Daniel Kalder praises some German originals who seem to have sprung fully-formed from the head of Wotan. I first encountered Rammstein in an almost empty cinema on Glasgow’s Buchanan Street, during an afternoon matinee of the largely unloved David Lynch movie Lost Highway. Balthazar Getty had just broken into a house, ... Read More...
About Author Profile: Daniel Kalder
Daniel Kalder looks back at the various vernal revolts of 2011 and argues we shouldn't get too excited. Sometime around the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a long period of abject Western media failure regarding the Putin phenomenon began. Journalists were so busy making fatuous comparisons to Stalin or hyping The New ... Read More...
Daniel Kalder continues our Record Rehab series with another look at a Bowie relaunch album that failed to fire on all rockets. Originally released in 1993, David Bowie’s Black Tie White Noise was the first of many albums he would drop over the next ten years that would each be hailed ... Read More...
We begin a new series, in which we rehabilitate unjustly condemned albums, with a look at a piece of German electronica - was it all about being badgered for sex by machines? Like many people I enjoy the music of Kraftwerk and think that their reputation as musical pioneers is entirely justified. ... Read More...
After a well-deserved break from reading the works of maniacal dictators, Daniel Kalder continues his popular series. Today we meet an authoritarian despot who in his writings manages to do a passable imitation of a human being. Islam Karimov (b.1938) was appointed General Secretary of Uzbekistan's Communist party by Mikhail Gorbachev ... Read More...
As Texas burns, Daniel Kalder continues to mull over the implications of living in a natural disaster area... The other night I was working in my backyard when I caught a whiff of smoke on the wind: a barbecue? I wondered. But there were no smoke trails coming from behind my neighbor’s ... Read More...
Had he lived, Roy Orbison would have been 75 this year. Here, Daniel Kalder writes about the Big O's transcendental power... For me, like most people, memory is intricately intertwined with music. Another Brick in the Wall pt 2 was a hit the year I started school, and so the song always ... Read More...
When I was young, droughts were something that happened elsewhere: as a punishment from God in the Bible, or in far off Africa, where unfortunate babies with distended bellies would die in the scorching heat of an evil sun. In Scotland, by contrast, there was never a shortage of rain ... Read More...
Robert Irwin is an English writer who has written six novels and numerous studies of different aspects of Islamic culture. He is also the Middle Eastern editor of the Times Literary Supplement and has been instrumental in shaping the list of the hyper literary and thoroughly esoteric publisher Dedalus. While ... Read More...
From a vantage point in today's Russia, Scottish-born Daniel Kalder reflects on the butts of jokes, past and present. Although I am still in my mid-thirties I am often struck by how much the world has changed in my lifetime. For instance, I remember when it was acceptable to make jokes about ... Read More...
