-repeat/ Found two videos this week that won’t leave me alone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/8/both-on-repeat/ Fri, 08 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/7/suddenly-a-trekkie/ I walked into the Star Trek premiere expecting nothing and Abrams actually pulled it off. The story was threadbare but it didn’t matter—the visuals had real weight, the action moved clean, there was this energy running through it that kept me locked in. I was there for it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/7/suddenly-a-trekkie/ Thu, 07 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/6/actual-food/ I was living on slimy canned ravioli, cheap pasta, whatever was left at the breakfast buffet. The basics, nothing you’d mention later. Then at some point I actually got decent at cooking. Stopped burning everything, started remembering salt without thinking about it. The kitchen went from a disaster zone to just a place where food happened. Haven’t needed an ambulance over my cooking yet, which feels like an achievement. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/6/actual-food/ Wed, 06 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/5/paper-moon/ There’s something about black and white that makes cute things unsettling. Blurstd’s Paper Moon wears that Paper Mario style but drains the color, and suddenly the same visual language reads differently. The sweetness is still there—the soundtrack makes sure of that, all sugary little melodies—but the starkness underneath changes how you see it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/5/paper-moon/ Tue, 05 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/4/the-gap/ Saw a commercial for some skincare brand and couldn’t focus on the product because I was too busy looking at the model. Her name was Dari, and she had this gap between her front teeth that I found genuinely appealing. The brand was running some campaign where they’d put young women into shared apartments across different cities and have them make content—music, fashion, lifestyle stuff, all tied back to the product. I didn’t care about any of that. I was just looking at her. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/4/the-gap/ Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/2/kreuzberg/ We were climbing the stairs when a beer bottle hit Sarah’s face. One second she was there, the next her hair was dark with blood and she was screaming. The chanting started from everywhere at once—black masks, slogans, the leftist fury that had been building all day. It should have been light out but the burning Molotovs and camera flashes and the endless blue lights above Kottbusser Tor had broken the sky into something unnatural. Sarah sank against the tiled wall, crying. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/5/2/kreuzberg/ Sat, 02 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/29/the-reeling/ Passion Pit’s “The Reeling” showed up and I immediately fell into it. They’ve been building toward their debut album for a few years, and this track is a solid indication they know what they’re doing. There’s something about the synths and the way Michael Angelakos sings that just pulls you in. Not much else to say—it’s one of those songs that does the job without needing explanation. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/29/the-reeling/ Wed, 29 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/28/sigur-rós-gobbledigook/ I was sick as hell that week—everything hurt, I’d run out of everything. Cornflakes, aspirin, the will to function. So I did what you do: watched music videos at noon. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/28/sigur-rós-gobbledigook/ Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/28/four-tonys/ I’m researching this film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, and I keep getting stuck on one specific thing: Johnny Depp plays Tony. Jude Law plays Tony. Colin Farrell plays Tony. Heath Ledger plays Tony. Same character. Four different actors. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/28/four-tonys/ Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/26/the-ting-tings/ A tip came through about The Ting Tings playing in Strasbourg on Arte.tv—one of those moments where you find out right before it happens or just after, and either way it doesn’t matter much. They were on a festival bill with Patrice and Miss Kittin & The Hacker, which alone made it worth paying attention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/26/the-ting-tings/ Sun, 26 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/26/la-roux-quicksand/ I really liked La Roux’s “Quicksand.” Elly Jackson and Ben Langmaid made this track that sits in a weird place—electro-pop but uncomfortable, like something pressing against the edges. The kind that gets under your skin. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/26/la-roux-quicksand/ Sun, 26 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/26/at-least-the-kooks/ Going to a Coca-Cola event to see The Kooks for free seemed like a decent idea at the time. What I didn’t account for was the six hours of opening acts designed to test my patience. Bands that sounded like they’d learned everything they knew from a village wedding in Bavaria and thought that was good enough. The genuine low point was last year’s MySpace-voted “winner,” who simply refused to leave the stage. I’ve never been more angry at people for not knowing when to quit. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/26/at-least-the-kooks/ Sun, 26 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/25/gloria/ “Dance With Somebody” got on my nerves almost immediately. I know I’m probably alone in this, but that song just wouldn’t let up. Then again, I caught Mando Diao at Rock im Park back in 2007 and they were genuinely good, so there’s that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/25/gloria/ Sat, 25 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/25/felice-fawns-eye/ On Lookbook.nu there’s this photographer from Cambridge named Felice Fawn who’s figured something out about fashion that most people miss. She started shooting at fourteen—just snapshots of pets and family at first—but by sixteen it became something serious. She trained as a tattoo artist in her hometown before switching to fashion photography at nineteen, and since then she’s been documenting the weird specificity of how people choose to dress. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/25/felice-fawns-eye/ Sat, 25 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/24/harmless/ The internet is mostly garbage—porn, hate, monkeys pissing in their own mouths. But then you find CuteBreak, this pocket of pure nothing. Kittens sneezing. Sloths wanting scratches. Puppies with that blank dumb expression. For a moment you forget everything—the boss, the bad breakup, whatever ripped you off earlier today. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/24/harmless/ Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/24/looking/ I kept a section of this journal just for found images—visual bookmarking, basically. A photo of Keeley Hazell in a bathtub, a moment caught on a New York street, a Mark Twain line I’d never noticed before. The appeal was entirely in the looking itself, no context or lesson needed. Just here’s something I found. Here’s a moment. The feed rolled constantly, new images arriving every time you checked back. That’s what pulls you back to anything like that, I think—the hunt never quite stops. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/24/looking/ Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/23/pseudo-sunshine/ Introducing songs like you’re a morning radio host always feels awkward, which is why I hate the whole act. But Marmaduke Duke’s ’Rubber Lover’ actually deserves the mention. The video is terrible—I don’t know what they were thinking—but the song itself is excellent. Bouncy and uplifting in the simplest way, the kind of thing that picks you up. That’s all any song needs to do, really: make you feel better for a few minutes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/23/pseudo-sunshine/ Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/23/mom-can-i-fuck-the-cat/ People will try to have sex with anything. Not as some grand philosophical observation—literally. Put a human alone with an object and something’s going in somewhere. Cucumbers, toothbrushes, bottles. Whatever fits, whatever works, whatever gets the thing done and then you spend hours feeling gross about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/23/mom-can-i-fuck-the-cat/ Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/22/two-sides/ Winifred makes jewelry she can’t sell. She’s nineteen, from Perth, and the pieces just accumulate because she can’t bring herself to part with them. She tried the logical approach—make more, flood the system, maybe exhaust the attachment. It didn’t work. A few pieces have been given away as gifts but the rest stay. That attachment to your own work, the pull to keep it close—I get that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/22/two-sides/ Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/22/the-ting-tings/ I was really into The Ting Tings during that period. Katie White and Jules de Martino make these songs that feel caught between panic and beauty—everything’s precise and clean but there’s something nervous running underneath. A show came up in Berlin, free concert at a venue in Charlottenburg. I thought about going, actually seeing them instead of just cycling through the same three songs on repeat. Live is where you find out if the precision holds up, if it’s real or just production. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/22/the-ting-tings/ Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/22/nylon/ NYLON was one of those magazines that understood fashion didn’t exist in a vacuum—that what people wore was connected to what they listened to, what they watched, what they believed in. It had always struck me as one of the few fashion magazines that could talk about music and art without sounding like it was slumming. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/22/nylon/ Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/21/the-afternoon/ The day was too nice for the office. One of those Berlin mornings where you catch the light just right and suddenly you’re thinking about literally anything else. So when I got the call about being on set for a Til Schweiger shoot, I didn’t think twice. Til Schweiger—German actor, carries every scene he’s in—sunny day, no real reason to show up to work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/21/the-afternoon/ Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/20/loic-peoch/ There’s something about the way Peoch frames people in black and white that just works. Paris photographer, and his whole thing is clean lines, contrast, models who look like they actually exist in the world instead of just posing. The color stuff is good too, but the black and white is where you see what he’s doing—he’s not chasing drama, just clarity. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/20/loic-peoch/ Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/20/mia-glows-in-the-dark/ M.I.A. turned up in Indio in these glowing clothes right after having a baby. Glow-in-the-dark or EL wire, hard to tell, not that it mattered. She just looked like someone who’d figured something out. Glowing pants, glowing shoes, the whole thing built for dark rooms. You could see how it spreads—clubs, late nights, all of that. It was one of those moments where you think someone’s actually ahead instead of just trying something weird. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/20/mia-glows-in-the-dark/ Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/19/keep-singing/ Jon Hainstock’s barely known but he’s got everything figured out. German guy, perfect mullet, and in the video a car just hits him. Straight up hits him while he’s singing on the street. Most people would stop. He doesn’t. Keeps right on singing like it never happened. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/19/keep-singing/ Sun, 19 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/18/soaked-through/ Maike was opening up her new place in Kreuzberg and threw this sprawling housewarming that turned into the kind of night you only half-remember and feel weirdly grateful for anyway. The plan was simple: arrive, get wasted, see what happens. We knocked it out of the park. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/18/soaked-through/ Sat, 18 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/17/still-watching/ I’ve stopped following gaming news for years, but I still catch GameOne whenever I can. It’s not really about the games. Budi and Simon get fifteen minutes of MTV and they fill it with something unguarded—ideas that don’t quite land, jokes that work sideways, the specific comedy of two people genuinely figuring it out as they go. It’s the opposite of polished. It’s just them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/17/still-watching/ Fri, 17 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/17/proof-of-life/ You wonder if models actually eat. Not whether they eat nutritionally—they obviously must—but whether they experience it the way people do, whether food means anything to them besides a number. Same thing with fucking and toilet paper. Of course they do these things. But the way they’re treated, like they’re made from different material, makes you want actual proof they’re human. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/17/proof-of-life/ Fri, 17 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/17/kilometer/ Sebastien Tellier’s “Kilometer” video is the fantasy I’d never actually admit to. He’s in this sixties villa like some kind of slimy messiah, surrounded by beautiful half-naked women who exist purely to serve him. The whole thing is relentlessly, unapologetically horny. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/17/kilometer/ Fri, 17 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/16/scary-girl/ You know those days when you don’t want to do much of anything, when the weather’s too good to waste on actual work or responsibility. That’s when something like Scary Girl makes sense—this Flash game where a girl is trying to figure out who this mysterious guy is, the one showing up in her dreams like he belongs there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/16/scary-girl/ Thu, 16 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/14/wildfox-couture/ The photoshoots are better than the clothes. That’s the whole strategy behind Wildfox Couture. Emily Faulstich and Kimberley Gordon designed it that way—California label, very intentional about mood. Sexy vampires. Girls crowded in bathtubs. Lipstick that cuts. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/14/wildfox-couture/ Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/13/fish-market/ You meet someone cute at a party. You actually like them, the conversation flows, there’s chemistry. A kiss. The next day you’re texting, hanging out, and then you’re in bed. And for the first minute it’s good—you’re into it, your brain’s already there. Then you smell it. Not roses. Not anything close. And suddenly the only word in your head is: fish. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/13/fish-market/ Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/13/use-somebody/ Natasha Khan’s Bat For Lashes project was doing something sharp with indie-electro around 2008, 2009—that sweet spot where art-school sensibility could meet actual hooks without feeling like a compromise. “Daniel” had that strange pull to it, the way it layered synths and vulnerability in the same breath. She was getting attention, rightfully. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/13/use-somebody/ Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/12/jonathan-leder/ Jonathan Leder photographs women on Polaroid and film stock, which means no Photoshop, no skin smoothing, no digital filters pretending to capture reality. Just actual bodies, actual light, actual emulsion. He’s from New York, and he figured out something most photographers chase for years and half never quite catch—that photographing a beautiful woman doesn’t need an apology, and that shooting in constraints forces better work than unlimited options ever will. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/12/jonathan-leder/ Sun, 12 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/12/stay-true/ There’s this 16-year-old photographer from a small Dutch village where, by her account, the words ’style’ and ’fashion’ don’t really exist. Everyone’s in black jackets, black pants, black shoes, and they seem perfectly fine with it. The rain helps—if it’s always wet and gray, why bother with clothes? She hates it. She drives to Amsterdam and Utrecht when she can, looking for people who actually care how they look, but even there you have to search. That kind of restlessness at sixteen, that impatience with your surroundings, usually means you’re going somewhere else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/12/stay-true/ Sun, 12 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/11/two-films-with-knightley/ I’d spent the whole day with movies and had zero interest in throwing myself into Berlin’s nightlife, so I just stayed on the couch with two Joe Wright adaptations. Keira Knightley twice in a row. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/11/two-films-with-knightley/ Sat, 11 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/11/summer-rain/ I work in an industry obsessed with standing out. Loud colors, loud statements, shock value hammered into everything. This website makes things that demand attention, and I love that aggression. But somewhere I started craving the opposite—quiet photographs, soft colors, barely-there stories you have to lean in to hear. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/11/summer-rain/ Sat, 11 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/11/gossip-girl/ There’s something voyeuristic about a show that’s basically structured around reading someone else’s private emails. The premise is almost nothing—an anonymous blogger on the Upper East Side documenting the chaos of rich kids at boarding school—but that’s exactly why it works. There’s a complicity from the start. You check the blog along with everyone else, waiting for the next bombshell, the next scandal, the next outfit. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/11/gossip-girl/ Sat, 11 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/10/the-song/ Anna made a song about this place and posted it on YouTube. I’d asked people to create something as a challenge—make it real, make me believe you’re actually listening. She made a song. Not clever or flattering or trying to be safe. Just genuine, the kind where you hear it and know she understood something true about what happens here. The kind that makes you realize someone really was paying attention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/10/the-song/ Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/10/the-ones-that-stayed/ Had a list of Japanese films somewhere—made it years ago, when making lists felt like a productive use of time. Never finished it. But the films stuck, which is the only part that mattered. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/10/the-ones-that-stayed/ Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/9/aggros-done/ Aggro Berlin called it. After nine years running Germany’s most reliably chaotic hip-hop outfit, Sido and the crew released Ansage 8 as their final record and decided they were finished. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/9/aggros-done/ Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/9/no-beds/ Thirty hours on a plane and maybe two hours of broken sleep, and I get to my Setagaya apartment to find there are no beds. Just mats on the floor. Everyone says Japan is this gleaming high-tech country and I’m too wrecked to think straight, hacking into my neighbor’s unsecured Wi-Fi, trying to tell someone I’m alive. I haven’t slept since I left and I’m so furious and confused I don’t even know which one. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/9/no-beds/ Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/8/someone-sees-it/ Malte Christensen, this designer from Berlin, just called the blog “absolutely hot” and talked about how authentic it is, how we’re willing to take stances on trashy or borderline material. He’s right. It was one of those moments where someone outside sees what you’re doing more clearly than you’ve been seeing it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/8/someone-sees-it/ Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/8/just-sun/ Berlin’s been wrapped in shimmering spring light. The sun is just obscene—I’m not exaggerating, the heat fixes something. I open the window at night. I grill with friends in the garden. I walk through the streets with a cold Becks and watch girls in thin skirts eat ice cream, and it feels like exactly the right way to exist. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/8/just-sun/ Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/8/mora/ I listen to songs five times in a row before they stick. If I find a good video, I know it matters. Sonny Moore’s “Mora” hit that mark—the sound, the design, the artist, all fitting together in a way that felt right. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/8/mora/ Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/6/mono-follow-the-map/ I’ve always been drawn to Japanese soundtracks—Joe Hisaishi with his orchestral expanses for “Spirited Away” and “Princess Mononoke”, Yoko Kanno as Japan’s reigning instrumental composer working with Maaya Sakamoto on “Arjuna” (I’ve circled back to that album countless times, it lives permanently on my iPod), Yasunori Mitsuda defining what video game music could be with “Chrono Trigger” and still holding that standard. This is the music you put on when you need to think without interference, to create in silence. It doesn’t demand anything—it just creates a space. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/6/mono-follow-the-map/ Mon, 06 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/6/that-saturday/ Woke up Saturday with nothing from Knaack but shadows. Looking at the photos felt like watching someone else’s night—I couldn’t tell if that was me or some lost twin who’d somehow gotten all the actual memories. Only proof was a crumpled ticket stub in my pocket, which honestly tells you everything about how the night went. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/6/that-saturday/ Mon, 06 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/5/warp/ Clocks getting smashed apart by stylish people. That’s how “Warp” opens—The Bloody Beetroots and Steve Aoki teaming up on something that actually has an image, which for electronic music is already unusual. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/5/warp/ Sun, 05 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/5/built-hammered/ Came home from Knaack completely wrecked and somehow decided that tonight was the night to tear apart and rebuild the entire site. Not my smartest call, but I was past the point where I could talk myself out of anything, which actually turned out to be useful. You overthink design when you’re sober. When you’re this gone you just move things around and if they look right you leave them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/5/built-hammered/ Sun, 05 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/4/kerli/ MTV only plays decent videos when I’m walking home drunk at three in the morning and turn on the TV to decompress. That’s when Kerli’s “Walking On Air” came through, and I fell for it instantly—the song, the video, everything about her. Couldn’t understand why she wasn’t everywhere. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/4/kerli/ Sat, 04 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/3/lisa-solberg/ I’m drawn to people who express themselves without calculation. Photography, painting, film, writing, or something nobody’s quite figured out how to categorize yet—when someone’s making work from genuine interest rather than design, you feel it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/3/lisa-solberg/ Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/2/seventeen-cents/ I always had this idea of student life—perpetually broke, lurking around the city, drinking away future worries at basement parties, the same three clothes wearing thin because laundromats are expensive and vaguely terrifying. Somewhere in that fantasy is probably just my actual life, but yesterday I got a taste of the real thing at the Charité Mensa, or close enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/4/2/seventeen-cents/ Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/31/why-writers-hide/ I watched Gulcan get a piercing through the ear—sat there while the needle went through, and it glinted after like it was supposed to. Right after, I nearly crashed into my ex-girlfriend getting out of an elevator. Just smiled at her friend and the moment passed. That’s how days stack up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/31/why-writers-hide/ Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/28/joanna-kustra/ Joanna Kustra’s photographs look like paintings from the eighteenth century. There’s no visible seam between the photography and the painting—it just reads as period work, the kind that makes you stop because you’re not entirely sure what you’re looking at. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/28/joanna-kustra/ Sat, 28 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/28/v-v-brown-crying-blood/ V V Brown has a song called “Crying Blood” that I can’t shake. It’s just relentless—that 50s-pop thing with her voice climbing over this hammering melody, somewhere between The Ting Tings and something older that I can’t quite place. The kind of track that burrows in and won’t leave. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/28/v-v-brown-crying-blood/ Sat, 28 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/28/trippple-nippples/ I watched this Arte episode about Tokyo and the thing that stuck with me was a drag queen living with seventeen tarantulas and three hundred and forty wigs. That’s the kind of specific commitment to something completely impractical that’s actually interesting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/28/trippple-nippples/ Sat, 28 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/28/zombie/ Most of the time I’m nowhere. Not in the despair where everything about life and love and the future makes me want to scream and crawl into that dark hole that somehow feels sweet in its bitterness, where I could write my pain out raw and watch it leave when I hit publish. Not in the euphoria either—that cloud-nine moment when it’s a girl or a career win or just a bright fresh day, and I’m singing out praise to the sun and freedom and love. Those feelings are intense. They’re real, and they matter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/28/zombie/ Sat, 28 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/28/new-look/ Found New Look through some magazine write-up—Dazed & Confused, maybe Cooler—and it stuck. Sarah and Adam making electro-soul out of Brooklyn, though they’re actually from Toronto and went by something else years back (Jungletalk, which doesn’t matter now). Their stuff has this weightless, almost meditative quality. The kind of music that sits in the background while you work or move through your day without asking for anything, but rewards you if you’re actually listening. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/28/new-look/ Sat, 28 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/28/vanity-teen/ Spent some time with the first issue of Vanity Teen, a free fashion magazine that dropped as a PDF. The photography is good—clean, contemporary, not trying to yell about itself. They brought in Marley Kate, Ryan Aylsworth, Karl Rothenberger: the kind of visual people worth paying attention to. What got me is the curation: it’s not the usual high-fashion apparatus. It’s someone looking at what’s actually happening in contemporary photography and saying ’this matters.’ And they’re not charging for it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/28/vanity-teen/ Sat, 28 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/27/gifted/ ’Gifted’ works in a way it shouldn’t. Kanye, Santigold, Lykke Li together—three voices with no reason to collide, except they do, and it’s brutal. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/27/gifted/ Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/27/caroline-winberg/ Caroline Winberg is Swedish, which explains most of it—blonde hair, freckles, the kind of charisma that doesn’t need explaining. She’s a supermodel. The photographs exist to prove what works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/27/caroline-winberg/ Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/27/hunting/ There’s something about finding a beautiful image you weren’t looking for. FFFFOUND! was that for me for years—an endless feed of bookmarks from people with better taste than commentary. Someone saw a face, a room, a moment of light breaking through, and thought it was worth saving. No algorithm deciding what matters, no narrative, just intention. You collect enough of these stolen moments and you start to see the pattern of what actually moves you. That’s all taste ever is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/27/hunting/ Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/27/the-apple-of-tv/ I’m a designer, so I get properly anxious about network redesigns. ProSieben’s launching a new on-air look Sunday night at 20:13, right before Pirates of the Caribbean 2. Silver. Modern. Clear. Cross-platform. They’re calling it “E-Motion”—which is either a moment of pure creative clarity or just the kind of theme that someone in marketing decided would make everything cohere. There’s a Pussycat Dolls trailer backing it all, because why not. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/27/the-apple-of-tv/ Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/27/war-toys/ Battle Royale had shown me what Japanese anime was capable of. Years of increasingly unhinged content had raised my tolerance for shock. Then Cat Shit One came out—this computer-animated film from 2010—and somehow cracked through. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/27/war-toys/ Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/27/god-save-the-queen/ Kate Moss was a mess. Everyone knew it. The coke, the bathroom incidents, the whole Pete Doherty disaster—it was all documented, all real. But somehow that wasn’t the interesting part. The interesting part was that despite being a complete wreck, she was still one of the most compelling people in fashion. Still is, honestly. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/27/god-save-the-queen/ Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/26/where-the-wild-things-are/ Never read the Sendak book, and it’s not like anyone sat down and read it to me—my childhood wasn’t really set up for that kind of thing. But I saw the trailer for the Jonze film and something about it worked. The creatures don’t look cute or safe. They look real, wrong, unsettling. Like somewhere you’d actually want to run to if home felt small enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/26/where-the-wild-things-are/ Thu, 26 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/26/one-down/ Pale supervisors circled the exam room like dementors from Harry Potter. IHK employees, methodical and serious, making sure no one cheated. This was the theoretical exam in Berlin’s fashion center—the thing that had cost me weeks of sleep. And it actually went okay. I wrote things that made sense. My mind didn’t go blank, which was the main thing I was worried about. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/26/one-down/ Thu, 26 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/26/keira-knightley-at-twenty-four/ There’s a particular kind of intelligence in how she holds her face. It’s not a beauty-pageant thing—it’s closer to attentiveness, like she’s tracking three conversations at once and finding them all faintly absurd. She doesn’t do the thing most actors do where they’re constantly performing for you. She seems to be thinking about something else entirely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/26/keira-knightley-at-twenty-four/ Thu, 26 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/26/vice-trap/ Vice’s Fashion Issue landed with the usual bait that year—models in bikinis, fashion spreads, the kind of visual noise I know is designed to grab me. The issue had some comparison between Berlin and London fashion, the sort of thing that pretends to mean something but is really just expensive clothes and good photography. I looked at it. Fashion rules. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/26/vice-trap/ Thu, 26 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/24/cramming/ Sitting in the agency surrounded by coffee cups and practice exams, actually studying for Thursday’s mid-term instead of pretending this will happen magically. The big push toward master status, except I’m pretty sure I’ve already forgotten half of it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/24/cramming/ Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/24/superpowerless/ A Vodafone commercial featured a band called Superpowerless. Are they real or did Vodafone just make them up for the ad? I can’t believe I’m wondering about this. A corporation manufactures a band, sells it as culture, and everybody moves on like it’s normal now. I have no idea if Superpowerless actually exists. I don’t think they do. But does it matter anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/24/superpowerless/ Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/24/super-mario-in-the-big-city/ I found this video where Mario gets warped into a real city and immediately can’t cope. The joke is that he belongs in that pixel world—platforms, pipes, simple rules. Real cities don’t work that way. You can’t jump to rooftops or find a power-up in a box. The video ends with massive explosions, which feels inevitable. It’s funny because it understands exactly how out of place he’d be in anything resembling reality. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/24/super-mario-in-the-big-city/ Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/23/not-fair/ I never understood why Lily Allen went with “Not Fair” as the second single off “It’s Not Me, It’s You.” “Everyone’s At It” had more momentum, and “I Could Say” was stronger. But she did, dressed entirely in country—cowboy boots, that hair—like she was auditioning for a honky-tonk. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/23/not-fair/ Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/23/scott-matthew-white-horse/ I don’t remember how I found Scott Matthew, but there’s this song called “White Horse” and I can’t stop thinking about it. The kind of thing that doesn’t ask permission—it just hits you and won’t let go. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/23/scott-matthew-white-horse/ Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/22/ryan-mcginley/ McGinley photographs young people the way someone who likes them actually sees them—loose-limbed, unguarded, bodies as landscape as much as objects. The color doesn’t perform; it just sits there, true. He’s been doing this for years and the work never got cynical, which is the only thing that matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/22/ryan-mcginley/ Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/22/karate-kid/ Daniel’s scrubbing a fence in the hot sun, thinking this old man is crazy or just slave-driving him. Wax on, wax off. Small board, right hand, big board, left hand. And somewhere in there, it’s karate. That’s the whole film for me—a kid learning from an old man who actually cares. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/22/karate-kid/ Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/21/just-the-video/ Opening YouTube to watch a music video used to be simple. Now there’s a banner ad, comments from every troll with a keyboard, buttons everywhere telling me to rate and share and subscribe. The whole interface is designed to interrupt me before I even hit play. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/21/just-the-video/ Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/21/renata-raksha/ I found Renata Raksha’s work and kept going back to it. She shoots for MTV, Disney, Nylon—all the expected places—but the work overflows with strange ideas and genuine creativity. Gold glitter on faces. Women in pig masks. A real window into her actual friends. She doesn’t compromise the vision for the client. The photographs are sexual and human, full of skin and desire, the kind that make you want to spend time with them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/21/renata-raksha/ Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/21/lil-amys-big-adventures/ Amy had finally had enough of being the logo for some second-rate website, standing in the same place day after day, hand in her crotch. She still dreamed about Hannah’s distraction entry sometimes—dreamed about it at night and woke up thinking about it. So she grabbed her two best friends, Waldo (a clever magical dildo) and Mort (a zombie bride who was always depressed), and the three of them moved into a döner place where they could fight against the Klabautermann, this evil creature from German folklore whose name nobody could actually say. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/21/lil-amys-big-adventures/ Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/20/green-hill-zone/ Mikael Aguirre paints characters from games that lived in my hand when I was young. Yoshi with Baby Mario on his back. Chun-Li with her impossible legs. Sonic in the Green Hill Zone. His work gets something specific about how those sprites looked and felt—perfect, infinite, small. Looking at his paintings makes you want to play. Not want to remember playing. Want to actually play, right now, to hit that button and keep going. The work gives you that itch. But there’s no way to scratch it with just a painting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/20/green-hill-zone/ Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/20/anna-selezneva/ I could write something pseudo-intellectual about black and white photography and how it strips away distraction to reveal essential truth. But these Hedi Slimane shots of Anna Selezneva just look too damn good. I don’t want to think about anything except what’s right in front of me. The monochrome works because there’s nothing but line and light and shadow, the way a face and body move through space. You see it and you can’t look away. That’s all there is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/20/anna-selezneva/ Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/20/the-tokyo-diaries/ David Schumann went to Japan as a student and got spotted on the street by a photographer—one of those things that actually happens to people sometimes. He’s a punk rocker with tattoos, so maybe he stood out in Tokyo. The modeling world, the culture shock, the randomness of discovery, all of it became a book called The Tokyo Diaries. I’m drawn to that kind of story: a life you don’t plan for that catches you anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/20/the-tokyo-diaries/ Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/20/gringo/ Found this Brazilian web design agency that built their whole thing around profanity. Like, they’ve collected curse words from everywhere—Spanish, Portuguese, English—and they’re using them as actual design elements. Flash animations full of crude language, clickable words that are just there to offend. At first I didn’t really get what the deeper idea was supposed to be. Spent five minutes clicking around, watching Portuguese translations of penis and pussy cycle through, wondering if there was a point underneath the shock value or if that was the point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/20/gringo/ Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/20/before-the-bus/ Life is fucking short, we all know that. The sane move would be to quit right now, buy a broken van, drive across Australia until you hit something, just to feel alive. Nobody does it. So I’m writing down everything I want to do before a Volkswagen bus plows me under. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/20/before-the-bus/ Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/19/fractal/ A poet and artist in the Burning Man community died of cancer last month. His name was Fractal. A woman who knew him organized a response: a shoot with photographer Cherry Vega, prints for sale at twenty-five dollars, money to a cancer research center. Just the practical thing to do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/19/fractal/ Thu, 19 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/19/hurricane-festival-2009/ Every spring brings the same exhausting questions: which festival, can you afford it, is any of it worth the drive? Becca and I had settled on Rock am Ring, the reliable German choice. Then Hurricane Festival released their lineup and I realized we’d been idiots. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/19/hurricane-festival-2009/ Thu, 19 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/19/döner-instead/ Starbucks on a Saturday, me and Gülcan with the full setup—folders, notebooks, the confidence of people who think they’re about to be productive. Screaming kids and a smell I couldn’t place killed that in about twenty minutes. We both dropped the pretense immediately. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/19/döner-instead/ Thu, 19 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/18/uh-huh-her/ I was going to write something glowing about Metro Station, their whole “Seventeen Forever” emo moment, but Miley Cyrus showed up in the video and it was obvious her dad was bankrolling the whole thing, and suddenly the performance fell apart. She’s not emo. She never was. The contradiction was too big. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/18/uh-huh-her/ Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/17/more-bloc-party/ Bloc Party was built for remix collections. That production sensibility—precise, angular, all space and structure—is basically an invitation for other artists to step in and rebuild it. When their third comp came around, I was just curious who they’d picked. Armand Van Helden taking on “Signs” was the first single, and it does that thing remix comps do best: the original melody stays intact but everything else gets dismantled and reconstructed into something that lives in a different headspace entirely. I remember a “Blue Light” remix doing the same thing well. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/17/more-bloc-party/ Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/17/lauren-peralta/ Came across Lauren Peralta’s work—black and white photographs about female eroticism and sexuality. American photographer. What stands out is the directness. No hedging, no ironic distance, no attempts at tasteful restraint. She just looks at the subject straight on. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/17/lauren-peralta/ Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/17/bowery-boys/ Keiichi Nitta published his first book in April, Bowery Boys, and it reads like the work of someone who spent real time in Terry Richardson’s studio—that same hunger for bodies and street rawness, that same refusal to soften anything. Packed with naked girls and street types, filtered through a Japanese sensibility that shouldn’t sit well with New York street photography but somehow does. Richardson must have been a good teacher. The pictures aren’t apologizing for what they are, and that’s exactly what they need to be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/17/bowery-boys/ Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/15/the-frame-narrative/ The realization came to me last night. If games have rules that make them work, and life is just another game, then there have to be glitches everywhere—ways through that only I can see, paths that make sense to nobody else. The actual machinery of how it all functions is so much more interesting than actually playing it. That’s what finally made sense: I’m not the protagonist. I’m the frame narrative. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/15/the-frame-narrative/ Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/15/the-duchess-in-march/ I was looking through Lula—Leith Clark’s magazine—and found these glossy stills from an upcoming short film by the Brownlee Brothers. The title’s impossible: “The Continuing And Lamentable Saga Of The Suicide Brothers.” Keira Knightley’s in it playing a fairy. The photos looked good, but I’ve been hunting for a trailer and can’t find one. So I’m just waiting to see what they’ve made. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/15/the-duchess-in-march/ Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/15/if-you-would-come-back-home/ William Fitzsimmons sings “If You Would Come Back Home” like he’s read the ending already. His voice comes in thin and careful over fingerpicking that sounds like rain on a window—not music that tries to lift you up, but music that sits with you in the dark and doesn’t apologize for what it is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/15/if-you-would-come-back-home/ Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/15/slumdog-millionaire/ There’s this moment in the trailer where the music just takes over and you know you’re watching something that matters. It’s Slumdog Millionaire, set in Mumbai, about two brothers—Jamal and Salim—who grow up on the same brutal streets and become entirely different people. Jamal gets on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, fighting through the questions one by one, trying to get back to Latika, this girl he lost somewhere along the way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/15/slumdog-millionaire/ Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/13/depp-in-wonderland/ The first stills came out - Tim Burton’s Alice with Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. By that point the casting felt inevitable: of course Depp, of course Burton. They’d figured out their language after Sweeney Todd, that shorthand between a director who thinks in silhouettes and an actor who can make himself look like one. Mia Wasikowski as Alice, this quiet Australian actress I didn’t know, strange in just the right way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/13/depp-in-wonderland/ Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/13/daniel/ Bat for Lashes’ “Daniel” doesn’t have room for Natasha Khan’s voice to hide behind anything—just breath and hesitation underneath the melody. It was a solid preview for “Two Suns,” and that moment where the song stops trying to convince you of anything is the one that kept pulling me back. Until it stopped working. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/13/daniel/ Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/13/the-ting-tings/ There’s something about The Ting Tings that just works for me. That electronic pop energy, the way they build these tracks that make you want to move even in an empty living room at two in the afternoon. I circled back to them recently, to that moment in the late 2000s when they seemed to be everywhere but still felt genuinely good. That combination is rare. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/13/the-ting-tings/ Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/13/lisa-wassmann/ Lisa Wassmann photographs people and catches them actual—no theme, no photographer’s trick, just someone being there and her watching clearly. Beautiful people, wrecked people, strange people. She treats them all the same: genuine attention, no bullshit. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/13/lisa-wassmann/ Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/13/sharp/ I’ve taken thousands of photos that mean nothing to me—the kind you make with a cheap camera and forget immediately. Everyone has. It’s the default mode now: cameras everywhere, no barrier between wanting to document something and actually capturing it, results are irrelevant. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/13/sharp/ Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/12/still-red/ I was eight or nine, sitting in front of the TV with whatever action figure was selling that season. Five teenagers in spandex yelling about dinosaurs and pulling giant robots out of nowhere. The transformation sequence hit different—that moment when the music swells and you stop being some random kid and suddenly you’re chosen. You have a color. You have a job. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/12/still-red/ Thu, 12 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/11/stood-up/ Lele Saveri shot Alice waiting. That’s the concept—not metaphorically, actually waiting, dressed in Vivienne Westwood and Levi’s and Agnes B, holding a lollipop and a balloon and a cake. Somehow it’s both funny and sad, which is probably why it works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/11/stood-up/ Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/11/ellens-emma/ Ellen von Unwerth shot Emma Watson in vintage clothes and it actually works. There’s the immediate part—she looks good, she’s attractive—but also something smarter in the frame. Chaplin’s in there somewhere, circus melancholy, all these references that could be pretentious but somehow aren’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/11/ellens-emma/ Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/10/cardoor/ There’s this video by someone called Rogue Wanda or Tim Cash where he just keeps grinning at the camera saying “Cardoor” while doing something that might be driving or might be performance art or might be the result of whatever he’s on. Like a car crash you can’t stop watching. The kind of thing where you don’t understand what you’re looking at but you also can’t look away. Makes you wonder if you should drink less beer at night. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/10/cardoor/ Tue, 10 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/10/call-the-police/ Two in the morning, karaoke night, and I’m standing in a room full of people absolutely butchering the hits of three decades because we’ve had enough beer to think we’re incredible. The 80s, the 90s, whatever we could find—it all sounded the same when we were singing it, which is to say it all sounded terrible. We knew it was terrible. We just didn’t care. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/10/call-the-police/ Tue, 10 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/9/remix-rotation/ I like remixes. There’s something about hearing a track you already know get pulled completely apart and rebuilt from whatever’s left. The good ones aren’t just someone layering beats over the original—they actually understand what they’re listening to. They find what’s worth keeping and make it into something else, something you want to move to or sit with late when everything feels off. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/9/remix-rotation/ Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/8/steve-aoki/ I have his poster on my wall. That’s the whole story right there. Steve Aoki’s this American club DJ, born in Miami, raised in California, and yeah, his sister’s worth worshipping, but what destroyed me was “Pillowface and His Airplane Chronicles”—finally downloaded it last year and couldn’t stop spinning it. He took the songs I actually cared about, the ones living in my head—Justice’s “Happen,” Uffie, Peaches, Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand—and remixed them into these devastating, gorgeous, absolutely filthy bangers. It’s like he’d somehow read my mind and figured out exactly what I needed: something to pull my heart out of indie-depression hell and make it actually feel something. Dense, gleaming club tracks that just hit right. Thinking about it gets me sweating—that deep club-floor sweat, the kind you get at 4 AM with a hundred bodies around you—and I need to sit with ice water. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/8/steve-aoki/ Sun, 08 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/8/mischa-barton/ The O.C. worked because of Marissa Cooper, and Barton played her like she actually understood what it meant. Not the money or the looks—it was watching someone with everything slowly destroy herself anyway. Just degradation in slow motion, and Barton had the gravity to make it matter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/8/mischa-barton/ Sun, 08 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/8/metronomy-a-thing-for-me/ Just got back from some guy’s birthday party, half-conscious, and collapsed on the couch. Turned on the TV and Metronomy’s ’A Thing For Me’ came on and grabbed me—something about it made me need to write it down right then, dead tired as I was. Shit, it’s already Sunday. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/8/metronomy-a-thing-for-me/ Sun, 08 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/7/she-always-knew/ She knew it would happen. Filippa Smeds had been blogging for about a year when we talked, already pulling fifty to seventy comments a post, getting features in Elle Girl, Les Mads, Metro dubbing her Stockholm’s best-dressed girl. When I asked if she’d expected any of this, she didn’t hesitate. She’d always believed her blog would get huge. There was no other choice, really—either you have it or you don’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/7/she-always-knew/ Sat, 07 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/5/what-google-knows/ I played that autocomplete game where you type your name plus “needs” and see what Google autocompletes it with. Mine was “Marcel needs our help.” It’s supposed to be a joke—Google already knows what you need before you do—but it landed different when I saw it. There’s something weirdly specific about what the algorithm comes up with, like it’s picking up on something real underneath all the search noise. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/5/what-google-knows/ Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/4/fairground-gas/ Vice had a photographer shoot fashion models on nitrous oxide. Maciek Pozoga got them completely gone on balloons. Which makes sense. Models are barely there anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/4/fairground-gas/ Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/4/what-youre-actually-thinking-about/ Five in the morning at a club and I haven’t gotten laid. The bus guy didn’t want to come home with me. My parents burst in with a birthday cake right before things could happen. So I lock the door, kill the lights, and beat off to take the edge off. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/4/what-youre-actually-thinking-about/ Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/3/evan/ Evan left SuicideGirls before I noticed her, but I remember the one set she posted. Red hair against a matching background, and something about it just clicked. People were still talking about it months later, which is odd for a single photo, but that was the thing—one moment, perfectly timed, and then she was gone before anything could dull it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/3/evan/ Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/3/purified/ Spring comes whether the weather’s cooperating or not, and with it the usual cascade—couples in parks, regrettable club decisions, the whole seasonal push toward sentiment. I’m not immune. So when Tamar’s “Purified” started circling my head, all black and white and dead serious about love’s power to remake you, I believed it. Completely. For at least three minutes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/3/purified/ Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/2/chrono-trigger-again/ Grabbed the DS remake of Chrono Trigger after hours of trudging through the Berlin rain. Got home soaked through, turned it on before I even changed, and fell straight back in. Three seconds and I’d remembered every path, every detail—the weight of that whole world. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/2/chrono-trigger-again/ Mon, 02 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/1/tokyo-carax-gondry/ Leos Carax and Michel Gondry made a film together called Tokyo. Two filmmakers with completely different visual languages meeting over the same subject—you notice that kind of pairing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/1/tokyo-carax-gondry/ Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/1/blonde-rises-again/ Every month I hit the magazine stand to see what’s actually being printed, what’s fighting to survive, what magazines still have anything to say. This time I flipped through Cooler—Australian surf photography, Kjersti Buaas and snowboards, Juliet Elliott in a photo shoot with her arm in a sling and somehow still making it work. Nylon had Kristen Stewart on the cover, and at least they let her say the obvious: nobody should wear what fashion magazines recommend. That’s honest. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/3/1/blonde-rises-again/ Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/28/just-hannah/ Hannah from Munich sent me a video of herself walking through her apartment, waving at the camera. Watch it and you’d think she’s on something—Red Bull, caffeine pills, something that keeps you moving at that speed. Energy practically vibrating off the screen, everything sharp and bright. But that’s just how she is. Hannah runs like that naturally, no artificial boost, no false enthusiasm. That’s her baseline. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/28/just-hannah/ Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/27/the-fat-green-g/ I didn’t care when GIGA shut down. One less shit TV channel in the world, big deal. By 2006, when Green and Realm ended, I’d already made my peace with the whole thing. Wasn’t planning to think about it again. Then today I went back and watched some old clips from those years, and something in my chest just opened up. Tears and everything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/27/the-fat-green-g/ Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/26/unpolished-tools/ I released a bunch of WordPress themes the other day. Eleven total, five new ones, all free. They’re not perfect—I went through them once, there’s definitely stuff that needs fixing, the customization can be a pain depending on what you’re trying to do. That’s kind of the feature, not the bug. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/26/unpolished-tools/ Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/24/on-display/ Safari’s new beta just came out and I’ve spent the last couple hours diving into it. The startup screen shows your most-visited sites, which is convenient enough—if you just want to get back to wherever you always go, it’s right there. CoverFlow’s integrated, search suggestions work better than before, the whole thing feels noticeably faster and more stable. It’s one of those updates that makes you wonder what they were waiting for. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/24/on-display/ Tue, 24 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/24/could-this-be/ I made the mistake of letting Lovers Electric play in the background. Just once. “Could This Be”—Australian pop that sounds like the Ting Tings filtered through pure sugar and ketchup. Now that “bababababa” hook is in my head and I can’t get it out. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/24/could-this-be/ Tue, 24 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/24/use-somebody/ There’s something about Caleb Followill’s voice that just works. It’s got this worn-in quality, like he’s been screaming into a microphone in dive bars for years, which I guess he has. Kings of Leon came up in that era when rock bands were supposed to have something to prove, and Followill’s delivery had real hunger in it—not performative, just genuinely hoarse and present. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/24/use-somebody/ Tue, 24 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/22/cute-little-pussies/ On this brutally cold Sunday, I’m bundled up with hot chocolate while a kid reads from a cat book. She keeps stopping to shout ’BOM CHICKA WOW WOW!!’ with complete earnestness, and it’s perfectly absurd—something about a tiny person saying something ridiculous just works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/22/cute-little-pussies/ Sun, 22 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/20/you-are-the-one/ Winter outside—storm, snow, everything gone to shit. I’m inside and somehow getting colder just thinking about it. Then Shiny Toy Guns comes on, and honestly, you’ve got to love a band with that name. Their song “You Are The One” has this electronic weight underneath that doesn’t exactly warm you, but it carries you through the gray afternoon when nothing else will. It sweetens the day, or at least makes the cold a bit easier to sit with. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/20/you-are-the-one/ Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/20/the-tree/ I was sketching in a café last week - nothing important, just working through a visual problem. Nobody was looking. The sketches were garbage. But something about being present for that felt real in a way other things don’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/20/the-tree/ Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/20/its-only-contacts/ I was flipping through Computer Arts—they’ve got this whole series on starting your own creative studio, seven pages about design and web and illustration and how to do it right. Supposedly my plan at some point, London or Tokyo or whenever I finally pull the trigger. But you read through all that and what do you actually get? Contacts. Vitamin B. Connections. One word. That’s the whole thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/20/its-only-contacts/ Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/20/lucas-in-love/ Lucas from Buenos Aires saw a photo online—red hair, freckles, a moment captured by some photographer named Oceanwave and posted on Flickr. He wants to find her. Doesn’t have a name, doesn’t know anything about her except what’s in that image. So he’s asking if anyone knows who she is. He’s asking me to ask you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/20/lucas-in-love/ Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/18/boombox/ Ely Kim spent a hundred days dancing to a hundred different songs at a hundred different locations. The video is hypnotic in the most straightforward way—no edits, no tricks, just him moving to song after song in parking lots, rooftops, apartments, streets. He’s a chubby American guy with tastes that don’t apologize, and the website that came with the project makes that clear. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/18/boombox/ Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/18/god-are-you-ugly/ Darwin Dating only accepts the most conventionally beautiful people in the world. You apply by confirming you don’t have acne, cellulite, sagging skin, stretch marks, too much body hair, unibrows, freckles, or red hair. Ten people supposedly made it through the filter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/18/god-are-you-ugly/ Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/16/piraten/ Summer 2009, and The Pirate Bay was in a Swedish courtroom. Somewhere in Europe I was downloading a TV series that wouldn’t air for six months, maybe a year, maybe never in any form I actually wanted. The studios controlled everything—when you could watch it, what language it came in, which territories got what. The Pirate Bay made it irrelevant. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/16/piraten/ Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/16/1999/ My knee was scraped raw against the concrete. The pavement flew past so fast I turned the blood into spotted abstract art. “Marcel, run faster, man, before those assholes catch us,” someone yelled. I could see Eniz and Ali ahead of me in the dark. We jumped fences, climbed hedges, ran down streets I didn’t even know existed. I had no idea if they were still chasing us or if we’d lost them somewhere in the last fifteen minutes of chaos, but my lungs were burning and I limped the last stretch to the playground gate. We climbed into the little house on the slide and collapsed into each other. I could hear their hearts pounding as loud as mine. Fireflies drifted around us in that eerie moonlight. We crouched there in total silence for minutes, just staring at each other, not moving, until dark shapes came running through the gate screaming our names and laughing, throwing their arms around us. It was them. The ZSC. My best friends. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/16/1999/ Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/16/before-the-sandman/ The video for Peter Björn and John’s “Nothing to Worry About” is completely unhinged in the best way. These greasy pseudo-yakuzas are out cruising hot cars in broad daylight, jumping around on playgrounds with the kind of swagger that only works if you commit to the absurdity. The whole thing is shot so matter-of-factly that the weirdness just sits there perfectly. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/16/before-the-sandman/ Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/15/how-to-disappear/ One moment. That’s all it takes to stop being a person and start being a problem. Kill a president—could be an accident. Sleep with the mob boss’s daughter and watch his guys fire up the acid. Synthesize an HIV cure in your kitchen and suddenly you’re worth more dead to the pharmaceutical industry than any disease is. Whatever it is, if it’s serious enough, you stop existing as a human being. You just disappear. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/15/how-to-disappear/ Sun, 15 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/15/scoli/ Found Scoli in that endless scroll of internet subculture, one of those profiles that actually looked like a person instead of a brand. Tattoos, deliberately messy hair, the confidence to get fake breasts and not perform shame about it. The music taste made sense—Against Me!, Queen, Foreigner, the kind of range that suggests someone who actually listens instead of curates. But the Bob Ross thing is what caught me. I used to do the same thing at odd hours, just sit with his voice and watch him paint things that made him happy. Having that as a hero says something about wanting to build instead of just rage, or maybe just needing that slowness as ballast. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/15/scoli/ Sun, 15 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/15/chilly-willy/ Becca came through the city over the weekend and completely ran me into the ground. We pushed through Corpse Bride in chunks—Tim Burton’s whole death-and-devotion thing playing while I got progressively more glazed. Then we made this ugly beautiful seafood situation baked with cheese and potatoes, the kind that tastes better than it looks. Shisha after that, drinks, music I’d picked specifically for the night. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/15/chilly-willy/ Sun, 15 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/12/every-year/ The season’s here. Every year the exact same thing—girls getting remade on camera, the internet screaming about tits and drama, and I’m sitting here too. Tessa’s my favorite so far. There’s a blonde I wanted further who’s made it through another round. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/12/every-year/ Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/12/caught-2/ Pete Doherty was on it. Lily Allen. Ladyhawke doing that synth thing I could listen to forever. And Sigur Rós—”Saeglopur”—starting as almost nothing, just this quiet moment, before it opens into what feels like a gentle emotional explosion. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/12/caught-2/ Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/11/office-levels/ So there’s this Japanese company that literally turned work into an RPG. Not as some clever metaphor—actually, genuinely, in the most literal way possible. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/11/office-levels/ Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/11/time-to-pretend/ MGMT’s “Time To Pretend” is the kind of song that works like an emergency button, the one you hit when the day decides to just go completely sideways. I’ve got it loaded for the specific moment when it’s cold outside and your mood’s stuck somewhere dark and you need something to jar you loose. The production has this almost manic momentum, all synth and forward thrust, and there’s something about how it’s built that just forces you out of whatever you’re trapped in. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/11/time-to-pretend/ Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/11/one-song-per-year/ I found Favtape last week—a website that does something charmingly specific: it picks one song for every year from 1901 to now. 1956 gets Elvis. 1987 gets Van Halen. No reasoning, no essays about why, just the song and the year. The interface is a grid that mimics the old Muxtape design, which feels appropriate for a site that’s basically one very long mixtape. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/11/one-song-per-year/ Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/10/coconut-night/ Three naked people wake up in a forest surrounded by creatures that aren’t quite human. This is the We Are Wolves video for “Coconut Night,” and it’s genuinely unsettling in a deadpan way—not trying to scare you, just strange. The costumes are clearly handmade and cheap, but that’s exactly what makes them work. Wrong without being slick about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/10/coconut-night/ Tue, 10 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/10/thirty-days-without-news/ There’s thousands of news stories every day. British teens spending hours on porn, world records for breasts, a twelve-year-old supposedly dying of joy over Lego. Spiegel, Twitter, the whole endless machine—politics, culture, business, nothing stops. But does any of it actually improve your life, or is it just noise filling your head? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/10/thirty-days-without-news/ Tue, 10 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/9/the-ting-tings-be-the-one/ I can’t stop listening to this. Sent “Be The One” to Hannah months back and she was lukewarm, but I’m completely obsessed. Five times a day minimum. It just triggers this enormous joy that I can’t explain. When I think about that NEON review trashing them, I want to puke. They’re brilliant, and anyone who doesn’t get it shouldn’t be writing about pop. Which should be obvious. But I’m the only one who feels this way, and that’s fine. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/9/the-ting-tings-be-the-one/ Mon, 09 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/9/and-the-winner-is/ We ran this desktop contest and the submissions just kept coming—way more than either of us expected. Hannah and I spent forever going through them trying to find the one that had it all, the one with actual charm and whatever makes something just work right. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/9/and-the-winner-is/ Mon, 09 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/8/majiya/ Came across Majiya on SuicideGirls one afternoon—twenty-four, eight piercings, loves The Simpsons and chocolate, hates rotten oranges. She seemed like an actual person. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/8/majiya/ Sun, 08 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/7/sixteen-hours/ You spend sixteen hours a day looking at a rectangle. That’s your desktop. So naturally people go a bit insane trying to make it perfect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/7/sixteen-hours/ Sat, 07 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/6/another-girl/ I didn’t know Manicure before this. No idea who they were or where they came from. The video credits are all Russian names, so I’m guessing Moscow area, but that’s just speculation. “Another Girl” is straightforward post-punk in the British style—all lean and dark. What’s strange is how well it works despite the band barely speaking a word of English. I’ve already played it three times in a row and that’s no accident. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/6/another-girl/ Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/6/nick-and-norah/ Nick makes mixtapes for his ex and never stops. It’s the most futile romantic gesture—she’s moved on, she barely listens—but when you’re that far gone it makes perfect sense. That’s how “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” opens: not with a declaration but with someone stuck in a loop, making art for a ghost. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/6/nick-and-norah/ Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/5/which-bitch/ I heard The View somewhere in one of those nights when everyone’s too drunk and the music just keeps playing—”Same Jeans,” “Wasted Little DJ’s” on repeat. Kyle Falconer’s singing grabbed me immediately, this dirty Scottish accent that sounds like he’s been smoking and drinking his whole life, which he probably has. I went all in, the way you do when the timing feels right and the whiskey’s helping. When their new album came out, I was already waiting for it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/5/which-bitch/ Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/5/lily-cole/ Most supermodels looked hollowed out, like the personality had been surgically removed for better bone structure. Lily Cole was different—twenty, English, completely arresting in a way that didn’t follow any template. Red hair, pale skin, the kind of presence that can’t be manufactured. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/5/lily-cole/ Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/4/m83-we-own-the-sky/ I’ve had M83’s “We Own The Sky” on my iPod for what feels like months, playing it constantly. The song builds these massive synth swells that feel like they’re going to crack open into something apocalyptic or transcendent, then they just keep building instead. That’s the whole appeal, really. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/4/m83-we-own-the-sky/ Wed, 04 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/4/lindsay-lohan-is-great/ Looking back at everything written about Lindsay Lohan, someone should actually stand up for her instead of just piling on. Yeah, she did the drugs, the drunk driving, all of it, but who hasn’t been stupid in their twenties? The difference is your failures weren’t stalked by paparazzi. She’s difficult now, her music got bad, she got scary thin. But that’s not the whole picture. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/4/lindsay-lohan-is-great/ Wed, 04 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/2/asobi-seksu-me-mary/ Asobi Seksu is Japanese for casual sex, which is the right band name for a New York indie rock group. Yuki Chikudate’s voice drifts through their songs without pushing, half-singing, half-thinking out loud. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/2/asobi-seksu-me-mary/ Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/2/every-blog-i-thought-of/ Made a list of every blog worth reading in my corner of the internet. Got to the end dead tired and already thinking of three people I’d forgotten. That’s always how it goes when you try to map a community: you finish and immediately know it’s incomplete. Maybe you’ll find something new in there. If I left you out, that’s on me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/2/every-blog-i-thought-of/ Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/1/small-world/ I stuck leaves all over the walls. Sounds stupid but it works—just grab whatever and plaster it everywhere randomly. Easy to add more whenever. I’m sure someone has some theory about creative spaces, but the real thing is when my head goes empty—and it goes empty a lot—I lean back and look up and suddenly there are ideas. Or I’m turned on. Both sometimes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/1/small-world/ Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/1/arisu/ Arisu styles hair and makes music and plays racing games seriously. These aren’t hobbies—each one is an actual commitment. That combination is rarer than you’d think. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/2/1/arisu/ Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/31/newsstand/ I’d grab whatever was at the newsstand. PRINZ had Berlin writers on love and drugs. VICE was running Issei Sagawa next to Richard Kern nudes. NEON mixed breakup advice with animal sex philosophy. NYLON called Franz Ferdinand the world’s best-dressed band while also interviewing a snowboarder named Kjersti Buaas. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/31/newsstand/ Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/30/berlin-fashion-week/ Got invited to fashion week tonight, which is hilarious because I’m going to be the biggest pleb in the room. Like, extremely obviously. But I dressed up anyway—really went for it—and I’m bringing a friend to share the weirdness. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/30/berlin-fashion-week/ Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/29/lykke-li/ Lykke Li showed up around the same time as Ting Tings and Ladyhawke, and she landed harder with me. I have a black and white portrait of her that’s been on my wall. She talked about art being the only way to approach life as a mystery, how she’d considered fashion and painting before landing on music as her form of expression—the thing that actually needed saying. Her video then was all purity, all clarity. No excess, nothing wasted. That’s why she stuck. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/29/lykke-li/ Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/28/we-told-jokes-once/ I lied to everyone about that SingStar night. Said there were no recordings, no proof. Found a video on an old camera card the other day—Anne and me, already pretty gone, telling jokes I can’t even remember. I was on Hohes C juice. Anne was on actual alcohol. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/28/we-told-jokes-once/ Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/27/blank-wall/ I have this massive blank wall at home. Actually I have several, but there’s one in particular that’s been staring at me for months—pristine white, completely empty, waiting for something. I’ve been collecting good photographs, images that stuck with me, stuff I actually want to look at every day. Printing them out seemed like the obvious next step, but then I hit this weird anxiety about execution. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/27/blank-wall/ Tue, 27 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/26/porn-stars-tweet/ Twitter somehow became the place where everyone just broadcasts everything. Millions of people glued to screens, sharing every random thought, and yeah, I’m as bad as anyone. But one thing that’s kind of funny—porn stars are on there too. Just posting like everyone else. Some of the most famous adult performers have huge followings, and people engage with them like any other celebrity, because that’s what they’ve become. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/26/porn-stars-tweet/ Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/25/pink-saturday/ The PlayStation was pink. Someone had joked about it beforehand, but there it was, and it worked, and that’s all that mattered. Saturday night, friends, a microphone. I’d only brought multivitamin juice, which completely undermined the getting-wasted narrative, but nobody cared. We were loud and stupid and the TV was turned way too high, and that was the whole point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/25/pink-saturday/ Sun, 25 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/25/kokeshi/ Kokeshi is basically exactly the type I go for—Japan, graphic design, photography, the obvious stuff. But it’s the other alignment that really does it: she’s too online, gets too attached to people, prefers the sex positions where she doesn’t have to do much. I’m looking at myself in a mirror and it works out. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/25/kokeshi/ Sun, 25 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/23/my-real-name/ Farin Urlaub of Die Ärzte sounds like someone who won before he started. Cher doesn’t need anything else. Mian Mian named herself and became a legend. Even Falco, the guy born Johann Hölzel in Austria, understood that your real name is the one you choose, not the one you inherit. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/23/my-real-name/ Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/22/mao-abe/ I know I’m that guy about Japanese stuff, and yeah, I just posted something else, but I can’t help it—I’m completely blown away by Mao Abe’s track. Eighteen years old and she’s made something that’s just landing different. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/22/mao-abe/ Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/22/scouting-for-girls/ I had “She’s So Lovely” on rotation for a while in the mid-2000s. Scouting for Girls were one of those bands that operated in the space between pop and rock—earnest, slightly ridiculous, unironic in a way that almost seemed defiant. Three guys writing straightforward songs about romance. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/22/scouting-for-girls/ Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/21/maximum/ Namalee Bolle operates at full saturation in London’s cultural mix—musician, designer, model, author, Super Super Magazine founder. Her whole aesthetic is Cartoon Couture: maximum neon, maximum volume, maximum brightness. The colors genuinely hurt to look at. Not subtle, not safe. Intentionally. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/21/maximum/ Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/21/last-thing-wins/ I’m drowning in information streams that’ll slowly drive me insane. What’s for lunch tomorrow? Did they find that missing girl? How’s Susi doing in Canada? When does the new season of Grey’s Anatomy air? If I actually tracked each thread with any real diligence, my head would explode or I’d spend the entire day just cataloging which priorities shifted where. Anyone willing to verify the credibility of all this has basically made a hobby into a career. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/21/last-thing-wins/ Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/18/eaten/ Bambu’s 23, sings and dances, and has decided she’ll be eaten by a shark that will launch her into her next life. Not metaphorically. As an actual scenario. How you land on that specific death fantasy, I don’t know. What shark it is, or how rebirth works via digestion—details aren’t clear. But she seems to have thought it through and landed on it with total conviction. Most people leave reincarnation abstract because the full picture is too weird to describe. Bambu’s the opposite. She’s imagined the absolute worst and owns it completely. There’s something honest in that, if nothing else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/18/eaten/ Sun, 18 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/18/these-four/ Midweek hit and I needed something to carry me through it. Lily Allen had this bratty, almost punchy energy, less careful than everything getting play on the radio. Shiny Toy Guns came in all angles and cold electricity—synthetic and hard in a way that felt right for the moment. School of Seven Bells was the opposite temperature entirely; I’d put it on late, something dream-like that didn’t ask anything of you, just held you while you worked through everything. Empire of the Sun was the outlier, psychedelic and sprawling, not what you’d expect from a playlist like this but somehow it fit. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/18/these-four/ Sun, 18 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/18/the-tissue-days/ Thursday morning I woke up knowing something had gone wrong. Not dramatically—just this weight in my chest, the scratchiness starting. By afternoon I’d collected enough used tissues around my bed to mount them as installation art. Peppermint oil and ginger tea with honey became the smell of my entire existence. The apartment reeked of it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/18/the-tissue-days/ Sun, 18 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/17/mowing-the-lawn/ Staying up late as kids with whoever was around, glued to the late-night stuff on TV, drinking cola to keep awake. The appeal was obvious: breasts, bodies, the whole forbidden thing. But the actual threshold, the moment you knew you cared, was seeing pubic hair. That was the marker. That meant you were looking at a woman, not some image. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/17/mowing-the-lawn/ Sat, 17 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/16/keep-looking/ 2009 started as a complete shitstorm—economy imploding, terror in the news, everything serious broken. But I wasn’t going to let that stop what I cared about. My response was to start paying closer attention, not less. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/16/keep-looking/ Fri, 16 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/12/marta-streng/ Found her work through one of those recommendation rabbit holes—a photographer from Poland doing work that doesn’t try to convince you of anything. Marta Streng’s photographs sit in clarity and restraint. Light, color, sometimes a face. Nothing reaches for the dramatic or the conceptually clever. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/12/marta-streng/ Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/11/cold-comfort/ Single life is actually genius. You kiss whoever you want, you come home at four in the morning falling down drunk and nobody cares, you never have to wonder if maybe you could do better. It’s real freedom, the kind people spend their whole lives talking about and never actually getting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/11/cold-comfort/ Sun, 11 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/11/always-bet-on-nora/ Nora Tschirner has a new German comedy coming out called “Murder is My Business, Darling.” It’s about a mafia member who falls for a publishing employee and pretends to be an author to be near her. The premise is pretty flimsy, but I’ve stopped questioning her career choices because she always makes whatever she’s in feel real and funny. That’s usually enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/11/always-bet-on-nora/ Sun, 11 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/10/still-drinking/ Wake up mid-afternoon with a headache that’s basically a separate organism. That’s the moment you know whether you had an awesome night or you’re officially old—today it’s both. I’d have injected aspirin straight into my brain if that were possible, but what I actually did first was upload yesterday’s photos. All of us at Rosi’s, properly destroyed, grinning like we had somewhere to be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/10/still-drinking/ Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/8/instant-nostalgia/ I’m a designer who never learned Photoshop—no patience for it. So I’m always hunting for software that just does the work for you. Poladroid is exactly that. Put an image in, get a Polaroid out. The colors are faded just right, the frame authentic, and it even gives you that waiting period—watching the photo develop. It’s pure nostalgia, and now it’s free in beta for Mac and PC. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/8/instant-nostalgia/ Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/8/about-to-freeze/ Freezing yesterday, so Mandy and I went to Alexa and I picked up a jacket that actually works. Then we went to McDonald’s and ate too much, mostly because it was warm and I wanted to be full. I spent too much on a maxi-menu hoping I’d win a Wii or at least a soft serve. Got nothing. My friend who works at the Zur Goldenen Möwe told me the whole thing’s a scam anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/8/about-to-freeze/ Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/6/new-camera/ My old camera finally gave up the ghost after seven years or so—one of those early digital compacts with maybe two megapixels if you squinted at it. Dead. Gone. I mean, I’d been carrying it around knowing it was on borrowed time, but when it actually stopped working I realized how much I’d gotten used to having a camera in my pocket. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/6/new-camera/ Tue, 06 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/5/25/ So I’m 25 now. A quarter century, which supposedly means I’m supposed to have my shit together at this point—be wise, mature, grounded, the kind of guy who knows where he’s going. And I’m sitting here thinking about all that and realizing I’m completely full of it. Nothing’s changed. I’m still the same mess I was at 24, just older and slightly more aware of how little I know. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2009/1/5/25/ Mon, 05 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/31/yen-town/ Some films just hit. Yen Town is about this girl Ageha whose mother dies, and she gets raised by a Chinese singer named Glico and introduced to this world called Yen Town where everything’s for sale—sex, power, money. They find cash in a corpse, and suddenly this weird crew of Japanese, Chinese, and American people are rich. They buy a nightclub, Glico becomes a star, and everyone else slides into greed and crime and eventually gets hunted down by killers. It’s the whole trajectory: you want something, you get it, it kills you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/31/yen-town/ Wed, 31 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/31/best-of-2008/ I played these songs in 2008 until they were grooves in my brain. Ladyhawke, Lykke Li, The Ting Tings, Santogold. They were there when I needed to cry, when I needed something bright and restless to shake off whatever was sitting on my chest. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/31/best-of-2008/ Wed, 31 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/31/move-your-ass/ My 2009 motto: move your ass. Dead serious. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/31/move-your-ass/ Wed, 31 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/27/home-blur/ The more I drive between Berlin and Bavaria, the more those worlds blend into each other. They used to feel completely separate—like they erased each other from my mind. Friends, surroundings, all of it felt like a short dream that had nothing to do with real life. Now it’s different. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/27/home-blur/ Sat, 27 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/21/so-that-was-2008/ Every year’s basically the same as the one before. You pay attention to the details though—the ones that made this year different, harder, more beautiful, more heartbreaking. The things that made it feel like something actually happened. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/21/so-that-was-2008/ Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/20/not-there/ The nightmare came sharp and didn’t fade. I woke up drenched, went to the kitchen, poured cereal and milk like it was any other morning. But I could still see her face—white like death. Still smelled it. The blood seemed like some sick play of light and shadow on my skin. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/20/not-there/ Sat, 20 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/19/sinned/ Got sent a sin calculator. One of those internet quizzes where you check off your transgressions and it totals up what you owe in penance. Mine came to €2,601.13. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/19/sinned/ Fri, 19 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/17/the-best-ones-i-know/ Some kids came by and we made Christmas cards together. Nothing complicated—just cutting and pasting and drawing for an afternoon, the kind of thing you don’t think about much while it’s happening. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/17/the-best-ones-i-know/ Wed, 17 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/16/back-online/ I forgot to pay the internet bill. Spent the money on oatmeal instead. They just cut me off like that—no warning, no grace period. I told myself it was an experiment, some kind of digital detox, but it wasn’t. Just a fuckup that spiraled into weeks offline. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/16/back-online/ Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/16/lights-off-and-crying/ Last day before Christmas break at vocational school, and we’d been grinding through databases and specifications—the kind of shit that makes you genuinely question the entire premise of learning anything. So when someone suggested ditching the final class and watching a movie, I was already on board. “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” Tim Burton, 1993. I’d seen it a dozen times before, but somehow it never gets smaller. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/16/lights-off-and-crying/ Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/11/up-that-hill/ Heard that song again the other day and it dropped me straight back—to that Placebo and Kate Bush version that aired somewhere in The O.C., moved me to tears then and moves me to tears now. ’And if I only could, Make a deal with God, And get him to swap our places…’ That’s it. That’s the moment that sticks. There’s something in how they do that cover, something that hits different every time. I’ve been thinking about artists willing to be that open, that real with what they make. That matters. Every time someone puts something genuinely theirs out there, someone else is hearing it and carrying it forward years later. That’s worth something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/11/up-that-hill/ Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/11/end-of-year-shuffle/ There’s something about late December that makes you want to hear music that’s already a little sad. Architecture in Helsinki, Anna Ternheim, some others whose names I’ll probably forget by January—none of it is new, all of it has been on some rotation for years, but somehow it lands different in December. The year’s winding down, the light’s gone by four in the afternoon, and you’re not fighting the mood anymore, you’re just sitting in it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/11/end-of-year-shuffle/ Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/10/uniquely/ Oakley funded a film called Uniquely about snowboarders and surfers, naturally featuring their new sunglasses collection. The production is clean—sharp editing, good cinematography, the polish you get when a major brand is paying for it. I watched it because I’m into this stuff anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/10/uniquely/ Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/9/all-in/ André crashed for an extended weekend and basically never left. The whole thing blurred together—dumb pseudo-gay jokes at strangers, driving through parts of the city I’d normally avoid, drinking with my girlfriend and whoever else could make it, games we forgot the rules to, South Park marathons at three in the morning, YouTube parodies of Harry Potter on endless repeat. At some point I even snuck him into school disguised as an exchange student, which shouldn’t have worked but did. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/9/all-in/ Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/9/lena-and-paula/ There aren’t many futures that actually keep me up at night. But there’s one: making more money than my father. Because at some point I decided it’s the money that ruined everything—all those zeros are why he keeps disappearing for months with whatever girl he’s focused on, leaving the rest of us with nothing. My mother doesn’t know how deep it goes. Probably doesn’t want to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/9/lena-and-paula/ Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/5/december-afternoon/ A group of kids from the SOS children’s village in Marzahn came by the studio last month—twenty of them, maybe fewer. They wanted to make Christmas cards, so we made them. They’d sketch an idea or describe what they wanted, I’d help get it into the computer, and we’d print it out. Then they’d cut and paste and find glitter somehow, because there’s always glitter. There was cocoa. There were cookies I didn’t eat. Someone brought costumes and we ended up doing photo shoots that nobody had planned. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/5/december-afternoon/ Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/4/yvonne-at-kulturbrauerei/ I was at the Kulturbrauerei Christmas market with Basti, completely wasted on Glühwein—the kind of drunk where you think you’re being clever and have zero filter. We’d grabbed some Kaiserschmarrn and were walking around like we owned the place, grinning at nothing in particular, when I noticed Yvonne Catterfeld making out with some guy like it was the most important thing she’d ever done. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/4/yvonne-at-kulturbrauerei/ Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/2/the-morning-lie/ They say morning exercise drives away sorrow and worry. I’ve done enough dawn runs to know the only thing it drives away is sleep. Your mood stays where it was. Your legs get tired. Your mind doesn’t change. There’s something almost beautiful about fitness culture’s delusion—the motivational videos, the promise that your problems are one workout away from solved. They’re not. By noon you’re back to being whoever you were, just sore and minus two hours of sleep. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/2/the-morning-lie/ Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/2/mtv-did-something-right/ The colors are aggressively modern, the typography actually breathes, and MTV pulled that signature move where they push the contrast so hard on everything it practically attacks you from the screen. MTV Iggy launches tomorrow with BoA performing in New York. It works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/2/mtv-did-something-right/ Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/1/background-extra/ Years ago my design studio ended up in the background of some Hollywood movie they were shooting in Berlin. We were barely in it—a few seconds, maybe, in what looked like our own office. The only part I remember is throwing a file folder across the room by accident during one of the takes, and somehow that made it into the final cut. It’s the kind of thing that seems exciting for about five minutes and then you forget about it entirely. My colleague Christian played a security guard in the same scene, which was funnier than my accidental prop work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/12/1/background-extra/ Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/11/30/how-the-day-sounds/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/11/30/how-the-day-sounds/ Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/11/29/mumbai/ Two young guys, maybe twenty, running through Shalimar Estate with rifles. Empty street, just them. One of them points his gun at a shop: “There’s a lot of alcohol here.” The other: “Yeah, so what? I don’t have a problem with alcohol.” They keep running toward the hospital where they’d be shooting people within the hour. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/11/29/mumbai/ Sat, 29 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/11/27/actually-happy/ I’m happy. Actually happy, which sounds stupid to say out loud but there it is. I’m living in what’s probably the most financially fucked neighborhood in the city, and I’m happy anyway. The people here are real, they’re kind, and nobody’s beaten me up yet. The bar’s low but I’ll take it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/11/27/actually-happy/ Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/11/26/december-listening/ December arrives and you’re sick of Christmas music before December even starts. Ladyhawke’s been my antidote—there’s something about that production, the cold precision of it, that matches the way winter actually feels. Clean, austere, a refusal to perform emotion. Lykke Li does something similar but from deeper inside, all that weight but never melodramatic. The Ting Tings bring pure momentum, no apologies. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/11/26/december-listening/ Wed, 26 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/11/26/the-selby/ Todd Selby photographs people in their spaces—artists, designers, makers, whoever’s doing something interesting—and just shows you where they work and live. The photography itself is straightforward, not trying to make anything look more dramatic than it is. What gets you is seeing how people actually arrange their days. The weird objects on the shelf. The light coming through the window at 3pm. How someone’s taste works when they’re not performing for anyone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/11/26/the-selby/ Wed, 26 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/11/19/perpetrator-and-victim/ I got off the train and let Gulcan head to Hermannplatz alone. All the way I was thinking about the past, couldn’t make sense of it—why things happened the way they did, what it all meant. My stomach started hurting and I kept seeing faces from before, wondering what they were doing now, how they felt in that moment. Do you lose the right to be heard if nobody’s listening? I don’t have the strength to search for places where nothing terrible happened. The street was wet and dark, figures in black moving through it, crossing my path. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/11/19/perpetrator-and-victim/ Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/11/16/running-out-of-stories/ Walking through Berlin at night and it hits me: nothing else is coming. I’ve known her for years in different shapes, different women, but always her underneath. Every year we’d find each other and I’d learn who she was again that year, think maybe this is it, then leave. It was the only pattern I could repeat. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/11/16/running-out-of-stories/ Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/31/unfurnished/ Spent my first night in the new apartment with no bed, no couch, no table—just standing in each room at midnight like I’d solved some great riddle. Thomi and Sven had loaded a truck at some ungodly hour and drove my life across the city, which is the kind of thing that requires a long memory. The empty space felt less depressing and more like possibility, at least for the first few hours. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/31/unfurnished/ Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/30/i-can-teach-you-how-to-do-it/ These party photography sites were having a moment—Last Night’s Party, The Cobra Snake, that whole scene. Same basic idea: shoot every event, upload thousands of photos, let people see what they’re missing. The appeal is pretty specific: you get to watch other people have the kind of night you’ll never have. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/30/i-can-teach-you-how-to-do-it/ Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/30/red-hair/ I’ve got this thing for redheads. Real ones—with freckles, pale skin, those little dimples around the eyes. An ex ruined me. I can’t help it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/30/red-hair/ Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/30/the-shortlist/ Some guy in Japan started a petition to legalize marrying anime characters. First thing I thought: Sailor Moon. Then Nami from One Piece. The girl from Plastic Little if we’re being completely honest about it. The list makes itself when you’ve been paying attention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/30/the-shortlist/ Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/28/barely-stressed/ I’m not stressed, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Sure, I’m moving in a few days. Sure, half my family’s coming with a truck full of furniture. Sure, what started as anticipation has curdled into pure dread and I can’t wait for this to be over. But that’s not stress. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/28/barely-stressed/ Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/28/beccas-out/ I had Becca lined up for Ladyhawke and Black Kids at the Lido on Tuesday, thought it’d be good to drag her out. But she’s completely wrecked—couldn’t make it. Disappointing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/28/beccas-out/ Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/23/shitty-night/ Couldn’t sleep. Stomach was wrecked the entire time, and whenever I finally managed to drop off I’d dream about being trapped on some awful IKEA vacation with friends. No money, no clothes that weren’t filthy, and I didn’t want to be there anyway. Just highways the whole time. My brain wouldn’t let me wake up from it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/23/shitty-night/ Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/23/michi-promise/ MiChi dropped a single called ’PROMiSE’ and I’ve been playing it on repeat. She’s one of those Japanese-English singers who’s been doing her thing in Tokyo’s underground forever, doesn’t seem to care much about getting famous. The single came with an Avril Lavigne cover (’Sk8er Boy’), which could’ve been terrible but isn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/23/michi-promise/ Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/23/mtv-is-dead/ MTV Deutschland just killed off what was left of itself. The news division is gone, the music shows are gone, TRL’s technically still there but in what they call “energy-saving mode”—corporate speak for slowly dying. I’ve complained about MTV’s decline for years. The loss of VIVA, the death of music video programming, the way they replaced everything with reality garbage and cheap content. But this is different. This is the company finally admitting it has nothing left. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/23/mtv-is-dead/ Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/22/the-pie-maker/ This show about a pie maker with the ability to bring dead things back to life shouldn’t work. Everything’s too pretty, too strange, all oversaturated colors and deadpan narration and a tenderness that has no business existing in network television. But it does work. It reminds me of Big Fish, that specific baroque excess that actually means something, and Amélie’s obsessive love of small useless beautiful things. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/22/the-pie-maker/ Wed, 22 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/22/into-dofus/ Finding a decent MMORPG on Mac when you’re burned out on World of Warcraft is like trying to read during rush hour on the subway—theoretically possible, practically a nightmare. So I spent an afternoon digging, expecting nothing, and somehow landed on Dofus. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/22/into-dofus/ Wed, 22 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/20/blank-walls/ I’ve got this new apartment and the walls are asking for something. I’ve been scrolling through color palettes and photos of other people’s living rooms where everything looks inevitable and right. But nothing sticks. I see a pale green that works in one context and it suddenly looks sickly in natural light. A warm gray photographs beautifully but feels like surrender in person. I know what I like when I see it, which is worse—I can taste what I want but I can’t name it, and every time I get close something else catches my eye and I start over. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/20/blank-walls/ Mon, 20 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/19/twelve-days/ My weekend had everything—relaxed and exciting and reckless and adventurous all mixed together, basically the opposite of any weekday. Friday night Na-Young, my favorite project manager, invited me to Chi Chuin in Kreuzberg because I designed their new menu. Me, Thomi, and Basti sat in this cute little place, looked at this killer painting by Ohyun Kwon on the wall, drank something called “Nep Moi”—mild stuff. The food was excellent and the owners were genuinely nice and totally unhinged. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/19/twelve-days/ Sun, 19 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/15/get-yourself-knocked-up/ Müller—the German dairy company—just ran an ad campaign with the slogan “Lass dich befruchten.” That’s the whole thing. Not a metaphor, not dressed up. Just pure biological desire language for milk and yogurt products. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/15/get-yourself-knocked-up/ Wed, 15 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/14/actually-good-style/ There were so many fashion blogs back then. Seriously, they multiplied like rabbits—endless feeds of aspirational crap, most of it forgotten the moment you scrolled past. The good ones, the places where actual taste lived? Those were rare. You’d dig through garbage just hoping to land on someone who knew what they were doing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/14/actually-good-style/ Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/14/the-new-ones/ Apple finally refreshed the portable Macs, and it’s exactly what everyone’s been predicting. Glass trackpad, LED backlighting, NVidia graphics. They’re doubling down on that iMac design language, which evidently not everyone’s on board with. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/14/the-new-ones/ Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/14/actually-hilarious/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/14/actually-hilarious/ Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/13/the-ghibli-game/ Studio Ghibli designing a video game is the kind of announcement that stops you. Those films—Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl’s Castle—they’re already complete as art. The thought of that sensibility in a game you control, a world you move through, isn’t hype. It’s knowing what you’re looking at. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/13/the-ghibli-game/ Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/10/mgmt-the-youth/ The kids in MGMT’s ’The Youth’ look genuinely annoyed, like someone confiscated something from them. But they’re dressed better than anyone has the right to be—the kind of effortless style that makes you question your entire wardrobe. Eric Wareheim directed it, and you can see his deadpan fingerprints all over it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/10/mgmt-the-youth/ Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/10/twenty-days/ The sun’s been out and it’s doing that thing where you forget fall’s actually happening. Hot girls in bikinis, nice water, the whole summer feeling just when you thought you’d missed it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/10/twenty-days/ Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/9/october-again/ Apple’s confirmed October 14 for new MacBooks. I’m past the stage where announcements feel like events—they’re just scheduled things now, reliable as seasons. There’s always an October. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/9/october-again/ Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/8/spring-fuck-that/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/8/spring-fuck-that/ Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/7/just-call-someone/ Batman’s got a crisis that could be solved with one call, but it’s not going to happen. Nobody ever makes the call in movies, not when it would actually solve anything. College Humor did a whole thing about this - how screenwriters act like phones are optional technology, like we’re in some pre-digital age where you have to physically find someone to tell them something important. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/7/just-call-someone/ Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/7/when-someones-wish/ I’ve circled back to this Utada song more times than I can count. “Dareka No Negai Ga Kanau Koro” operates on a frequency most people skip past. She’s singing about someone half-gone, already out of reach, the impossibility of asking them to stay. The genius is in the restraint—no melodrama, no desperate crescendo, just her voice moving through the ache like she’s already accepted it, like she’s just telling you how it is. You’re listening from inside that acceptance, which somehow makes it worse than if she were actually begging. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/7/when-someones-wish/ Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/7/harry-and-the-potters/ Just finished the first Harry Potter book. Yeah, I know everyone else got there first. The prose isn’t fancy, and I don’t think it’s trying to be. It’s just fun following this nerdy kid around Hogwarts, the kind of book that keeps you reading past when you planned to stop. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/7/harry-and-the-potters/ Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/5/i-didnt-eat-for-three-days-so-i-could-be-lovely/ Hung over from the night before, so I stayed in bed with Skins season one on my iPod. Cassie’s my favorite—Hannah Murray as this gaunt, constantly wasted pseudo-model with this strange pull about her. She drifts through her scenes like nothing else exists, and you sit there the whole time with this dumb smile, just hoping she doesn’t fall, hoping she’ll actually eat. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/5/i-didnt-eat-for-three-days-so-i-could-be-lovely/ Sun, 05 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/4/crying-together/ How are you doing up there? Hanging with Elvis and Tupac now? Or are they too tame for what you want? I watched Toy Story 2 yesterday. Had nothing better to do. That song came on—the one you always cried at—and I found myself tearing up too. You would’ve laughed at me. I wish you could’ve seen it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/4/crying-together/ Sat, 04 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/3/kicking-the-tv/ Dinner with friends, spaghetti somewhere, and Popstars was on the TV. This is the German talent show where untalented people cry about their dreams in front of judges who’ve learned to look serious. The only good part about it was when Mandy or Anne appeared—for maybe thirty seconds you’d see someone who could actually sing, and then it went back to being garbage. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/3/kicking-the-tv/ Fri, 03 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/1/autumn-shuffle/ The dark comes earlier now. I notice it most on the drive home, the sky folded into itself by 5:30. Every autumn the music shifts without warning—brightness drains out and everything gets heavier, more textured. It’s automatic. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/10/1/autumn-shuffle/ Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/30/out-of-stock/ My favorite Puma cologne, Create, has been discontinued. A very nice Douglas employee broke the news to me recently, which is genuinely awful. I don’t just wear this stuff—I’ve basically become it. After all these years, my actual smell has merged with it, and now it’s gone. I found a family pack with free shower gel at some drugstore and grabbed it, which buys me some time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/30/out-of-stock/ Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/29/viva-bavaria/ I left Bavaria a year ago and everything there’s been falling apart since. The CSU is collapsing, Bayern Munich looks hopeless, and my family stopped showing up for each other’s birthdays. There’s the picture: Bavaria in freefall, and somehow it’s my fault for leaving. I moved to Berlin, to the Prussians and their tired jokes—something about Bavarian walls, something about Bayern at the World Cup, something about getting stabbed at the train station in ten minutes. The same old shit, but it sticks with you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/29/viva-bavaria/ Mon, 29 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/29/leveling-up-in-study-hall/ Sitting in vocational school learning gradation curves and histograms, I’m automating my Final Fantasy party instead. Gulcan handles the walking, I handle the menus. It feels clever for about five minutes before it just feels like half-attention to two things at once. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/29/leveling-up-in-study-hall/ Mon, 29 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/28/burn-down-the-city/ My head’s still buzzing. Everything comes out in fragments now because language just gave up somewhere during the night at Sladdi’s place. We were at a party and by the end I was running on nothing but pure gibberish. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/28/burn-down-the-city/ Sun, 28 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/27/october-waiting/ October used to hit different - you’d hate everything in small ways. Software updates, tax nonsense, even the musicians you’d been waiting for would manage to disappoint. You’d eat a box of snacks without tasting them, just filling time. You’d resent things that didn’t deserve it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/27/october-waiting/ Sat, 27 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/26/muxtape-is-dead/ The music industry won. Muxtape got killed the way good things always get killed—quietly, by people who wake up sweating about what users might do with a simple tool. Justin had to pivot the whole thing toward bands, which means the mixtape part is gone. The reason anyone cared, dead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/26/muxtape-is-dead/ Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/25/martens-back/ Marten’s finally back from summer. He moved to Berlin and now he’s got a camera and a backlog of work that needs finishing. There’s always this gap—you shoot something, then weeks or months pass before you actually do anything with it. Makes you forget what you were thinking when you took the picture in the first place. I should check in on what he’s shot, but something about that lag feels right to me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/25/martens-back/ Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/24/stitches/ I dug up “Stitches” by The Dykeenies while scrolling through my iTunes the other day—one of those songs that gets buried until you randomly bump into it again. The band’s name still makes me stumble; I can never say it without it sounding ridiculous, which hasn’t stopped me from playing it anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/24/stitches/ Wed, 24 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/23/no-backup/ So TokyoPunk didn’t come back. Not really. I restarted the whole thing, and half a year of posts just evaporated—January through June 2007. I still don’t know exactly what happened. I just know they’re gone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/23/no-backup/ Tue, 23 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/23/who-grabbed-the-designs/ You make something and put it out there, and then you forget about it. That’s how it works. You finish, you release, you move on to the next thing. Years later someone tags you in a photo, or you’re looking at something completely unrelated and suddenly there it is—your work, somewhere you didn’t put it, doing something you didn’t plan for. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/23/who-grabbed-the-designs/ Tue, 23 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/22/christophe-kutner/ Christophe Kutner takes good photographs of good-looking people, which sounds like a limitation until you actually look at the work. He’s shot Milla Jovovich, Diane Kruger, Charlotte Gainsbourg. What stuck with me was Book 2, his Brazil series in black and white. The photographs are clean—just what’s there, no staging. Someone’s actually looking behind the camera. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/22/christophe-kutner/ Mon, 22 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/20/rostock/ I spontaneously hopped on a train to Rostock last night for Marten’s farewell party. What else was I going to do, stay home? We drank through the whole night, got destroyed at foosball, ate döner and donuts at six in the morning—all of it was exactly what a send-off party should be. His friends are the right kind of weird, the specific constellation that only happens in certain places with certain people. The conversations that make sense at three in the morning after too much beer, where random things somehow feel profound. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/20/rostock/ Sat, 20 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/19/look-like-an-ipod-day/ I wanted to post a photo of my new iPod nano on Pirate Day. Anne had asked me to. Then I realized the joke was already there: here I am with a music player, and everyone online is making piracy jokes. Too perfect not to notice. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/19/look-like-an-ipod-day/ Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/18/swiss-orgy/ Found Matthieu Bessudo’s work in the middle of an illustration safari—a drawing so clean, so perfectly composed, so committed to its own premise that it felt like proof drawing could still do something that mattered. You clicked for the title, I know. The work itself delivered on the promise. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/18/swiss-orgy/ Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/18/blue-nano/ Blue iPod Nano. Got it at Gravis because my headphones finally quit, wandered in, and this one caught my eye instead of the silver or black one everyone else gets. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/18/blue-nano/ Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/18/cheap-addictions/ Been sick, mostly recovered now. Existing on cough drops and melon slices, sitting at the agency doing the important work—FBI, CIA, CSI level important. The usual. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/18/cheap-addictions/ Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/17/good-illustration/ Hannah was hunting for illustration references for some class project, and I got roped into the search. That’s how I found myself clicking through portfolio after portfolio on a Tuesday afternoon, the kind of aimless browsing that surprises you every once in a while with something that actually sticks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/17/good-illustration/ Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/17/fever/ Yeah, it’s true - I’m sick. Been in bed since yesterday. Fever, cough, cold, the whole thing. Summer ends and here we are. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/17/fever/ Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/15/killer-ushi/ So I watched this German creature feature—a movie about a killer cow, or at least that’s what I think it was about. The plot didn’t survive translation, if it ever existed. Could be the whole thing is a joke. Could be it’s accidentally brilliant. Either way, nobody really knows why this movie exists, and that’s what makes it worth watching. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/15/killer-ushi/ Mon, 15 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/15/greedy/ I’m the kind of asshole who’s never satisfied, and December gives permission to want everything. There’s already gingerbread at the supermarket. Snow could start any minute. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/15/greedy/ Mon, 15 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/14/home-sweet-home/ Nothing happening, just staying in. Cartoons playing, Nutella straight from the jar, while everyone else is playing Spore or whatever. I’ve got The Sims 2 running instead. Built a little family, nothing elaborate. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/14/home-sweet-home/ Sun, 14 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/12/this-weeks-songs/ Put together this week’s mix: The Ting Tings’ loose, almost accidental energy, Bloc Party when they’re tight and nervous, Pop Levi, and this gutting ballad with Yoko Kanno and Ilaria Graziano. They shouldn’t work together but they do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/12/this-weeks-songs/ Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/12/collect-something/ Vocational school week destroys you. Waking up at six every morning, nearly passing out in the shower. By evening, there’s nothing left. So I’m home with multivitamin juice, watching Monsters collect people. Someone told me My Name Is Earl got cancelled. That’s shit—would’ve saved the night. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/12/collect-something/ Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/9/back/ My nano was finally dead. The white earbuds gave out weeks ago. When Apple announced the new lineup, I figured it was over—they’d fold everything into the touch, kill the slim device, end the pocket thing. But they brought back the nano. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/9/back/ Tue, 09 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/9/see-you-as-pikachu/ The world ends tomorrow morning at half past nine, or everyone gets sucked into Narnia, or turned into Pokémon, I’m not entirely sure which. Before that happens though, I wanted to say something to the people who made this possible. My parents, my family, my friends who actually showed up. My producer. Whatever’s running this thing. And to you lot, the ones who read this stuff, left comments, told me I was wrong, told me I was right, got angry, got into it. Thank you. For all of it. Keep a Knoppers bar handy tomorrow morning. See you in the next life. I’ll be the Pikachu. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/9/see-you-as-pikachu/ Tue, 09 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/8/barcelona/ Rain hard enough to wash the color out of things. My jeans are still bleeding dye onto my white sneakers—that indigo running in trails that won’t come out—and I’m moving through the city in the particular way you move at three in the morning when your body has decided it doesn’t care about straight lines. Somehow we’d ended up somewhere across the Westend, no clear path back to how we got there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/8/barcelona/ Mon, 08 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/8/happy-birthday-wherever-you-are-now/ I can’t wait until Thursday when your actual birthday hits. I can’t face that day yet. You’re just gone and I feel it everywhere. I’d do terrible things to have one more night like we used to have - wine dark and sad, music soaking into everything, talking until the apartment went cold, knowing I could be myself with you. Mona, come back. This is killing me. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/8/happy-birthday-wherever-you-are-now/ Mon, 08 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/6/final-fantasy-iv/ Sari had me wanting Final Fantasy IV months ago. Then I heard it actually came out for the DS here, which I should’ve expected but somehow didn’t, and that was it—I’m buying it today and disappearing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/6/final-fantasy-iv/ Sat, 06 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/5/tales-of-hearts/ Every game store right now is the same dead inventory. Zelda ports I’ve already played three times over, whatever new releases they’re pushing that don’t grab me at all. The shelves look full but feel empty. I leave empty-handed every time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/5/tales-of-hearts/ Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/4/feral/ There’s a strange kind of magic that happens when a corporate party actually works. Yesterday the office threw a Hawaiian thing in autumn—some excuse about grabbing one more summer before it died, but really just a reason to let everyone off the leash for a night. The music was good, the meat was grilled, the drinks were flowing, and somewhere around hour two the whole place turned feral. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/4/feral/ Thu, 04 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/4/jake-and-ami/ There’s something about comedy that doesn’t need you to get it. Jake and Ami just exist in their own frequency, committed to the absurdity without performing for approval. New layout, college casual, nothing overthought. Most creators are working so hard to reach you. These two just commit and move on. That’s rarer than it should be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/4/jake-and-ami/ Thu, 04 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/3/lykke-li-breaking-it-up/ This one gets at the particular exhaustion of knowing it’s over before you say it. Lykke Li has this way of making a small admission feel final, like she’s already packed her bags and is just being polite about leaving. The song’s quiet enough that you feel the silence more than the words. By the time you get to ’give me the reason to stay,’ you know there isn’t one, and neither does she. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/3/lykke-li-breaking-it-up/ Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/3/chrome/ Chrome. The band, not the browser. Helios Creed on guitar, Damon Edge on drums and synth, American electronic rock pioneers from way back. Which is how you have to introduce them now, apparently, because Google’s browser completely swallowed the band’s entire existence. Not some web culture in-joke. Not a Google product. Just a group that invented something, got there first, and then got completely buried under a search engine. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/3/chrome/ Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/2/the-robot-keeps-running/ Found this on Mecha Fetus—just a robot running. Running endlessly. No destination you can see, no purpose that makes itself obvious. Monsters or obstacles block its path, and it keeps going anyway. You watch it and start asking the thing everyone asks. Is it running away from something? Chasing something? Is it trapped in the loop, or is this what it’s actually built for? The piece doesn’t tell you. It just shows the running. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/2/the-robot-keeps-running/ Tue, 02 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/2/eiswald/ We went to IFA on a Sunday with Tomi, though we both ran out of energy almost immediately. The whole fair is designed to exhaust you—endless booths, endless displays, endless reasons to feel like technology is about to transform your life in some way that never quite happens. We made it maybe two minutes before taking a break, and spent the rest of the day drift-shopping, looking at things we’d forget about by Tuesday. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/2/eiswald/ Tue, 02 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/2/paul-robertsons-fever-dreams/ Paul Robertson is an Australian pixel animator who makes GIFs that feel like they shouldn’t exist. SNES-style graphics, deranged movement, anatomies that ignore every law of physics and decency. That’s the whole offer. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/2/paul-robertsons-fever-dreams/ Tue, 02 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/1/who-are-amy-and-pink/ Jetzt.de made me their favorite link. They described me in their piece: a young web designer who writes about what he likes and dislikes, hugs people and hates people, throws peach-flavored donuts at emos in some coffee shop. The usual stuff. Most of it’s accurate enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/1/who-are-amy-and-pink/ Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/1/eight-ninety/ Grabbed Keinohrhasen at MediaMarkt for 8.90 euros because why the fuck not. Nobody buys DVDs anymore, but there it was, cheap enough to feel like stealing. Nora Winatschek on the cover, and I’ve been following her stuff for years, so that was reason enough. Three seconds, no actual decision. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/9/1/eight-ninety/ Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/30/september-friction/ Your pants don’t fit. Summer won’t let go and fall’s already at the door, so you’re stuck in that narrow space between who you were and whoever’s next. Mona’s birthday was this month but Mona wasn’t there—the kind of small, pointed absence that makes everything feel slightly off for no reason you can explain. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/30/september-friction/ Sat, 30 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/29/basement-days/ I’ve been in the basement for the past few weeks. Some secret project that requires complete isolation from the outside world—no contact, no news, nothing. Sometimes I think about emerging and realizing I’ve missed something huge. Did anyone I care about do anything interesting? Probably not. But maybe. I’ll never know until I get out. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/29/basement-days/ Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/29/when-the-show-rings-twice/ Siemens invited me to IFA this weekend, which is kind of perfect because IFA is basically the machine that sells you appliances made visible. Thousands of booths, corporate theater, companies showing you washing machines and refrigerators like they’re going to change your life. As a designer, there’s something genuinely fascinating about seeing what manufacturers believe matters—and watching how often they’re completely wrong. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/29/when-the-show-rings-twice/ Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/28/fuck-manga-avatars/ Everyone’s got a manga avatar now, and ninety percent of them are aggressively forgettable—the same three recycled styles, character design by committee, all that dead-eyed stare. I see them everywhere and they blur into nothing. But every once in a while you find someone who actually drew their character with some care, who understands proportion and expression instead of just copying the template, and it’s a completely different thing. The difference between lazy and intentional is huge. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/28/fuck-manga-avatars/ Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/26/another-world/ Step off the train at Buchloe and Berlin evaporates. Charlottenburg, the parties, the work, the school—all of it just gone, like I’d never left. I’d known it would be this way. Last time was the same. Everything here feels like another world. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/26/another-world/ Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/20/electremo/ I started hearing about Electremo floating around the music blogs and venue listings, and my first instinct was that it was a joke—someone mashing genre names together for clicks. But it was real: electro production married to emo sensibility, which is as unlikely as it sounds. Metro Station, Play Radio Play, Plushgun leading the charge. All of them with that particular kind of calculated dishevelment and synths that by every rule of taste should not work but somehow do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/20/electremo/ Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/19/i-caved/ You wore me down. Months of it—’Come on, rejoin the platform,’ ’Just get back on there’—until I had nothing left and caved completely. I’m back. No principles, no spine, nothing standing between me and whatever you’re all doing on there. So go ahead, add me, write me something scathing about my lack of character, tell me which groups I need to join. This is just a summer break, okay? We’re going to agree on that. Not a fundamental collapse of everything I said I believed. Just a temporary pause. Cool? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/19/i-caved/ Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/18/the-end-of-the-night/ I came to with the entire Third World War happening in my skull. Eyes crusted shut, I rolled over and found Lena’s bare ass in my face, her three-legged cat purring on top of it. Everything was hammering. Bombs. The sun broke through the window like a knife and made me want to die. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/18/the-end-of-the-night/ Mon, 18 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/17/chill-out/ The weekend was too short and absolutely full of drunk people saying absurd things—the kind of weekend where you end up with phone numbers of people you’ll probably never talk to again. Spent most of it with Lisa, my future roommate, and her chaotic friends around Berlin, mostly in Wedding. We had a decent brunch, then I found myself singing sad Corpse Bride songs with Svenja and Meike at some point, which makes way more sense when you’re already drinking. Later at Conny’s place around three in the morning we were playing those stupid games with pieces of paper where you write something dumb and it gets worse every time someone reads it. It felt profound at the time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/17/chill-out/ Sun, 17 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/15/rockie-nolan/ Rockie Nolan. Found her work recently and that was it. Georgia girl with a name that actually works. She’s making soft, slightly surreal images that fit the exact indie-pop lane I’ve been in for years—Rilo Kiley, Mates of State, Tilly and the Wall. The freckles help. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/15/rockie-nolan/ Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/15/mixtape-weather/ When it rains like this, the day stops. Everything outside becomes irrelevant. All you want is enough blankets and music that doesn’t demand anything—just songs that sit in your head without commentary. Earworms. The ones you don’t get tired of. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/15/mixtape-weather/ Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/12/a-year-in-berlin/ August 2007. My friends scattered to Munich and Augsburg, and I ran to Berlin—away from heartbreak, away from a life that had stopped moving. I told myself it was temporary, a trial run I could bail on if it got bad. I knew I was lying. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/12/a-year-in-berlin/ Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/10/i-want-what-she-had/ Just watched a Japanese film with lesbian characters and couldn’t stop staring at one of their apartments. Bright, creative, clearly arranged with some thought. She had this lamp that threw stars across the entire room—just little points of light everywhere. The kind of thing that should feel gimmicky but completely didn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/10/i-want-what-she-had/ Sun, 10 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/8/skins/ Each episode opens with someone’s name and that’s the whole show right there: you’re inside one person’s head for forty minutes while everyone else is just living their own impossible lives. It’s a structure that matters, because it makes sure nobody is the supporting character in their own story. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/8/skins/ Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/7/moving-to-wedding/ Moving to Wedding in the fall. Found a small old apartment—real Berlin place, high ceilings and worn wood—and there’s a blonde girl living there right now who’s really into Hello Kitty and keeps an aquarium. She’s leaving, I’m moving in. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/7/moving-to-wedding/ Thu, 07 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/6/these-shoes/ Hannah and I were at the Adidas Originals store in the Hackescher Markt—that’s the market in Berlin—and she found these Superstar I sneakers in neon from the NBA Highlights collection. Fluorescent. Stupid bright. The kind of shoe that shouldn’t exist but did anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/6/these-shoes/ Wed, 06 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/4/spacy-to-go/ Hannah came to Berlin for a long weekend. We sat through Narnia 2 and Sex and the City—neither of them worth it—then moved through shopping districts so packed they felt dangerous, and spent nights on the S-Bahn where the heat and the bodies and all the eating created this feeling like being inside someone’s mouth. Hannah had brought small cinnamon-star stickers she’d made and spent the entire weekend trying to stick them on walls and people with about 40% success. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/8/4/spacy-to-go/ Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/30/couples/ I’ve watched enough couples to know the pattern. They play with each other’s hair and call each other honey and bicker about nothing. The sex is always this whole thing—maybe anal, maybe not, it hurts, be gentle, forget it. And then the contraception, which somehow becomes both their problem and only her problem. The pill she forgets. The timing that’s off. The morning-after pill that wrecks her for a day. They miss things they planned. The constant negotiation. The friction wearing them down. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/30/couples/ Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/30/hand-drawn/ I never pretended I didn’t watch the Disney cartoons. Aladdin, The Lion King—there was something there worth looking at, regardless of what you were supposed to care about at twelve. The animation held up. The character design held up. You weren’t just watching pretty colors move around. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/30/hand-drawn/ Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/30/something-darker/ The Half-Blood Prince trailer dropped and it’s a different beast from what came before. The whole thing has this murky, almost gothic energy to it. No more of that brightly lit Hogwarts adventure nonsense—this is a film about shadows and secrets, about a school that’s rotting from the inside. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/30/something-darker/ Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/30/the-mojave-trick/ Microsoft’s Mojave Experiment was almost funny. They showed Vista to people on the street under a different name, got positive reactions, and suddenly had proof the product wasn’t broken. People just had bad PR about it. That’s not a fix, that’s desperation dressed as marketing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/30/the-mojave-trick/ Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/29/first-subscriber/ Anna’s letter caught me unprepared. Specific and unsolicited—she’d been reading for years, she said, was my first subscriber and never stopped. The posts where I’d written about failing, about confusion, about things falling apart and then not falling apart—they’d actually reached her. At moments when she needed proof that someone else was lost too. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/29/first-subscriber/ Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/29/do-i-love-new-york/ Tim brought back an I Love New York t-shirt from his trip to the States—the most generic souvenir possible. He knows the bit. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/29/do-i-love-new-york/ Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/28/friend-coming-through/ Hannah’s flying in Thursday for a few days. We’ve sketched out the basics—shopping, eating, going out. The kind of weekend where you end up staying out later than you normally would because the company’s good and there’s no reason not to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/28/friend-coming-through/ Mon, 28 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/27/the-empty-rebellion/ I finally understand what’s creating this emptiness. Why I fight against the things that are supposed to be good for me. Why I can’t just accept school, work, love, happiness. Something’s missing. I need a reason to push back, and I don’t have one. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/27/the-empty-rebellion/ Sun, 27 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/26/reader-mail/ I love getting actual mail from people who’ve found their way here. Most of it’s garbage, but every now and then something arrives that makes the whole thing feel less like I’m just shouting into the void. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/26/reader-mail/ Sat, 26 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/25/this-weeks-rotation/ I’m spinning through the same few things on repeat. Lykke Li keeps me tethered—that strange electronic production, her voice suspended inside it like she’s singing from somewhere else entirely. There’s a tension in how she sits in the mix that makes you listen differently. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/25/this-weeks-rotation/ Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/23/pixars-presto/ Pixar’s short before Wall-E is just a magician and a rabbit fundamentally at odds. The magician needs him to perform; the rabbit’s more interested in sabotage. That’s the whole thing. No dialogue, no sentiment, just two characters locked in physical comedy for a few minutes. The rabbit’s a bastard, the magician’s desperate, and watching that dynamic play out without any cutesy framing is refreshing. Simple idea executed exactly right. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/23/pixars-presto/ Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/22/the-new-facebook/ Facebook redesigned itself again and I spent the usual twenty minutes confused about where everything went. That’s become the mandatory move now—every couple years one of these networks decides the furniture needs rearranging, as if MySpace hadn’t already shown us how that goes. Some people get excited about it. Most of us just want to find our notifications. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/22/the-new-facebook/ Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/22/hillary-the-mammal/ On a rainy Tuesday with nothing better to do, I found Hillary Rainmeer from Portland somewhere online. The kind of photographs that make all the scrolling feel worthwhile. She probably had a MySpace page in there somewhere, but I’d already checked out of that place. The pictures were enough to brighten the afternoon. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/22/hillary-the-mammal/ Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/19/stay/ The courtyard hits you before your eyes do. I pushed through the buzzing door into Prenzlauer Berg and found walls covered in activist slogans and scrawls, bikes piled against the building like the aftermath of something, strollers wedged between graffitied mailboxes. The whole place looked exactly like the kind of building you dismiss before you even get inside. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/19/stay/ Sat, 19 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/13/pride-and-burnt-potatoes/ The pizza guy sees the TV behind me—Pride and Prejudice playing, Keira Knightley—and says I’m a classics fan. I’m just standing there because I burnt the Bratkartoffeln too badly to fix it. Blackened edges, the smell of failure. I take the pizza, nod, don’t explain. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/13/pride-and-burnt-potatoes/ Sun, 13 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/11/my-muxtape/ Music is one of those things it’s hard to stay cynical about for long. You can tell yourself it doesn’t matter, that it’s just sound, but then a song lands right and you’re gone—eyes closed, somewhere else. The lyrics, the melody, they shift you into a different headspace where you can think about things that won’t come loose any other way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/11/my-muxtape/ Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/10/east-girls/ I’m digging through my pockets, my wallet, my backpack. Need some change. I’m starving for a kebab from my place—the good spot with the herbs and garlic. Don’t care if I smell like it. No one has to smell me today anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/10/east-girls/ Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/10/blond-fades/ I had three magazines that mattered to me: Vice, NEON, and Blond. Just those three. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/10/blond-fades/ Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/9/guardian/ Rain came where sun was. It happens. But I found myself thinking about you—the way weather does that sometimes, shifts something in the air and suddenly you’re just there. All those plans still hanging there unrealized. We were going to watch that panda movie. Take over London. Get drunk on red wine and fall asleep in each other’s arms like we were too lazy to move. I have the song we used to play on loop all night because getting up seemed impossible. Sometimes I still put it on. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/9/guardian/ Wed, 09 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/8/afternoon-in-wilmersdorf/ Coming out of Charlottenburg station with my brain still tangled up in whatever teenage fantasy was happening in that last class—the kind of thing that makes you weirdly horny for reasons you’ll never fully understand—I turn right toward Wilmersdorfer Straße. Sun on the back of my neck, a list of stupid thoughts: how one bottle of Lipton iced tea covered my entire daily sugar requirement, the petition I’m supposed to be pushing as class rep (English instead of PE), the fact that lessons were actually bearable today, probably because the usual assholes weren’t there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/8/afternoon-in-wilmersdorf/ Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/6/wannsee/ I’m half-reading Feuchtgebiete, mind wandering through its crude details—shaving, pearls, the whole messy thing—and I set it down to watch Cedric steer the sailboat across the Wannsee. The sun cuts right through the water. Rebecca’s here from Bavaria for the weekend, trying to shake me out of whatever mood I’ve sunk into. Cedric’s got that effortless thing with boats. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/6/wannsee/ Sun, 06 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/1/back-to-it/ I’d been in bed for days. My iPod was a graveyard of the saddest songs I could find. I was eating whatever strange shit was left in the fridge. At some point you just can’t stay there anymore, even when you’re not ready. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/7/1/back-to-it/ Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/27/death-and-all-his-friends/ I’m sitting on our bench in the park listening to the Finding Nemo soundtrack. She loved that movie—nobody else could get worked up about a dumb clownfish like she could. And now she’s gone. Just like that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/27/death-and-all-his-friends/ Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/26/i-live-to-let-you-shine/ One humid summer night, after too much red wine—Hungarian wine, the cheap kind—Mona and I had the brilliant idea to write each other’s obituaries. It made sense at the time. If one of us died (which seemed impossible, which seemed like it would never happen), we’d already have something written, something honest. We sat in opposite corners of her bedroom with paper and pens and just… wrote. I wrote nothing but bullshit. You can read it yourself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/26/i-live-to-let-you-shine/ Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/24/why-so-many-trees/ Okay, we didn’t sink. That was the main concern—Sonjalein and I in this little boat on the Neuer See, trying to keep our phones and iPods dry. The mission succeeded, at least technically. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/24/why-so-many-trees/ Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/23/letters-to-an-angel/ Spent the weekend doing a film shoot and it absolutely destroyed me. Two solid days of filming just to get maybe five minutes of usable footage. That’s how it works though—you shoot a scene, shoot it again, the light’s changed so shoot it again, someone moves wrong, again. You’re doing the same thirty seconds over and over until everyone’s seen it a hundred times and it finally looks right. But there’s something about it. Working with a crew, everyone locked in on solving the same tiny problem, and after a few hours you stop noticing how tired you are. Your brain just shuts up and does the thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/23/letters-to-an-angel/ Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/22/the-bathtub/ I’m lying in hot water, steam rising in shapeless clouds. The new Coldplay album is playing softly from somewhere else in the apartment—”Lovers in Japan” mostly, the song that plays on repeat. Vanilla-scented candles are scattered around the bathroom. The whole room has gone quiet in a way that makes you forget there’s a world outside it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/22/the-bathtub/ Sun, 22 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/22/the-day-we-became-famous/ Our agency got drafted as extras for a film shoot at Sat.1, which meant a full day of running around in costume looking busy. First thing: they didn’t like the slogans on our shirts—too on-brand, apparently—so we got marched off to a costume woman who’d apparently decided that all agency people needed to look exactly like each other. Mission accomplished, I guess. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/22/the-day-we-became-famous/ Sun, 22 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/20/this-lip-dub/ Found this at work and couldn’t stop smiling about it. There’s that thing lip dubs do sometimes—total commitment to something ridiculous—that just works every time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/20/this-lip-dub/ Fri, 20 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/18/nothing-much/ I ducked out on Sex and the City with Kathi, thought I’d finally write something, and now I’m sitting with some sausages realizing I’ve got nothing. Not a thought worth finishing, not even a paragraph that lands. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/18/nothing-much/ Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/18/myspace-grew-up/ The new MySpace is boring, which might be the worst possible outcome. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/18/myspace-grew-up/ Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/15/baltic-run-08/ The TV tower appeared on the horizon and I was genuinely glad to be home. We blew past the Brandenburg Gate and the Victory Column, Revolverheld’s “Mit dir chill’n” playing in the CD player like always, and I closed my eyes. I was already nostalgic for the week that had just ended—the nights we’d burned through, my ears still ringing from singing our lungs out at karaoke, my head pounding from tequila shots, the image of all those hairy nudists seared into my brain forever. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/15/baltic-run-08/ Sun, 15 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/5/summer-not-in-the-city/ Saturday I’m heading to the coast for a week. It’s fucking hot and I can’t stand being in the city anymore. Beach, beer, the Euro on some bar’s TV. That’s the plan. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/5/summer-not-in-the-city/ Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/2/take-care/ The city had shifted in an hour. It still smelled like cut flowers and ice cream, but the sun’s relentless heat was gone, replaced by this cool, unsettled calm under the dark clouds rolling low across the sky. Sina and I walked past the cafés along the street. Their staff were already moving chairs and tables to safety, like they could sense what was coming. I felt the first drops on my skin and pulled her hand, walking faster. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/2/take-care/ Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/2/creative-inspiration/ I’m actually furious right now about how much useless theory they’re forcing us through at vocational school. It’s all bloated, endless stuff that could be cut by ninety percent and still do its job. The whole point is supposed to be that we’re here learning how to actually make things, how to design, how to test what we can do as artists. That’s not what’s happening. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/2/creative-inspiration/ Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/1/what-ruled/ June was the month where you’re embarrassed about being embarrassed, where you’re dying of thirst but nothing in the fridge is right, where your t-shirt somehow has blood on it and you stopped asking when. You’re inside when the sun’s screaming outside. The train packed with bodies, everyone sweating, everyone regretting being there. Video games suddenly more real than television. Overly sweet food tastes like a mistake in heat. That light blue bleach powder that ruins whatever you’re trying to save. Jokes that won’t die—Chuck Norris jokes, then jokes about jokes, until the joke is the format itself and nobody laughs but it keeps happening anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/6/1/what-ruled/ Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/31/have-a-great-day/ Lisa Bund’s got a birthday today and it was a good one, so I’m wishing you all something nice—a really good, beautiful, sunny day. From here. Take it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/31/have-a-great-day/ Sat, 31 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/30/gisela/ The boat was called Gisela. Little thing on the Spree, beautiful Berlin weather, a captain who actually looked like he belonged there, and a buffet that had no right being that good. Even brought the dog along. Even the dog seemed pleased. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/30/gisela/ Fri, 30 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/28/five-details/ My friend and I spent an evening listing our exes, three each, and the strange part is how a whole relationship compresses into five or six random images when you look back. A bike path. A dog. The dumb thing someone said. The lake you kept going back to. You don’t remember the conversations. You remember the texture. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/28/five-details/ Wed, 28 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/26/sarah-danley/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/26/sarah-danley/ Mon, 26 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/25/thirty-songs-for-3-am/ It’s summer and you’d think that means happiness, heat, light, all of that. But somehow that’s when the bad love stuff hits hardest. Or maybe it’s just that summer makes being alone feel worse. Either way, you end up in the dark at 3 AM with music that has no interest in making you feel better. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/25/thirty-songs-for-3-am/ Sun, 25 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/24/the-killer-in-me-is-the-killer-in-you/ After an absolutely insane week I was running on fumes by Friday night, but Maria was turning twenty-one and celebrating late at the Knaack, so I had to show up. Started at Tomi’s parents’ grabbing fish and cucumber salad—sounds mundane but it’s exactly what you need when you’re this destroyed, something casual and grounding. Then the power cut out across the neighborhood somehow and I might’ve caused it or just convinced myself I did in my fog. Either way we got to the car quick, picked up Sven with his cherry beer, went to Mandy’s to mess with her guinea pigs Paul and Paula for a bit. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/24/the-killer-in-me-is-the-killer-in-you/ Sat, 24 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/22/munich-takes-over/ So the story is perfect: Berlin’s phone books went out with Munich’s city hall on the cover. Not the Red City Hall where it should be—the Marienplatz, that iconic Bavarian Gothic thing. Two image files swapped somewhere in production, and suddenly a million Berlin households are holding a cover that belongs to another city entirely. The publisher called it an unfortunate error. A whole year before the next printing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/22/munich-takes-over/ Thu, 22 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/21/nora-again/ Nora’s birthday’s coming up soon, and Sonja and I ended up in the YouTube hole last night rewatching her old stuff—Halloween sketches, parody bits, the kind of obscure comedy that doesn’t get talked about anymore. Nothing makes sense when you explain it to someone who wasn’t there, but rewatching it feels like finding something you forgot you liked. The timing still lands. The absurdity still works. You remember why this person mattered. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/21/nora-again/ Wed, 21 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/19/little-kids-with-their-toy/ Yeah, I know. We’re the kind of people who get excited about stupid shit. Frogs at Christmas. The smallest nothing. We light up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/19/little-kids-with-their-toy/ Mon, 19 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/17/tasteless/ I’ve got a few theories about why my taste went dead. Maybe I burned my tongue pretty badly—that’s the harmless one. Maybe it’s the weird stuff I smoke sometimes—getting darker. Or maybe it’s because I ate a whole handful of pure pasta seasoning powder that chemically burned my mouth raw. Yeah, that’s probably it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/17/tasteless/ Sat, 17 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/16/virginity-is-for-losers/ Was hunting for t-shirt slogans for some project and this one stuck around in my head. Sometimes a joke that dumb—so direct and crude—hits different when you realize someone actually made it into a shirt. No cleverness, no layers, just straight-up cruelty and confidence. Pointless to think about it, but I did anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/16/virginity-is-for-losers/ Fri, 16 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/16/designs-get-around/ Matt featured a few of my themes on his WordPress site. I don’t remember much about it now—where he found them, what exactly he said—but the note was genuine. Someone out there in the world uses the things I make. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/16/designs-get-around/ Fri, 16 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/15/the-double/ I was at Knaack with Ines and we’re in one of those conversations—about life, emotions, whatever—when I notice this guy across the room. He’s basically me. Not vaguely. I mean he has the exact same black Adidas shoes, the exact same jeans, that green New York shirt I’m always wearing, the belt the same way. He moves like me. He laughs like me—that dumb laugh I have. And I’m watching and waiting and sure enough, he’s picking his nose the exact same way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/15/the-double/ Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/13/that-heat/ Yesterday was stupidly hot in Berlin. I showed up at the beach pool in Wedding with Anna, Sladdy, Tomi, Agnes, Anne, and Philipp. We sat in front of the TV with McDonald’s and chocolate muffins from Mauerpark, just trying to wait out the heat. That’s it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/13/that-heat/ Tue, 13 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/11/marmor-stein-und-eisen-bricht/ We got the call that Sladdi was in the hospital—not important enough to explain—so we did the dutiful thing and visited him, which was depressing, which is why we ended up at Knaack afterwards. Karaoke in Berlin is always the same crowd: Amy Winehouse devotees with questionable commitment to the look, guys who seem to have stepped directly out of Family Guy, women with absolute certainty that their voice could carry them through any song at two in the morning. It’s beautiful in how thoroughly delusional it all is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/11/marmor-stein-und-eisen-bricht/ Sun, 11 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/10/what-i-learned-tonight/ Tonight I figured out that a Beck’s beer on the train is apparently the most normal thing in the world—everyone’s got one. At the agency, the whole team crowds around the Mac and there’s this perfect unspoken agreement: nobody looks when someone’s typing their password. Such specific respect. I’ve always been drawn to girls with accents, something about the way they shape a word. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/10/what-i-learned-tonight/ Sat, 10 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/5/fan-mail-from-england/ I got fan mail from England today. Still weird saying that. Scott and Gemma sent a thank you for the Stilbruch theme, along with a CD they promised held secret content. Just a letter and a package that made its way across the ocean. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/5/fan-mail-from-england/ Mon, 05 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/5/before-the-lights/ The new caterer showed up at the office with this insane spread—bagels, fruit, little mozzarellas, everything. People just froze looking at it, paralyzed by the options. Too much choice does something weird to your brain. I’d bought this beat-up secondhand bike recently and decided to ride in that morning, thought it’d take at least an hour to get there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/5/before-the-lights/ Mon, 05 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/5/lego-universe/ As a kid I was absolutely obsessed with Lego. Hours and hours in a room that basically belonged to us—my friends and I building incredible worlds and characters, the Lion King soundtrack on repeat. It was everything. Eventually you grow up, sell it all off on eBay one day, and that’s the end of it. Marcel the builder was dead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/5/lego-universe/ Mon, 05 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/4/part-of-your-world/ For someone who watches the Simpsons regularly and enjoys seeing Disney get skewered in nearly every episode, I probably shouldn’t care about a lip dub cover of “Part of Your World.” The corporation gets mocked constantly, and there’s something satisfying about that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/4/part-of-your-world/ Sun, 04 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/4/melody-fetishist/ I’m in the middle of gutting my music library. With nearly 7000 tracks—all totally legally obtained, obviously—iTunes is starting to choke, and so am I. I spend most of my commute just hitting skip on my iPod, which is already squeaking like it’s dying. There’s so much garbage on here it’s embarrassing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/4/melody-fetishist/ Sun, 04 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/3/luigi-goes-off/ I must’ve poured a thousand hours into Super Mario World growing up, but nothing like this. Luigi’s absolutely locked in—every move timed perfectly to the music, just unstoppable. It’s genuinely awesome. And then it ends and Luigi’s still just Mario’s little loser brother, which is all he’ll ever be. He can’t catch a break. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/3/luigi-goes-off/ Sat, 03 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/3/summer-blogging/ Summer’s when you actually want to show people something. The photos are better, the moments feel shareable. You need a blog that doesn’t get in the way—clean, simple, letting your content do the work. I’ve been at this for twenty years and I’ve learned that the template matters way less than the decision to share at all. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/3/summer-blogging/ Sat, 03 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/2/what-to-wear/ I stand in front of my closet unsure what I’m becoming. The rebellious version of myself? The serious one? The guy who just wears jeans and a black shirt and stops overthinking everything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/2/what-to-wear/ Fri, 02 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/1/joy-stick-heroes/ Woke up way too early one morning and there was Joy Stick Heroes on the tube—that old Nintendo commercial pretending to be a real movie. Just kids driving to California to win some video game tournament. Pure marketing, obviously, but the shameless commitment to the fantasy is what makes it work. No irony, no winking. They actually believe in this tournament, in each other, in the whole thing. That earnestness is what made it mean something back then. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/5/1/joy-stick-heroes/ Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/29/may/ May starts bad. Your allergies are absolute shit—every photo you take, you look wrecked. You’re stuck inside despite the sun being everywhere, which makes no sense but that’s how it is. You eat beer-flavored chips for days and forget vegetables exist. The internet moves like it’s 1998. You wake up at 3 AM soaked because you got the blanket situation wrong. That February deal that seemed promising completely fell apart, and May is the month where you have to really sit with that failure. You’re wearing ballet flats because everyone else is. You think about the Klabautermann—that weird sailor myth—for no reason. Grey’s Anatomy ended again. That song was cool three weeks ago and now it grates. The Baltic trip is still months away. You’re generally depressed despite the weather. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/29/may/ Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/28/false-alarm/ Oh man, Super RTL gave me a heart attack in my dream—totally cancelled Hannah Montana. Woke up thinking it was real, full panic mode, had to sit for a second and let my brain catch up. I mean, apparently I care about this show enough to actually freak out. Anyway, it was just a nightmare. Deep breath. Crisis averted. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/28/false-alarm/ Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/27/fridge-crimes/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/27/fridge-crimes/ Sun, 27 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/27/my-own-worst-enemy/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/27/my-own-worst-enemy/ Sun, 27 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/18/two-favorite-songs/ I’ve been up all night drinking with Anna and Philipp—that guy’s actually lived through everything—but somehow I’m still wired. Won’t last much longer. The weather’s absolute shit, so these two songs have basically become my whole rotation right now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/18/two-favorite-songs/ Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/17/no-internet/ I remember watching this South Park episode where the internet just vanishes one morning. Everyone in town immediately comes unglued—panic, withdrawal, chaos. It’s the kind of premise that should feel like old satire, except it doesn’t anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/17/no-internet/ Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/16/face-for-the-radio/ At 3 AM you’ve already tried everything—hot milk with honey, a warm shower, the arsenal of remedies that supposedly work. The night when your brain won’t stop. When sleep feels like a language you’ve forgotten. All the usual fixes sit there, useless, and nothing works except The View. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/16/face-for-the-radio/ Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/16/transparent/ I’ve been drinking Beck’s Green Lemon for a while now—bright, citrusy, nothing complicated. When I saw Beck’s Ice on the shelf, I grabbed it without thinking, except it was clear. Actually transparent. You could see straight through it in the glass like it wasn’t beer at all. The label said lime and mint, so I figured why not try. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/16/transparent/ Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/16/fuck-other-peoples-rules/ Read something about Apple’s approach to business and all I could think was: they just don’t care. They see a rule and ignore it if it gets in the way. No permission needed. There’s something almost honest about that level of arrogance—most companies do the same thing but wrap it in disruption language and move-fast rhetoric. Apple doesn’t bother with the costume. They elbow past everyone to get what they want, then make it seem like it was always supposed to be that way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/16/fuck-other-peoples-rules/ Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/16/wednesdays/ Every Wednesday I settle in to watch Grey’s Anatomy, already wanting to know what’s about to come apart. The show’s plotting is predictable—the same disaster shapes repeating—but it works anyway. There’s always someone falling apart, always some new catastrophe to untangle. And I keep coming back for it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/16/wednesdays/ Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/15/hermines-birthday/ Emma Watson’s eighteen today, which is when you’re supposed to draw some kind of line, except I don’t think I ever drew one. Hermione’s been complicated for a while. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/15/hermines-birthday/ Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/14/ōkami/ Ōkami made me want a Wii. This Clover Studio game about painting spells and mythology, motion controls woven into the narrative rather than bolted on as a gimmick—it was the kind of exclusive that made the hardware matter. The music was genuinely good, and you could feel the visual design had a philosophy behind it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/14/ōkami/ Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/14/the-world-ends-with-you/ I’d basically abandoned my DS for the better part of a year. Not consciously, just drift. Sunday I was bored enough staring out the train window that I decided to find something worth playing. The rides home were too long to waste. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/14/the-world-ends-with-you/ Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/14/failblog/ One click and thirty minutes vanished. That’s Failblog. I’m not usually into those oversaturated joke sites online—the ones designed to pummel you with content until something lands. But this one got me. My coworkers and I basically surrendered half the afternoon to it, just grinding through clips of people getting demolished or eating pavement. The ones who didn’t get sucked in just watched the rest of us cackling like idiots. We were probably annoying as hell. But yeah, it’s good shit. It just works. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/14/failblog/ Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/13/education-pt-2/ Hanging around with everyone from graduation class, and this Metros video hits exactly right. It captures that suspended moment—you’re still all together but can feel it ending. The video doesn’t apologize for it or try to be sentimental; it just sits in the awareness of something shifting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/13/education-pt-2/ Sun, 13 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/12/who-the-fuck-are-you-hannah-montana/ There’s a party somewhere in a warehouse space, and everyone looks like they’ve walked off a fashion shoot. Catholic school kids in expensive jackets, all acting serious about something. I’m not sure what. There’s an energy to those schools—like everyone there has already figured out how to be an adult. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/12/who-the-fuck-are-you-hannah-montana/ Sat, 12 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/9/the-hunt/ A girl named Victoria Lindsay got beaten by eight teenagers in 2007. They filmed it, posted it to YouTube. Within hours the internet found them—names, addresses, photos published everywhere. Fox News ran the pictures. Comments filled with “hang them,” “kill them.” https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/9/the-hunt/ Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/8/the-blank/ Waking up at some abandoned S-Bahn station near Potsdam on Saturday morning was my first sign things had gone wrong. The bruises on my ass were the second. The complete blank where the night should be was the third. I have fragments—herbal schnapps, a guy named Jimi Blue, weird figures in the Oranienburger—but they don’t thread together. There’s a good chance I ended up in some German fail-compilation show, which feels about right. You wake up in the wrong place with marks on your body and you just accept you went there wrong. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/4/8/the-blank/ Tue, 08 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/30/the-walls-were-moving/ I was 24 and living in a student apartment in Berlin that had somehow gotten smaller. Not metaphorically—the walls moved in. My landlord laughed when I asked about anything, this real incredulous laugh at the ratio of what he was charging to what I was living in. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/30/the-walls-were-moving/ Sun, 30 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/28/angel/ I was freezing cold as I sat on the train home. The internal heat from the alcohol I had consumed the night before had given way to an empty cold hours ago. The heating was turned up to the highest setting. Through the dirty window, I could only make out the outlines of the trees and villages passing by. Here and there, in isolated spots, there was snow that the approaching spring had not yet melted away. The only other person in my compartment was an old man who was staring thoughtfully at the hat he was holding in his hands. I closed my eyes and held my fingers to my nose. They still smelled of Vanessa. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/28/angel/ Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/28/good-spots/ I stopped being a devoted PlayStation fan years ago—no particular reason, just moved on—but the commercials they put out sometimes are genuinely good. I’m not talking about clever marketing, I mean they’re made well. Someone clearly understood how to move you in thirty seconds, how to make an image stick. When you spend time making things, you develop a nose for that kind of work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/28/good-spots/ Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/28/uncomfortable/ Watched that Fitna film yesterday, the one by Dutch politician Geert Wilders that Wikipedia apparently freaked out about. Fifteen minutes of Quran verses cut against footage of violence. It’s blunt propaganda, the kind that doesn’t really hide what it’s doing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/28/uncomfortable/ Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/27/already-dead/ The sun was brighter back then, the sky a deeper blue. Even the Lidl lemonade tasted better, came in cans too. Summers were hotter, the nights at the swimming pool more forbidden, the skin-on-skin more electric. And the TV—man, that was actual television. The whole Pokémon-obsessed crew sprawled in front of the screen after school, chips and cola within reach, one dubbed anime after another, and then out into the streets running like we’d sprouted tails and learned to fight like Goku. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/27/already-dead/ Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/26/spiral-chord-x-keiichi-nitta/ Keiichi Nitta’s Spiral Chord video is fucked up in exactly the right way. He started out working for Terry Richardson, that perverse photographer, but this is something else—visual transgression that doesn’t feel like it’s asking for permission. It just is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/26/spiral-chord-x-keiichi-nitta/ Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/26/thats-what-you-get/ Paramore’s been cycling back into regular rotation and they’re just doing something nothing else is doing right now. There’s this thing about how they write—all that melodic precision mixed with actual heaviness, the way Hayley’s voice can be both technically impressive and genuinely unguarded in the same moment. Not overthinking it, just good songs that land. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/26/thats-what-you-get/ Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/25/marching-for-peace-or-something/ Mona and I headed out in this fucking perfect weather and got caught up in a peace march near the zoo—troops out of Afghanistan, conscientious objectors doing time, all of it. We danced around, wore the flags, screamed for a better world. Easy to get caught up in. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/25/marching-for-peace-or-something/ Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/25/getting-rich/ Alessandro pointed out that Smashing Magazine featured my WordPress theme. That explains the traffic spike on this blog. I’m getting rich, bitch. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/25/getting-rich/ Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/22/karinas-getting-married/ I found out the way you find out about these things now—a notification, something in a feed. Karina’s getting married in twelve days. She was my first real love, which is a strange thing to be at this point, because it just means I learned what wanting felt like before I understood that wanting isn’t keeping, and keeping isn’t forever. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/22/karinas-getting-married/ Sat, 22 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/21/burning-through/ A week with Becca moved like that—fast, easy, the kind you want to happen again. Meyerbeer saw us enough to nearly complete our stamp card. There was Thomas’s annual 80s party, the one nobody admits they enjoy until they’re already there. Then Sakura 2’s sushi buffet near closing time, when you’re tired and the good stuff’s gone but it’s still somehow perfect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/21/burning-through/ Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/21/the-future-is-unwritten/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/21/the-future-is-unwritten/ Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/18/blackout/ Had what was probably the best sex of my life last night. Too drunk to actually remember it. That’s the whole tragic comedy of it—got everything right and then checked out completely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/18/blackout/ Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/17/forty-two/ Becca showed up Friday and we did the dumb weekend thing—shopping, drinking, Resident Evil at stupid hours, potato salad, weather that couldn’t decide what it wanted to be. By Monday I was already on vacation so it just kept rolling. Nothing happened. Just a friend, a few days, no agenda. Those weekends where something happened even though it didn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/17/forty-two/ Mon, 17 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/17/what-vista-became/ Somewhere in Japan, toilet paper was being sold with Windows Vista printed on it. I don’t know what year that happened or if anyone actually bought it, but the image stuck with me. Vista had already been a punchline for years—the operating system nobody wanted, the one everyone was trying to get rid of. Microsoft knew it. The whole world knew it. And yet some company somewhere decided the answer was to slap the Vista logo on toilet paper and see what happened. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/17/what-vista-became/ Mon, 17 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/13/love-is-tuna-fish-pizza/ Someone sent me this video and it stuck with me. The whole thing’s just sweet in the way things are when they’re trying to be honest about something messy—in this case, love, which apparently tastes like tuna fish pizza and deserves to be called shitty. The quotes are the thing: “I find love shitty” dropped so casual it almost disappears, and then “Love is like tuna fish pizza,” which is absurd enough to be profound, or profound enough to be absurd. I’m still not sure which. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/13/love-is-tuna-fish-pizza/ Thu, 13 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/13/stay-friends/ He stood in the stairwell with a bag of his last things. An awkward kiss that landed somewhere between my mouth and my cheek. And then, quietly: Let’s stay friends. The words hung there longer than his footsteps down the stairs, louder than the door slamming, crueler than the plate I threw at it later. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/13/stay-friends/ Thu, 13 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/12/zoo-station/ Sina’s not her real name. The kids down here don’t use real names, especially the ones trying not to be found. Parents looking. Police looking. Both, maybe. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/12/zoo-station/ Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/12/vimeo-redone/ Vimeo redesigned itself. Didn’t need to—I liked the old version fine. But they managed not to wreck it, which is harder than it sounds. Cleaner, a little lighter, everything still where you’d expect to find it. That’s the thing about good redesigns: you notice them a few days in because something feels easier, not because there’s a splash screen telling you what changed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/12/vimeo-redone/ Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/12/garys-back/ Half a year of nothing. Gary went to Tokyo, sent a vague note about following the oranges and Pikachus, and then disappeared completely. I figured he’d either stopped existing or merged with some anime dimension he couldn’t escape. But he’s alive—showed up today like nothing happened, explaining it away with some story about a woman who wouldn’t let go, so he had to vanish for a while. Classic Gary. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/12/garys-back/ Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/12/my-death-space/ MyDeathSpace.com is an archive of MySpace profiles belonging to dead people. You find them there—photos, music players, wall comments, last logins from years ago. The profiles don’t age. Nobody’s updating them. It’s like walking into someone’s apartment the day they stopped living in it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/12/my-death-space/ Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/11/sunny/ On gray, wet days I’m completely gone—depressed, dark thoughts, the whole spiral. The world looks grim. Everything feels impossible. Then the sun comes out and something just flips. Suddenly I’m convinced I could take over the world. The sky is blue and infinite. I love every creature on this planet, even the ones that were making me miserable five minutes earlier. Everything becomes beautiful and worth being part of. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/11/sunny/ Tue, 11 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/9/through/ Finished The O.C., California just in time—all four seasons before The Simpsons came back. That scene with Ryan and Marissa gets me every time. I don’t know what it is. My eyes go wet and I can’t look away. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/9/through/ Sun, 09 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/9/the-suit/ There’s this guy sitting outside the building in a dark suit, hair slicked back, and he starts talking to us as we’re passing. His voice is hard to make out, everything slow and deliberate, and he’s telling us he hasn’t eaten in days. His hands are moving like he’s pulling the words out of the air. I tell him we’re broke, we’re students, I say it without thinking about it. We were heading to McDonald’s. Of course we were. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/9/the-suit/ Sun, 09 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/8/gates-vs-jobs/ Jobs had the design obsession, the turtleneck, the mystique. Gates had the pragmatism to put a computer in every home, even if nobody would ever call it beautiful. Two completely different philosophies about what mattered. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/8/gates-vs-jobs/ Sat, 08 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/8/all-in/ I threw it all away. Kept betting, couldn’t stop, kept chasing the next spin. The ball went round and round, hypnotic, and somewhere in there I lost my mind and my money. One moment you’re careful, the next you’re reckless, watching chips disappear like they were never real. Ten euros gone in seconds. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/8/all-in/ Sat, 08 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/6/google-is-down/ The best part of Google being down is the first thirty seconds when you don’t realize it yet. You hit search and nothing happens. Your brain takes a beat to process that something this foundational just stopped working. Then comes this weird little thrill—a massive company with its fingers in everything, and for once it’s useless. A tiny moment where you’re not being tracked, not being fed results, not asking permission to know something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/6/google-is-down/ Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/6/ismoke/ Saw some iSmoke branding on the street—someone had the idea to apply Apple’s minimalist playbook to cigarettes. The overlap is almost too obvious: sleek, addictive, unnecessary, purchased by people who don’t actually need them. I’m still loyal to Gauloises, but the joke landed anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/6/ismoke/ Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/5/sailor-moon/ I got into Sailor Moon when I was a kid, same as everyone. Transformation sequences, bright colors, girls in sailor suits—it works on an eight-year-old. Rewatched it recently though, and the character stuff is actually solid. Usagi doesn’t fix her laziness through some character-growth montage. She just figures out that caring about her friends matters more than avoiding effort, and she shows up. Most kids’ media doesn’t trust that kind of straightforward character work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/5/sailor-moon/ Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/5/i-am-legend-alternative-ending/ The BVG strike made Friedrichstraße station feel like I Am Legend in reverse. Thousands of people crammed in, herded by police in some bleak choreography. The film’s all about being alone in an empty world, and this was the opposite—everyone here at once, packed into the same suffocating moment. No air. No space. I kept thinking Will Smith’s character had it easy. At least he survived the alternative ending. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/5/i-am-legend-alternative-ending/ Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/4/half-ready/ Monday the entire city was supposed to shut down—a total transit strike, nothing going anywhere. No U-Bahn, no S-Bahn, no buses, just nothing at all. I had no idea how I’d even get to the office, but there was something darkly funny about it, Berlin just grinding to a halt like that. Work from home was looking pretty attractive suddenly. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/4/half-ready/ Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/2/chocolate-and-ouzo/ Sonja dragged me to this indie birthday party in an actual kindergarten, which sounds like a setup for a joke but wasn’t. We loaded up on gin and tonics, flatbread, and this chocolate nut cake that wobbled on the plate. The music couldn’t decide between indie and electro-house, so we just split the room between us—my side and hers. At some point we got ambitious about bartending, which lasted about one drink before it became clear we were just drunk and pointing at bottles. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/2/chocolate-and-ouzo/ Sun, 02 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/1/final-distance/ I want to see you, but something invisible keeps pushing us apart. Every time I get close enough, it happens again. Just more distance. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/1/final-distance/ Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/1/smoothies/ Smoothies are genuinely the laziest way to eat better—you dump fruit into a bottle and drink it, suddenly you’ve had all your vegetables without noticing. McCafé’s ones are actually good, which means something coming from a chain coffee place. They don’t water them down or ruin them with weird syrup. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/3/1/smoothies/ Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/27/everything-but-your-friend/ Die Ärzte doing what they do best: a trashy fucking love song about wanting everything from someone except for their terrible friend. It’s German punk at its most gloriously crude, the kind of stupid that somehow lands because they’ve never apologized for being dumb. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/27/everything-but-your-friend/ Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/26/my-personal-crusade/ The sky over Alexanderplatz is gray, the kind of heavy cloud cover that seems to catch on the TV tower. Perfect weather for what I’m doing here, which I’ve been telling myself for the last month is a personal crusade, though that word feels too grand for what is basically me trying to stop being haunted by a shopping center. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/26/my-personal-crusade/ Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/24/close-your-eyes/ She tells me to close my eyes and I do. A Silver Mt. Zion’s “Blindblindblind” has been playing for what feels like three years, and I let myself sink into her arms. The moment I close my eyes everything rushes in—school, money, love, problems, worries, suffering. But there’s also the blue evening sky over Berlin, stars, the smell of shower gel on her skin. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/24/close-your-eyes/ Sun, 24 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/23/still-ringing/ I went to White Trash alone because everyone had made excuses. The weather was shit, wind in my face the whole way, and I showed up looking like I’d been electrocuted. I ordered a Beck’s and then just kept cycling through them, taking each back for the deposit and getting another, burning time until Blood Red Shoes showed up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/23/still-ringing/ Sat, 23 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/22/sweeney-todd/ Watched Sweeney Todd and ended up liking it more than I expected. After Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride I had some idea what Burton might do with a murderous barber musical, but nothing prepared me for how dark and sick this thing actually is. The singing, the blood, Depp completely unraveling in a basement with a straight razor. Genuinely disturbing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/22/sweeney-todd/ Fri, 22 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/20/blood-red-shoes-live-in-berlin/ Caught them at White Trash. Laura-Mary Carter on stage doesn’t seem to be performing so much as channeling—like the music’s just moving through her and she’s watching it happen with the rest of us. Their records are decent but live they’ve got something that the studio can’t quite hold. Intimate venue, good sound, the kind of night that makes you remember why you bother leaving the house for shows. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/20/blood-red-shoes-live-in-berlin/ Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/20/half-a-year/ I get out of the U-Bahn and turn right without thinking, walking slowly beside the tracks. Six months in Berlin. Following Ella here was probably the biggest move I’ve made, and everything’s different in a way that still doesn’t quite make sense—confusing even now. New job, new school, new friends, new girls. A lot happens in six months when you actually commit to being somewhere. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/20/half-a-year/ Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/20/broken-light/ Broken traffic light at my corner this morning. You’d expect people to slow down—look both ways, be cautious, that kind of thing. Instead everyone there (drivers, cyclists, old woman with a crutch) did the exact same thing: crossed it fast, like the light was still working, like red was coming. It’s funny in an awful way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/20/broken-light/ Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/19/never-again/ I’m not reading any more think pieces about amateur porn destroying the professional industry. It’s all just people being prudish about something that’s already happened. Nothing interesting there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/19/never-again/ Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/19/from-kreuzberg/ Prinzessinnenbad is this German documentary about a public swimming pool in Kreuzberg. Immigrants, kids, old people, the neighborhood sweating in chlorine and sun. No plot, no arc, no real narrative—just summer days and whatever a community looks like when nobody’s filming. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/19/from-kreuzberg/ Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/19/the-third-one/ This Simpsons episode split into three stories. The first two don’t work—Bart with the Sex Pistols in one, Lisa and Nelson getting fucked up until the doctors quit in the other. But the third one lands. Death, love, chocolate, all of it. That’s the one. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/19/the-third-one/ Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/18/blond-redesigned/ Blond magazine redesigned itself and landed on my favorite color, which feels like the kind of thing that matters if you care about how things look. I’ve been reading it alongside NEON for years—it’s rare to find a magazine that stays thoughtful all the way through. The relaunch issue cost basically nothing, so I grabbed it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/18/blond-redesigned/ Mon, 18 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/18/grip-like-a-vice/ This song gets into you. I don’t know what it is exactly—the way it builds, the way it lands—but I come back to it constantly. It has this grip on me that I can’t shake. Every time it plays I’m just fully there with it, can’t think about anything else. No explanation needed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/18/grip-like-a-vice/ Mon, 18 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/17/three-columns/ I had Mona over and we went to Kosmos, then came home and threw cheap Lidl pasta in the microwave while The O.C. season three played. My head was pounding. There was this Amy Winehouse feeling I couldn’t shake—indifference and dizziness and arrogance all mixed up, that strange state where you feel cool and slightly wrecked at the same time. That mood made me decide the site needed a third column. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/17/three-columns/ Sun, 17 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/15/cheese-nachos/ Melted cheese on fried tortilla, a sweet cocktail on the side, both half price. The cheese browns and crusts, the chips still crisp. The drink tastes like candy. This is the kind of bar snack you don’t overthink—you just eat it, drink it, and feel momentarily clever for catching the deal. It’s enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/15/cheese-nachos/ Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/14/fuck-valentines-day/ Valentine’s Day is just panic and obligation dressed up as romance. Everyone’s stressed about whether they’re doing it right, if they’re spending enough, if they’re showing up with the proper gesture, as if there’s one correct way to care about someone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/14/fuck-valentines-day/ Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/12/care-package/ Becca sent me a care package the other day. Just a box with my name on it, but opening it felt like she’d emptied her brain trying to figure out what would actually make me happy. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/12/care-package/ Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/9/spring/ I’m the kind of person who lets most things pass by without thinking much about it. Childish sometimes, naive more often, emotionally checked out most of the time. But heartbreak is the one thing I can’t handle at all. I know the rules. My friends have been saying them for weeks. Forget her. Distract yourself. Move on. There are other girls. She wasn’t worth it. I know it’s all true. I believe most of it. But I miss her. The space next to me is empty. And I don’t know what comes next. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/9/spring/ Sat, 09 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/6/someone-wake-me-up/ There’s that moment between sleep and waking where you’re trapped in both at once, knowing you need to open your eyes but your body won’t cooperate. The dream logic breaks down just enough that you realize you’re dreaming, but you can’t force yourself out of it. Someone shaking your shoulder, voice cutting through—that’s mercy. Without it, you’d drift back down into the half-sleep, the worse place, where everything feels important and nothing feels real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/6/someone-wake-me-up/ Wed, 06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/4/your-ex-lover-is-dead/ I woke up on the U-Bahn. A woman’s voice was telling me I was at Sophie-Charlotte-Platz. I got off without knowing how I’d gotten there. I’d been single for a week, and everyone had the same prescription: drink until it stops hurting. Thomas, Hannah, Kathi all nodded like they knew what they were talking about. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/2/4/your-ex-lover-is-dead/ Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/26/final-fantasy-xii-revenant-wings/ Square Enix put together a website for Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, this Nintendo DS game that’s coming in a couple of weeks. Beautiful site—orchestral soundtrack underneath, trailers, downloads, the whole thing. Which makes sense because this is still Final Fantasy, even if it’s on a handheld and smaller in scope. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/26/final-fantasy-xii-revenant-wings/ Sat, 26 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/26/textback/ Made a WordPress theme called Textback over the winter. Wanted it to feel clean and deliberate, like the season itself—nothing wasted, every element doing actual work. The color and spacing are where the elegance lives. No decoration, just structure. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/26/textback/ Sat, 26 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/26/helvetica/ Someone brought the Helvetica documentary to the studio this week and we all crowded around to watch it. It’s this strange thing to sit through when you work in design—watching old men explain why they’re obsessed with a typeface that’s basically everywhere, and then watching it get torn apart by everyone who came after them for being everywhere. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/26/helvetica/ Sat, 26 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/25/internet-explorer-still/ You build your site to the spec. Valid HTML, clean CSS, following the actual standards. And then Internet Explorer shreds it. This has been the designer’s curse since IE decided to write its own rulebook back with version 5.5. Microsoft got to make up the internet, and the rest of us had to choose: build it right and watch IE butcher it, or abandon standards and hope IE happens to understand what you’re doing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/25/internet-explorer-still/ Fri, 25 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/24/i-wouldnt-sleep-with-a-windows-user/ I wouldn’t sleep with a Windows user. Not because I’m a snob—okay, I’m definitely a snob—but because it tells you something fundamental about who you are, what you notice, what you’ve accepted as normal. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/24/i-wouldnt-sleep-with-a-windows-user/ Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/23/still-here-anyway/ I’m the kind of person who doubles down when I feel wronged. It’s defensive and stupid and it breaks things, and I’ve spent enough years doing it to know better. But knowing and doing are different problems. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/23/still-here-anyway/ Wed, 23 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/19/mac-users-always-win/ Some market research firm called Mindset Media published findings showing that Mac users are 60% more likely to be open-minded, liberal, and completely convinced of their own superiority. Fox Business reported it. The researchers labeled this “Openness 5”—people who seek new experiences and believe imagination and intellectual curiosity are central to a meaningful life. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/19/mac-users-always-win/ Sat, 19 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/17/waiting-it-out/ The DS library was thin. SquareEnix had spent years dismantling the Mana series and selling it back in pieces. Brain Training games were pointless. The job sims—lawyer, surgeon, fishing guide—weren’t happening. I needed something to make those endless subway rides feel like less than purgatory. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/17/waiting-it-out/ Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/17/good-trash/ Came across Sally and Jannis’s blog and immediately got it. Drawing Mario, driving around, eating school food. Sounds dumb until you see how they do it—like they figured out something about just living that everyone else is missing. Hoping this becomes something I’m actually following. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/17/good-trash/ Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/16/dieter-rams/ Art and design are a mess. Someone throws buckets of paint at a wall and that’s design now. Someone starves a dog at a gallery opening and calls it art. Someone pisses their name in the snow for a photo. Maybe that’s art too. No one knows anymore. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/16/dieter-rams/ Wed, 16 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/15/madness/ Insanely expensive, but if money fell out of the sky somehow, the MacBook Air is getting bought. That’s it. No other shopping after that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/15/madness/ Tue, 15 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/14/wrong-about-til/ Weeks I spent avoiding Keinohrhasen. Til Schweiger. Something about him had stuck as untouchable, even though I’d never actually sat through anything he was in. Tonight Jenny and I needed a movie, and every other option looked worse, so we landed here: reporter chases a story, meets this uptight kindergarten teacher obsessed with the environment, they fight and then don’t, standard romantic comedy beats. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/14/wrong-about-til/ Mon, 14 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/12/the-only-thing-that-scares-me/ Most horror films just bore me. Stupid teenagers trapped in some killer’s house, getting chased by psychopaths in their dreams—I don’t feel anything from that. What actually gets to me is the apocalypse stuff. Viruses, the end of everything, vampire-zombies, the whole collapse of civilization. That’s what sticks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/12/the-only-thing-that-scares-me/ Sat, 12 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/12/every-song/ Saturday night, brain off, so I threw on The O.C. season two—Jenny gave it to me for my birthday a while back and it had been sitting around. I didn’t think it would land the same way, but the opening credits hit and suddenly I was back there, seventeen, sweaty from the lake with chips and a cold beer, about to watch Ryan and Seth spin through their little catastrophes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/12/every-song/ Sat, 12 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/8/fuck-you-google/ I hate Google. I hate what they do, I hate the monopoly, I hate that they own my searches. I also know there’s no real escape—Yahoo’s just as greedy, Bing is Microsoft’s version of the same evil, Lycos is dead. So I sit at my Mac and throw my most private thoughts into their servers anyway, every single day. The contradiction is complete and there’s nothing I can do about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/8/fuck-you-google/ Tue, 08 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/7/whats-with-the-pink/ I’m obsessed with a specific shade of fluorescent pink—the kind that’s impossible to photograph or reproduce in any magazine or print. Once you see it in person, you can’t unsee it. It’s crude and beautiful, hitting you on a purely animal level before your brain catches up. You find it in candy and neon signs and skin, in combinations that shouldn’t work but do. Buff Monster said it best: you can’t fuck with this much pink. He’s right. It’s one of those rare colors that works immediately, that makes people feel something before they understand why. Once you start looking, it’s everywhere. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/7/whats-with-the-pink/ Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/7/cloverfield/ A reader sent me down this rabbit hole back in 2008. Someone leaked a video from a New York penthouse party—drunk people, someone filming with a handheld camera, then the building lurches. Everyone’s screaming. The power cuts. The feed cuts out. That’s all anyone had. Nobody explained what happened. The internet spent weeks staring at that fragment, trying to piece it together. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/7/cloverfield/ Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/6/im-a-farmer/ When I was a kid I was obsessed with games. Everything I could grab—alone in my room, at friends’ houses, with random kids in the arcade. I was happy. Walking around as Link in Hyrule, eating mystery mushrooms as Mario, dragging that yellow electric mouse around as Ash. The best part was knowing I’d grown up in this weird window when games could fool us into thinking we were actually out there doing something important. Finding magic, saving the world, being someone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/6/im-a-farmer/ Sun, 06 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/2/still-gets-me/ 3 AM, can’t sleep. Bob Marley keeps me company and I’m scrolling, trying to write my way into tiredness. Somehow I end up here—back on your site. The one I found years ago when I was just starting to understand design, watching how you’d build something and learning to see the craft underneath. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/2/still-gets-me/ Wed, 02 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/1/night-without-morning/ I gripped Jenny’s hand as we pushed through streets packed with people clutching champagne bottles and firecrackers, dodging whatever shot past our feet. The sky exploded in spinning colors and I suddenly stopped—another police barricade. The crowd was shouting at the officers in green, hurling firecrackers. Behind the flashing lights I could make out the Brandenburg Gate. There had to be another way. We ducked into a side street where an enormous Ferris wheel spun indifferently overhead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2008/1/1/night-without-morning/ Tue, 01 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/12/30/web-and-japan/ Dusty Asian bookstore, an old Japanese guy overcharging me for something I didn’t need, and it snapped everything into focus. I’d been wandering intellectually for a while—picking things up and putting them down, never landing anywhere. But standing in that shop I remembered what actually moves me: web design and Japan. They need to connect somehow. That’s it. Everything else is noise. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/12/30/web-and-japan/ Sun, 30 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/12/19/runs-in-the-family/ I copied everything my older sister did as a kid. Not just surface stuff—the music, the clothes, the attitude, all of it. You do it because she’d already figured out what mattered. Stupid kid, but it’s funny years later when you catch yourself doing the same thing with other people. Must run in the family or something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/12/19/runs-in-the-family/ Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/12/6/everything-shifts/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/12/6/everything-shifts/ Thu, 06 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/28/another-one-gone/ Christoph stopped blogging. It was one of maybe three blogs I actually read—the kind of thing I’d check every morning, the kind that shaped how I thought about things. Ad’s gone, Nicki’s gone, now him too. I’m not trying to be melodramatic about it, but there’s a real emptiness there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/28/another-one-gone/ Wed, 28 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/21/spongebob/ I caught an old episode randomly and it held up better than expected. What surprised me wasn’t the comedy but the design—the color work, the character animation, the way they built a world that makes no sense but feels internally consistent. There’s something almost obsessive about the care they put into a show about a cartoon sponge flipping burgers. The writing gets darker the more you watch it. SpongeBob isn’t actually happy, he’s delusional, and everyone around him is trapped in their own kind of despair. Once you see that it’s hard to unsee. Funny and sad in equal measure, which I guess is the only way something gets to stick around this long. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/21/spongebob/ Wed, 21 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/19/schinesisch/ Jenny says “Schinesisch” when it should be “Chinesisch” and I’m not the one who’s going to correct her. We went to get Chinese food and she ordered it like that, and the place just smiled and didn’t blink. We stuffed ourselves with sweet and sour pork and sukiyaki and made crude jokes the whole time, the kind of stuff that should’ve gotten us thrown out. She laughed anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/19/schinesisch/ Mon, 19 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/18/where-does-the-ocean-go/ There’s something about standing at the edge of it that makes you feel like you’re watching something alive leave. The water pulls back, and you know it’s coming back—tides, physics, the same old rhythm—but in that moment it feels like something’s being taken from you. I’ve spent enough time at the coast to know the ocean doesn’t go anywhere. It’s always there, always returning, indifferent and constant. Maybe that’s why the question feels important anyway. Maybe what we’re really asking is where we go, or what we lose in the time between waves, or why we keep expecting the ocean to answer for something it’s not responsible for. The water doesn’t care about any of that. It just moves. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/18/where-does-the-ocean-go/ Sun, 18 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/18/the-pierces/ The Pierces are one of those acts that slipped through the cracks—sisters making synth-pop that hit different when you were stuck on some long drive or trying to decode what you felt about someone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/18/the-pierces/ Sun, 18 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/17/zune-originals/ The Zune Originals were actually kind of cool. Those limited-edition players came wrapped in custom covers designed by real artists and designers—not just different color options, but actual design work. Some of it was weird, some was genuinely good-looking. The whole thing felt like a small, doomed gesture toward making a media player into something you’d actually want to carry around, an object worth looking at rather than just functional hardware. It didn’t matter that the Zune was already losing to the iPod by that point. There was something respectful about going down swinging with some visual culture involved. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/17/zune-originals/ Sat, 17 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/17/the-star-breaks/ Nicki’s gone now. I sat on a hill in the grass, just sitting there in the dark for a while, and then I saw this thing—a star, or something like a star, dark and bright at once, cracking open toward the sky. It lit up the whole horizon for a moment and then it was gone again, fading back into nothing. We’re sitting here together now, him and me, both in the dark, both alone. Waiting to see if it comes back. Waiting to see if he comes back. I don’t know. He had this way of seeing things that made everything look different—not like he was trying to be wise about it, just like he actually saw something the rest of us were missing. Now there’s just the dark and the memory of that light, and the strange stupid hope that maybe you appear again if you just sit still long enough and don’t look away. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/17/the-star-breaks/ Sat, 17 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/17/scouting/ Jenny and I were scouting the scene neighborhoods in the capital. I want to move somewhere like that—the rents are still cheap, at least they were then. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/17/scouting/ Sat, 17 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/11/blasphemy/ Mac OS is beautiful. Use it and you’re automatically in this club of people who understand elegance and intuition. It’s basically a religion. Then Friday I needed out. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/11/blasphemy/ Sun, 11 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/11/superstar/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/11/superstar/ Sun, 11 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/11/maggi/ Berlin got buried in snow for a few days and I basically gave up on being a functional person. Spent the whole weekend with Jenny watching DVDs, fucking, and eating—noodles with Maggi, cake, potato gratin, cereal, Turkish bread, ham, back to noodles. The kind of time-blurred day where you stop looking at a clock and wonder if your stomach actually has a physical limit. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/11/maggi/ Sun, 11 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/8/destroying-google/ What’s worse than a company that only wants money? One that already has too much. Google is that company. They’ve got the kind of wealth that makes governments nervous, they’ve convinced people to organize their entire existence around a search algorithm, and they understand that information is power—the kind of power they’re perfectly positioned to exploit. They’re collecting today and they’ll control tomorrow. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/8/destroying-google/ Thu, 08 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/7/skipping/ I keep thinking about running away from time. Not in some dramatic I-need-to-escape way, just… skipping ahead past the rough months. Peeking at whether I’ll actually sign that lease, whether I’ve found someone worth keeping. The thing is, you’d need to come back. Same person, same memories, just without the damage from waiting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/7/skipping/ Wed, 07 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/4/senseless/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/4/senseless/ Sun, 04 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/3/gustav-saves-the-world/ Jenny was grinding through Final Fantasy III while I dove into Phantom Hourglass, which I’d renamed to feature Link Gustav, the worst possible name for a hero. I’d rush through temples with three hearts left, four if I was being careful, and I could feel Jenny tensing up every time I took damage. She never said anything, but you could sense the second-hand panic. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/11/3/gustav-saves-the-world/ Sat, 03 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/31/five-meters/ I ended up in the wrong class. Everything was wrong—the room, the people, the energy. Didn’t belong there. Didn’t want to. And they didn’t want me either. My best friend from the old class was the only thing keeping me from completely losing it. But what actually got me through was seeing Marcel between periods. During lessons I couldn’t focus on anything else. Phone vibrating every ten minutes. I knew he’d written. I had to get back. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/31/five-meters/ Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/31/when-everything-fits/ I’m in that run right now where everything’s clicking. Living in a city that pulses, work that actually means something, finally making real money that’s mine. Got a girlfriend who’s smart and hot and just as bent in the head as I am. We get each other’s damage, and that’s what makes it work. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/31/when-everything-fits/ Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/28/walk-on/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/28/walk-on/ Sun, 28 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/28/double-cheese/ Ordered pizza online for the first time. Used to walk down to the place next door, now it just arrives. The strange part is what they’ll combine. Fish stick pizza, obviously. They had this Christmas special: roast sauce, cheese, potato slices, red cabbage, beef, and cheese again. Listed separately. Double cheese. That’s the whole thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/28/double-cheese/ Sun, 28 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/24/id-like-a-hole/ The piercer’s apartment was in Berlin’s Adlershof, somewhere in a sprawl of buildings I spent half an hour walking through in the cold. Snow falling. I’d fought my parents for weeks to get here—they’d actually signed permission, which felt momentous at fifteen or whatever I was. I was checking the address they’d given me, increasingly convinced it didn’t exist, or that I’d find myself in someone’s living room, the piercer working between kids and cats and kitchen tables. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/24/id-like-a-hole/ Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/23/im-it/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/23/im-it/ Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/20/ruby-gloom/ I hadn’t seen this many candy-colored Gothic characters bouncing around a cartoon in forever. There was a bat with a speech impediment who’s afraid of flying, Siamese twins who just wanted to eat chips and dip, and this purple thing that shuffled through scenes looking half-dead, never saying anything but flat monotone observations. And the title song was actually great. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/20/ruby-gloom/ Sat, 20 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/19/exactly-like-this/ I wanted my new apartment—didn’t matter which Berlin neighborhood, Mitte or Prenzlauer Berg or wherever—to feel exactly like this. Like home the moment I walked in. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/19/exactly-like-this/ Fri, 19 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/18/operator-please/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/18/operator-please/ Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/17/that-look/ The starfish on the shelf—a gift from my ex—suddenly felt ridiculous when she laughed at it. I defended the thing like it mattered. Maybe I was drunk, but pretty sure I wasn’t. There was something about the way she moved through my apartment that made me need to prove a stupid toy was worth something, which tells you everything about where my head was. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/17/that-look/ Wed, 17 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/17/a-lucid-dream/ She knocked and I opened the door. There she was, smiling at me, and I loved that look, that moment. I’d spent hours getting the small apartment ready—so little space, so much to sort through. She came in and took her shoes off, moving through the rooms like she was cataloging everything. The photos, the desk, the shelves. I couldn’t stop watching her move. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/17/a-lucid-dream/ Wed, 17 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/16/ready/ I’d been on Windows for years, reinstalling XP every few months just to keep it from falling apart. Mac OS X changed everything—you installed it, and it worked. It stayed good. You stopped having to maintain your operating system. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/16/ready/ Tue, 16 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/14/sara-stays-pink/ Sara’s still having fun with this. Most people who start blogging burn out or get bored, but she just keeps going, actually enjoying it. There’s something rare about that—someone who blogs because they like it, not because they’re supposed to be building something or performing for an audience. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/14/sara-stays-pink/ Sun, 14 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/13/the-wall-falls/ Thirty-eight years of concrete and barbed wire, the Cold War made visible. And then November 1989 and it’s just rubble. People dancing on the fragments. I think about how permanence dissolves in hours, how something so absolute could just collapse. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/13/the-wall-falls/ Sat, 13 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/10/rhythm-and-fruits/ I notice it after a while—how the right song changes the way an apple tastes. Or maybe it’s just that I can’t chew in silence anymore, that rhythm has become as necessary as taste. Something about the tempo makes sweetness sharper, makes texture matter more. It’s a small thing, the kind nobody mentions, but once you catch it you can’t stop noticing it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/10/rhythm-and-fruits/ Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/10/house-of-cards/ This song has always been about the moment when you stop pretending. Not the fight, not the dramatic ending, just the quiet realization that you’ve been living in denial for so long that you don’t even remember when the actual foundation cracked. Radiohead does that better than almost anyone—that exhausted acknowledgment that nothing you built was ever going to hold. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/10/house-of-cards/ Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/10/youre-not-finding-it/ Every three months the supermarket reorganizes and it’s like they’re designing it specifically to waste your time. You learn where everything is—milk here, eggs there, the quick-cooking stuff you eat at midnight in a specific aisle—and then they move it all. The eggs go where the drinks were. Drinks end up somewhere that makes no sense. You’re walking in circles for twenty minutes looking for something basic, asking staff who are equally lost, leaving with maybe half of what you came for. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/10/youre-not-finding-it/ Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/9/breaks/ Her bed was soft and smelled good. Disney DVDs on the shelf, a windchime motionless from the ceiling, her boyfriend’s photo on the desk. All of it kept us from kissing, so we read sex scenes to each other instead and laughed stupid hard. Burying what had happened that morning when they separated us into different classes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/9/breaks/ Tue, 09 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/7/nothing-changed/ I disappeared for a while. A virus was going around killing blogs, my friend ended up 850 kilometers away in a hospital, and I coded myself into exhaustion trying to redesign this site. At some point I wanted to throw the whole thing—the code, the browser, all of it—in the trash. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/10/7/nothing-changed/ Sun, 07 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/29/cut-off/ Ko Htike called from Yangon and said it sounded like war. Fifty shots, maybe more. Tear gas in the schools. The military had already killed the internet, so his voice on the phone was the last direct line out of the city I could reach. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/29/cut-off/ Sat, 29 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/28/girl/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/28/girl/ Fri, 28 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/26/everyone-down-there/ The first piece I needed to write, it should’ve been brilliant. Instead I kept coming back to the U-Bahn. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/26/everyone-down-there/ Wed, 26 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/26/march-2007/ They only called me Toki anymore. I kept forgetting my real name, or stopped caring about it—probably both. Nintendo’s snoring was breaking my heart, all night long. I got up to grab some water. The moon had the whole room painted in soft blue. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/26/march-2007/ Wed, 26 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/23/when-you-leave/ The last television show that actually mattered to me was The O.C. Four straight years where a weekly episode made existence bearable. Every time the Phantom Planet theme kicked in, whatever was falling apart would just stop. School was a disaster. I was heartbroken. I was generally lost. For an hour it didn’t matter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/23/when-you-leave/ Sun, 23 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/22/coming-home/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/22/coming-home/ Sat, 22 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/17/bangalu/ The bouncer in all white didn’t look like he wanted us there. That expression that said very clearly: beat it, kids, before I walk you to the next train. I almost whined it at him: “We’re from Aperto.” The moment those words were out, something shifted. His whole face changed, and suddenly he was waving us past like we actually mattered. I grinned at him. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/17/bangalu/ Mon, 17 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/16/the-design-in-my-head/ I can’t pinpoint when design became the thing I cared about. It was probably somewhere in those early years with comics, that first moment of realizing someone had deliberately made a choice about every line and color on the page. Growing up, I did what everyone else did—watched TV, idolized firemen, went through the standard childhood. But somewhere in there, that design part stuck. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/16/the-design-in-my-head/ Sun, 16 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/15/the-weight-of-a-dot/ There’s this point on the page that sits all wrong, restless. A line running through it breaks the frame, gets softer as it fades, barely holds itself. They loop around each other on A3 paper—one thing, then nothing, imploding into white space. This is what design school teaches. That placing a dot here instead of there matters in ways you have to feel. That every mark carries weight. That the machines we use to think with are as important to understand as the thinking itself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/15/the-weight-of-a-dot/ Sat, 15 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/13/the-white-garden/ I went to see it on an ordinary afternoon, not expecting much. There’s something about white-only gardens that seems impossible until you’re standing in one and it’s everywhere—the monochrome doesn’t flatten the space, it opens it up. Each plant becomes architecture. Shadows matter. The whole thing looked deliberate in a way that gardens usually don’t, like someone had edited reality instead of just planting things. I spent an hour watching how the light moved through the blooms, how green became irrelevant, and understood what it meant to strip away decoration and get left with form. It made me rethink the whole idea of constraint—that narrowing the palette isn’t loss, it’s focus. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/13/the-white-garden/ Thu, 13 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/12/hannah/ I always read Hannah’s column first. She had this way of making something stupid feel real, or just saying what everyone was thinking but wouldn’t say. That voice doesn’t come around often. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/12/hannah/ Wed, 12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/11/the-shirt-ive-kept/ I’ve been carrying this t-shirt for years. It’s got your picture on the front. I wear it under other clothes mostly, pulled out when nobody’s watching, which is probably the worst reason to keep something like that. But that’s how things stick around—buried, private, heavier than they should be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/11/the-shirt-ive-kept/ Tue, 11 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/10/nowhere-fast/ I bolt out of the S-Bahn with t.A.T.u. pounding in my ears—they’re coming back, trust me, at least in my head—and check the clock. Almost nine. I have no idea where the Ernst-Litfass School is. Thomas already called, impatient. I tell him I’ll be late and start running. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/10/nowhere-fast/ Mon, 10 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/9/reckless-beauty/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/9/reckless-beauty/ Sun, 09 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/8/settling-in/ First week’s done and I still can’t quite get my head around being here. It feels like I could walk to the airport right now and leave—go back to everyone I know, everything I left behind. The strange part is how genuinely possible that feels, like escape is always an option. Eniz told me not to forget where I come from, and she’s right, but it’s hard to hold onto that when you’re suddenly at concerts and galleries and random things you didn’t plan on. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/8/settling-in/ Sat, 08 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/5/what-the-fox-knows/ The thing about Saint-Exupéry’s fox that sticks with you is how brutally practical it is about love. You know the passage—”What does it mean to tame?” “It means to establish ties.” The fox sits in the wheat and explains that the prince isn’t special yet, and neither is the fox. They’re interchangeable with all the others. But if the prince comes back at the same hour every day, the fox will start to feel happy in the afternoon, will listen for his footstep, will know him by the sound of his walk. That’s how you make someone matter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/5/what-the-fox-knows/ Wed, 05 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/5/three-days-in/ Three days at Aperto and I’m not even trying to hide it anymore—I love it here. I know if someone from the agency reads this they’ll think I’m pathetic, but it’s true. A few months ago I was washing dishes and doing pizza runs. Now I’m sitting in the creative department with my own desk, my own space. My co-apprentice Thomas is solid. Arabella, the intern, is cool. We get free breakfast every day—good breakfast, not some corporate joke. The machines we’re working on right now are already an upgrade from anything I’ve had, and we’re getting even better ones soon. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/5/three-days-in/ Wed, 05 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/2/agency-stuff-2/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/2/agency-stuff-2/ Sun, 02 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/2/someday-in-page/ Tomorrow I start making money as a designer. Someone’s actually going to pay me for this, which still feels like a con I’m running on the entire creative industry. But here we are. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/2/someday-in-page/ Sun, 02 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/1/the-holy-intel-stand/ IFA was completely packed. Cedric had brought Rebecca along, and I’d brought whoever I was seeing at the time. The whole scene was this beautiful chaos—gorgeous booth staff, middle-aged guys desperately trying to hand you flyers, Asian businessmen who’d basically mastered this dismissive float through the aisles with their hands held up like shields. But you could at least get close to the new tech. Digital photo frames. 3D TVs. The iPhone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/9/1/the-holy-intel-stand/ Sat, 01 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/31/visible-cords/ Just became an official Berlin resident. Only took a full afternoon at city hall with the strangest collection of humans I’ve ever laid eyes on—though I guess they roam around outside just fine anyway. But I’m warming to this place more every day. I don’t understand why anyone complains about city living. You step outside and there’s Hugendubel for magazines, Karstadt for Puma sneakers, Lidl for microwaveable junk. Okay, technically you could get all that back home. But something about it feels cooler here. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/31/visible-cords/ Fri, 31 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/31/south-of-nowhere/ I’d just seen Tegan and Sara and wanted to find something that felt like that—queer, restless, alive. The O.C. was ending in Germany anyway, so I was ready for whatever came next. Someone told me about South of Nowhere. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/31/south-of-nowhere/ Fri, 31 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/30/the-same-three-things/ I buy the same three things every week. Wrigley’s from Rossmann, coffee from Lidl, fruit wherever they have decent ones. Nothing special about any of it. I just know what I’m getting—no debate, no thinking. I walk in, grab what I came for, done. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/30/the-same-three-things/ Thu, 30 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/30/still-into-her/ Julia Hummer’s still got me. Berlin entertainer, naturally charming, the kind of person you want to know. But then she shows up in a GEZ campaign—promoting Germany’s public broadcast fee—and it’s just… why? That’s the kind of gig that makes people stop caring. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/30/still-into-her/ Thu, 30 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/29/the-conveyor/ I love riding the U-Bahn. Nowhere else do so many people look so serious at once—reading, staring, making out, fooling around. You could sort them by type. File them away. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/29/the-conveyor/ Wed, 29 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/29/agency-fun/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/29/agency-fun/ Wed, 29 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/28/from-ibiza/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/28/from-ibiza/ Tue, 28 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/28/the-lawyers-won/ I spent a lot of time on SuicideGirls in those early years. Founded in 2001 by Missy, the site managed this impossible thing—held together sex and art and genuine alternative thinking without feeling like a contradiction. You could lose hours there. The models were intelligent, tattooed, in actual bands. The photographers weren’t just shooting nudity; they were artists. The whole place felt like you’d found something that wasn’t supposed to exist yet somehow did. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/28/the-lawyers-won/ Tue, 28 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/28/the-best-way-to-waste-your-life/ Berlin is the best place in the world to waste your life. I read that in some guide once—maybe Vice—and it stuck. The city’s one long drunk parade of immigrants and lazy bastards and dogs that never stop shitting. Everyone here is either pretending to study or actually just giving up, and there’s no real distinction. The only people wearing suits are homeless men, and even they’re doing it ironically. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/28/the-best-way-to-waste-your-life/ Tue, 28 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/27/just-quiet/ Becca drove back home this afternoon and I had this massive headache, thought my ears were actually going to explode on the subway. Should probably see a doctor about it. Will do once the aspirin wears off. It was a good week with her, and now that she’s gone, it’s eerily quiet again, that almost haunted feeling. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/27/just-quiet/ Mon, 27 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/26/becca-back/ Becca came to town. That’s how it starts—my ex-girlfriend rolls back in and suddenly we’re acting like we never stopped. Before the Tegan and Sara show at Columbia Club we’re on the U-Bahn already buzzed on Lambrusco and whatever that weird Beck’s Green Lemon beer was, the kind of stupid pre-game drinking where you can’t believe you’re both laughing this hard at nothing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/26/becca-back/ Sun, 26 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/22/new-ground/ When you’re moving to a new city and furnishing an apartment alone, Ikea becomes this special kind of hell. You go in with a list, you follow the arrows on the floor, and for a while it makes sense. Then suddenly you’re lost in a warehouse you’ve walked a hundred times before, and nothing is where you wrote it down, and you’re staring at an empty shelf or the wrong color or some entirely different piece of furniture. Maybe this is easy for everyone else. Maybe I’m just built wrong for Ikea. Either way, leaving the store I felt like I’d failed some basic test of adulting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/22/new-ground/ Wed, 22 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/20/death-proof/ Tarantino’s got his fixations. Pretty feet. Women with a specific kind of beauty. Bodies arranged just so. And conversations that keep circling back to fucking with no narrative reason, just the impulse leaking out. Death Proof is two hours of girls talking about sex and chasms and sugar-free Red Bull. Without his name on it, I would have walked out asking for my money back. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/20/death-proof/ Mon, 20 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/19/cheesecake-at-three/ I’m sitting in my new life now. Sun outside, kids trying to do cat sounds, Tom Cruise filming downtown. We got here Thursday morning, and the second I opened the door to my tiny dorm room, I wanted to leave immediately. But every hour here makes it clearer: Berlin is better. Just is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/19/cheesecake-at-three/ Sun, 19 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/16/before-i-left/ I’d been avoiding it for weeks, the simple fact of me leaving. I didn’t think about it directly, didn’t let myself picture it. Not until yesterday morning. I opened my eyes—not even eight o’clock yet—and suddenly felt it, this brush of the future in my chest. The boxes were still there, on the floor. My life packed into cardboard. That’s when it got real. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/16/before-i-left/ Thu, 16 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/14/leaving-buchloe/ It’s three in the morning Thursday and I’m leaving Buchloe. Most of the packing is done—CDs, DVDs, books, clothes. I’m not taking much since the student housing in Berlin comes furnished. I’ve been trying to make a list of everything I need to buy once I’m there. Brush, salt shaker, pens. A microwave, which I’ve never owned. That alone feels surreal. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/14/leaving-buchloe/ Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/10/summernight/ Summernight was a project I could never get right. I built it—this WordPress theme—and it became this unfinished thing I kept picking at. Not in the good way where you’re refining something. In the way where you’re just making it worse, adding complexity when it needed subtraction, and eventually you get so sick of looking at it that you have to walk away. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/10/summernight/ Fri, 10 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/8/le-gary-returns/ Le Gary vanished without explanation and came back with the most dubious story. Kidnapped, he claimed, by two Brazilian law students. Two weeks in captivity with Paula and Sara—their relationship drama, nacho recipes, endless gossip about some Brazilian soap opera. He said he nearly threw up. But being a gentleman, he kept quiet and eventually escaped one night hidden in a transvestite’s purse at the club. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/8/le-gary-returns/ Wed, 08 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/8/postcard-equation/ A postcard on my plate at breakfast—sand in the corners, bent from the journey. One of those coast shots with a few sentences on the back. Weather’s great. Beach is beautiful. Food’s fine. The usual postcard script. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/8/postcard-equation/ Wed, 08 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/6/against-the-wall/ She’s not even my type. That’s the lie I tell myself when I think about writing something about this girl who takes my breath, scrambles my brain, drives me half insane. I could write a novel about Ana. Thousands of poems. Millions of words. Every one of them bleeding out from somewhere deep. But it would be garbage. Pure self-deception. Because she doesn’t love me back. And even though I know that—maybe because I know that—I want every second I can get near her. I’m an idiot. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/6/against-the-wall/ Mon, 06 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/1/a-reading-trip/ Gary was supposed to be in Munich Monday. He wasn’t—somewhere in Rio by then, or maybe he wasn’t anywhere at all. Either way, Ana and I had the next couple days to ourselves. We spent them at Hugendubel bookstore, basically just sitting there for hours. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/1/a-reading-trip/ Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/1/my-new-zoo/ Horse and giraffe masks. My New Zoo spray-painting their name on a white sheet at some small festival in Biessenhofen. I’d never heard of them before, and for a moment I thought, what is this going to be. Then they started and I got it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/8/1/my-new-zoo/ Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/29/sunday-poison/ I needed out of the house, period, or someone was going to get hurt. So there I was Friday night at a stranger’s birthday party somewhere in the sticks, and it should’ve been perfect. Good music, attractive people, free alcohol all night. But somewhere between the drinking and laughing I felt it coming. The fear. Berlin. The move. The leaving. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/29/sunday-poison/ Sun, 29 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/27/garys-friend-ate-my-dashboard/ Freddi wanted to check out my dashboard setup. Good idea, I thought. Then I open it up showing him all these perfect little widgets I’ve collected, and Larry shows up—Gary’s friend, the one who’s always hanging around. Grabs the dashboard icon and bites it before I can even screenshot the thing. Just like that. My Flappie widget, the daily Buddhist wisdom, the little green-eating reminders. All of it, gone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/27/garys-friend-ate-my-dashboard/ Fri, 27 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/27/from-russia-with-love/ Found the first t.A.T.u. album while clearing my apartment. Just grabbed it on impulse and loaded it into iTunes, and the opening track opened a door back to somewhere I’d completely forgotten. My early twenties, my Discman, that whole era collapsing in on itself like a badly folded shirt. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/27/from-russia-with-love/ Fri, 27 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/25/headed-to-berlin/ I finally found a place in Berlin. A student dorm apartment in Charlottenburg, Suarezstraße—bathroom, kitchen, my own space, free wifi. These small things matter more than they should. I’m moving in mid-August. The plan is to spend a few months there and then actually hunt for something permanent in the eastern part of the city, one of those old buildings that’s been properly restored. No more crashing with Cedric, though I owe him. A lot. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/25/headed-to-berlin/ Wed, 25 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/25/the-uniform/ I’ve got a lot of clothes. Not enough to be a problem in theory, but enough that getting dressed every morning involves this moment of paralysis where nothing feels right. Too many black shirts. Too many jeans in shades I don’t really distinguish between. Five pairs of shoes in colors that are basically the same. The rest are optimistic purchases—pieces I thought I’d wear, bought with some intention I can no longer remember. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/25/the-uniform/ Wed, 25 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/23/after-hours/ There’s a particular feeling to finding a scene you didn’t know existed—basement venues, underground clubs, places that don’t advertise, where you learn about the next gig from someone who overheard someone else talking. I spent a night in New York chasing that feeling, moving between rooms that smelled like stale beer and cigarette smoke and the specific electricity of people who actually cared about the music playing. The artists were mostly names I’d never heard, recommendations passed person to person, music existing in those spaces rather than on playlists or streaming services. Each room led to the next, each set to another set, and suddenly you’re three hours deep in something you didn’t plan. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/23/after-hours/ Mon, 23 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/20/pseudo/ I deleted my name last night. Not officially—bureaucracy can wait—but I gave myself an actual pseudonym instead of pretending the birth name means something. Mar Ci. Mar is the patient one, the wise one, the part that actually finishes things. Ci is the saboteur, the self-destructor, the party animal who’s also lazy, the version that burns shit down just to feel something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/20/pseudo/ Fri, 20 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/20/why-i-really-go/ Blond talks about turning Berlin into a village, which is a weird way to describe a city of nearly four million. Twenty-two years in Pankow, she’s lived the slow version of Berlin, and now that she’s moved to Friedrichshain and actually exploring the Mitte, everything feels new. She’s got opinions about people who let music channels think for them—no sympathy there. You have to actually know what you like. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/20/why-i-really-go/ Fri, 20 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/18/good-days/ Six in the morning. The alarm killed whatever I was dreaming about. Up to walk Amy, the dog, because it had to be done. I hate early mornings—there’s something specifically evil about them. Threw on a tracksuit still half asleep and drove to the woods. Already hot. Already bright. Munich summer was starting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/18/good-days/ Wed, 18 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/17/nothing-left-to-watch/ I was always good at television. Knew when to sit, how to make it last, trusted the gray box to fill whatever needed filling for a few hours. German TV used to be decent at that job. There were shows that meant something, programs that felt intentional. Then MTV bought VIVA, fired everyone, turned the music shows into ringtone ads, and that’s when I understood it was actually over. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/17/nothing-left-to-watch/ Tue, 17 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/15/roasting/ Banana milkshakes at the lake with Irina yesterday, who’s barely an adult now—that still feels strange to say. We played Durak, some Russian card game where I’m perpetually useless, and I got demolished every single hand. By evening we were too wrung out to do anything but collapse in front of whatever was on the TV. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/15/roasting/ Sun, 15 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/14/hookah-lounge-landsberg/ We ended up at this hookah lounge in Landsberg where the music was chill and everything felt stuck in time. The shisha was apple and mint, and I watched someone named The do impossible things with smoke—rings, shapes, impressions. You know the type of person who’s bored enough to master something completely useless. Lisa and Fex were into the music, basically dancing while sitting down. Silvi spent the whole night leaning over whispering mean shit about people, pointing out who was gay or ugly, exhausting to be around until you remembered you were eighteen and that’s what eighteen-year-olds did. She had nice breasts though, which is probably not the point but it’s what I remember. Kathi wouldn’t shut up about being in the newspaper once, couldn’t remember the reason, and I never cared enough to ask. You just nod and move on. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/14/hookah-lounge-landsberg/ Sat, 14 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/12/its-in-the-name/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/12/its-in-the-name/ Thu, 12 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/12/making-it-up-as-i-go/ The last twenty-four hours are just a collection of objects and names and places I grabbed because they stuck with me. A bottle of Bacardi, something that tastes like fruit and pure regret, a pastry nobody should eat that late at night, the people I was around, the rooms we landed in. André’s apartment in Landsberg, this red light district we kept wandering through, TV shows on disc, a swimming pool, a pink vibrator left behind somewhere. Party pizza. The whole thing is still sitting in my head like I’m still actually there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/12/making-it-up-as-i-go/ Thu, 12 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/11/still-there/ In elementary school, my best friend and I did everything together. We’d sit around making plans for the future like we had any idea what we were doing, seven years old and convinced we were going somewhere. Then my family moved six hundred kilometers away and that was it. We wrote letters for a while, called sometimes, visited when we could manage it. But you grow up, school changes, you become a teenager and the wound of it just fades. And then years later I ran into her and it was like all that distance and all that time had collapsed. We fell right back into the same conversation, the same way of being together. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/11/still-there/ Wed, 11 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/8/looking-for-a-place-in-berlin/ I’m starting my apprenticeship in media design in Berlin soon, and I need to actually find a place to live there. Doesn’t matter what it is—one-bedroom apartment, student dorm room, a spot in a WG. Under 400 euros a month, somewhere in Mitte or the surrounding area, ideally Prenzlauer Berg or Friedrichshain. Just not Wedding. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/8/looking-for-a-place-in-berlin/ Sun, 08 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/8/monastery-show/ Words don’t always tell you the truth. Diet cola doesn’t make you thin, a book doesn’t clean your apartment, and a band festival isn’t necessarily either of those things—or any good. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/8/monastery-show/ Sun, 08 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/7/getting-old/ Getting older doesn’t come all at once. It hits in waves—a word, a gesture, a sudden feeling. It’s shitty. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/7/getting-old/ Sat, 07 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/6/confirmed/ Friday morning, a week after Berlin. Half asleep when the phone rings. I’d planned to sleep in before Silvi’s party. Slowly I hit the red button. Hello? My grandmother. Wants to know how I am, whether she should drop by for something, if I’ve cleaned my room. Good, no, thanks. Hung up. Back to dozing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/6/confirmed/ Fri, 06 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/4/the-approach/ I’m in my room, Damien Rice playing, and I realize I haven’t touched a real book in what feels like forever. Or I have, but only ones I had to read—for class, for credentials. Now there’s a stack of design books on my nightstand and I’m working through them like they’re instruction manuals for becoming the person I’m trying to be. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/4/the-approach/ Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/2/ines-is-back/ Ines posted something new after two years of nothing. You notice when someone you’ve been reading disappears long enough that you’ve stopped expecting them to come back. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/7/2/ines-is-back/ Mon, 02 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/6/30/berlin/ Friday morning, a TUI flight to Tegel. The flight attendant is cute in that budget-airline way—yellow uniform, perfect hair—but you can tell she absolutely doesn’t want to be miming the safety demonstration. The captain comes on cheerful in German and English, saying something about the weather. The attendant’s speech turns into white noise: “pfffft… pfffft…” The guy next to me keeps sneaking photos into the cockpit when he thinks no one’s looking, which is weird enough to actually make me nervous. I’ve got Dashboard Confessional in my ears. “Stolen.” Good start. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/6/30/berlin/ Sat, 30 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/6/30/i-love-plastiscines/ Plastiscines hit me like a secret nobody else knew about. Russian punk band, all noise and refusal—they played like nothing mattered except the sound. I’d come back to them years later wondering why some bands age better than others, and it was always the ones that never tried to make you like them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/6/30/i-love-plastiscines/ Sat, 30 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/6/27/beautiful-people/ Went to see Hostel 2 with a friend, then we headed to this party at Luna for some FOS/BOS Abi thing that turned out to be pretty dead because of Southside pulling everyone away. Didn’t really matter much though—when the two of us are out somewhere together we tend to make our own thing anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/6/27/beautiful-people/ Wed, 27 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/6/24/computer-hate/ Someone wants me to torture my Mac mini. Open every program simultaneously, photograph the death throes. I’d been curious anyway about what these things can actually handle, so why not. Turns out the old G4 took it without much complaint—actually surprised me. I thought it would just give up, but no. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/6/24/computer-hate/ Sun, 24 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/6/22/stranded/ The desert island films question forces honesty. You pick what you’d actually rewatch over and over, not what makes you sound smart. My list: Lost in Translation, Battle Royale, Amélie, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Spirited Away. Some I’ve watched a hundred times. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/6/22/stranded/ Fri, 22 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/6/22/uffie/ She was everywhere in the mid-2000s if you were paying attention to electronic music and that specific moment when electro-pop felt like the future. The voice, thin and synth-processed, that deadpan delivery over those bouncing synthesizers—it shouldn’t have worked but it did. “Sex and Candy” and everything around it felt like a world I wanted to be inside of. There was something about the aesthetic of early MySpace electro that made you feel like you were in on something before it got swallowed by everything else. Her music sounds thin now, maybe, but that was the point. The thinness was the appeal. She knew who she was and she made exactly the music she wanted to make, which is rare enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/6/22/uffie/ Fri, 22 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/6/20/i-make-websites/ There’s not much to it, really. I make websites. Design them, code them, make them beautiful. Everything else is noise. I could tell you about the Adobe products I know inside out—Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Fireworks—or how I move equally well on Mac and Windows, though the Mac is where I actually live. I could talk about HTML, PHP, CSS, all of it. But the truth is simpler: you give me a brief and I make something good from it. That’s the job. That’s always been the job. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/6/20/i-make-websites/ Wed, 20 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/6/20/that-afternoon/ Phone rings midday. Norri asking if I want to go swimming. Obviously. We pick a time and I’m rushing—shower first to deal with leg hair that’s somehow gotten out of control overnight, then sunscreen, the highest SPF I can find. Ever since a trip to Mallorca years back I get this heat rash that burns and itches like hell. Doesn’t matter. Trunks on and I’m out the door. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/6/20/that-afternoon/ Wed, 20 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/6/19/static/ The air outside was just as thick as the air on the train. I climbed down slowly and made a face as the sun hit me in the eyes. A couple of older people, unpleasant types, stared at me like I’d just revealed my true self straight from hell. Their stupid little ugly dachshund barked at me. I barked back, just as ugly. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/6/19/static/ Tue, 19 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/6/17/killing-the-machine/ Deleting a blog is easier than you’d think. Just click, confirm delete, and years of writing are gone. I’m not going to act like I’m devastated. What bothered me was watching it become something I didn’t recognize. Started as a place to write whatever came to mind. No reason, no plan, just needed to get it down somewhere. Then it shifted. Numbers mattered. Comments, traffic, rankings. Every post was feeding a machine instead of being something I actually wanted to say. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/6/17/killing-the-machine/ Sun, 17 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/6/13/ana-in-wonderland/ I found pro-ana forums one afternoon while researching eating disorders. Just curiosity—the kind of corner the internet opens up when you follow enough links. Pro-ana: communities built entirely around anorexia nervosa as a lifestyle, a goal, almost a calling. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/6/13/ana-in-wonderland/ Wed, 13 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/6/6/the-masturbated-elephant/ I’ve been running into porn references constantly lately. Not in a fun way—just everywhere, and it’s gotten weird enough that I keep thinking about it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/6/6/the-masturbated-elephant/ Wed, 06 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/25/show-me-your-bar/ My Mac menu bar is a personality test that fits in half an inch of screen space. Mine’s nearly empty—Bluetooth, volume, clock, Spotlight. Then I look at other people’s Macs and there’s this wall of icons, everything from abandoned utilities to backup software they installed years ago and forgot about. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/25/show-me-your-bar/ Fri, 25 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/24/it-shouldnt-work/ Jack Sparrow stumbles out of a cannon in the opening scene and I’m already gone, sold on whatever comes next. By the third film I’d tied myself to this trilogy in a way I didn’t expect after the first one. Not Star Wars for me, not Lord of the Rings—those are other people’s myths. This one was mine. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/24/it-shouldnt-work/ Thu, 24 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/23/multitasking/ That multitasking thing everyone talks about—it’s everywhere. You can’t avoid it. Every article, every productivity podcast, every self-help thing is selling you on the idea that you can do multiple things at once and do them well. Just keep juggling. Stay focused. Maximize. The fantasy is that your brain can split itself into pieces and handle work emails, a conversation, making dinner, whatever, all at the same time with equal attention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/23/multitasking/ Wed, 23 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/22/how-hard-it-is/ Found Songbird in a forum thread about iTunes alternatives and immediately thought: I could leave. Not that I was unhappy with Mac OS X, but there it was—an open-source media player designed to not extract money from me. And then the whole cascade: if I could switch that, why not the whole system? Ubuntu instead of this, goodbye to Apple, goodbye to the calculated ecosystem designed to make me feel good about paying. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/22/how-hard-it-is/ Tue, 22 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/21/easy-gold/ My blood elf runs through Deathwing’s Lair most weeks while I wait for StarCraft 2 to load. Just casual zombie-smacking, nothing that requires real gold. But somewhere along the way the in-game economy developed its own shadow market, complete with commercial dealers. GameGoods is basically the main operation: they sponsor communities, run ads everywhere, sell gold and character levels like a legitimate business. Two euros per hundred gold, instant in-game delivery, and they claim they’ve never had trouble with GMs. Maybe it all happens at night when the admins are actually asleep. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/21/easy-gold/ Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/20/melody-without-words/ Friday I started this Pirates of the Caribbean puzzle with Becca. South Park and Late Knights playing in the background—both stupid shows but they have their moments. We barely made a dent, just sat there for hours picking at pieces that wouldn’t fit. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/20/melody-without-words/ Sun, 20 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/20/family-party/ Just got back from my family thing, drunk and high. That’s the actual ideal state for a family celebration, I think. My aunt kept shoving drinks at me—Sekt, Radler, all this weird multivitamin juice—and meanwhile my younger cousin and I had snuck away with a hookah full of apple tobacco and a deck of Skip-Bo cards, with Blur on in the background. That’s really all a family gathering needs: some chaos, some games, a little buzz. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/20/family-party/ Sun, 20 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/17/everything-new/ I had Wednesday off and decided to make it my personal refresh day. Shaved, cleaned the apartment, then completely nuked my Mac—deleted everything without backing anything up and reinstalled OS X from scratch. First time I’d ever done that. It felt genuinely thrilling in a way I didn’t expect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/17/everything-new/ Thu, 17 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/16/mighty-mouse/ The click ring snapped the second I opened it. One of the side buttons immediately went dead. And I couldn’t get the damn thing back together. This is what happens when you try to fix an Apple Mighty Mouse. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/16/mighty-mouse/ Wed, 16 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/15/mood-shuffle/ Shuffle was supposed to feel liberating—that whole pitch about life being random. Your whole library, everything you’d accumulated over the years, just playing back in whatever order some algorithm decided. There’s something appealing about surrendering that control. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/15/mood-shuffle/ Tue, 15 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/9/ads/ Everyone got mad about a blog selling links, and the logic was simple: ads are bad, blogs with ads are bad, done. But I don’t think that holds up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/9/ads/ Wed, 09 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/8/film-trivia/ I won a stick somehow by correctly identifying a film from a screenshot in some internet game. Utterly pointless prize for recognizing something you’d forgotten you even knew. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/8/film-trivia/ Tue, 08 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/8/choose-a-vista/ I’m obsessed with these Apple commercials and genuinely don’t understand why they’re not shown everywhere. They’d be the only thing anyone talks about. There’s something about how Apple makes ads that just works—the wit, the craft, the specific kind of yearning they capture. The ones that get regional releases and never make it to your country are always the best ones. That’s how it works, apparently. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/8/choose-a-vista/ Tue, 08 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/6/it-spreads/ I didn’t really pay attention when it first happened, but reading the full story later made me understand how much of a thing it actually was. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/6/it-spreads/ Sun, 06 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/6/rio/ I released Rio as a WordPress theme because people kept asking about the design I was using. It’s nothing complicated—just minimal and clean, the kind that doesn’t get in the way. I let hot pink come in sharp against all that restraint. No sidebar nonsense. It’s built on XV but I stripped it down to only what actually matters. The Gravatars plugin makes the avatars render right. That’s the whole thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/6/rio/ Sun, 06 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/6/magazine-habit/ Nicole asked what magazines I keep stacked in the bathroom, and honestly, she caught me. I’m obsessed. Paper in warm water does something a screen never will. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/6/magazine-habit/ Sun, 06 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/5/when-the-sun-goes-down/ The weather’s still pretending it’s spring, but summer’s already waiting. Those nights when the sun finally drops and everyone moves outside—to the lake, to the grill, to someone’s backyard where the beer gets warm and the morning sneaks up before you notice. The whole season hanging in the humid air like a promise nobody asked for. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/5/when-the-sun-goes-down/ Sat, 05 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/2/who-am-i/ You spend months on a blog. Late nights on design, posts you actually care about, registering with every search engine that will listen. You refresh the stats and they tick upward. People are reading. Then you check the comments and there’s nothing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/2/who-am-i/ Wed, 02 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/1/quarry-summer/ The heat never lets up. You’re at the quarry with whoever showed up, iPod on repeat, taking photos on a camera that was already obsolete the day you bought the phone. Early 2000s and that passed for a summer. Proof you were somewhere doing something, which was enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/1/quarry-summer/ Tue, 01 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/1/no-souls/ May night. There were riots and chaos happening—property destruction, the usual insanity. We’d had plans, wanted to get out and be part of it, but the more we tried to organize anything the more everything fell apart. This is just who we are: spontaneous or nothing. So the big party caravan through Landsberg we’d been talking up turned into a night of drinking, shisha, and South Park at my place instead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/5/1/no-souls/ Tue, 01 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/30/cold-cold-water/ While some ambitious bloggers were driving traffic somewhere yesterday, I was flat out in the sun with CSS blasting—’Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex’ is still ridiculous. Then I went swimming and froze my ass off in water that should not have been that cold. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/30/cold-cold-water/ Mon, 30 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/30/someone-i-found-online/ I was getting real traffic by then. People from other countries reading what I wrote. It went to my head the way it does when you’re young and suddenly visible. I thought it meant something. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/30/someone-i-found-online/ Mon, 30 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/29/warm-night/ Spent last night at André’s for one of those retro campfire gatherings. Vodka that wasn’t great, shisha, the usual. Somehow we ended up at a couple of cemeteries after midnight—not planned, just the kind of weird thing that happens when you’re outside late and looking for something to do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/29/warm-night/ Sun, 29 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/29/red/ I’m at the lake with my shirt off, letting my belly tan, when I find out two different blogs have written about this place. Just mentioned it, praised it even. I’m not sure what I did to deserve it. Maybe they were bored. Maybe there’s nothing else worth writing about lately. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/29/red/ Sun, 29 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/28/ninety-nine/ I’m at Norma with Becca. She’s frozen in front of the cookies, completely unable to decide what to commit to, and I’m walking the aisles in a kind of trance—past Thai mushroom sauces, Polish car radios, whatever they’ve decided the international section needs today. Then I see it. Organic basil. Green, full, genuinely substantial. Ninety-nine cents. I’m adopting this plant. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/28/ninety-nine/ Sat, 28 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/28/the-ernie-and-bert-thing/ There’s always an Ernie and a Bert. The Ernie dances blind through life, doesn’t look left or right, doesn’t think about damage—just moves. The Bert cleans up afterward, worries constantly, manages things, thinks about tomorrow while the Ernie’s off doing whatever. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/28/the-ernie-and-bert-thing/ Sat, 28 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/27/china-hates-me/ Somehow I’ve pissed off China, or at least the part that controls what gets through the Great Firewall. Which shouldn’t have happened—I’m not exactly a dissident. I like their food, I help tourists find their way, I even wrote a school paper about internet control in Beijing. But here we are, probably blocked. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/27/china-hates-me/ Fri, 27 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/24/exposure/ I’m scrolling through tracks on my iPod when a Britney Spears song comes up and I skip it. Not because the guy next to me on the train would judge me—though he might—but because I’m terrified it’s being scrobbled somewhere, feeding into some invisible profile of me that exists on Last.fm, a permanent record of every musical failure I’ve ever pretended to like. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/24/exposure/ Tue, 24 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/22/sash/ Sash was my first WordPress theme, named after someone I cared about. Two columns, grunge aesthetic, no special features—just the bare structure of what a blog needs. If you wanted to build something more, you did it yourself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/22/sash/ Sun, 22 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/22/shifting-ground/ Earth Day happens in a hundred and fifty countries. Mostly it’s people remembering they’re supposed to care, changing their pictures, talking about it for a day. We’re built for gestures like that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/22/shifting-ground/ Sun, 22 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/21/pattern/ Friday night and the world’s wide open. I had three options, and I was already halfway through justifying my first choice—the Melo with André and Lisa. Seen the Microsoft-Apple thing anyway. Going to parties with Ana never ended well, just never. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/21/pattern/ Sat, 21 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/19/painty-panties/ Drunk girls taking their clothes off for internet photos was already a thing, but somewhere around the mid-2000s someone thought it needed spray-paint graffiti. BubbleGirls. Strip a girl, paint her, post the pictures. Like it was a new artistic medium instead of just what it was. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/19/painty-panties/ Thu, 19 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/19/the-spinning/ There’s this phase where nothing moves. The days are all the same—sun up, sun down, nothing changed. Then something breaks and suddenly everything accelerates. You’re drowning in moments, good ones and terrible ones, and you realize you’ve been standing still the whole time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/19/the-spinning/ Thu, 19 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/18/the-pact/ Ana quit school, and it stirred things up here. The question that wouldn’t die was how much of your own life you actually get to decide when everyone has expectations about what you should do. I was sick with a cold when we drove to Memmingen—still am, really, cough hanging on—but we went to the career information center anyway so she could see what her options were. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/18/the-pact/ Wed, 18 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/16/she-just-left/ Spring in Bavaria, school’s back in session, and my best friend dropped out. Not a dramatic scene—just called the gymnasium that morning and said she was done. Twelve years in, straight-A student, months away from her Abitur, and she simply walked away. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/16/she-just-left/ Mon, 16 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/15/ramen-and-regrets/ Internet’s back. Better internet this time—went from that dead DSL 2000 to a proper 6000er line with unlimited calls. Took longer than they said it would, something about strikes, but I’m not complaining. My plan was to just plant myself in front of the screen once it was hooked up. Didn’t quite work out that way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/15/ramen-and-regrets/ Sun, 15 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/14/sash/ There was a moment in the early 2010s when alternative culture felt like it was taking over the internet. Not in a commercialized way—genuinely alternative. SuicideGirls was huge then, this platform for people who didn’t fit the mainstream look. Sash was my favorite. She had this unguarded blog where she’d post whatever crossed her mind, make jokes, share photos. Beautiful photos, yeah, but there was something about the whole thing that felt honest in a way most internet stuff wasn’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/14/sash/ Sat, 14 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/13/nothings-moving/ Apple pushed Leopard back to October instead of spring because the iPhone needed the developers. That’s the story, anyway. Everyone online is upset—they were counting on it to finally make Windows Vista look ridiculous. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/13/nothings-moving/ Fri, 13 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/10/looking-for-a-song/ Sia’s “Breathe Me” is one of those songs that hits you in a specific, dark place. I don’t put it on casually. Regina Spektor’s “Samson” does something different—it just breaks me open, there’s something about how her voice lands on certain notes that I can’t defend against. The Killers’ “Read My Mind” is the opposite extreme, pure joy. Ai Otsuka’s “Smily” can snap me out of basically any funk. Arctic Monkeys’ “The View from the Afternoon” won’t let you stay still—your body just moves. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/10/looking-for-a-song/ Tue, 10 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/8/going-soft/ I was never one of those fitness-obsessed types, the kind who burns a thousand calories before allowing themselves to eat a sad bowl of diet salad. In school PE I was a complete failure on the rare occasions I actually showed up. Never played competitive football like everyone else did. The “sports are murder” philosophy was basically my identity. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/8/going-soft/ Sun, 08 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/4/rice-and-potatoes/ Being vegetarian is harder than it sounds, especially when you work in a hospital kitchen. There’s always something—full meals, light meals, vegetarian options—and normally I can count on enough leftovers. But then the menu reads “Kaiserschmarn” for the vegetarian choice, which is this sweet Bavarian thing that makes everyone lose their minds. Suddenly the whole hospital wants the vegetarian meal, and what’s left for me? Rice. Potatoes. A roll from breakfast. Hurray. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/4/rice-and-potatoes/ Wed, 04 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/1/phantom-returns/ Deutsche Telekom’s managed to avoid restoring my phone line for two months while billing me for DSL I can’t use. The absurdity is complete. My internet is a hotel hotspot across the street at twelve cents a minute. You’d think this couldn’t be real, but here it is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/4/1/phantom-returns/ Sun, 01 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/1/21/8th-ocean/ I don’t usually watch MTV shows. Not the one where the guy customizes cars, not the renovation guys, not whatever’s trendy this week. Someone cheating with their ex, someone else’s mother, an influencer selling foot detox—it all blurs together. The Real World was somehow more interesting. Everything now just feels like they’re grasping. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/1/21/8th-ocean/ Sun, 21 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/1/17/blood-elf/ While everyone else was apparently smashing store windows and losing their minds over World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, I somehow missed the entire thing. Didn’t even know it was out until I was holding it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/1/17/blood-elf/ Wed, 17 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/1/14/friendship-sex/ I spent the weekend with Ana doing basically nothing. We went shopping, she got her hair done while I sat in the salon reading, we walked around, ate chocolate, watched SuperStar. Then André had a birthday party at the Landsberger Juze yesterday and somehow I’m sick now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/1/14/friendship-sex/ Sun, 14 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/1/9/prime-time/ Ana and I were sprawled on her couch when the commercial came on. Durex. Some new lubricant with a warming effect, the narrator going on about how their love would get hotter. I was eating cold fish nuggets and not really paying attention when Ana cracked an eye open and just laughed. I got it immediately—they were selling lube on regular television like it was dish soap. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/1/9/prime-time/ Tue, 09 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/1/8/apples-gravity/ Apple barely had to advertise. Every other tech company was dumping money into campaigns, and Apple just pinned a countdown on their homepage. Macworld was coming, and anyone paying attention was already weeks deep in speculation. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/1/8/apples-gravity/ Mon, 08 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/1/7/nothing-lost/ Five years to the day, VIVA PLUS launched and I hated it immediately. I was a VIVA Zwei kid—that was the real channel, stuff that actually mattered. Then they replaced everything with this thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/1/7/nothing-lost/ Sun, 07 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/1/5/twenty-three/ I turned 23 today. I don’t look or feel particularly 23, whatever that’s supposed to mean. The age seems arbitrary—too old to be young, too young to have anything figured out. One of those in-between numbers that doesn’t register as anything special until someone points out you’ve been alive for twenty-three years and then suddenly it lands. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/1/5/twenty-three/ Fri, 05 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/1/5/orange-county-over/ FOX cancelled The O.C. Ratings dropped and that’s all there was to it. Josh Schwartz made some graceful comment about how for a certain audience at a certain time it meant something, and he’s right. For a while there, Newport Beach felt like the only real place on earth. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/1/5/orange-county-over/ Fri, 05 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/1/4/basically-squidward/ I was driving around with pizzas yesterday when it hit me—I’m basically Squidward. That permanently miserable squid from SpongeBob. Same grumpy disposition, same refusal to eat anything at my actual job, same aching desire to be anywhere but where I am. The comparison felt uncomfortably accurate. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2007/1/4/basically-squidward/ Thu, 04 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/31/the-year-that-broke/ It’s New Year’s Eve and I’m supposed to do what people do—look back, find the meaning, polish it into something readable. Skip it. 2006 was shit. Setbacks, depression, the kind of year where you’re just surviving until it ends. I’m not going to dress it up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/31/the-year-that-broke/ Sun, 31 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/30/what-he-thought/ I couldn’t sleep. Ana had been over, and I was already drained after the Munich airport. Then I spent the afternoon helping André and his father build a garage, the evening delivering pizzas, and by the time I got into bed, sleep wasn’t happening. The TV was all I had. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/30/what-he-thought/ Sat, 30 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/25/living-in-america/ I’d meant to write something poetic about Munich but it never came together. Just wandering through Hugendubel for hours, one of those bookstores that swallows your afternoon, and then I found myself standing in a perfume shop breathing in everything they had. Not what I’d planned, but it didn’t matter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/25/living-in-america/ Mon, 25 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/24/merry-christmas/ The good Christmases are the ones where you get to annoy your nieces and nephews without guilt, steal the last cookies off the plate, maybe reconcile with someone you fell out of touch with. It’s the one time everyone’s supposed to pretend forgiveness is real, so you might as well use it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/24/merry-christmas/ Sun, 24 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/22/come-for-peace/ December 22 is World Orgasm Day. I’m not making that up—there’s an actual initiative behind it based on the theory that if everyone on the planet came at the same time, we’d all be so relaxed we’d stop threatening each other with nuclear weapons. Or at least think about it less for a day. It’s utopian and stupid in equal measure, which is exactly why I respect it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/22/come-for-peace/ Fri, 22 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/20/still-listening/ The year’s almost gone. I’ve been through whatever I’ve been through—new people, lost people, plans that worked and plans that didn’t. Everyone I know has some version of the same story. But the one thing that didn’t change, the one thread through all of it, was music. I couldn’t imagine this year without it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/20/still-listening/ Wed, 20 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/18/mr-it/ Microsoft was having a rough time around 2007. Jim Allchin, who ran Vista development, admitted in an interview that he’d buy a Mac if he didn’t work at the company. The company was stealing UI elements from competitors and pasting them onto their own websites. Bill Gates kept hearing from bloggers about how many of them used Macs. Everything pointed to trouble ahead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/18/mr-it/ Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/18/person-of-the-year/ Yeah, the rumor’s true: I got named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2006. Not exactly a shock. I ran against some decent names—Ahmadinejad, Al Gore, Condoleezza Rice—but the people want what the people want. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/18/person-of-the-year/ Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/17/latin-graffiti/ It’s been too hot all week, and then Sunday comes with rain. Makes you want to vote on new week names instead of world wonders, just to break things up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/17/latin-graffiti/ Sun, 17 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/14/for-the-horde/ The Burning Crusade trailer came out and it was genuinely great. Not the hype kind, actually great. The servers had been in freefall for months, the battlefields were completely broken since that last patch, everything felt like it was collapsing. The trailer was the reminder that there was still something under all that mess worth the time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/14/for-the-horde/ Thu, 14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/14/nothing-to-see/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/14/nothing-to-see/ Thu, 14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/12/new-email/ I stayed up until one-thirty playing games with Ana. The next morning I went through my inbox and realized it was beyond saving—three years of pure spam. Viagra, donations, concerned inquiries about skin conditions I don’t have. The filters gave up long ago. The spam’s too smart now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/12/new-email/ Tue, 12 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/11/if-not-for/ Friday night was supposed to be just me and Ana. Saturday, the Christmas shopping trip to Munich. Then Tobi’s class reunion party at the beer tent. Rebecca was making cookies Sunday morning to cure the hangover, and some blockbuster would close it out. The whole thing was supposed to be great. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/11/if-not-for/ Mon, 11 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/11/on-my-desk/ Took a photo of my desk the other day—one of those chain things where everyone documents their workspace. Mine’s unusually tidy in the shot, which is funny because that’s not how it normally is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/11/on-my-desk/ Mon, 11 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/8/wii-day/ The Wii hit shelves across Europe this morning. Everyone’s trying to find stock and I’m stuck broke watching from the sidelines, which is annoying because my friends are all diving in. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/8/wii-day/ Fri, 08 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/7/themes/ WordPress has always been the tool I trust for putting things on the internet. It’s yours in a way that other platforms never are. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/7/themes/ Thu, 07 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/5/still-green/ I tested the new ICQ 6 preview on a Windows machine and have to admit it actually looks good. Not meaningful good, just prettier. Flashier. Greener, somehow, than anything should reasonably be, and the design philosophy seems to be targeting people who won’t notice that they have maybe three people in their contact list. But yeah—it’s clearly an upgrade from the last version, which was starting to feel ancient. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/5/still-green/ Tue, 05 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/5/the-mood/ I got buried in homework this morning and needed to surface. Becca’s coming over Wednesday to bake cookies—actual baking, the kind that fills a kitchen with real warmth—and she stopped by yesterday to check what I actually had on hand. Not much. That made me think we might as well try to actually feel like it’s Christmas while we’re at it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/5/the-mood/ Tue, 05 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/4/samson/ I had a dream where “Samson” by Regina Spektor was playing in the background, and I can’t remember anything else about it except that the song was there. Next day I found this cover on YouTube, and between the dream and that version, the song just got under my skin. It moved me more than I expected. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/4/samson/ Mon, 04 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/1/december-again/ December 1st. World AIDS Day. I remember MTV making these awareness campaigns about it, back when MTV actually cared about something beyond ratings. That’s pretty much the only decent thing the channel ever did. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/12/1/december-again/ Fri, 01 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/30/not-thinking-in-translation/ The English was a wall. Every thought had to cross it before I could write it down—get filtered, get made acceptable to an imaginary audience that didn’t actually exist. I opened the editor less and less. Eventually I stopped opening it at all. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/30/not-thinking-in-translation/ Thu, 30 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/28/cold-months/ It’s dark, the sun’s packed up and it’s getting colder. I don’t mind it though. I’m home, watching According to Jim, eating pizza, working through math homework. This is what civilization is for. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/28/cold-months/ Tue, 28 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/28/fog-over-the-city/ Winter came and the sun left. Now I’m home with pizza and TV and math homework, which is fine because that’s exactly what winter is for—sitting somewhere warm while the rest of the world stays dark. Civilization has its uses. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/28/fog-over-the-city/ Tue, 28 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/26/small-list/ Quiet Sunday. Finished the Napoleon biography, wandered through Undercity with Sune—my sweet undead princess—chatted on ICQ, watched School of Rock. Unremarkable. Just a smooth afternoon. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/26/small-list/ Sun, 26 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/26/napoleon-is-undead/ Sunday was one of those days that passes without anything happening. I finished reading about Napoleon at some point in the afternoon, then spent time in Undercity—a game, or maybe just a place to be for a while. Watched School of Rock. Had brief chats on ICQ with people I barely knew. The kind of Sunday where you look back and can’t quite remember it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/26/napoleon-is-undead/ Sun, 26 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/25/marie-antoinette/ Watched Marie Antoinette at Ana’s place, hoping it would be close to Lost in Translation since Coppola made that one perfect. You think maybe lightning strikes twice. Doesn’t. The first half is all Antoinette discovering sex in beautiful clothes, and it loops back on itself endlessly. Ana was asleep after an hour. I sat through to the end anyway, kept waiting for the actual film to start. It never came. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/25/marie-antoinette/ Sat, 25 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/23/that-car/ I had no real investment in James Bond. The franchise seemed like something I’d get around to or skip entirely—I hadn’t kept up with the movies, didn’t know the mythology, wasn’t losing sleep over either. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/23/that-car/ Thu, 23 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/23/control/ Somewhere in the first hour of Casino Royale, I stopped waiting for it to be bad. I went in skeptical—Bond movies weren’t my thing, and I’d never heard of Daniel Craig—but the film just took hold. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/23/control/ Thu, 23 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/22/treasure-town/ Black is small, dark, the kind of kid who moves through spaces like he owns them because in some way he actually does. White is taller, slower, genuinely dumb in a way that somehow works. They share a city, Treasure Town, which is the only place either of them has ever belonged to. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/22/treasure-town/ Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/22/the-room/ Breakfast that day was a multivitamin juice and cheese and onion chips left in a bag for too long. Mostly hair. Ate them anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/22/the-room/ Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/22/what-burns/ Black and White own Treasure Town the way you own something you’ve survived in. Black is all angles and darkness, punk energy barely contained. White is drifting and half-asleep, a kind of innocence that makes no sense. Taiyo Matsumoto drew them in the manga with this incredible control—every panel feels both intimate and impossibly wide. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/22/what-burns/ Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/22/everywhere-at-once/ Had juice and chips for breakfast - bag was full of hair, genuinely more hair than snack. Ate them anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/22/everywhere-at-once/ Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/21/open-and-easier/ I plowed through a whole German exercise book, which felt like progress. Then came French history—the Revolution, exams closing in. Ana became my study partner, the kind of person who actually loves this stuff, and she started helping me with maths and Spanish without being asked. With Becca things had shifted. We both knew what we’d been building wasn’t going to work, but instead of letting it get messy we just opened up a little, decided to be real with each other instead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/21/open-and-easier/ Tue, 21 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/21/keep-on-learning-baby/ Irina dragged me all over town—cold, dark, pointless until we’re eating spaghetti with sausages on her plasma TV watching “According to Jim.” You walk, you suffer, you get fed. Basic transaction. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/21/keep-on-learning-baby/ Tue, 21 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/19/making-a-cut/ I restarted the blog. Not that I bought a Wii or anything actually dramatic, but I needed to make a cut. My website is the mirror of my life, and mine was getting out of sync. Getting older. Feeling different. The way I used to live wasn’t going to work anymore if I wanted to make something of myself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/19/making-a-cut/ Sun, 19 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/19/restart/ I dug up a design I’d coded and abandoned about a year ago. Brought it back last week. Still works. Made it WordPress compatible. Here it is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/19/restart/ Sun, 19 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/12/rewired/ The weekend’s over and I made it through. Went to Flo’s birthday party for like twenty minutes yesterday and realized it wasn’t going to happen, so I bailed and spent the night driving around the city with Eniz and Ali instead. We ended up at the old playground on Zugspitzstraße, where we basically lived as kids, and just sat there talking about how everything used to feel simpler. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/12/rewired/ Sun, 12 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/11/that-night/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/11/that-night/ Sat, 11 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/11/half-a-movie/ Smart enough this time to take the bus instead of biking out to Turkheim in the dark. Irina picked me up anyway. We watched a German sitcom and then Wild Wild West with Will Smith, which is as dumb as you’d expect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/11/half-a-movie/ Sat, 11 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/11/party-at-juze-irsingen/ Mandy and Bibi threw something together at the Juze, and it was one of those nights that doesn’t need much planning to work—just the right people in a room that doesn’t care what you spill on it. I remember the usual mix of whoever showed up, someone’s questionable DJ attempt, the way those youth centers always have that particular smell of stale beer and teenage ambition. There’s something about those venues that makes everything feel bigger than it should, even if it’s just a handful of people making noise on a Friday. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/11/party-at-juze-irsingen/ Sat, 11 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/11/wild-wild-west/ Took the bus to Turkheim instead of biking through the dark like an idiot. Lost three-fifty euros, but Irina picked me up at the other end so it felt fair. We watched some rerun at her place—or maybe it was the series starting over, hard to tell—and when Daja got there we switched to Wild Wild West. Will Smith in a steampunk Western, which is exactly as strange as it sounds. Not a masterpiece, but that’s not the point when you’re hanging out with people. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/11/wild-wild-west/ Sat, 11 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/9/all-of-it/ I keep thinking about how eighteen is supposed to feel like something. Like you wake up that morning and you’re different. You probably aren’t. It’s just another day, except now you can sign things. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/9/all-of-it/ Thu, 09 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/9/eighteen/ Happy birthday to someone who’s just turned eighteen. I want you to know that whatever you’re reaching for, you’re going to get there, but you have to go easy on yourself in the meantime. You’ve already done more than you think you have. Be proud of that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/9/eighteen/ Thu, 09 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/9/the-ceiling/ This week was suffocating. Just constant weight—fighting with Ana, the Abitur still hanging over me, stuck in this routine of sleeping late, sitting online all day, then being too exhausted from doing nothing to do anything. It wasn’t working. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/9/the-ceiling/ Thu, 09 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/9/one-good-night/ This week fell apart. I was stuck at home, useless, glued to ICQ, and by evening too drained from doing nothing to care about anything. Ana and I were fighting constantly—the easy summer thing had evaporated—and the whole Abi situation was still dragging. This couldn’t keep going. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/9/one-good-night/ Thu, 09 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/6/weightless/ I’ve been cycling through these wild mood swings lately. One moment I’m completely in love with the world and everything in it, ready to spread good vibes around like I’m on some gospel mission, and the next I feel completely betrayed by everyone around me and all I want is to disappear to Canada and never look back. In between I’m clicking through iTunes like a man possessed, playing the same Placebo songs until they’re completely worn out, and deliberately skipping anything by Muse just out of spite. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/6/weightless/ Mon, 06 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/5/what-she-wont-remember/ We were at Julian’s party, and it was fine until the predictable thing happened. Girl drank too much, ended up in a corner basically unconscious, and one of those guys with no other moves decided it was his opening. Hands on her, her just sitting there not really registering anything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/5/what-she-wont-remember/ Sun, 05 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/4/nothing-without-her/ I caught Borat with André at the cinema. When they were naked on the bed wrestling, the entire theater lost it. Just these two older guys sat there completely silent. I thought they’d get up and leave, but they never did. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/4/nothing-without-her/ Sat, 04 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/4/the-name-they-skipped/ I took André to see Borat after we’d been shopping in Kaufbeuren. We got into this almost empty theater—the other room had some dwarf adventure comedy with Otto signing autographs, and that’s where everyone actually was. Borat was crude and funny. The hotel bed wrestling scene got the whole theater laughing. Except for this older couple who either had the wrong movie or were expecting actual Kazakh documentary—they didn’t laugh once. I was shocked no one just walked out. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/4/the-name-they-skipped/ Sat, 04 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/4/burning-crusade/ I spent a week waiting for my Burning Crusade beta key. Refreshing my email, checking the forums, that whole anticipatory loop you get into before something you want actually shows up. When it finally arrived, I should have been thrilled. Instead I went straight to eBay and listed it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/4/burning-crusade/ Sat, 04 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/4/cant-keep-it/ I waited a week for that Burning Crusade beta key like I was twelve again. The kind of stupid anticipation where you check your email every hour, refresh forums, convince yourself you’ve earned this somehow. Then it showed up in my inbox and I couldn’t use it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/4/cant-keep-it/ Sat, 04 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/2/first-snow/ The snow came, which means I’m immediately thinking about the Muppet Christmas Carol—the one where Kermit is Scrooge. It’s my dumbest comfort object. Last year when it first snowed we’d just gotten back from Prague, which feels impossible now. A whole year. Now the snow is here again and December is actually happening. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/2/first-snow/ Thu, 02 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/2/season-four/ Marissa Cooper died at the end of season three, or at least that’s what they told us. It was one of those TV deaths that’s designed to feel both pointless and devastating at the same time—the kind where you’re not entirely sure what the show just did to itself. I watched it happen and felt genuinely gutted, which is embarrassing to admit about a teen drama but also true. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/2/season-four/ Thu, 02 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/1/a-direction/ I was feeling lost. The whole-life kind of lost where nothing makes sense and you can’t see any way forward. I’d quit this work-study thing at a nursing home because the residents stopped being easy to scare, I guess. Whatever the reason, I just couldn’t keep doing it. So I was sitting around thinking about what comes next, what I was supposed to be doing with myself. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/11/1/a-direction/ Wed, 01 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/31/always-blue/ Blue doesn’t wear on you the way other colors do. You can look at it for hours and it stays calm. Everything else—dark, busy, minimal, whatever—gets loud or boring or heavy after a while. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/31/always-blue/ Tue, 31 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/31/cum-on-a-clit-is-punk-as-fuck/ I couldn’t sleep that night. Sitcoms were running in the background on some network channel, the kind of garbage you watch when your brain won’t shut off and you’re just scrolling through everything. But I kept getting pulled back to this photographer—Clayton James Cubitt. And I’m adding him to the list of photographers I actually care about. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/31/cum-on-a-clit-is-punk-as-fuck/ Tue, 31 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/29/the-long-odyssey-to-the-club/ Woke up at 7:30 with a club night to organize in two and a half hours. Naturally everything landed on me. Phone and messenger open, calling André about ten times before he picked up. Irina and Ana texting for information already. Threw a pizza in the oven. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/29/the-long-odyssey-to-the-club/ Sun, 29 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/28/mtv-got-heavy/ I used to check MTV.com for the American charts—TRL, MTV2, whatever was actually climbing that week. The site was cluttered even back then, but it worked. You could find what you came for. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/28/mtv-got-heavy/ Sat, 28 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/27/the-last-liver-sausage/ Three weeks in a DEKRA training program hunting for internship placements. Started with maybe fifteen people. Eight actually showed up. By the end, it was four of us. Andi, who lived in the Antenne Bayern chat getting fake-married to bots, Sven driving his death trap up the B12 with no sense for overtaking, Alex who looked like he was printed straight from a farming catalog, and me. A strange little crew. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/27/the-last-liver-sausage/ Fri, 27 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/25/i-got-in/ Got the email. Burning Crusade beta access for World of Warcraft, and after all the delays it actually feels like this expansion might exist. Blizzard handing out keys to test Outland, and somehow I got one. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/25/i-got-in/ Wed, 25 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/24/where-the-wisdom-comes-from/ I’m the guy my friends come to for shit. André needs help with women. Ana’s got butterflies. Kathi’s prepping for whatever disaster she’s about to date. I’ve got a line for everything, some half-smart observation that lands just right when they need it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/24/where-the-wisdom-comes-from/ Tue, 24 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/23/anti-ana-art/ Allison Harvard hit MySpace young, 18, and built something fast—photographs, artwork, a following. Sharp images. She had a look. Thin. Skeletal. And that’s all anyone could see. Every piece of work got swallowed by the diagnosis everyone wanted to make. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/23/anti-ana-art/ Mon, 23 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/23/dead-stretch/ Got a new lip ring a couple weeks ago. Not like it fixes anything, but there’s something about doing it anyway that matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/23/dead-stretch/ Mon, 23 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/18/when-giga-sued-the-internet/ German television in the early 2000s still thought it owned the future. GIGA, this flashy tech channel, had been pushing esports for years—competitive gaming, the thing that was already pulling millions in Korea and the US. They had the broadcast infrastructure, the corporate sponsorship, the credibility. They were supposed to lead Germany into digital sports. Then the internet showed up with a better idea. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/18/when-giga-sued-the-internet/ Wed, 18 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/17/burning/ Ali gets hard for exactly two things: hot girls and World of Warcraft. When the Burning Crusade beta dropped, he couldn’t shut up about it. New races, new zones, the whole expansion spinning up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/17/burning/ Tue, 17 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/15/the-new-rock-dwarfs/ German radio started playing German music at some point without anyone making it dramatic. Years back musicians wanted a quota like France had, radio said no, that good music would get on naturally. Apparently they were right. Juli, Silbermond, Aggro Berlin basically opened that door and everything else followed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/15/the-new-rock-dwarfs/ Sun, 15 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/14/the-curse-broke/ I’d made peace with being hated by my exes. Ana and I had a name for it—the ex-girlfriend curse. You date someone, it ends badly or messily or just wrong, and suddenly you’re enemies. Or at least strangers who used to matter. Every relationship I’d been in followed this path. The reasons were always legitimate. I understood all of them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/14/the-curse-broke/ Sat, 14 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/14/still-here/ Nothing beats a Friday night at home with people you actually like, getting drunk on Beck’s Green Lemon, blasting Billy Talent and The Killers so loud someone eventually yells at you to turn it down. Running Super Smash Bros Melee tournaments, spilling beer on controllers, that feeling where nothing else in the world matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/14/still-here/ Sat, 14 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/9/your-trusted-browser/ There’s a rule in web design: let people choose their browser. Opera, Firefox, Safari—good options, all of them. Then there’s Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s monument to making designers question their career choices. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/9/your-trusted-browser/ Mon, 09 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/8/bad-music-good-sangria/ Friday night the sky was perfect—black clouds against deep blue, a fat round moon hanging over the youth center in Irsingen where Bianca and Mandy were having their birthday. André, Kevin and I had been playing Super Smash Bros. Melee first (I won), then we drove out to Bad Worishofen to pick up Lisalein. The whole drive was Rammstein, “Moskau” especially—the kind of song that gets stuck in your head and you know you’ll hate it later but right now it’s perfect. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/8/bad-music-good-sangria/ Sun, 08 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/8/knowing-what-you-want/ There’s a difference between people who drift through relationships taking whatever comes along, and people like Irina who actually know what they’re looking for. Most of us fall somewhere in between—we have some idea, half-formed, that gets clarified only when we meet someone and realize they’re either it or they’re not. I’ve always admired people who are clear about it, though I’m suspicious of anyone who claims they know exactly. Clarity about what you need in someone else is different from the fantasy of the perfect person. The real thing is rarer—someone who’s thought about what matters and can actually recognize it when it shows up, even when it shows up messier or stranger than expected. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/8/knowing-what-you-want/ Sun, 08 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/8/make-love-not-warcraft/ I watched this one multiple times. It’s the World of Warcraft episode where grinding just slowly consumes the characters—the animation darkens, the humor drains, leaving something closer to apocalyptic than comedy. The transition is so gradual it doesn’t feel like a transition until you realize the episode has already tipped into bleakness. And once you see that, you can’t unsee it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/10/8/make-love-not-warcraft/ Sun, 08 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/27/games-and-mike/ Smash Bros. Melee, Simpsons Road Rage, Sonic Adventure 2 Battle—Friday was gaming and beer. I was good at Melee that night, better than usual against Ali. The Simpsons game annoyed me though. Eniz was supposed to show and didn’t, which tracks. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/27/games-and-mike/ Wed, 27 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/21/did-i-win/ I don’t know how to describe this feeling besides luck. Somehow I won two tickets to see Mike Park at the Hirsch on Saturday, and I wasn’t even trying. I’d resigned myself to maybe catching him another time, maybe not. But then there they were. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/21/did-i-win/ Thu, 21 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/20/nothing-doing/ Nothing much happening at the moment. Waiting for South Park. Got a haircut today—finally took the mop off. That was the highlight, honestly. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/20/nothing-doing/ Wed, 20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/17/mtv-was-free/ MTV and VIVA came free through European satellite one week—I never figured out if it was a mistake or someone’s weird experiment. You grabbed whatever you could record before it all shut down again. The part that stuck with me was how the same content was playing everywhere. Same video rotation, same format, same slow drift toward reality shows. Getting it for free somehow made that repetition more obvious, like you could suddenly see how little was actually different between any of it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/17/mtv-was-free/ Sun, 17 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/17/how-universal-saved-music/ I watched Universal’s lawyers arrive in the early 2000s with their cease-and-desist letters, telling a story that almost made sense. Kids were stealing music online. Burning CDs for friends. Uploading videos with songs in the background. The artists were suffering. The industry was collapsing. They had to act. And for a moment, you could see it from their perspective—Napster had shaken something loose, and the record labels were genuinely panicking. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/17/how-universal-saved-music/ Sun, 17 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/16/nearly/ December 8th. The Wii hits Europe and I can see it: all-nighters with Smash Bros, Zelda for disappearing, Mario in that perfect simple form. The kind of nights where we’re raw and unfiltered about everything. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/16/nearly/ Sat, 16 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/15/autumn-mix/ When autumn starts creeping in and the air gets that bite to it, I always have the same impulse: disappear into bed, plug in headphones, and commit to assembling a season soundtrack. The kind of playlist you build in your head for weeks but never quite finish, always adjusting, always wondering if you’re getting the mood right before winter actually shows up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/15/autumn-mix/ Fri, 15 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/13/the-evil-is-back/ Couldn’t stand that white design for long. Looked clean maybe, but it felt wrong—like I was being someone I wasn’t supposed to be. So I flipped back to black. Back into the mud. Feels right again. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/13/the-evil-is-back/ Wed, 13 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/11/bettys-eighteenth/ Betty turned eighteen that night, and we lit fireworks in the dark with everyone gathered around. I remember the way the light would flash across faces for a split second before the sky went black again—that moment just before the sound reached you. Everyone was loud and happy in that uncomplicated way you only get at a certain age, when getting older still feels like something happening to someone else. We stayed out until the bottle was empty and the last sparks faded into the garden. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/11/bettys-eighteenth/ Mon, 11 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/11/call-911/ It was my first day of school in 2001, but I don’t remember going to school. I remember sitting in front of a TV with everyone else, watching the same footage over and over. The towers burning. Planes hitting. People jumping. Nobody changed the channel because nobody knew what else to do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/11/call-911/ Mon, 11 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/10/the-coconut-bourbon/ Saturday morning comes early when Friday had been too good. The sky’s that bright blue you get at dawn, O.C. reruns on German TV, and in the back of my mind I already know the weekend’s finished. I got to bed early so I’m up now. Saturday’s boring me already, which is fine because Friday was good enough to talk about instead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/10/the-coconut-bourbon/ Sun, 10 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/7/after-marissa/ The season four promo photos came out and Mischa Barton wasn’t in the cast list. I’d held onto this dumb hope that maybe the Marissa death was some elaborate fake-out, that she’d somehow resurface. But the photos made it official: she was gone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/7/after-marissa/ Thu, 07 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/7/natascha/ There was a moment in 2006 when Natascha Kampusch’s face was everywhere. She’d just escaped an eight-year imprisonment in a basement dungeon in Austria, and her first interview went out on television to what felt like the entire world watching at once. She was young, coherent, composed in a way that seemed to surprise everyone who saw it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/7/natascha/ Thu, 07 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/7/europe-always-waits/ Living in Europe in the mid-2000s and being into games meant accepting you were always months behind. Japan got the new console first, America got it weeks later, and Europe was somewhere at the back of the line. The pattern had repeated enough times that frustration had curdled into resignation. Just how things worked. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/7/europe-always-waits/ Thu, 07 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/6/keep-writing/ Almost everyone who blogs writes about blogging eventually. And yeah, today’s that day. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/6/keep-writing/ Wed, 06 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/6/what-we-keep/ Information is power, they say. Spies, detectives, journalists—whole industries built on excavating the one thing everyone’s supposedly chasing: the truth. Who took what, who pulled the trigger, who lied to who. As if truth is something singular and waiting, just hidden somewhere. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/6/what-we-keep/ Wed, 06 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/5/saturday-drinks/ Spent Saturday drinking and watching movies at André’s. Me, Ana, Lisa, André, some friends, and a couple of girls who showed up—which definitely helped the vibe. We made it through Eurotrip, which I’d somehow never seen, then Date Movie, which wasn’t funny then or now, then The Fog, which at least had something going for it. Lots of Beck’s Green Lemon. It was fun. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/5/saturday-drinks/ Tue, 05 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/2/a-crawl-in-name-only/ Ben showed up at my door out of nowhere, months since I’d seen him last. He’d apparently set a whole pub crawl in motion through conversations I didn’t even know about. People started trickling in and we headed to the first bar, the Balu. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/2/a-crawl-in-name-only/ Sat, 02 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/1/muc/ We drove up to Munich way too early one morning—me, Ana, no reading material, no music, just the two of us and about three hours of highway. The blond people around us were interesting enough to not resent the commute. The sky kept threatening to go dark but never quite did. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/9/1/muc/ Fri, 01 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/29/is-that-really-you/ https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/29/is-that-really-you/ Tue, 29 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/29/not-caring/ The more I stop caring about something, the better it works. I’ve been watching this pattern play out the last few weeks, and it’s relentless. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/29/not-caring/ Tue, 29 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/29/bounty-hunter-charm/ I was really into the bounty hunter thing after watching Domino. There’s something cool about the idea of just going out and catching criminals on your own, no bureaucracy, no one breathing down your neck. So last night when Ana bailed and I was lying around with nothing to do, I had to choose between Dog the Bounty Hunter on TV and some documentary about RVs. The choice seemed obvious. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/29/bounty-hunter-charm/ Tue, 29 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/28/the/ The ^^ emoticon had a life. Lived in anime forums and instant messengers, became the smiley for people who thought they were in on the same joke. I used it too, helped spread it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/28/the/ Mon, 28 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/27/domino/ Watched Domino the other night with Becca—the Tony Scott film from 2005, Keira Knightley playing Domino Harvey. I love movies that are essentially extended trailers, and this thing is pure MTV. It’s shooting and cutting like it has somewhere to be, like it can’t sit still for a second. Everything looks like an ad campaign, all saturated color and aggressive editing and no patience for letting a shot breathe. Scott just lets it run wild. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/27/domino/ Sun, 27 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/26/bagel-season/ I’ve always been obsessed with “The O.C.”, and now apparently I’m also obsessed with what they eat for breakfast. Bagels. The Cohen family goes through these every morning like clockwork, and I guess watching that finally wore me down. So I went to the supermarket and bought some. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/26/bagel-season/ Sat, 26 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/24/the-view/ I took the curtains down. Went back to how I used to have it. There’s something about bare windows that makes everything feel less cramped. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/24/the-view/ Thu, 24 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/23/loves-dead/ There’s this moment where you stop buying it—not love itself, but the version they sell you, the one that fixes things or makes you whole. You realize it’s just need and timing and fear. That realization came on a random Wednesday. The world hadn’t changed. I had. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/23/loves-dead/ Wed, 23 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/23/ernie-and-bert/ We were exploring the side roads near Buchloe at night when Ana and I found them—two small frogs near John’s place. We caught them without thinking, just grabbed them from the grass. The moment I held them, I felt like a kid again, that pure uncomplicated thing you get when something unexpected and alive is in your hands. They were cute, genuinely cute, in that serious way frogs have. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/23/ernie-and-bert/ Wed, 23 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/21/the-oc-all-night/ I’m completely destroyed. Haven’t slept since yesterday afternoon. We’ve been watching The O.C. since four o’clock—André, Lisa, and me—just chaining episodes together, drinking, eating, existing in Newport Beach for fifteen hours straight. The weather outside is actually decent, which makes it worse somehow. We could be outside doing something. Instead we’re inside watching a show about rich teenagers ruining their lives. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/21/the-oc-all-night/ Mon, 21 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/19/vincent-gallo/ Vincent Gallo once tried to sell his sperm on eBay for a million dollars. This wasn’t metaphor or art-world provocation hidden in theory—it was him, listing it, with explicit racial preferences stated right there. The kind of thing you hear once and never forget, partly because it’s grotesque, partly because only Gallo would actually follow through on what most people have the sense to keep private. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/19/vincent-gallo/ Sat, 19 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/18/back-in-prague/ I keep thinking about that Prague trip. Hotels destroyed, clubs at 3 AM, the kind of drinking where you lose track of time and stop caring. We were old enough to know what we were doing, young enough that nobody really stopped us. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/18/back-in-prague/ Fri, 18 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/18/the-wrong-laptop/ Microsoft was running this campaign called “Click. You’re clean.” Their solution to malware on Windows. The marketing image showed someone at their computer, everything clean and professional. It was a PowerBook. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/18/the-wrong-laptop/ Fri, 18 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/18/pirate-politics/ The Pirate Party started in Sweden and spread because the internet had changed faster than the law could follow. By the time Germany formed its chapter, it was already in half of Europe, Russia, and the US. The platform was straightforward: restore basic digital rights, dismantle mass surveillance, soften or abolish copyright restrictions. If you’d ever been caught in the machinery of intellectual property law—a cease-and-desist letter, a throttled connection—the party’s position made immediate sense. They were naming what everyone already knew. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/18/pirate-politics/ Fri, 18 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/17/the-last-cat/ She’s the last one. Started with three, and now it’s just Koko—small, with these unusual, beautiful colors that don’t quite fit any standard cat palette. She’s become a complete cuddle junkie, always needing to be held, kneading at my chest while purring. Which makes it strange that her left eye is probably going to fail. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/17/the-last-cat/ Thu, 17 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/15/breathing-room/ I’d been working inside constraints I didn’t choose. The site was strangling me—image dimensions that cut off arbitrarily, categories I didn’t need, metrics I never checked, pages that loaded reluctantly. I adapted. I learned to work inside walls. But that’s not creating; that’s just adapting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/15/breathing-room/ Tue, 15 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/14/a-night-in-the-winter-garden/ Betty’s eighteenth was a week ago, but certain nights stay with you. Julian was sprawling across everything, half on top of me for most of it. Patrick underneath, talking in his sleep like he was composing an entire novel for someone only he could hear. Ana to my right, having taken down a serious amount of whatever was flowing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/14/a-night-in-the-winter-garden/ Mon, 14 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/12/just-talk/ I switched to iChat because I’m staring at the screen half the day anyway—might as well use something beautiful. Apple designed this with actual restraint: no games, no ads, no features you didn’t ask for. Just a window where you and someone else talk. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/12/just-talk/ Sat, 12 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/10/that-hurts/ “Popstars” is back, and the first half of the premiere is painful to watch. Not just the failed auditions—it’s the whole thing. Compared to “Deutschland sucht den Superstar,” which at least has some style, this is the gutter version. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/10/that-hurts/ Thu, 10 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/10/all-grown-up/ I watched Rugrats for years—Chuckie, Tommy, all of them navigating a world that was comically, terrifyingly oversized because they were so small. Everything was strange. A living room was an epic landscape. Angelica was a monster we genuinely hated. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/10/all-grown-up/ Thu, 10 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/10/mostly-free/ I’ve reached the point where I can’t take Microsoft seriously anymore. Years of bloated software, lies wrapped in marketing-speak, and the absolute confidence that we’re all too dependent to leave. After I switched to Apple, I finally had room to actually do something about it. Out went Office. Out went Virtual PC. And as of today, out goes MSN Messenger. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/10/mostly-free/ Thu, 10 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/8/pointless/ Tuesday, August 8th, 2006. One of those days that shouldn’t exist—no point to it, no point for anyone. I spent the whole thing on my Mac, jumping in and out of the Giga Forum and watching The Simpsons four times in a row. Ana got so bored she wanted to find a friend just to do sports with. Irina was going to inline skate, but stayed home the whole day instead. My cousin disappeared into her PC playing solitaire for hours. So thanks for that, world—a completely pointless, headache-inducing Tuesday. At least South Park was coming on. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/8/pointless/ Tue, 08 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/8/watching/ She’s been at summer camp in Greece since Thursday for two weeks—sun, beach, sea, all of it. Karaoke contests, animation, fashion shows. The thing is, the camp posts photos and videos online every day, so I can actually see what she’s doing down there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/8/watching/ Tue, 08 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/7/waiting-for-one-more-thing/ Waffles and a Beck’s Green Lemon on the desk while Apple’s servers exploded. Five PM keynote time, the usual ritual—Steve Jobs walking out and everyone in every chat room acting like kids on Christmas morning. This was going to be it. New iPod. New iPhone. Something that would justify all the breathless waiting. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/7/waiting-for-one-more-thing/ Mon, 07 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/4/eat-my-shorts-again/ The Simpsons is the fallback. When everything else fails—when the new shows tank, when clever concepts don’t land—you schedule The Simpsons again. It always works. ProSieben tried for years to make original programming stick, gave up, and now it airs twice a day. There’s probably a decade of my life accounted for in whatever was on TV at any given moment, and The Simpsons was there for most of it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/4/eat-my-shorts-again/ Fri, 04 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/3/they-won/ Sometime around 2006, RTL and Viacom decided that German satellite TV would be encrypted from then on. New receiver, monthly subscription, installation fees—the whole apparatus of corporate extraction. I was genuinely furious, not because I watched much, but because it was so baldly greedy. No innovation, no improvement, just the decision to charge for something people already had. When I found out ProSieben and the others would follow, it didn’t even feel like news. It felt inevitable. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/3/they-won/ Thu, 03 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/3/sexy-fox/ Betty’s come out the other side of whatever those years were, and now there’s someone new and a different energy about her, the kind you can actually see shifting. We’ve had some genuinely strange times together since Fritz came into the picture, and when I think about her my brain just loops back to all the idiotic things I said that she immediately forgot, those cold nights standing outside the gym during Carnival, the video marathons at her place when everyone called her Big Mouth for reasons that made perfect sense at three in the morning. That stuff sticks with you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/3/sexy-fox/ Thu, 03 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/3/bloat-works/ Coming in, people had conflicting opinions on whether the second Pirates film beat the first. I didn’t need to think about it—it clearly did. ’Dead Man’s Chest’ is bloated and overstuffed and way too long, but somehow you don’t feel any of it. The film just keeps moving. Action, humor, story all tumbling together. The fights are weird and inventive. Keira Knightley looks incredible in period wear. Johnny Depp is doing something with that character that makes him impossible to look away from. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/3/bloat-works/ Thu, 03 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/3/goodbye-sarah/ MTV Europe used to mean something. Real money and energy behind fighting AIDS stigma, actual opposition to the mainstream, genuine stakes. Now it’s just ringtone ads and paywalls and firing anyone worth watching. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/8/3/goodbye-sarah/ Thu, 03 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/7/26/still-small/ Lydia’s never gotten taller, is the thing. It was one of those running jokes—would she actually stay that small? Among friends, between drinks, the kind of thing you wonder about someone. And the answer, now that she’s eighteen, is yes. She’s exactly the size she was going to be, and apparently everyone’s okay with that now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/7/26/still-small/ Wed, 26 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/7/25/no-shade/ The heat was unrelenting. One of those apocalyptic days where it doesn’t matter what time you wake up—it’s already burning everything down. Becca and I drove out to the Lamerdinger Baggerweiher, this local gravel pit lake that someone at the gymnasium’s school paper had somehow thought deserved a rating: ’Ice cream trucks, ducks and fish, no shade.’ I don’t remember seeing any ducks or fish, but there were plenty of bodies stretched out in the sun and one older guy who’d clearly made peace with his body a long time ago. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/7/25/no-shade/ Tue, 25 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/7/23/back-around/ Becca and I got back together. We’d been doing that thing—you know, break up for a while, try other people, realize after a stretch that you were actually fine where you were. Sometimes you need to leave something to figure out it was good. So we’re back to it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/7/23/back-around/ Sun, 23 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/7/15/it-was-time/ We were supposed to go to an open-air concert, but plans are fragile things. Ana and I ended up at my place instead, watching some game show on RTL, then a disaster program, and then we just played the new Muse album on repeat for hours. Nothing glamorous. Just two people burning a night that was supposed to be somewhere else. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/7/15/it-was-time/ Sat, 15 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/7/13/killer-horseflies/ The heat hit different today—the kind of hot where you suddenly understand why lakes exist. I picked up Ana and Irina but they still weren’t ready, something about needing to shave, hitting Edeka for a new phone card, deciding between skirts and pants or whatever. The whole thing ate an hour while I’m melting in their living room playing with cats and staring at this massive flat-screen, just wondering what their electricity bill looks like. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/7/13/killer-horseflies/ Thu, 13 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/7/12/seventeen/ Iri’s seventeen now. She’s responsible for the single most downloaded photo in this site’s history—not content, just her. That fact tells you everything: beautiful in a very specific way, completely aware of it, and finding the whole situation funny. Happy birthday to someone who knows exactly what she does to people. Keep being relentless. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/7/12/seventeen/ Wed, 12 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/7/11/solo-2/ Rebecca broke up with me. I knew it was coming, but knowing and it actually happening are two different things. Some people will be happy about this—they wanted it to end. But it was her move, and she’s right to make it. I wasn’t always the friend I should’ve been, and she’s seventeen and wants to see what else there is. I’ve been here before, done this with other people, so I know how to live with it now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/7/11/solo-2/ Tue, 11 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/7/5/munich-2006/ Becca and I drove to Munich during the World Cup. The city was packed—flags hanging from buildings, horns everywhere, a kind of noise and energy I’d never felt before. We bought team shirts and moved through the crowds, caught the heat and the chaos of it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/7/5/munich-2006/ Wed, 05 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/29/what-the-hell/ Needed the bathroom, figured I’d load up Animal Crossing on my DS for a minute. But the second the load screen clears, there’s Don Resetti—this furious little mole apparently speaking on behalf of Nintendo itself. He thanks me for buying the game, then goes completely off on me because I didn’t save the last time I played. Just turned it off and left. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/29/what-the-hell/ Thu, 29 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/29/ideas-on-paper/ Found this thing where people submit ideas the old way—handwritten on paper, in an envelope. No digital polish, no algorithmic optimization, just you and a piece of paper. There’s something good about that friction. You can’t fire off half-formed thoughts or iterate endlessly before sending. You commit or you don’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/29/ideas-on-paper/ Thu, 29 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/28/power-and-rebel/ Spent the day with Becca in Munich yesterday. One of those rare days where everything just clicks—blue sky, no wind, that particular kind of peace you don’t really think about until it’s gone. We headed out on the U-Bahn to check out her new school, looked it over properly. No one minded that we were poking around. Back into the city after that. Pizza Hut for lunch, then Gravis to look at MacBooks, some ridiculous raspberry-tea-whatever from Starbucks that tasted cloyingly sweet—they were out of lemon-mango. We hit Saturn because she’s thinking about getting a laptop, so I wandered through the notebooks, glanced at the CDs and DVDs. Then we stepped back outside and the sky had just gone. Dark blue to dark gray in maybe five minutes. This unsettling wind tearing through the shopping street, rain on your skin before your brain even registers it’s raining. We ducked into Hugendubel, and that’s where I finally grabbed the book I’d been wanting: “Power and Rebel” by Matias Faldbakken, this Norwegian writer. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/28/power-and-rebel/ Wed, 28 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/28/preparing-for-nothing/ I spent an afternoon reworking my dashboard. Hit F12 and the whole thing unfolds: calendar, clock, weather that never gets the forecast right, CNN ticker, TV streaming panel, an orange calculator, Wikipedia widget, web radio, and a turtle named Bordi who does nothing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/28/preparing-for-nothing/ Wed, 28 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/28/sixteen-episodes/ André and I ran into each other last night with nothing in particular planned. So we grabbed a case of Beck’s Green Lemon and chips and decided to just lock in with South Park. Sixteen episodes. Straight through. In English. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/28/sixteen-episodes/ Wed, 28 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/26/the-constant/ Mario was created in 1981 by Shigeru Miyamoto as a simple sprite—a figure that moves and jumps. There’s no story. No explanation for anything. Just the immediate problem of crossing the screen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/26/the-constant/ Mon, 26 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/25/burned-in/ I made a list of ten songs that stuck with me, burned themselves into my head at some point and never left. Not because they’re the best or because everyone’s supposed to care—just songs that at the right moment meant something specific to how I think and feel. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/25/burned-in/ Sun, 25 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/23/where-my-noise-comes-from/ Someone sent me a link to Last.fm and I’ve been using it for a while now. It’s a small web radio player that learns what I like by actually paying attention to what I listen to. I start it with an artist or band, it plays something, and I either skip it or save it as a favorite. That’s the whole system. No complicated profiles, no playlists full of filler—just play, react, move on. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/23/where-my-noise-comes-from/ Fri, 23 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/22/sayonara/ Japan played Brazil at the 2006 World Cup and I remember thinking they might actually do something. They had moments of real competence, weren’t outclassed or anything. But the other results went wrong—Croatia beat Australia or Australia beat Croatia or whatever, the point is the fixtures didn’t align. Sometimes you play well and still lose to math. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/22/sayonara/ Thu, 22 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/22/starcity/ You get in a taxi in the pouring rain. The driver asks you questions—where are you from, what’s your favorite food—and by the time you’re standing outside your new house, you’re already invested in the place as real. Then Tom Nook shows up. He’s the guy who sold you this house, and you owe him twenty thousand bells. He offers you a job. You take it. He fires you almost immediately. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/22/starcity/ Thu, 22 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/22/windows-resentment/ In the late 90s, when I’d walk into a computer lab or office and see nothing but Dell boxes running Windows, there was this pure, clean hatred that just flowed through me. I knew it was pointless—I wasn’t going to change anyone’s mind by getting angry about it—but the pointlessness made it worse somehow. Everyone around me thought this was just what computers were. A pale blue screen, wait for it to load, buy the antivirus, get infected anyway. They had no idea what they were missing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/22/windows-resentment/ Thu, 22 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/21/cracked/ I went to Kaufbeuren today and broke a promise to myself. I’d said I wasn’t buying a Nintendo DS Lite. But it was sitting there in black, alone, and something just gave. I had to have it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/21/cracked/ Wed, 21 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/20/following-the-motion/ The Wii controller was the moment when everyone admitted they’d run out of ideas. Nintendo made this little white remote that actually did something different—you’d swing it around for tennis, aim like a gun, whatever the game needed—and suddenly Sony and Microsoft realized they’d been stuck making the same controllers for a decade, just refining them into slightly nicer shapes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/20/following-the-motion/ Tue, 20 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/19/only-one-survives/ I’ve been obsessing about operating systems. Windows, Linux, Mac OS X. They feel like more than software—like something that matters. The line is that only one will survive. But which? And which would I actually want to? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/19/only-one-survives/ Mon, 19 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/19/amanda-bynes/ Amanda Bynes isn’t the most successful actress, but she’s one of the few from that era I actually want to watch. There’s something about her—timing, warmth, some ineffable thing—that makes even the worst material feel worth it. *What a Girl Wants* is an advertisement for teen pop-star fantasy that shouldn’t work, but she carried it with this effortless ease that made you believe in the whole thing anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/19/amanda-bynes/ Mon, 19 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/14/xp-in-a-tuxedo/ I loaded Vista Beta 2 yesterday and installed it on my mom’s computer during the Brazil match. After fifteen years with Windows—good stretches and bad ones—I figured I could give the thing a fair shot. But it’s not a revolution. It’s just XP in a better suit. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/14/xp-in-a-tuxedo/ Wed, 14 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/12/invader-zim/ There’s this pattern where I’ll start watching a new series and just not get it at first. Nothing lands. Then weeks later something clicks and I realize I’ve been completely wrong about the whole thing, and suddenly I can’t stop watching. Happened with The O.C., happened with Invader Zim. Took me a few episodes of the latter before its actual frequency became clear, but once it locked in I was completely gone on it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/12/invader-zim/ Mon, 12 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/12/three-in-ten/ Japan had it won. Up 1-0 in the eightieth minute against Australia—should’ve been routine, but then it all fell apart. Three goals in the next ten minutes. Three. It was like watching one squad decide to stop playing while the other one stayed awake and noticed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/12/three-in-ten/ Mon, 12 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/1/so-long-nick-comedy/ I watched enough sitcoms on Nick Comedy to fill a few years of evenings—”King of Queens,” “Friends,” but mostly “Mad About You” in German dubbing, which came on at hours when nobody else was watching. The channel filled that space after MTV2POP vanished, a mix of solid stuff and throwaway filler, the kind of programming that doesn’t seem to matter until it’s gone. There was something about Helen Hunt and Paul Reiser speaking German at midnight that felt right at the time, the same way late-night TV feels necessary when you’re the only one awake. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/6/1/so-long-nick-comedy/ Thu, 01 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/5/29/maxeen/ LA punk band getting reviews in Germany. Young group making waves outside their hometown market, which is just how things work these days. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/5/29/maxeen/ Mon, 29 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/5/25/waggle/ The gimmick was honest: hold a remote, move it like you mean it, and your character moves with you. I saw the Rayman trailer and thought this is stupid and wonderful, this is how games should feel. Not sitting there watching a screen but actually in the room, moving your arm, swinging at things, jumping around like you’ve lost your mind. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/5/25/waggle/ Thu, 25 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/5/25/koko/ Becca’s got three kittens and somehow one of them has become ours. Not officially yet, but the plan is that when we move out, Koko comes with us. She’s the one who figured everything out first—eating, the box, the whole logistics of being a kitten. The other two are still kind of bumbling, and Koko’s just already sorted. There’s something you respect about that right from the start. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/5/25/koko/ Thu, 25 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/5/22/sick-on-a-perfect-day/ Beautiful morning and I’m still ill. The whole weekend I barely slept, felt like a wet sack. Couldn’t make it to Becca’s cousin’s confirmation. Just sat around Sunday with nothing to do, so I kept rewatching the Wii trailer. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/5/22/sick-on-a-perfect-day/ Mon, 22 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/5/21/imogen-heaps-hallelujah/ Marissa Cooper’s death. That moment on The O.C. when everything just… stopped. I was young enough to actually care about her as a character, old enough to recognize the show as teen melodrama, which only made it worse somehow. The music swelling in the background was Imogen Heap covering “Hallelujah”—not the Leonard Cohen version everyone knows, but the Jeff Buckley devastation, the one that sounds like someone’s entire world is caving in on itself. Which is what was happening on screen. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/5/21/imogen-heaps-hallelujah/ Sun, 21 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/5/16/california-everywhere/ Everyone kept telling me to go to California. The O.C., the Chili Peppers, E3 in Los Angeles, celebrity gossip shows, my classmate André—everything pointed the same direction. At some point you stop arguing with it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/5/16/california-everywhere/ Tue, 16 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/5/15/another-smash/ I remember the original Smash Bros. feeling like a cheat code—minimal learning curve, maximum chaos, everyone suddenly good. Brawl’s the bigger version now, fatter roster, more stages, motion controls that feel tacked on. The question is whether bigger actually means better, and I don’t have an answer yet. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/5/15/another-smash/ Mon, 15 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/5/14/mbeu/ There’s a quality to early-2000s teen TV that doesn’t fade. The O.C. ended ages ago, but Mischa Barton still holds something. That look—bored, wealthy, untouchable. She was the thing you wanted and couldn’t have, which I guess is the whole point of casting someone like that. It doesn’t matter that the show’s been off the air for decades. Certain faces stick. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/5/14/mbeu/ Sun, 14 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/5/8/summers-over/ Next week, The O.C. ends in America. Germany gets the finale in June on Saturday afternoons—a strange time for a show that mattered, a quiet way of saying goodbye. Austria gets it earlier. Maybe they’re kinder to their doomed shows. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/5/8/summers-over/ Mon, 08 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/5/8/the-e3/ The E3 was the event you waited for. Every year there’d be this one moment when the industry gathered and announced what mattered next. I remember the year of the PS3 and the Wii—two very different answers to what gaming would be. The Wii was the confusing one. Nobody understood it at first. Motion controls, less power, the whole thing looked like Nintendo had surrendered the hardware race. Then you’d see someone actually hold the controller and move it, and it was still confusing but different. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/5/8/the-e3/ Mon, 08 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/5/7/the-report/ Spent all of Saturday on a report for social studies class about Chinese internet censorship. Falun Gong, Yahoo, Shi Tao—the usual suspects in that particular story, caught between what their government wanted them to say and what they actually thought. Useful homework, I guess. Meanwhile my friends were doing better things: Koksi was throwing a party, Andreas was doing birthday pizza somewhere in Landsberg, and his sister Ilka was supposedly worth meeting. Never met her. The weekend had that feeling of stacking one bad choice on top of another and deciding it was already ruined. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/5/7/the-report/ Sun, 07 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/5/4/im-so-hungry/ School was good today. Everyone was in a decent mood. We did some improvisation in class, and after, a group of us sat by the lake during break and talked about life, god, the usual things you talk about when you think you understand something. The afternoon was like most afternoons, nothing remarkable, but I went to the barber and booked another appointment—something about getting a short cut appeals to me right now, something I can just wash and forget about. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/5/4/im-so-hungry/ Thu, 04 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/5/3/boa/ Got into BoA around the time she was becoming hard to ignore across Asia—this Korean singer breaking through in Japan and China when K-pop wasn’t yet the inevitable global force it’s since become. Kwon BoA, born 1986. I just know her as BoA. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/5/3/boa/ Wed, 03 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/30/the-revolution-that-wasnt/ When Nintendo announced the Wii—they’d been calling it the Revolution, which sounded like what you’d name a console at a tech conference to impress people—the actual name landed different. Wii, like “we.” It was a tiny thing, but it said something about what Nintendo was actually trying to do. This wasn’t a product designed to deepen the existing audience. This was designed to expand it entirely. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/30/the-revolution-that-wasnt/ Sun, 30 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/27/herr-lehmann/ I caught Herr Lehmann the other night and it’s the kind of film that reminds you why German cinema used to matter—not because it’s trying hard, but because it doesn’t seem to care if anyone’s watching. There’s a joke early on about a Beck’s beer ad that made me laugh out loud, which is basically the whole vibe: sardonic, specific, the kind of humor that assumes you’re paying attention. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/27/herr-lehmann/ Thu, 27 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/27/the-revolution/ Nintendo said the Revolution would come with every old game you wanted, free to download. NES, SNES, N64—just waiting there. It felt like the future had actually arrived. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/27/the-revolution/ Thu, 27 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/27/popetown-on-mtv-germany/ MTV Germany announced they’d air Popetown, this old BBC cartoon about a pope who just screws around with greedy cardinals, and the entire country had a moment. The show had been made years ago and never aired—just sat on a shelf somewhere. But the announcement alone was enough. The CDU filed a police report. The church demanded it be pulled. Every major network ran stories about it like it was an actual political emergency. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/27/popetown-on-mtv-germany/ Thu, 27 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/24/strange-and-exact/ Shiina Ringo makes music that refuses to be simple. The drums come in wrong. The strings sound like they’re out of tune. Her voice sits somewhere between singing and speaking, flat and exact. Nothing about it sounds like someone trying to please you. It sounds like someone following an idea, trusting that the right people will understand. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/24/strange-and-exact/ Mon, 24 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/24/summers-back/ The light’s hanging around longer. That’s the first thing you notice—the evenings stretch, the sky turns this specific shade of blue, and suddenly you’re not checking the weather before you leave the house anymore. Winter’s finished. People are back outside doing nothing in particular, and it’s the best part of the year for that reason. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/24/summers-back/ Mon, 24 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/22/drawing-lines/ I boycotted Yahoo in the mid-2000s. The reason was specific: Yahoo had identified a Chinese blogger named Jiang Lijun to the police, and he got four years in prison for writing pro-democracy posts. Reporters Without Borders got hold of the case. It was concrete—a name, a sentence, a company’s complicity. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/22/drawing-lines/ Sat, 22 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/22/zapping-impossible/ Philips patented a technology to prevent channel-switching during commercials. The broadcaster sends a signal, your TV locks, you’re stuck. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/22/zapping-impossible/ Sat, 22 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/18/the-troll-cave/ I was waiting for a battleground queue and got bored, so I loaded World of Warcraft and did some quests to kill time. Nothing serious—save a maiden, defeat her corrupted brother, the usual. After that I was still restless, so I decided to explore. Just wander into the unmapped edges. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/18/the-troll-cave/ Tue, 18 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/14/that-night/ Today was weird so I’m talking about yesterday instead. Becca and I made schnitzel with tomato spätzle for lunch and it was good—genuinely good. Then I’m watching this Moses film on TV and it’s pretty brutal. The guy’s basically a mass murderer. I’m convinced he just had a brain tumor and was hearing voices his whole life. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/14/that-night/ Fri, 14 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/11/orange-range/ I’ve been listening to Orange Range lately—a J-Rock band from Okinawa who’ve been with Sony since 2003. Five guys: Naoto, Ryo, Yamato, Yoh, Hiroki. They make this loose mix of rock, pop, and hip-hop that just lands. No trying too hard, no staying in one lane. Solid hooks and enough attitude that it never feels safe. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/11/orange-range/ Tue, 11 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/11/the-mac-thing/ I’ve been using Macs for so long I don’t really think about it anymore. Open the laptop, work happens. The trackpad is intuitive enough that I’m not constantly fighting muscle memory. Fonts render clean. Applications just work together without me having to mediate. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/11/the-mac-thing/ Tue, 11 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/9/behind-glass/ I made something and called it art. A frame I’d picked up in Munich, something from a magazine printed and mounted behind the glass. It turned out bigger than expected—almost a meter wide, seventy centimeters tall—the kind of size where you have to actually find a place to put it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/9/behind-glass/ Sun, 09 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/7/apple-is-awesome-the-mighty-mouse-is-crap/ You know I’m a huge Apple fan and I love my Mac, but now I have to publicly complain about one of their products: the Mighty Mouse—Apple’s first two-button mouse. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/7/apple-is-awesome-the-mighty-mouse-is-crap/ Fri, 07 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/6/bart/ Took a Simpsons personality quiz and got Bart. The description: “Very misunderstood, most people just dismiss you as trouble. Little do they know you’re wise and well accomplished beyond your years.” Felt like the quiz was reading my mail. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/6/bart/ Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/6/server-full/ Six million people were playing World of Warcraft and Blizzard had to stop selling it. They pulled it from shelves, halted distribution to retailers, did everything they could to keep the servers from collapsing completely. I’d never heard of a game doing that before—turning people away because you made something too popular. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/6/server-full/ Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/5/thick-air/ Meggi used to be the one who kept things light. Witty, charming, made everyone around her laugh without trying. Then Prague happened, and she came back different. Now every small noise gets a hissing “Psssst” and the mood just dies. School was eating her alive. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/5/thick-air/ Wed, 05 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/5/boot-camp/ When Apple released Boot Camp in 2006, it felt like heresy. Here was a tool that let you run Windows natively on a Mac—not in some clunky emulator, but dual-boot, full speed. The premise was almost funny: buy a beautiful, expensive Mac, then load it up with the thing it was supposed to make you stop using. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/5/boot-camp/ Wed, 05 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/4/the-three-episode-test/ There’s this rule I have about new shows—the third episode is the one that matters. By then you know who all the characters are, you understand what the show’s trying to do, you’ve had two chances for it to grab you. If it doesn’t work by episode three, it’s probably not going to work at all. I stick to that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/4/the-three-episode-test/ Tue, 04 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/4/warcraft-down/ I was all set to quest when the server died mid-countdown and booted everyone. Now I’m refreshing status pages and forums, waiting to see if it’s coming back up tonight or if I’ve got the evening free. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/4/warcraft-down/ Tue, 04 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/2/when-it-rains/ Hung over from last night, head pounding, and now it’s warm and muggy outside—the kind of weather that makes a hangover worse. Can’t shake it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/4/2/when-it-rains/ Sun, 02 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/31/goodbye-giga-green/ Giga’s shutting down today. The longest internet party the world ever had, and now it’s done. I found it back when the internet was still young enough that a German show about technology and pop culture could just exist—no filter, no calculation, speaking straight to the people who were actually paying attention. Most things don’t feel that way. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/31/goodbye-giga-green/ Fri, 31 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/29/she-had-it/ Lena Gercke won Germany’s Next Top Model and it felt like the right call. I’d been watching that season and she was my favorite—there was something easier about her than the rest of the contestants, less of that desperate reaching for it. When Heidi announced her name, I actually felt good about it, not in some invested-in-reality-TV way, but like I genuinely wanted this one person to get the thing she was going for. I never really tracked where she went after, but that moment was enough. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/29/she-had-it/ Wed, 29 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/28/a-few-days/ Friday was Ana’s birthday at some place in Turkheim called Americano. We all showed up with decent intentions, and then we left after two hours because it was boring. Got pretty drunk in that window, though, which I didn’t expect. The whole thing made me realize I haven’t spent time with most of these people in a while, and I wasn’t sure if I minded. Mille brought his girlfriend Anette, and she’s actually cool—funny and low-key in a way that made the night feel less like a chore. Even Becca liked her. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/28/a-few-days/ Tue, 28 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/28/lotta-in-crisis/ A new show called Lotta in Love premiered on German television and got cancelled by the internet within two days. There’d been this enormous advertising campaign, all the expectations, and then the schedule dropped and people saw it was replacing The Simpsons, and that was it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/28/lotta-in-crisis/ Tue, 28 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/28/quiet/ A woman was killed by her husband in Buchloe last week. She was 33, Turkish, and now the town’s gone silent about it—the papers won’t touch it, like refusing to report it might somehow contain the damage. Her family’s at war underneath. All anyone wants is for it to settle without getting worse. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/28/quiet/ Tue, 28 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/28/still-asleep/ The last video game I actually finished was Majora’s Mask on the N64. After that, nothing. I kept thinking someday I’d get back into gaming, but years passed and nothing stuck. I assumed it meant I’d just grown out of it, the way you grow out of things. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/28/still-asleep/ Tue, 28 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/24/when-the-spd-called-the-power-rangers/ One detail from early 2000s German politics has stayed with me: the moment the SPD basically gave up and called in the Power Rangers. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/24/when-the-spd-called-the-power-rangers/ Fri, 24 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/24/sega-on-nintendo/ Nintendo was going to offer Mega Drive games on the Revolution. Sonic, Shining Force—the whole archive. Right there on Nintendo hardware. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/24/sega-on-nintendo/ Fri, 24 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/23/i-am-error/ There’s this guy living in Hyrule, some character tucked away in a house with four windows and a table. That’s all he needs. When Link walks in—when the hero finally shows up looking for answers—the man just looks at him and says, “I am Error.” https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/23/i-am-error/ Thu, 23 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/23/happy-birthday-ana/ Ana turns eighteen today. I’ve worked with her through this place for a while, and she’s one of those people you don’t secretly dislike. She’s genuinely interested—in people, in what they think, in everything going on around her. Not performing, not trying to impress. You can have fun with her, but you can also have conversations that actually matter. I hope she stays exactly like this. And maybe tell your sister to lighten up once in a while, but I won’t hold my breath. Happy birthday. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/23/happy-birthday-ana/ Thu, 23 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/22/predictable-math/ Bad school day I’m not going to get into. Becca, her sister, and their friend took me to see this Matthew McConaughey rom-com. You know exactly where it’s going before the opening credits—every turn already visible, every joke predictable. But that’s the thing about those films: you don’t always want to be surprised. Sometimes you just want the same story again, updated with different faces. It was funny enough and required nothing of me, which was exactly the escape I needed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/22/predictable-math/ Wed, 22 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/21/leveling-up/ Ana was explaining how she treats her gym routine like a video game now—each exercise another level, get strong enough and move on. It’s simple but it actually works. Instead of suffering through reps, you’re progressing. Leveling up. Makes the whole thing feel less like punishment and more like a game you’re already winning at. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/21/leveling-up/ Tue, 21 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/20/two-tickets/ I got home today and my mom told me she’d won two World Cup tickets on some game show. The kind of thing you never expect to actually happen to you. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/20/two-tickets/ Mon, 20 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/20/giga-signing-off/ I found out GIGA was ending—March 31st, the parent company was pulling the plug—the way I find out about most things: late, almost by accident. There was something deflating about it, even though I’d already watched the thing slowly stop being what made it worth watching in the first place. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/20/giga-signing-off/ Mon, 20 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/19/i-start-again/ I’ve completely switched over to WordPress now and dropped my dark, international design. I just can’t be bothered anymore to spend ages working on a design that pisses me off a few minutes after uploading it. I really like this design—it fits well and it’s super easy to customize. But it’s late, so I’m not doing anything else tonight. Tobias is a superstar. Good night. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/19/i-start-again/ Sun, 19 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/19/spring-showed-up/ Spring hit and with it the first girls in short tops. Good reminder of why you bother surviving winter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/3/19/spring-showed-up/ Sun, 19 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/2/27/that-weekend/ So the first holiday weekend was over. Saturday afternoon we had this solid meal at Becca’s mum’s place—I was completely stuffed. We played Singstar 80s for a while, and at some point I just snapped and walked out. My partner stayed over Saturday night, and we had cheese and watched some German talent show. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/2/27/that-weekend/ Mon, 27 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/2/24/one-of-those-nights/ We all sat through Woyzeck at the Volkstheater last night, and I nearly fell asleep about halfway through. The actors were technically fine, but nothing about it landed for me or Rebecca. Dinner before the show—Augustiner Keller or wherever—wasn’t any better. One of those evenings where everything is supposed to be good but just feels flat. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/2/24/one-of-those-nights/ Fri, 24 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/2/21/blank/ Handed in the exam almost entirely blank today. Five minutes in and I was done. Seven years fighting this subject and I finally hit a wall I couldn’t pretend to climb anymore. Just walked out and went home. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/2/21/blank/ Tue, 21 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/2/19/one-billion/ iTunes crossed a billion downloads sometime in the mid-2000s—I don’t actually remember when, but I remember the milestone feeling real. Not because of some contest, but because it meant something about how we bought music had fundamentally shifted, and this number made it impossible to deny. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/2/19/one-billion/ Sun, 19 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/2/17/back-again/ Yes, our beloved blog is back. God, how I missed it – our little friend to whom I can confide everything and who immediately tells it all to the big wide world. Unfortunately, you’ll have to excuse me for not writing much today, because it’s really very late. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/2/17/back-again/ Fri, 17 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/2/17/quietly-gone/ When a new product launches, the whole world seems to know about it by Tuesday. The marketing is relentless. You see it at the store, online, on your phone. But when something gets discontinued, nobody tells you anything. You just walk in one day looking for it and it’s gone. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/2/17/quietly-gone/ Fri, 17 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/1/7/after-the-battle/ Alright, I survived my birthday and the party that came with it, and today I’m just chilling at home. A lot of people showed up and I had a really good time, even though there were a few minor disturbances — and my awesome favorite perfume disappeared (well, after a trip to V-Markt, that was sorted out too). Thanks to everyone who congratulated me by email and SMS and whom I couldn’t reply to for reasons of time and cost. Next time I’ll also make sure more photos are taken. For now, I’m just glad we still have a day off tomorrow. I’ve got zero motivation for school, but it has to be done. So, good night folks — see you around. P.S.: The links page has now been completely redesigned and should be error-free. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/1/7/after-the-battle/ Sat, 07 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/1/4/people-i-know/ Becca is my sweetheart. I’ve chosen myself a great girlfriend—Becca is sometimes even crazier than I am. And that’s exactly what I love so much about her. I think the (short) breakup was a learning experience for us, and you know that you mean everything to me. I’m looking forward to our future together, and with that in mind, you sweet little pain in the neck: Let’s make love! https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/1/4/people-i-know/ Wed, 04 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/1/2/more-winter-in-munich/ Today I left a ridiculous amount of money in Munich because, despite the freezing cold, Becca and I bought so many beautiful things. First of all, two DVDs with Japanese films: Kiki’s Delivery Service, a Studio Ghibli anime (like Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Howl’s Moving Castle), about the little witch Kiki and her funny black cat Jiji opening a small delivery service in the bakery of the kind Okino. Such a cute movie. Then the complete opposite: Izo, where the ghost of a samurai wanders around killing people — first his mother, his lover, his friends, and in the end he even confronts God himself. I also bought two CDs: one by Utada Hikaru — “Be My Last,” of course including a nice bonus video DVD — and one by the frontwoman of my favorite band the brilliant green: Tommy heavenly6 with her self-titled album. On top of that, I picked up an issue of the Japanese magazine Popeye, a copy of Muteen, two posters of kagerou and Merry, an iPod cassette adapter so I can finally listen to my iPod in the car (yes, we still have a cassette player in our car… g), and the Mac game Tropico 2, where you’re a pirate king building up an island à la Anno 1502. So cool. I also ate the biggest sandwich of my life at Subway — of course with double cheese and bacon. So good. Oh yeah, Basti — thanks for your repeated praise (always nice to hear g). You’re right, the links page should probably look different. Let’s see what can be done about that. Finally, I’d like to briefly respond to my good friend André, who was ranting about GQ magazine: I’ve been collecting that magazine since 2002. So don’t be so cheeky g. In that sense: take care and have a great evening, everyone. I’m off to become king of the pirates!! https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/1/2/more-winter-in-munich/ Mon, 02 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/1/1/welcome-to-the-year-of-change/ So, did you survive New Year’s Eve? Mine was pretty fun — I celebrated with Becca’s family and then we watched the last part of The Lord of the Rings. It was really cool. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2006/1/1/welcome-to-the-year-of-change/ Sun, 01 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/31/the-hangover-is-coming/ Alright folks, New Year’s Eve is just around the corner — so celebrate properly and slide smoothly and stylishly into the new year. Bye, see you next year. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/31/the-hangover-is-coming/ Sat, 31 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/28/desktop-wreckage/ Spent today in the city with Mille and out at Eniz in Turkheim, then came home to keep grinding on this Prague film at record speed. I didn’t think the project would get this big, but it has, so I’ve been deleting entire programs and whole folders just to carve out space for iMovie. My desktop is now just gray question marks everywhere—all these orphaned files wondering where their programs went. Soon as this is done I’m going to reinstall Tiger clean and actually maintain this thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/28/desktop-wreckage/ Wed, 28 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/26/nintendos-soul/ There’s a company that’s more than a company—something like a religion for the people who gave their childhood to it. Not Apple. Nintendo. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/26/nintendos-soul/ Mon, 26 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/25/sick/ I’m completely sick. The full package—congestion, cough, voice destroyed, probably running a fever but I was too lazy to actually check. So I’m half-dead in bed watching Pearl Harbor, which is what you do when you’re this wiped out. At least I know how it ends: Japan loses. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/25/sick/ Sun, 25 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/24/cookies-and-milk/ Santa still makes his rounds, sliding down chimneys with gifts that nobody asked for but somehow needed. I leave out cookies and milk by the fireplace like I always do—part ritual, part habit, part faith in the whole strange tradition. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/24/cookies-and-milk/ Sat, 24 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/23/christmas-party/ So the school Christmas party had karaoke, coffee and tea stands, some speed dating thing, way too much food. Only problem was they didn’t stock any sodas—no Coke, no Fanta—so I was parched the whole time. After that, Katha and I went into the city to hunt for gifts, ran into Meggi on the way back and she drove home with us. Then I went over to my girlfriend’s place for a bit, then to Steffi and Patrick’s to borrow some DVDs—got “Sahara” and “Harry Potter IV.” https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/23/christmas-party/ Fri, 23 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/23/the-sell/ Apple rings aren’t as good as apple chips, but whatever. Last real school day today and somehow I aced an economics test that had the class split down the middle—half of them got it, half didn’t. Tomorrow’s the Christmas party and we’re selling pizza, which means I’m definitely eating half of what we make because I’m already hungry. Got one in the oven right now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/23/the-sell/ Fri, 23 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/23/winter-in-munich/ Went to Munich with my mom yesterday to grab some clothes and pick up a Mighty Mouse I’d ordered. The cold there is something else—the kind that makes your face hurt. Got myself a proper scarf and gloves because you’re not surviving that without them. We ate at a steakhouse and I just went at it like I hadn’t seen food in months. Genuinely starving. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/23/winter-in-munich/ Fri, 23 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/20/back-on-air/ The website was down for the rebuild when a snowstorm hit and knocked the satellite dish completely off, so I was stuck with ProSieben and SF1 as my only television options. Don’t ask me why I was watching either one. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/20/back-on-air/ Tue, 20 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/19/back-to-the-roots/ I gutted the site and launched version 7.0. Nothing massive changed, but I stripped out most of what was there—removed rubric experiments that never worked, deleted features nobody needed, added a comment system that doesn’t break. Cleaner palette, fewer sections, the whole thing tighter. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/19/back-to-the-roots/ Mon, 19 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/17/farewell-to-orange-county/ John was around yesterday. We walked for a while and talked about the usual human despair. He’s got these green contact lenses that are kind of disturbing. Found out Kalli wants nothing to do with me anymore—one of those things you find out and then just move on from. School was half-good. Spent the evening with Becca in Kaufbeuren. Now I’m waiting for the last episode of The O.C. tonight at 21:15. The world’s brutal but at least there’s this. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/17/farewell-to-orange-county/ Sat, 17 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/15/frequently-asked-questions/ In one of my Mac magazines, the editors were asked to fill out a questionnaire for an anniversary. I’ll take the questions, but not the answers. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/15/frequently-asked-questions/ Thu, 15 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/13/the-end-is-near/ Soon, so many things we’ve gotten used to will be coming to an end. Whether it’s the finale of The O.C., the passing of the year 2005, or even the end of this website. But of course MARCELTV.COM will strike back even stronger in 2006 — with Version 7. A premiere, by the way, that I’m actually announcing an update. Let’s hope that brings us some luck. And then you’ll once again be flooded with my wonderful blog posts, just like you’re used to. It won’t be long now. Until then, stay loyal to MARCELTV.COM and stay tuned to see what’s still waiting for you here before the big update. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/13/the-end-is-near/ Tue, 13 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/7/not-yet/ The OC ended and I hated that it did. Not the show—I love the show, the finale especially. I hated that it was over. I knew this day was coming, sure, but knowing and watching are different things. The finale went all in. They killed people you thought were untouchable. Kirsten and Sandy still tangled up. Ryan and Marissa uncertain. The Coopers in pieces. The show just stops there with nothing resolved, nothing answered, everything hanging. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/7/not-yet/ Wed, 07 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/6/tuesday/ School was stupid and fun that day—we caused enough trouble that it didn’t feel like I was just moving through the system. Went to the city with Katha after, both of us looking for things neither of us found, got some good chicken wings anyway. Then home for a minute and back out with Mille for döner. One of those afternoons that just dissolves into the next thing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/6/tuesday/ Tue, 06 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/5/made-a-podcast/ Made a podcast. After enough time writing the same way, you wonder what it’s like to just talk instead. The voice is different—more immediate, weirder, because you can’t backspace. That’s the whole point, really. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/5/made-a-podcast/ Mon, 05 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/4/we-are-podcast/ Well I’ll be damned — like the world’s been waiting for this: even we’ve got our own podcast now! It took a long time to get everything just right — choosing the perfect music and interesting topics — because of course the MARCELTV.COM podcast is supposed to shoot straight to number one as fast as possible! So join in and grab the official MARCELTV.COM podcast now on iTunes! https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/4/we-are-podcast/ Sun, 04 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/3/already-happy/ Found this old quote making the rounds again—the kind of thing people used to pass around when we actually debated which browser you were using. “If you’re on a PC, your life will be happier if you give up Internet Explorer and switch to Firefox. If you’re using a Mac, your life is already happy. Carry on.” https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/3/already-happy/ Sat, 03 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/2/the-noon-train/ Spent three hours writing German essays for class—absolutely brutal. Afternoon classes were just us messing around after that, nothing serious left to do. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/2/the-noon-train/ Fri, 02 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/1/waiting-around/ School was okay today, even if the day drove me nuts. Went to the post office and sent fifty dollars off on what’s probably a long, slow journey—hell if I know when those people will actually process it and unlock my access to whatever I’m waiting for. But that’s how it goes. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/1/waiting-around/ Thu, 01 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/1/permanent-record/ Found it on KaZaA while downloading music, sometime in the early 2000s. Some girl’s sex tape. Libby Hoeller. She’d broken up with her boyfriend in D.C., he got angry, and since he had this video of her from when they were dating, he figured why not push it onto every P2P network he could reach. Standard revenge plot. The internet just made it frictionless—a couple hours and it’s on thousands of computers. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/1/permanent-record/ Thu, 01 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/1/awarded/ Ta-da! MARCELTV.COM has won an award! https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/12/1/awarded/ Thu, 01 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/30/the-oc-finale/ Becca and I are back together. Was inevitable, we just work. Fifty dollars from the bank today. First time holding US currency. Foreign money just feels different. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/30/the-oc-finale/ Wed, 30 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/30/wrecked/ Back at school sports for the first time in weeks and I immediately knew why I’d quit. Basketball completely wrecked me, just standing around gasping for air. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/30/wrecked/ Wed, 30 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/29/secret-santa-like-the-elves/ School was okay today, but somehow yesterday was more fun—I have no idea why. Tuesdays always go by so slowly, even though we technically have the fewest classes. Tomorrow is Wednesday and that means sports. Oh God, I hate school sports, but once every two months I guess I’ll survive. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/29/secret-santa-like-the-elves/ Tue, 29 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/28/the-alarm/ Wake up some mornings and think about ending it all. The alarm clock, that sound, the half-light—everything about my life compresses into that one moment. Last night I dreamed I was on some kind of trip with my bonsai tree, absolutely zero logic to it, but there I was. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/28/the-alarm/ Mon, 28 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/27/bad-girls-for-life/ If you know my site, you know that when I disappear without warning, an update might be coming—and what an update this is! Version 6.1 “Gogo” says goodbye to the nice MARCELTV.COM image and moves into a darker, less friendly direction. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/27/bad-girls-for-life/ Sun, 27 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/25/japanese-music-i-like/ The 28-year-old singer Namie Amuro, who gained stage experience in the music group Super Monkeys, is now a successful solo artist with fast-paced, R&B-influenced tracks and is one of the biggest names in showbiz. My recommended tracks areComeandAs Good As. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/25/japanese-music-i-like/ Fri, 25 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/23/winter-in-munich/ Went to Munich with my mom to buy clothes and pick up my Mighty Mouse. It was freezing cold. Bought a proper scarf and gloves. We ate at a steakhouse — I devoured everything because I was starving. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/23/winter-in-munich/ Wed, 23 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/22/solo/ Being taken was somehow more attractive than being available—women materialized when you were already committed, like they could smell the unavailability. That’s how it worked for years. Now I’m actually single again, properly single, and I’m waiting for the inverse to happen even though it probably won’t. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/22/solo/ Tue, 22 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/22/converting/ Converting a video to DVD on a Mac has turned out to be way more annoying than I expected. To get the raw footage into the right format there’s this whole ecosystem of file types and options, most of which don’t do what you think they’ll do. You pick one, hit render, and then two hours later the status bar is still saying 845 minutes remaining. I wanted to use DivX—iMovie HD has DivX as an export option, right there in the menu—but it turns out you have to install the DivX codec separately first, or else iMovie exports in garbage quality. So I installed it, and things got slightly less infuriating, but it’s still not what I’d call easy. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/22/converting/ Tue, 22 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/21/the-other-version/ Was at a friend’s place the other day and checked my site on his Windows PC. Internet Explorer. The nav bar had this thick white stripe straight down the middle, fonts had turned Times New Roman, everything looked completely different from what I was seeing on Safari back home. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/21/the-other-version/ Mon, 21 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/20/kangaroo-and-fries/ I went to my grandmother’s birthday party at this restaurant. Started with pumpkin seed soup—nothing fancy but I’d never had it before and it was actually good. Good enough that I had them pack the leftovers. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/20/kangaroo-and-fries/ Sun, 20 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/18/prague/ Just back from Prague and completely wrecked. We were out the entire time, moving constantly. My group was what made it—the kind of people where exhaustion feels like a small price for being around them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/18/prague/ Fri, 18 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/16/shows-i-like/ The O.C.showcases the art of the modern soap opera. Anyone who disturbs me on Wednesday evenings can be sure of their imminent demise, because that’s when my absolute favorite series,The O.C., airs on ProSieben! The series deals with the everyday life of a high society family in Orange County, which consists mainly of intrigue, power, and sex, but of course also combines love and friendship in episodes that are always cool and never boring. Awesome! https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/16/shows-i-like/ Wed, 16 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/14/see-you-friday/ Heading to Prague tomorrow with my class. Bringing my Sony Handycam because I’m working on this film project and I actually want it to be good, so don’t steal it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/14/see-you-friday/ Mon, 14 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/13/heartbeats/ You watch other people’s relationships and you see the same pattern over and over. John and Mandy just broke up—both of them wanted out, it just wasn’t working. So like everyone does, John tries to fix himself. Goes full goth, decides he needs something “real” this time, someone he doesn’t have to perform for. As if the problem was ever the costume. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/13/heartbeats/ Sun, 13 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/11/music-i-like/ The Brilliant Green bring Japanese summer days into your home. The Japanese band consisting of Tommy (vocals), Ryo (guitar), and Shunsaku (bass) is my personal favorite JPop band. With songs likeRainy Days Never StaysandForever to Me, they prove how cheerful, cheeky, and also sad Japanese music can be and is. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/11/music-i-like/ Fri, 11 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/9/still-good/ Had her birthday at her place, friends came over. At some point while we were all there I caught myself just watching her and thinking about how rare this is, how much I want it to last. I don’t usually admit stuff like that, but there it is. Things are really good with her right now. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/9/still-good/ Wed, 09 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/6/back-from-nothing/ I formatted my hard drive. Not intentionally—I was doing a clean install of Tiger, got sloppy, and erased everything instead. All my files, all my shit, gone. I sat there waiting for the OS to load and realized I was staring at a completely empty machine. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/6/back-from-nothing/ Sun, 06 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/5/movies-i-like/ Lost in Translationcaptivates with its sense of longing. Bob, an actor going through a midlife crisis, and Charlotte, the young, neglected wife of a successful photographer, meet by chance in the middle of Tokyo. They decide to paint the town red together. In doing so, they discover the little secrets behind the huge metropolis and its multifaceted inhabitants. The film is beautiful, and for me personally, the fact that it is set in Tokyo, where the two lonely souls find themselves, was of course a decisive factor. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/5/movies-i-like/ Sat, 05 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/4/open-heart-surgery/ Becca and I watched the MTV Europe Music Awards last night. Borat was brilliant as host—genuinely one of the best I’d seen. But something nagged at me: 99% of the performances and nominations were American. It’s the Europe Music Awards. Where were the European artists? Robbie Williams, Rammstein—they were basically the only ones that actually registered. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/4/open-heart-surgery/ Fri, 04 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/2/blue-walls/ Heard something on Giga today about Windows going cloud-only someday—no installation, just log in online and your whole interface appears. Pretty funny idea in theory, supposedly stops piracy, though I doubt anyone wants to use it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/2/blue-walls/ Wed, 02 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/1/he-shouldve-known-better/ Helped Becca paint her room today and it actually went well—one of those moments where it clicks and you both think maybe we should do this more often. Then Basti came over for the Halloween DVD night and immediately set about finding something wrong with basically everything: the TV, the room, the chips I bought, my internet connection, my web editor, the whole movie selection. He wasn’t wrong about Wrong Turn being a slog, I’ll give him that. But then he said something about the Mac and I was completely done. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/11/1/he-shouldve-known-better/ Tue, 01 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/10/31/whats-vacation/ My mom walks in around seven in the morning yelling at me to get up, like I’d somehow overslept. I’m barely awake and confused, so I just tell her I’m on vacation, and she leaves. But of course I can’t fall back asleep after that. So I end up at the computer working on the website. Then breakfast. Then listened to some music. Then back at the computer. Nothing really happened. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/10/31/whats-vacation/ Mon, 31 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/10/30/the-whole-crew/ Nearly three in the morning and I’m wired from P.M. for the first time. Julian, Danny B., Mille, Ana, Knuffi—all there. The place is bigger than Nachtcafe, more going on, actual food. That alone makes it worth the trip back. Five euros for a Smirnoff though, which is insane, but the space, the room to move around, made up for it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/10/30/the-whole-crew/ Sun, 30 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/10/29/the-station/ School ended yesterday. Got a week off, finally, though first there was the usual eight hours of slogging through classes—only French was worth sitting through. There’s talk about Prague coming up, and the logic seems to be that if I’m already having this much fun just being around people at school, an actual trip would be even better. We’ll see if that holds up when it actually happens. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/10/29/the-station/ Sat, 29 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/10/28/suicide-circle/ It is a normal day as people wait for their train at a Tokyo subway station. Some schoolgirls run down the stairs laughing and telling stories. A male voice announces the next train arriving. Suddenly, the schoolgirls line up, cheerfully shout1, 2, 3and jump onto the tracks together. A bloodbath with 54 dead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/10/28/suicide-circle/ Fri, 28 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/10/27/bombed/ Couldn’t get out of bed this morning. One of those mornings where you just can’t. Dragged myself to the station half-conscious, heading out to Kaufbeuren while the rest of the group had scattered to their own plans. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/10/27/bombed/ Thu, 27 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/10/26/tracking/ Been watching The O.C. and the whole Ryan-and-Marissa thing is either going somewhere or it’s not—the show keeps dragging it out with this Trey subplot instead of just telling you what happens. It’s stupid to care this much about a television show but here I am, invested in two fictional teenagers like it matters. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/10/26/tracking/ Wed, 26 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/10/25/the-cold/ The leaves turn brown and all the spring couples start breaking up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/10/25/the-cold/ Tue, 25 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/10/22/three-things-i-like/ Japanese pop music: As a big fan of everything that comes from Japan, my heart always beat faster when I heard Japanese music as a child. In the past, it was almost impossible to get hold of this kind of music, but today you can find tons of J-pop on the internet. My favorite artists are The Brilliant Green, Ayumi Hamasaki, and Utada Hikaru. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/10/22/three-things-i-like/ Sat, 22 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/10/20/tower-keeper/ We all got together in September for Kallilein’s birthday. The night was silly and rambling, the kind where you’re not sure how long things will last but you’re enjoying it anyway. The highlight was this tower we built - hundred-something pieces stacked up - which somehow became this thing everyone wanted to solve. I ended up as the tower keeper, whatever that means. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/10/20/tower-keeper/ Thu, 20 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/10/14/2ldk/ The two less-than-talented actresses Nozomi and Lana are forced to live together in a two-room apartment rented by their agency, even though they can’t stand each other. When both qualify for the lead role in a yakuza feature film, a psychological death spiral erupts between the luxury bitch Lana and the provincial mouse Nozomi, starting with pointed remarks and escalating to a fight to the death in which everything from beer openers to samurai swords to a chainsaw is allowed.—neither of them wants to leave the apartment as the loser, and little by little, many secrets from the past come to light. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/10/14/2ldk/ Fri, 14 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/10/10/the-oc-night/ I was in rough shape. Threw up twice the night before and had no idea why—one of those nights where your body just bails on you completely. Then couldn’t sleep. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/10/10/the-oc-night/ Mon, 10 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/10/6/that-kind-of-night/ It’s dark outside. Just watched two episodes of The O.C. back-to-back—bought the season one DVD box today and grabbed the soundtracks while I was at it. “Rain City” by Turin Brakes is playing in the background. There’s a melancholy settled in the room that I’m not bothering to resist. I’m not in the mood to write about my day. I’m just putting this down, these few minutes of sadness and half-thoughts, and leaving it there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/10/6/that-kind-of-night/ Thu, 06 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/10/5/locked-in/ I hate what The O.C. does to you. Every time an episode ends, you’re left with this melancholic feeling you don’t know what to do with, and then you’re stuck waiting a week to find out what happens next. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/10/5/locked-in/ Wed, 05 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/9/10/back-from-holidays/ I’m back from vacation and was shocked to see that my site on the new server is even more cluttered with ads than before. I will completely redesign the site and upload it with my own .de domain. That may take a while—see you soon. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/9/10/back-from-holidays/ Sat, 10 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/23/nickelodeons-back/ Nickelodeon’s back on German TV. The news was probably circulating a while, but it’s happening now—MTV2POP is getting displaced, Nickelodeon’s taking its place, and they’re stripping Super RTL of a bunch of shows in the process. They’ve timed it perfectly for the school year, which is exactly the kind of calculated nostalgia move the channel would make. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/23/nickelodeons-back/ Tue, 23 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/22/new-host/ I had to leave my longtime host Tripod because of excessive ads and because their pages aren’t listed on Google. Maybe I should finally become professional and get a real domain. For now, my site is hosted at cybton.com. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/22/new-host/ Mon, 22 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/21/wet-start/ My mom woke me up early because her car wouldn’t start. We went out in the rain to push it around the driveway, me in my Nike hoodie getting completely soaked, but nothing happened. My uncle finally showed up with jumper cables and got it going. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/21/wet-start/ Sun, 21 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/21/eeny-meeny-mac-and-youre-gone/ I replaced the “Sound / Video lists” section with a new one called “Apple Macintosh.” After I switch, I’ll document my experiences with the Mac. This is a big step for me, and I’m excited to discover something completely new. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/21/eeny-meeny-mac-and-youre-gone/ Sun, 21 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/20/the-switch/ I made the jump from Windows to Mac sometime in the early 2000s, and I remember the relief being almost physical. The blue screens, the inexplicable crashes, the sense that everything was one update away from catastrophe—it all just stopped. I’d spent years troubleshooting drivers, running disk defrag utilities like they were religious rituals, restarting for what felt like the thousandth time before something simple would work. Windows felt like it was actively working against you, like the machine resented your presence on it. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/20/the-switch/ Sat, 20 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/20/too-late/ Seth’s holding on to Summer way too hard, and he doesn’t realize until the end that letting go is actually the only move that makes sense. But knowing it and being able to do it are different things. Marissa probably felt something similar when she saw Ryan with Lindsay—that moment where someone you wanted has already left, and you’re just watching it happen after the fact. It’s bleak. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/20/too-late/ Sat, 20 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/18/the-reset/ Yesterday after watching The O.C. (double episode) I was lying in bed wanting to listen to an album on my iPod. Hit play. Nothing happened. Checked if I’d hit the hold button like an idiot, but no. Tried every combination of buttons. My iPod was just dead. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/18/the-reset/ Thu, 18 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/17/blood-ties/ Finally caught The OC episodes I’d missed, two in a row on Wednesday. I can’t quite separate them in my head anymore, the timeline’s already gone soft, so I’m just going to let them stay blurred and talk about what mattered. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/17/blood-ties/ Wed, 17 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/15/mac-dreaming/ I couldn’t figure out what I wanted. Next year I’d need a new computer, and the question was simple enough on paper: Windows Vista or a Mac? But nothing about it was actually simple. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/15/mac-dreaming/ Mon, 15 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/14/once-a-year/ Rain has this quality I like—something melancholic about it that feels almost beautiful, even when it’s just weather doing what weather does. Lucky for us it didn’t rain yesterday because we had a van full of stuff parked at a flea market between Bad Wörishofen and Irsingen. Selling things by the hour is numbing once you’ve been there a few hours, just people walking past your table, but it was worth it—I made almost 300 euros. In the evening I went to Becca’s mom’s birthday party, one of those reliably pleasant events. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/14/once-a-year/ Sun, 14 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/13/vista/ Vista showed some genuine design thinking when the early builds started circulating. The glass effects, the transparency, this visual language that made Windows look like it might actually belong in the 2000s. There was something there. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/13/vista/ Sat, 13 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/12/nightmare-weight/ Last night I had this incredibly vivid nightmare that’s been sitting in my chest all day like something heavy I can’t shake. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/12/nightmare-weight/ Fri, 12 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/11/quote-of-the-month/ As always at the beginning of each month, here is the quote of the month: https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/11/quote-of-the-month/ Thu, 11 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/11/therme/ My girlfriend came over. We had one of those conversations that doesn’t arrive anywhere but feels essential anyway. Then my favorite cousin. Then Mille, Palle and I somehow went shopping with zero money, which works out if you’re not too particular about buying things. Then nearly everyone made it to a thermal bath in Bad Worishofen—crowded and hot and full of people, which sounds bad but wasn’t. Pizza after. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/11/therme/ Thu, 11 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/10/how-it-happens/ Watched Halloween 5 at Mille’s last night—painfully boring, no surprise there. But the movie wasn’t really the point. Somewhere around the middle, while Michael Myers was doing whatever, Palle and Madeleine figured out they liked each other. You’re all scattered on couches, not paying attention, and suddenly two people are hyperaware of each other. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/10/how-it-happens/ Wed, 10 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/8/darker-now/ Japanese rock music, loud enough that everything else disappears. That’s the only way to redesign something that’s yours. The old design was too clean, too apologetic. This new version—darker, weirder—is what should’ve been there from the start. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/8/darker-now/ Mon, 08 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/6/the-island/ Yesterday we spontaneously decided to all go to the Corona cinema. Some really wanted to seeMr. & Mrs. Smith, but I was more interested inThe Island. So they went to one movie, and Lydia and I went to seeThe Island. And it was worth it! The film was breathtakingly well made—great story, great action, and amazing visuals. The beautiful Scarlett Johansson (from my favorite filmLost in Translation) and the likable Ewan McGregor (whom I also loved inMoulin Rouge) made it even more worth seeing. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/6/the-island/ Sat, 06 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/3/bettys-seventeen/ Betty’s seventeen now. Somehow that happened. Anyway, happy birthday. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/8/3/bettys-seventeen/ Wed, 03 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/31/no-parking-spaces-anywhere/ Bad Worishofen apparently has no parking. We were supposed to meet at Chaplin II and ended up driving around for twenty minutes looking for a spot. The bar itself is fine, nothing wrong with it, but there’s some kind of event happening inside—loud, chaotic, feels like a small bombardment. Not the vibe you want when you’re just trying to grab a drink with friends, so we give up. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/31/no-parking-spaces-anywhere/ Sun, 31 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/31/that-munich-day/ Drove to Munich yesterday with Ben, Lydia, Betty, and Bianca. They all had free train tickets from some grades-based promotion the railway does every year, so we figured we might as well go. Breakfast at Burger King, lunch at McDonald’s, dinner at Pizza Hut—a real health food adventure. The girls wanted to hit Orsay and Pimkie while the rest of us just wandered along. Everyone made it to Saturn. But I was mainly there for Neo Tokyo, this anime and J-Pop shop I’d been meaning to actually visit instead of just knowing it existed. Picked up more CDs than my budget could handle, which is always what happens the moment you step inside a place like that. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/31/that-munich-day/ Sun, 31 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/31/blow/ His daughter won’t look at him anymore. That’s what stays with you. Johnny Depp’s George Jung spends two hours convincing himself that every bit of it—the cocaine, the money, everything—is for her, for security, for the family. And then she’s gone anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/31/blow/ Sun, 31 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/30/that-kind-of-night/ Met up with everyone at Mille and ended up back at my place with Sabrina and her friend instead of heading to Chaplin. We put on a couple of terrible movies just to have something on, the kind you’re not really watching anyway. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/30/that-kind-of-night/ Sat, 30 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/28/a-new-era/ Oh, it could have been so nice. The last few minutes ofCharmedhad just finished, I sat down comfortably on my couch with my iced tea and my remote control, and I already heard,Previously on The O.C....when suddenly the doorbell rang. I looked downstairs—who was standing there? Sarah and her friend—who is also named Sarah. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/28/a-new-era/ Thu, 28 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/27/lydias-seventeenth/ Lydia’s seventeenth was last night. Her parents did a backyard grill thing. Pretty much everyone came. I dragged Eniz along since he wasn’t working. The whole evening came together—one of those where everyone’s in a good mood and nothing really goes sideways. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/27/lydias-seventeenth/ Wed, 27 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/26/happy-birthday-lydia/ Lydia turned seventeen today. I wanted to mark it somehow, to say I hope she stays exactly as she is. We haven’t seen each other in too long. One of those friendships where the time doesn’t really matter, but you still notice the gap. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/26/happy-birthday-lydia/ Tue, 26 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/24/its-raining/ It’s raining. The weekend’s over, saying goodbye the only way it knows how—for good. She started her England tour this morning. I couldn’t make Lydia and Betty’s birthday yesterday, had something come up. See what next week brings. Hope I can be there next time. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/24/its-raining/ Sun, 24 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/18/statement/ I am delighted that myguestbookis being used so actively. It’s the ideal way to send me an open message that is freely available to everyone. This post is a case in point. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/18/statement/ Mon, 18 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/17/the-twin-effects/ Becca and I had a cozy DVD night together yesterday and watchedThe Twin Effects. And because I actually enjoy watching movies and will always do so, I want to start incorporating cool movie reviews from now on whenever I’ve seen a good film. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/17/the-twin-effects/ Sun, 17 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/16/this-is-the-middle-ages/ Mille, Palle, Julian, Becca, and I made our way to the Tänzelfest in Kaufbeuren yesterday. After narrowly missing the train, hanging around at the station for an hour, and bumping into Steffi—who then came with us—we finally arrived. Mille and Palle were already drunk as skunks when we arrived, while Julian held back. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/16/this-is-the-middle-ages/ Sat, 16 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/15/madagascar/ Rebecca and I went to the movies yesterday and sawMadagascar. I thought the movie was awesome, but she likedShrekbetter. Still, I can really recommend this movie to everyone—it’s fantastic. Here’s my review of the movie: Action: 2/5. Sex: 0/5. Humor: 5/5. Suspense: 2/5. Overall rating: 5/5. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/15/madagascar/ Fri, 15 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/14/ryan-marissa/ What happened to sweet Marissa? After Ryan briefly left, she threw herself into alcohol addiction—which has nasty consequences, believe me—and slept with the gardener. Consequences? It’s pretty clear that joker Seth and his girlfriend are getting back together, but what really interests me is Ryan and Marissa. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/14/ryan-marissa/ Thu, 14 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/7/a-small-note-on-my-own-behalf/ The HTML code on my website is now error-free. A minor script issue introduced during the last update has been identified and corrected. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/7/a-small-note-on-my-own-behalf/ Thu, 07 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/7/attacks-in-london/ It has happened again. I wake up, turn on the TV, expecting the usual news, and once more I am confronted with a terrorist attack—this time in London. Such incidents are becoming all too common, prompting the unsettling question: are we living in an age defined by terror? https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/7/attacks-in-london/ Thu, 07 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/6/different-than-expected/ The rumors are confirmed: tomorrow’s newspaper front page reveals that Mille is in a new relationship. Contrary to expectations, his partner is not Irina, but a 20-year-old named Steffi from Bobingen. We hope this relationship proves to be lasting. For those interested in learning more about her, she can be found on iLove. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/6/different-than-expected/ Wed, 06 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/4/no-comment/ A 25-year-old man has been arrested for fatally stabbing his 25-year-old girlfriend on a public street in Buchloe, Ostallgäu. Authorities believe the attack may have been motivated by the woman’s intention to end the relationship. The suspect was taken into custody at the scene. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/4/no-comment/ Mon, 04 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/1/battle-royale/ I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Swiss television for broadcasting Battle Royale in its entirety, apparently without cuts. I had previously assumed that the German-language version had been edited, but it seems this was not the case in Switzerland. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/7/1/battle-royale/ Fri, 01 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/6/27/then-it-turned-black/ It was a quiet Monday morning. A rerun of “The King of Queens” played in the background while I sat at my desk, reflecting once again on the design of my front page and the topics I wanted to share. Then, without warning, it happened. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/6/27/then-it-turned-black/ Mon, 27 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/6/22/paper-war/ On Saturday, I visited the city’s newest trendy shop with Mille—The Trend Factory, sometimes jokingly referred to as a knick-knack store. We spent some time browsing, examining the more curious items, and taking in the assortment of posters on display. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/6/22/paper-war/ Wed, 22 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/6/19/family-family/ What began as a rather uneventful day is finally drawing to a close. The occasion was a large family gathering—relatives visiting from the Far West had made their way to Germany, and everyone dutifully convened at a fairly unremarkable restaurant in a quiet village. I’ll be honest: without my cousin Dennis and his girlfriend Rebecca, the afternoon would have been a trial. I’m grateful for both of them. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/6/19/family-family/ Sun, 19 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/6/18/the-end-of-a-drama/ It’s over. Mille and Irina have separated—not by mutual agreement, though few who knew them well could claim to be surprised. There was something genuinely painful about watching their relationship in its final stretch: the way it strained to move forward, the way Irina’s words landed like small wounds, and the way Mille absorbed it all in near-silence, apparently out of love. But that chapter has now closed. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/6/18/the-end-of-a-drama/ Sat, 18 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/6/17/happy-birthday-mom/ A quick but sincere happy birthday to my mother—today deserves at least that acknowledgment. It also happens to mark my last final exam of the year, though I find it difficult to summon much feeling about it either way, given that I’ll be repeating the year regardless. Apparently I’m not alone in that situation this year, which is a small consolation. In any case: vacation, at last. Now if only whatever is making that noise outside my window would stop. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/6/17/happy-birthday-mom/ Fri, 17 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/6/16/the-oc/ I finally gave in and watched The O.C. on ProSieben last night—two episodes back to back, which says something, given how long I'd held out against it. I'll admit I was wrong to resist. The show is genuinely well-crafted and stands out as one of the more engaging things on German television right now, where the summer schedules are otherwise thick with reruns. I'm looking forward to next Wednesday and curious to see where the storylines are heading—particularly the question of Theresa's pregnancy. On an unrelated note, Mille was right: Marissa really does bear a resemblance to Rebecca. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/6/16/the-oc/ Thu, 16 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/6/1/hello-world/ My name is Marcel Winatschek. I was born on January 5, 1984, in the small Bavarian town of Buchloe, where I still live with my mother. On my father’s side, I have a half-brother and a half-sister who grew up with him in Turkey—two siblings I’ve had the chance to meet only once. https://www.marcelwinatschek.com/2005/6/1/hello-world/ Wed, 01 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +0000