A tour of Germany's cool capital contrasts the Cold War past with the corporate present.
Ron Verzuh
Berlin's graffiti-art underbelly
This is no ordinary romp through Berlin. A transplanted Californian called Summer Banks, a stand-up comic by night and city tour guide by day, leads curious and slightly adventuresome tourists on a search for the finer examples of graffiti art and alternative living in the squats of the trendy and, in some ways, still-divided German capital.
Summer's stand-up routine is called "Comedy Gone Wild" and she's making them laugh every third Saturday at the Comedy Club Kookaburra. After a five-minute introduction there is little doubt that her tour will also be pretty wild. Her show's brochure says the comedy will be "uncensored." Ditto her tour commentary.
Moscow: Red souls in repose
A visit to Lenin's Tomb in smoky Moscow is a trip into the paradox of Russia's past and its present.
Related rabble.ca story:
Moscow: Red souls in repose
Wild fires still raged around Moscow in mid-August and the smoke clouds above Red Square hung heavily over the brown marble block that sits below the ominous red walls of the Kremlin. This is the final resting place of the leader of the October revolution, the event that changed the world in 1917. Here lies Vladimir Ilyich Lenin looking as fresh as a daisy.
Lenin died in 1924 but his body has been kept intact ever since and on display in the polished Red Square crypt. The guide books tell us that his brain has been sliced into thousands of pieces and is preserved for scientific purposes. Was it perhaps to decode and bottle the revolutionary spirit? The rest of him is kept from deteriorating by various treatments and is, in effect, mummified.
Matilda and the literary lights of the Round Table
A cat’s eye view of Manhattan culture from the legendary Algonquin Hotel.
Related rabble.ca story:
Matilda and the literary lights of the Round Table
I curled my body around some blue-jean-covered legs as the human attached to them started to read a copy of The New York Times pulled from the antique rack in the cramped lobby of the most famous literary landmark in Manhattan, The Algonquin Hotel. A momentary purr slipped out as I cosied up to watch the morning hubbub begin. It was a few weeks before my historic home would celebrate its 107th birthday.
Red Seattle: A travelogue
An old episode of Frasier, the television comedy set in Seattle, focuses on an impending strike at the fictional radio station where Frasier works as an on-air psychiatrist. Whether the script writers knew it or not, they were tapping into the radical history of a city that has the dubious or proud distinction of being the location of the first general strike in American history. And that's not all.
In a recent visit to the compact west-coast city about two hours south of Vancouver as the Nexus card let's you fly, er, drive, I uncovered numerous examples of Seattle's connections to the labour movement, indigenous struggles for survival and the haunting licks of Jimi Hendrix's weeping guitar. It was a visit full of eye-opening surprises.
Rage against the vaccine
“I’m just astounded at people. Do they think doctors, scientists, and government are out to poison them or something?” – Dr. David Suzuki
The rage against getting the H1N1 flu vaccine has been largely missing from mainstream hysteria mongering, but there is a palpable and angry segment of the population that is refusing to comply with the recommendations of any and all authorities to get the shot. Like Dr. Suzuki, I was astonished at this recalcitrance to obey those who know or are supposed to know what’s good for us.
Celebrating Inca culture
As we rode the air-conditioned bus down from the mountain citadel at Machu Picchu in the Peruvian Andes, a small boy dressed in traditional Inca warrior gear, appeared on the dusty single-lane road leading to the village of Agua Calientes far below. A few among the packed busload of gringos noticed the boy. The driver honked at him and a few more craned their necks to see him. What they saw was Inca culture in action, but we’ll get to that in a moment.
A May Day in Havana
It was early, too early, when we heard people milling about in the streets of Vedado, a usually quiet neighbourhood in Central Havana. The night had been long and it was still dark as the hum of an overworked air-conditioner competed with the fan to keep us cool but also wide-awake.
The sounds mingled with the periodic roar of a thousand all-night street parties everywhere across the city. It was May Day in Cuba and a million campaneros and campaneras were on the march before dawn.
