Happiest Places On The Planet?

I never know how to deal with these surveys/lists.  I mean, Vietnam is the #5 happiest place on the planet?  Would that be before you eat the chicken that's been laying in the sun for 4 days, after you've seen the dead motorbiker (everywhere) or after you've run out of breath in Saigon (which happens a lot, with that pollution thing).

The following does a good job of deconstructing the Happiest list:

http://www.bravenewtraveler.com/2009/09/21/live-long-and-prosper-deconstructing-the-happy-planet-index/

Kunsthaus Tacheles Berlin - WOW

I saw some high-brow musicians perform last night at the most LOW BROW place I've ever been to.  Kunsthaus Tacheles looks like a crazy squat - walls lined with graffiti, pee smell, a makeshift bar in the hall.  Located in the old Jewish Quarter, this big building is five stories of concrete.  It's now an art space but formerly housed a department store.  It even had a pneumatic tube system for sending inter-building mail. 

Anyway...members of the Deutsche Symphonie Orchestra Berlin got together to kick around some Stravinsky for about an hour.  They performed in a concrete hall with an audience on folding chairs.  You can hardly imagine two different things that go so well together. 

I don't know crap about Stravinsky so I spent most of the time wondering what the building has been like during its lifetime.  It was built in 1908.

(download)

Noah And The Whale

(download)

I caught Noah and the Whale this week in Berlin.  It was about my eighth time seeing them.  They looked tired and beaten...they played like it too.  It's hard to watch a band play like this, like the road is catching up with them.  The venue was too big for where they're at - they'd have done well to play a packed-out smaller room and fed off the energy.  I saw them at Reading and Leeds this month - they killed it.  Hopefully they'll pull it together.

I love the new album. Here's a track that gets stuck in my head all day long.