Raising the Count

I spent a fair amount of the last weeks typing and staring at a screen, but there's at least one event worth reporting: Richard Kirk was playing live and I found to my surprise that the man can still hack it and hack it good. I was under the impression that his post-Cab stuff was either directionless or derivatively stabbing at trendiness. I just went to have seen him and found that not only can he still conjure up that old elegantly paranoid atmosphere but he also was able to update it. The sheer volume and the good psychedelic CNN videos helped, as did Kirk's adorable flat stubborn Northern working class face which would qualify him for the role of alcoholic hippie father in any Mike Leigh movie. The location was also nice, the gutted steel-and-concrete remains of the former Palast der Republik. Pity they will demolish that building in the long run; but for the extremely ugly coffee-brown windows I like the Palast, and generally find East German postwar architecture superior to West German postwar architecture. By the way, they seem to have demolished the quite beautiful building in which "Maria am Ostbahnhof" used to be located, too. What is this, architectural revisionism?