Author: old_wp_importer

The Bad Rash seems like one of the better English blogs in Barcelona. Most posts have some meat to them, and it’s nice when a blogger shares your political/cultural prejudices. He also has links to plenty of other expat blogs in his sidebar.

Of these, From Barcelona concentrates on culture and expat life. Drink Barcelona is a bar guide, unsurprisingly. Catalonia Blog and South of Watford cover politics. This blog mixes Spanish and Scottish politics; this one concentrates mainly on Catalan nationalism.

Of the international networks, Metblogs and [Gridskipper](http://gridskipper.com/tag/barcelona) are absent, but [Unlike](http://barcelona.unlike.net/) and [Spotted by Locals](http://www.spottedbylocals.com/barcelona/) make up for that.

This is a notes-to-myself entry, in which I try to figure out the best online sources for Spanish news in English. There doesn’t seem to be much, which I guess is useful encouragement to learn Spanish

• Guardian
• New York Times
• Google News
• Of sources aimed at expats, Typically Spanish seems to be the only one with any content at all. Euro Weekly News is low-volume and looks like repackaged wire copy.
• Barcelona: Barcelona Reporter has the most news (not much). Barcelona Metropolitan is an entertainment/lifestyle magazine; Barcelona Connect is mainly classifieds.

Simon Reynolds speaks truth:

one of my fiend heros (ex this parish) is said to have said that deconstruction did more damage to him than the drink and the drugs ever did.

My past life peddling MMORPGs to children made me deeply uncomfortable; I’d lump (some) online games in with twitter, religion, Marxist introspection and, yes, deconstruction as serious memetic dangers.

[written with a certain flippancy. Deconstruction has its uses, but too often it forms part of an inward-looking academic world unable to make much connection to the rest of reality. I’m very fond of those rare theorists who

can

harness deconstruction to achieve real-world ends]

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This is a notes-to-myself entry, in which I try to figure out the best online sources for Spanish news in English. There doesn’t seem to be much, which I guess is useful encouragement to learn Spanish

• Guardian
• New York Times
• Google News
• Of sources aimed at expats, Typically Spanish seems to be the only one with any content at all. Euro Weekly News is low-volume and looks like repackaged wire copy.
• Barcelona: Barcelona Reporter has the most news (not much). Barcelona Metropolitan is an entertainment/lifestyle magazine; Barcelona Connect is mainly classifieds.

[from a comment posted elsewhere]

There’s a goth club listing at http://etoile.de/; Berlin is in the section ‘PLZ-Bereich 1′. You can probably read through the genre descriptions and club addresses without needing much German.

The Kit Kat Club is — well, if you’ve had it recommended, you probably have an idea. I like it, although I’ve not been since a couple of years ago, when it was in a different venue. [I stopped going after seeing a page on their site seemingly saying that they don’t want Turks or feminists in the club. Probably it’s just an unfortunately-worded page, but it didn’t make me want to go back]

Also on the sex end of the spectrum, check out Insomnia. It’s a fetish club, with a monthly goth night called ‘angel in bondage’.

K17 is the largest and most regular goth club, with a big dose of metal and industrial. On a Friday or Saturday, they generally have four floors: one trad goth and 80s, one electro/industrial, and two small ones for metal. The venue is ugly as hell, but also huge.

If you fancy going out on a Monday night, Duncker is a lovely smallish club, with a lot of regulars and a friendly atmosphere. They (always?) have some kind of barbeque-type food in their back courtyard, and will keep going until Tuesday morning. I think there’s also a small goth market there every other sunday afternoon (http://www.darkmarket.de/).

Other places: Kato is more rock-oriented, and has lots of smallish live gigs. ACUD and Sama-Cafe are squats (perhaps legalised; I’m not sure), which do goth/wave nights. They’re incredibly cheap (to make them accessible to everybody; do pay a bit more if you can!). Expect plenty of shabby-looking punks and people out of their heads on (cheap) Sternberg beer.

This [via CT] is a good overview of the state of play on the Lisbon treaty:

But some diplomats say it is the foreign policy high representative who may emerge as the strongest figure in the new set-up.

….

The foreign policy chief will be powerful because he or she will not only speak on behalf of EU national governments but will also hold the title of Commission vice-president. The holder will oversee the EU’s multi-billion euro foreign aid budget and control a diplomatic service that will ultimately employ up to 3,000 officials.

Forget who will be the first EU president. The more interesting question is, who will be the second? After 2+ years under the new constitution, what kind of figure would make a plausible president? Will interest groups trampled by the first president push for a low-key successor? Would the position — having, as it does, few formal powers — turn out to be of minor importance? Will the first president be re-elected again and again? (is that possible under the Treaty of Lisbon?) Will politicians start openly campaigning for the office, rather than putting up a public face of being surprised and honoured to be considered?

The Parti Socialiste may be disintegrating at a national level, but according to AG it’s much stronger at a regional level.

The connection between psychology and society is the kind of topic that gets batted endlessly around among pundits, but never makes a dent in practical politics. Currently, it’s in the form of a “greed is stressful” meme, whether in Oliver James’ Affluenza and Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety.

That shape doesn’t much interest me, perhaps because I’m not directly affected by it. I prefer the brute statistical case made by The Spirit Level, a recent book on “why more equal societies almost do better”. This takes the prevalence of mental illness as the key figure (see the radical psychiatrists shudder), and plots it against income inequality:



It all seems horribly deracinated, considering how much attention has been given to similar topics over the decades. We had Lacan and then Guattari in France, treating madness as a rational response to society, and schizophrenia as the model for deconstructing it. Or Marcuse in America, or Laing in Britain, an army of radical psychiatrists, anti-psychiatrists, critical psychiatrists, patients’ movements….There’s plenty worth abandoning from each approach, but surely there’s some scope for cherry-picking?

[PS: out of Paris. Have my mind back. More frequent posts likely, hopefully at least some more coherent than this jumble]