Criolo live in Berlin 2012 (via Ley)

Kleber Gomes a/k/a Criolo, rapper and soul singer from São Paulo has lots of great tracks but Subirusdoistiozin is certainly a highlight. Check out the video and, if you're in the area, his live gig on November 17, 2012, in Berlin (at Gretchen in Kreuzberg).

Mawil Goes Brazil

Wonderful comic artist Mawil recently left Berlin and is currently traveling Brazil. After some time in the north-east he seems to have a month-long residency at the Goethe Institut in Porto Alegre at the moment before attending for example the comic fair Gibicon in Curitiba at the end of the month.

His brilliant impressions and beautiful sketches can be found at http://blog.goethe.de/osmose/.

--- Update 13.10.12: The Osmose Blog is bigger than I thought and it includes sketches from 3 Brazilian comic artists in Germany and 3 German ones in Brazil. Hence, Mawil might not have visited Salvador (yet) and the drawing I uploaded was by Aisha Franz.

German Zweideutigkeit of "Macht"

A linguistic gem of the German language is that the word "MACHT" not only means "power" but is also the plural imperative of "machen" (translated as "to do, to make, to create")...

(Picture from a Poetry Jam in Hannover)

Europa / Europe

Vielleicht ist dies das Europäische daran, dieses unerlöste, nach allen Richtungen ausgreifende Denken, das weder bei den materialistischen Passionen der Neuen Welt noch bei der Spiritualität des Ostens zur Ruhe kommen wird.

(Eberhard Falcke in "Die Zeit" No. 32/12)

Maybe this is the European aspect of it, this unredeemed thinking which reaches out in all directions and which will neither find peace in the materialistic passions of the New World nor in the spirituality of the East.

(my own translation)

Kandel's Reconciliation? "Age of Insight" to appear

I have to admit that 650 pages about "The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present" is quite a good excuse for the constantly postponed publication of "Principles of Neural Science - Ed. 5".
Eric Kandel's "Age of Insight" to appear soon.

#400: Tempo, tempo, tempo, tempo (via Ley)

Fittingly to the beginning of a new year and as blog post number 400:
Caetano Veloso's Oração ao tempo (lyrics here)



and the version by Rita Ribeiro

The Best of Both Worlds

Peter Baumann, former core member of progressive rock band Tangerine Dream, talks about the interplay of conceptual thinking and embodied experience.

Similarly, the Mind & Life Institute seems to combine the best of both (or rather "all") worlds, bringing spirituality, art and science together - for example in an interesting one-day conference called Being Human 2012 on March 24 in San Francisco.

3D Multiverse Multitouch

Tellinya - Cyperspace-Metaverse is just around the corner: The ubiquity of fast internet, remote interaction in real time, (quasi) 3D perception - and now this: Multitouch handling in real space (cf. Minority Report) and 3D reality reconstruction has become feasible by hacking the Kinect depth camera system. Now we just need to hook up more than one and we're ready to evade real reality.

2012 on Information is Beautiful (thanks, Francois)

There is a nice wrap-up of the whole 2012 New Age hype on Information is Beautiful