I want these new Mike Mills pillowcases which have just arrived in store with our friends at Third Drawer Down.

Another fine and eclectic event to clutter your busy Berlin weekend schedules with.

‘I wish climbing up was as easy as the sliding down…’

A few weeks back, we asked Kim Hiorthøy, Oslo & Berlin dweller, late blooming electronic musician & MPC wizard, shape shifting renaissance man, prolific graphic designer (for Rune Grammofon et al.), director, artist (who might want to see this in quotes) and art world defier, author, and self-proclaimed amateur for life, to redesign a cheesy Berlin postcard for us. This is what he sent back, saying, “just don’t ask me what it means.” We didn’t.

Legendary Koi Klub is back – we’re so pleased.

This might all change now that I noticed Bernd Kuchenbeiser – the man who signed our popular issue #26 on ECM and the accompanying app for iPad – and his A Book A Day Tweet, where he, quite literally, proposes one art or design book a day. Now trust us, this is someone who really knows what he is talking about – Bernd is an avid collector and connoisseur as far as design is concerned – after all, he was the first subscriber to mono.kultur, long before we were offering any such thing. So if books are your poison, you might want to make this a daily stopping point.

With gentrification swapping back with full force into the Western districts of Kreuzberg and Neukölln that had been pretty much left to their own devices for the past 20 years, and Kreuzbergers being a historically belligerent lot, our neighbours complain about rising rents, the many apartments turned into holiday flats, drones of European youth roaming the streets in search of the next Berlin party. While there maybe some valid questions or issues, surely this can not be the right answer.

So just to say, we think it’s great. The more the better. Not only do bring tourists a not inconsiderable amount of money into our poor but sexy town, but more importantly, they bring the cosmopolitan and international spirit that Berliners have always envied the larger metropolises of London, New York or Tokyo. The visitors we see, we see them go to our local stores, bars, clubs because those are the places we go. Was that not meant to be a good thing?

Germans love to travel – we’re particularly set on finding hidden, local spots, and we adore it when we feel welcome. So shouldn’t we be welcoming ourselves? Germans love to work or study abroad – so what could we possibly have against foreigners wanting to study or work in Germany?

To me, just that fact that Berlin should have this attraction to foreign youth to want to come and live here, to learn the language, is kind of amazing. A thing one couldn’t have imagined 20 years ago, when Germany was probably somewhere among the bottom five on the international hipness scale.

So anyway, us being Berlin as well, we say don’t you worry, none of it is true.