On more occasions than not, after getting tanked up on Gin Tonics and red wine and listening to Iggy and New Order most of the evening, my friend Karla and I will end up listening to Elvis’ “In The Ghetto” and ABBA’s “The Winner Takes it all” – don’t ask. Yesterday was different though, since …
The common once-in-a-century pandemic turning into mental hell because this time it is taking place in neo-liberal times and the age of surveillance capitalism. The televised genocide on Palestinians, an Israeli Apartheid based on racial superiority that’s being feverishly supported in my country. A falling Empire that’s leaving the world with the monsters and masters …
Amitav Ghosh‘s The Great Derangement (2016) is one tremendous book which examines the question why climate change is not being reflected in contemporary literature and modern art in general. It would be impossible to summarize Ghosh’s elaborate and nuanced thought lines in just a few paragraphs: the Indian writer takes his reader on a journey …
15 months into the pandemic, and life feels like the ending of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale: a heavy veil is slowly lifting and awakening us from a sleep which for many was filled with endless nightmares of multiple kinds. But while the sleeping beauty’s gentle awakening was entwined with roses and initiated by a Prince’s …
We live in a computer world, so we made a song about it. Ralf Hütter In 1981, Edward Snowden‘s revelations on how Imperial America mass-surveilled its own citizens and the citizens of the world were still 32 years away. Yet, the seeds for today’s surveillance capitalism and globalization as 21st century version of colonialization were …
Director: Paul Poet Death is a sad and solemn business? Not always. Especially when it works as natural and just selection, it is a reason for absolute celebration. On October 11th in 2008, I met with friends at Bar Tabac in Cologne to celebrate the death of Austrian Neo-Nazi Jörg Haider by drinking, singing and …
Like in literature, Russians can allow themselves a fastidious arrogance when their electronic music has to measure up with comparable art from the rest of the world. Take a band like Kraftwerk, the German pioneers of electronic music which have always drawn from Russian art and were never really popular in Russia. The Russian avant-garde …
Why All Minorities Should be Scared to Death to Live Under Biden and Colonial European Leaders “What Do You Think of Western Civilization?” “I Think It Would Be a Good Idea” Mahatma Gandhi There is a big elephant in the room: while apartheid and the cruelest possible colonial rule of a far-right government is being …
Director: Wolfgang Petersen Germans had a historical collective TV experience when Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot (1981) was aired as an extended 6-episode (360min) TV-series in 1985 and turned German living rooms into claustrophobic WWII U-boats. Basically every German who was old enough at that time watched the series and was confronted with the true nature …
The now cryogenized Walt Disney, awaiting his resurrection at minus 180 degrees Celsius, conceived and realized a deep-frozen infantile world full of regressive imaginations and phantasms through his movies. Movies that taught especially American society on how to notoriously sugar-coat, and which established an entire unhealthy system of values and ideals, mostly beauty ideals that …
