ROCHEL & THE DORKS

For many many years now the Fun Club initiative has been a huge Smoker Jesus fan, some say the only fan the band ever had. A while ago we managed to retrieve pieces of their first and only album that is out of print by now. Read and listen here.

Both, Robin Pineda Gould (formerly known as Jimmy Pure Evil) and Tony Abstract (also known as Stash Brown, Michel Braun & The Sheriff), started solo careers after Smoker Jesus went South. We featured the former here & here and the latter here.

While making music & money on their own, they never fully gave up on the idea of joining forces for the good of society and love. Under the name of Smoker Jesus Tokyo Drift they collaborated with Lucy London, later they were called The Best Dressed Musicians and The Drunken Mohammeds, but the songs they wrote while wearing these names are nowhere to be found. A few years back they met in Mexico and started the project Arp Incorporated together with legendary local figure Arp Inbodien. In only three weeks they wrote and recorded a full album containing highly romantic songs. We're trying to retrieve a copy of this rare LP and will post it on Fun Club soon.

However, enough of the foreplay, a few days ago our two favorite composers founded a new band just next door here in Berlin. We just found out about it on Wrangelkiez. Enjoy Rochel & the dorks:

SHOCKING NEUKÖLLN NEWS FROM CANADA

Montréal - We just received confirmation that a shockingly good bar is in the making somewhere in the depths of Neukölln. The source is a Mexican fugitive who found shelter in said well-known French ghetto up North. Claiming to go by the name of Johnny Guitar, he promises a hideaway for broken hearts and cowboy baths, a place where a man can still be a man irrespective of whatever sex or gender he might have, a place where drinking is more than a religion. Here we go, see the video behind the news:

Time to kill (or Sitting with kings (having a drink)) from Robin Pineda Gould on Vimeo.

RANDOM SHOTS FIRED IN NEUKÖLLN

We don't know who said it first, but it was probably an old man with a white beard and an alluring coffee breath: "Life's pretty random." In January 2010 a bunch of chosen deadbeats set out to conquer and expand said credo: "Life's pretty random and so's the Fun Club initiative." Well, we all heard this story before, they made a busload of money with advertisement for fair-traded coffee and such and spent it all an liquor and illegal immigrants - most of them deported from the United States of America before Obama changed everything. However, the cyclical forecast is optimistic, so the Fun Club crowd got back together and decided to send their chief executive himself to Neukölln to shoot spots no human eye has captured before.

Here we see a bussinesman overspraying some lame-ass graffiti close to Wildenbruchplatz. The man is not in the picture anymore because he had to spray somewhere else, yet we see two elderly women talking about their poodle and nuclear waste.

In the next picture we see the kitchen of a restaurant in Neukölln. We're legally bound to keep the name of the restaurant confidential, but it bought us a nice dinner at a better place.

Speaking of beauty, we found a nice make-out place in the Julius street next to the the Neukölln Ordnungsamt. It is somewhat retarded, but we like it: