Monthly Archive for October, 2009

Strange way of capitalism that is

Strolled along Broadway Market last weekend to buy some groceries. The market is just around the corner from where I live and the food there is amazing. Passed by the two sweet white haired old men selling some of the best bread in town. Bought a loaf and got another one for free. Then I walked over to where the garden vegetables are sold. Bought five apples with two worms, and got three courgettes for free as well as two peppers.

Went to Liberty the next day after work. Besides walking up and down the beautiful wooden staircase, I had to buy some Aveda stuff. Mine was empty, and other than the staircase one litre of Aveda’s shampure is worth crossing half of the town twice a year. Bought three product and got additional hair-care product, hair brush, lip-gloss and hair spray for free. That makes four in exchange for three.

tasteofbitterlove2

Is capitalism insane here? For the Broadway Market incident, it simply made no sense to throw the stuff away, so I can explain that they were pampering me with give aways. But when Liberty showered me on the next day, I got really confused. Strange way of capitalism this is. If you have money to spend, you’ll get it returned. If you don’t have any money, that’s your own fault.

But actually if I give it a thought, at least if it happens spontaneously the buy-one-get-one-free attitude is much more sympathetic as well as pragmatic than the strict German you-pay-for-what-you-get system. The German one denies the logic of supply and demand much more, at least on the side of supply. So even if you have money, you can never get the feeling you have been lucky, since you have to pay dearly. Hm. Which one do you prefer?

28/10/09
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The soul is still dancing, ach Werner Herzog

guano

Went To the UK premier of ‘Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans’ on Friday, thanks to my friend Plugimi, who is always curious enough for new impressions of our modern culture to pull me along. And I have to say, I didn’t regret it. We came out stoked.

Now, I never been much of a Werner Herzog fan. I always thought most of his movies, at least the ones I have seen, were something very special but pretty massive and a bit to massive for me. An act of force. And then this dark, wonderful, absurd, playful, brutal, beautiful, skewed and honest film caught me, which manages to fall between the cracks and make itself comfortable right there.

“Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans” is a film noir, and maybe that genre is perfect for a Werner Herzog, who lives in the States and still speaks with a heavy German accent. The style of the movie is not Hollywood, but the story is very much so. Its attitude is European, sometimes it is a parable of a man between good and evil, then again the story is to fast and entertaining for it, more as in a Hollywood action thriller, which suddenly takes an absurd turn like French cinema sometimes does. The atmosphere is dark as in one of David Lynchs movies, but Nicolas Cage is not fighting for love. He is sliding.

Let me put it like this, I think, the film is not about the story, but the story is there because it enables Herzog to make such a film. It is definitely not the story of a basically good cop who becomes a cocaine addict and then things go wrong, till in the last moment luck turns on his side and he gets the gun, the girl and the house. No, because first of all the shit is to dark, secondly the story line stumbles over the only scene that is repeated, repeated in the moment when the end is already there and happy: Everything is good, good, good, the new home looks amazing and then an unbelievable good drug addict cop aka Nicolas Cage misuses his power in a rather disgusting way to abuse a couple/party girl again (second time open end).

In between you get unbelievable dialogues, two guanos which sing Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Please release me” and a high-class hooker (Eva Mendes), who walks out to the AA. Anyway, the precision, the playfulness and the Herzogian act of force makes it a breath taking movie, a work of art. Besides, I love the South. Go have a look yourself. Don’t miss.

26/10/09
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The Force of Facebook

katemoss In the German feuilleton of Die Zeit Adam Soboczynski discusses the social network again and gives us a broad hint that Facebook changed the rules of the publishing society: Visibility was something that was dosed in the courtly society as well as in the civil one. Not so today, though. Thanks to Twitter and social networks like Facebook the rules changed: You can’t remain silent anymore. Who remains silent, won’t count.

Well, surprise, eh? But wrong assumption. First of all, the society, yes, is talkative, but it got talkative years ago. Even ages. It is indeed worth to re-read your Foucault here, and smash what he wrote about the culture of confession against what is going on now. Because there is something going on, with this intuition the text is right. Unfortunately it didn’t look closer.

Because what is going on is not, as the text suggests, an absolute force we have to obey. Make up your mind, respond creative: You can always lie on Facebook. Nobody forces you to tell what you really do, just invent your own life.

Therefore the text makes me kind of sad. Instead of trying to find its way through the complicated and differentiated good and bad moments of social media, it makes up a simple equation: Before you had the right to stay silent, now you are forced to act out in public. Answer this: Why got Miley Cyrus even more popular with leaving Twitter? And why is Kate Moss still the most wonderful, contemporary, unhappy, fairytale princess? Because she choose to remain silent. … psssst.

Sorry. World more complicated than this.

23/10/09
. 3 Comments

The publishing society

There is an application that makes you understand, that there was a change: After push and pull comes publish. We live in a publishing society, indeed.

15/10/09
. 2 Comments

Fashion. Or what in the end is human?

agambenmcqueen2
Homo sapiens, then, is neither a clearly defined species nor a substance; it is, rather, a machine or device for producing the recognition of the human. In line with the taste of the epoch, the anthropogenic (…) machine is an optical one (…). It is an optical machine constructed of a series of mirrors in which man, looking at himself, sees his own image always already deformed in the features of an ape. Homo is a constitutively ‘anthropormorphous’ animal (…), who must recognize himself in a non-man in order to be human.
Giorgio Agamben, The Open. Man and Animal. Stanford University Press 2004, 26-27

Alexander McQueen just created the movie/fashion show to this quote. At least in the first two-thirds. Amazingly brilliant art. Watch it here. In addition, that can be understood as an example of Jan Joswigs call for a fashion that uses its craft for questioning immanent ideologies, and is asking for a utopian transformation. What? I approve this message, of course. Like totally.

15/10/09
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