Mercedes Bunz

A couple of days ago, Kate Moss said in an interview that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels is her motto, and I posted the sentence right away on Facebook. I found it beautiful in its own way as it is provocative; pointing precisely to the inner logic of today’s politics of the body.

When the furor of Kate Moss saying that how can she reached Germany, a couple of my friends got back at me asking if I really think posting that was a good idea, because it was always a motto anorectic girls cling on to. However, I think I like the sentence exactly for that reason. It is a dangerous sentence because it is interwoven with this subject. It makes us think about the way we live and understand life. That’s why I like it. And that’s why I always loved Kate Moss. Apart from being beautiful, the way she takes live makes me think.

Yes, there are anorectic people out there, and I had one anorectic among my friends and another one among my acquaintances. It is a horrible disease leaving you and anybody else around totally helpless. A person who is actually clear in his/her head, destroys herself/himself in front of your eyes and is actually willing to starve to death. 20 per cent of anorectic people die. They rather die than let loose the only control about the world they think they have.

So let’s face it, nothing tastes as good as skinny feels first of all describes a certain kind of power you feel when you overcome the inner self, despite of some people who think we shouldn’t talk about it. No. We should talk about it. More as there is a thin line between overcoming and destroying. Being on a diet can be fun, that’s why it is so dangerous.

Now, personally I think you should decide what you want to look like and then go with it. First of all, because a lot of bodies don’t look good when the person that wears it is thin. Secondly, it can be a subversive decision not to count calories and watch the fat and sugar.

That was the other thing I liked about the sentence. Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels reveals that Kate Moss is not naturally thin. Well she is, but in a world where you can buy Gü even in a Tesco supermarket, you bet there is always something that tastes as good as skinny feels around the corner. Indeed Kate Moss thinks so, too, as her motto was accompanied by her saying: “You try and remember, but it never works.”

So all this assuring of models who eat normal is a joke. They fight. Yes they eat, but nearly all of them are constantly on a diet, whatever they tell you. Is Kate Moss really to blame for saying that? What is the furor all about? Is a diet an eating disorder? And are we discussing this issue with the same verve when we talk about premier league football players? Why has everybody a say with models while we discuss doping as a medical mistake? Politics of gender anyone?

Fashion is a sphere of beauty. It creates an ideal, and an ideal is never about the real world. As I like ideals, I am actually not sure whether models should look normal, or people should be capable of being more reflective. Fashion creates an image and this is something art did for centuries. Fashion is fiction. It uses real people for it and a lot of photoshop. But its industry is not less brutal than football.

Maybe instead of locating the discourse in the female body, we should consider making the process more transparent. Get magazines to cover the process with every shooting, and consider teaching the mechanisms of media as a curriculum in school. In modelling as in being a professional football player, only some bodies can be part of the production of beauty, and we should deal openly with this situation. This is not about what we all should look like, this is a mean of production.

In fact, I find it interesting that the discourse is ranting about the thin issue all the time while being tall is as important as thin but no one finds that too much of an exclusion. Clearly, the thin issue is where the politics of the body are happening today and meanwhile it reached the male body, too. But whatever. A diet is not going to make anyone more beautiful. Being confident will. Kate, thanks for bringing it up.

Let’s face it hipsters, the time of the skinny jeans over. Passé. Nice shoes might save us a bit, but actually it is out for a longer time now, because acutally we look the same for five years now, and in a way that it isn’t even retro. It is just annoying. Ups. Well, most of us hipster got aware of that, but here comes our dilemma: The skinny jeans is out, but there is nothing to replace it. The fashion uniform of the hipster reached a blind end. We wear something that is over. Out. Just not fashionable anymore. But we can’t help it. Brandnew, you’re out! Well, we take it on the chin.

Indeed, skinny jeans are still the internationally acclaimed uniform of the hipsters. Male hipsters, female hipsters and Kate Moss wear them. We can spot each other in New York, Berlin or London easily. Okay, we like to wear funny glasses at the moment, a bit like Ugly Betty. But that doesn’t help us. You think that is a made up problem? Well, style is attitude, and life is hard so it needs some design, don’t you think?

So on a recent evening in the delicious restaurant in Barbican me and my friends aka three skinny trousered hipsters were looking out into the London night getting excited about our fundamental problem. Sure, there are some experiments to replace the skinny jeans with a loose trouser, but let’s face it, they don’t really have a chance on the hipster mass market. They are exceptional hipster fashion, made for moments when we hipsters dress up. Not a choice for everyday hipster life. And the mass market for hipster knows that, too.

I tried to buy trousers today. Two of the pullovers which I stole from the wardrobe of the fashionable mum want to be worn with white trousers. First of all, I thought of the classical skinny jeans, but then I changed my mind to one a little bit wider and maybe made of wool. In fact, I am so out now, that I couldn’t find a light trouser at all. So please, if you have any idea where to get one help me. If you have an idea how we get out of this dilemma help all of us.

The job is stealing blog time. Twitter is stealing blog time. Facebook is stealing blog time. And by the way, I badly need to go out. After I mutated into a type writer within the last months, here comes a personal selection of the text flow word while reading.

- My favorite at the moment are the 8 ideas about the future of news with 2 of them being really innovative, namely integrated storytelling and a differential display of news.
How news will change in Google’s eyes as Google’s Eric Schmidt gives eight ideas on the future of journalism.

- Linking isn’t always cool.
Is the link economy of UK news sites managing or making abundance? Obviously the ‘link economy’ reached the point where news sites produce information overload rather than managing it

- We badly need a new way of monitoring online advertisement. So do you have any idea who could be the lobby fighting for that? Please get in contact with me!
As sales fall, newspapers must find a way to measure multimedia readership, because advertisers may be swayed with new figures as more readers head online and use devices such as the iPhone and Kindle

- And I try to figure out how digital media changes journalism abroad
How your internet knowledge can help African radio, or using mobile phones, digital technology and social media the SW Radio Africa broadcasts information to the fugitives of Zimbabwe

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.