An introduction

This is a semi-public place to dump text too flimsy to even become a blog post. I wouldn't recommend reading it unless you have a lot of time to waste. You'd be better off at my livejournal. I also have another blog, and write most of the French journal summaries at the Eurozine Review.

Why do I clutter up the internet with this stuff at all? Mainly because I'm trying to get into the habit of displaying as much as possible of what I'm doing in public. Also, Blogger is a decent interface for a notebook

Monday, November 30, 2009

Sunday, November 29, 2009

CT Fantasy recommendations

Crooked Timber book recommendation threads are always, always worth reading. This time, fantasy, with an interesting number of people trying to worm some SF in one way or another. Why are there more people talking about ideas, people and society in an SF than a fantasy setting? Can we blame it all on Tolkein?

me dicen el clandestino / por no llevar papel

Ulrich Beck is writing a monthly column on 'Weltinnenpolitik' for the Franfurter Rundschau. His first piece is devoted to the political demands of sans-papiers. It's not a bad introduction to the issue, which apparently hasn't really come to the fore in Germany. Particularly, the extent to which entire industries and cultures depend on illegal workers.

Grumbling about theatre in Berlin

The Tagesspiegel has a good old rant about the caution and backwardness of Berlin theatre:

All das existiert bis heute, es ist die Avantgarde von gestern und vorgestern. Wie modrige Pilze. Die Formen und Mischformen erzeugen kaum mehr Reibung, sie werden mehr oder weniger aufregend recycelt.


You want to pat the author on the back, give him a pep-talk. I don't know nearly enough about the Berlin theatre scene to say whether it's accurate; certainly there are few people with a positive word to say about Berlin theatre at the moment. My feeling, though, is that the big and famous theatres are always boring, in every city. The interesting stuff is going to come through newer, smaller venues, of which the article avoids much mention. HAU, for instance, seems to be the epicentre of interesting theatre in Berlin, with a constantly-changing programme that puts the bigger places to shame.

On the other hand, much of HAU's content comes from touring companies; that might not make them the best advert for Berlin thetre.

Chinese art in Germany

Sign and Sight, in its weekly guide to the cultural pages of German newspapers, is keeping up a relentless focus on Chinese art. I'm struggling to figure out how much this is a reflection of a genuine trend in the German media, and how much it's just the interest of S&S's writers, editors or backers.

Photoshop labelling

The Telegraph:

A group of 50 politicians want a new law stating published images must have bold printed notice stating they have been digitally enhanced.
....
"It is not an attempt to damage creativity of photographers or publicity campaigns, but to advise the public on whether what they are seeing is real or not."


Well, yes. And that's before you get onto how unpleasantly inhuman all these doctored images look.

Also, I love that the term 'airbrushed' seems set to stick around long, long after every genuine airbrush has been consigned to the scrap-heap

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

What is culture?

From Art Goldhammer's lecture on French culture:

A Jew, Sartre said, is one who is a Jew for the anti-Semite. So let us say that Culture is that which is Culture
for the Other. And let us stipulate further that the Other of Culture is Power, with which it is
locked in mutual embrace

Possession

Just started reading A.S. Byatt's Possession, and am massively enjoying it. Somehow able to be excited by it even though all the characters are, so far, noticeably wet. Little understanding of why I like it, though -- or at least none I'll put in public on the web.

Two new blogs

Once upon a time there was an excellent blog called Volsunga. But its author got busy, or bored, and the blog vanished into the ether. It's now no longer even in the wayback machine, so far as I can see. But - the author has returned!.

Meanwhile, here is another new blog from another excellent person. I like this trend; the more blogs the better.

Monday, November 23, 2009

Tobias Rapp on Rammstein

Spiegel yet again, where Tobias "Easyjetset" Rapp has a delightfully cynical article on Rammstein finally getting their latest album (not quite) banned:

For the professional provocateurs it is almost a little offensive that a passé gay joke about homosexuals supposedly inserting hamsters into their bodies riled the censors more than earlier songs about the cannibal of Rotenburg and incest, or their Leni Riefenstahl video.


And he has the cultural situation of Neue Deutsche Härte precisely pinned down:


Rammstein, six East German musicians who played in various underground bands in East Germany, derived a successful business model from their understanding that there are no consequences for cultural rebellion in capitalism. Their recipe is simple: Cram sex and violence into a Dadaist vise (a technique that is probably most successful in "Pussy," with lines like "Blitzkrieg with the meat gun"), add layers of loud guitar music and synthesizer noise, and gurgle out the words in a deep, throaty voice.

MultiKulti fail

Also in Der Spiegel, polling of Turkish Germans:

Turks are the largest ethnic minority in Germany and make up almost 4 percent of the country's population. Yet only 21 percent of those polled feel happy to call Germany home.

Decline and fall

Paris-bashing is seeping gradually further into the mainstream:

"It is now well-known that Paris has lost all kind of European leadership to the benefit of towns such as London, Barcelona, Prague and Berlin, to which more and more French professional artists are going into exile,"

Monday, November 9, 2009

Gerry Adams and MLK

In a (month-old) interview with Gerry Adams, Johann Hari emphasises the similarity between Republican movements in Ireland and a cross-Atlantic counterpart:

.

Over the next few years, Catholics in Northern Ireland – stirred by the black civil rights movement in the US, and the dream of Martin Luther King – started to peacefully organise to demand equality.... "There was a sense of naiveté, of innocence almost, a feeling that the demands we were making were so reasonable that all we had to do was kick up a row and the establishment would give in," he says. But the civil rights marches were met with extraordinary ferocity. Protestant mobs attacked the demonstrators, and then the RUC swooped in to smash them up.


Following this line, the divergent outcomes for the two movements become a case study of the snowball effect of political choices. Also of the distortions of hindsight, which tends to elide the violent parts of the US civil rights movement, and the peaceful ends of Irish republicanism.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

'Liberation'


Bobbed, geometric haircuts. Chunky jewellery. Vegetarian diets. Saxophone playing. Breathing exercises. Painting. Carving. Snapping with brand new 35mm Leica cameras. Dressing in the artiest handmade clothes. Attending arty parties. Ninety years on from the founding of Walter Gropius's legendary art, craft and design school, the female students of the Bauhaus appear to have been as liberated as young women today.

--- the Guardian