There are some things I’m quite happy to not know anything about. I hope that doesn’t sound ignorant – even though that’s probably the very definition of ignorance. I’m mostly talking about French theorists after early Foucault. I know enough about Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida and Badiou to confidently [more]

(h/t: Kliph Nesteroff) Okay, don’t worry, this ain’t gonna be another one of those “What does a Jew like you think of Christmas?” posts. Really. Cause the truth is simple: Christmas is the best. Just the best. “Completely flawless” as another Jewish friend has put it. Especially if [more]

Tolokno is free, and maybe we can see how important that is because she herself says that it’s really unimportant. Maybe this is not a time for theory though.

I like best things. Not “better” things – this film is better than this film – but best things. I will often say: this or this is one of the best things. Of course you have to draw the line somewhere, because otherwise everything would be the best [more]

Answer to the question posed yesterday – and it really was a question, despite the lack of a question mark – is as follows: you go back the next day to see what’s what. The Coen Brothers’ latest is a great film about, among many other things, what [more]

What if you’re having one of the most meaningful, therapeutic, religious, cathartic, pain- and beatiful film experiences of your life – and somebody in your aisle (not the person sitting next to you) is laughing out loud, but not because of shittiness or derision or “irony” but because [more]

“There comes a time in any Jew’s life where he has to say goodbye to Woody Allen” would probably have been the first sentence of this text three years ago. And it actually is in 2013 as well, and 60pages wasn’t around then anyway. So I have manoeuvred [more]

Let’s talk about dismissing artists for moral reasons, and be honest about it. I wrote a long text about R. Kelly yesterday – please, do read it, I beg of you – and the struggle to dismiss artists you like. (Just to be clear: the struggle in that [more]

I must have listened to “Ignition (Remix)” by R. Kelly many hundreds of times. It’s a great song: goofy, fun, a killer bass line. Just a stone-cold jam, of which Kelly has quite a few: “Sex in the Kitchen”, “I Wish”, “Shut Up”. If I ever threw any [more]

Maybe that’s a really obvious truth. But there are some people so influential, who’ve left a mark so indelible you can’t even see it. Some people would add: and those that came first, so super-influential, also feel a bit pat now. Or trite. I don’t think so. I [more]

I guess it’s tempting that every time you have a group/collective/society you look back and think of them as creative geniuses who were also great pals and just hung out a lot. That of course very very rarely was the case. But of course we’d like to think [more]

Today I bought a Yahrtzeit candle. The place where I usually get them didn’t have any left. (Yes, you read that right, “them”. I could just buy them in bulk, but I won’t.) So the owner explained the way to a different shop. “And then you get to [more]

(Not to be confused with “A People’s Guide to Peoples”, about the screenwriter and director David Webb Peoples.) So there are all these categories we try to put people in. Some of them have historical origins, some don’t. Most of them are pretty useless now – devoid of [more]

In front of the Landesbank, not far from the Fernsehturm, you very often see people recruiting other people, for the Malteser or Amnesty International. Sometimes it’s Scientology offering free “stress tests”. The Amnesty and Malteser folks will step in your way and even follow you for a meter [more]

Nothing but these two thoughts. Yes, Leon Wieseltier once wrote that “displaced and unglossed quotations […] bristle smugly with implications”, but maybe this time it’s different. I don’t feel they are displaced. I. “Nature is very exact in the matter. Grief hurts just as much as it is [more]

What’s a good movie anyway? I don’t know, but I’m pretty confident in saying that “The Counselor” is a good movie. Maybe even more than that. So I don’t know why people aren’t talking about it more. Maybe if this was 2008 and people suddenly cared again about [more]

Tom Scocca writes: “Here is a piece of writing that has attained a certain length. Share it, this quantity of reading.” He’s talking about Longread culture. He’s talking about many things in his essay “On Smarm“, published by Gawker and puzzled over these last few days like a [more]

There is a very nasty and very sad book by Otto Weininger called “Geschlecht und Charakter”, Sex and Character. It’s a nasty book because it blames women – or “the Feminine“ or just “the Woman“ – and Jews (the feminine being par excellence) for many of the world’s ills. [more]

Before you bury someone you need to dig up some earth – some dirt, as it were. In the case of Nelson Mandela it’s other people who get dirty. And some fabulous dirt it is too. There’s a poster going around made in the 80s by the FCS, [more]

There’s a storm a-comin’, so I went to the corner store to get supplies. Like, some chocolate milk. The corner store is a supermarket, so I couldn’t really expect to see people board up their windows and doors. Or maybe they did, on the third floor of their [more]

This, right here, is one of the most wonderful movies. One of the most wondrous. It seems to come out of nowhere, it shines brightly and then flickers away, only to re-appear again and again. It’s the lost highway and the light in the darkness. Sedmikrásky. Two young [more]

When Preston Sturges made “The Sin of Harold Diddlebrook” in 1947 it was at the tail-end of what may be the most amazing stretch of comedies in film history. It had started with “The Great McGinty” seven years earlier, the first film he directed. By then the Sturges [more]

Carole Lombard makes me curious, Fredric Marc makes me excited, Music by Oscar Levant seals the deal and Written by Ben Hecht makes me giddy: “Nothing Sacred” is one of those movies that builds up almost impossible expectations during the credits. It’s a newspaper picture, a genre that [more]

Bill Burr. “The New Louis CK”. Very funny: everybody is wrong, including me. Machine gun, hard worker. Just great. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcGSsT4BAOc

Actually “Wattstax” is quite a weird thing. It’s mostly a concert film, about the Wattstax concert that took place in Watts in August of 1972, the seventh anniversary of the riots. There’s some other stuff, like interviews with Stax locals about their lives and above all Richard Pryor [more]

“Coulda woulda” is always a fun and sad game to play. “Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam” (At night, when the devil came) is one of the most “coulda woulda” things in film history. On the surface it’s decent enough, maybe even intriguing considering its history. It’s one of [more]

“More ideas in the ten first minutes than other films have over the entire running.“ has become somewhat of a cliché, sadly, but it can still be true. “Youth of the Beast“ is one of these movies. It’s full of little twists and turns, both stylistically and narratively, [more]

This is the single greatest film about Hip-Hop, more specifically Hip-Hop from 1987 to 1993. Which according to some is the only Hip-Hop that counts anyway. On the surface „Fear of a Black Hat“ just takes the structure of „This is Spinal Tap“ and transfers it to the [more]

Can mouthwash get you high We should only start showing high school pictures of celebrities once they’ve hit 30. Everything before that is creepy. More like Lacan’t (note: this will actually be a text one day) How do you make your own mouthwash The lost Beach Boy Picketfence [more]

Florence “Shotgun“ Nightingale The goat is the animal that is least likely to be a metaphor when it appears in a novel or a film. Nobody eats gooseberries There’s a lot of Thomas Mann in European literature, but not much Europe in Thomas Mann. Or anything else, for [more]

I guess I am a Millenial – please bear with me; but also I don’t care if you do because I’m a Millenial – but I think I have a pretty decent understanding of how things used to be, sometimes even from my own memory. Like, I have [more]

When I search for “60pages” on Twitter – which amounts to ego-googling these days, because obviously it is I and I is it – I very often find schoolgirls and – boys who complain about homework and their workload: “still 60pages to read till tomorrow”. They’re mostly French, too. [more]

In 1938 L. Ron Hubbard went to a dentist. He was just a pulp writer at the time, who worked so fast that he used butcher paper to type on, which he then cut up and sent to his editors. The dentist put him under. Hubbard felt himself [more]

That’s probably a really common thing but there was a time when things that announced themselves as aggressively high-brow were quite appealing to me. I knew about The New Yorker, yes, but when I learned about The New Republic I was quite charmed. Because of the age, yes, [more]

I went out, to get some lightbulbs. I wasn’t sure which size and what Watt power. I wanted to surprise myself. I wasn’t feeling weird, like, at all. There’s a Gentleman’s club not far from where I live that I passed. For the first time I noticed the [more]

There is nothing worse – nothing, I tell ya! – than starting a negative review with “I’ve tried, Artist X. I’ve really tried.” So I’m even gonna be pretend that I’ve tried to like “Arcade Fire”. But I have listened to them, quite closely in fact, at various [more]

Below is what may be the most disturbing video on YouTube that nonetheless is completey PG. Well, almost. Anyway: In 1987 during the broadcast of an episode of Doctor Who this guy hacked the signal and managed to be on the air for a full 2 minutes. (Earlier [more]

It’s easy to not be a Berlin asshole in Berlin. You know the type: complaining about Swabians and expats and basically everyone and everywhere that is not Berlin. Who cares, ultimately. Maybe it’s not so easy to not be that outside of the city though. Like when I [more]

Don Draper must have smelled like a ferret. All those heavy suits, the booze sweat, the old smoke. That’s not a new observation – though I don’t think it’s been addressed on the show. I’m just thinking about it because on this week’s “Brooklyn Nine Nine” there was [more]

Strange headline, maybe. It sounds like a particularly desperate song by a garage-punk revival band from Portland from the early 2000s. But there is more to it than that. I won’t bore you with what my life was like in 2008 when the mortgage crisis started. Let me [more]

20 years and some odd days ago two albums were released: „Midnight Marauders“ by A Tribe Called Quest and „Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)“ by the Wu-Tang Clan. If memories of the Golden Age – be they first-hand or passed down – make you giddy or sweetly nostalgic: [more]

So “Gravity” – which I saw last night – is perfectly fine. It is a film that seems to be centered around small moments: a great visual interpretation of the song “Space Cowboy”, a dog and a baby, or a joke so fine that I almost believe that [more]

So the best German novel of the last year – either the last 12 months, or of 2012 entire – is “Eskimo Limon 9” by Sarah Diehl. And it’s a wild beast of a novel too. A beautiful sprawl, about many things at once – and yet it [more]

Even if Gabriele Tergit hadn’t been a good writer she’d be interesting to read just because of the times and places she found herself in. But she was, so it’s even better. She wrote everything – short prose, long prose, straight journalism, not so straight journalism – as [more]

There is this story of stolen art going around – do I want to say “still” because it’s been like a week? I hope that one day maybe Lawrence Weschler will write about it. Anyway: It’s been referred to as a Nazi-Schatz which makes me think of the [more]

Another thing that #60pages might be: an oral history in the making. An oral history of things that were very rarely actually said out loud, but still. Or maybe I’m just thinking that because I’ve been wondering why they’re everywhere lately. Oral histories, I mean. We’re living in [more]

“I just don’t enjoy pretty faces in leading roles” my friend Polina says. We’re eating bagels, ’cause we Jews. More specifically: Jews from the 50s. Whenever she’s in Berlin we meet up, to work on things and to eat the Jew-iest things we can find. But not like [more]

Just to dispel any notion that this here publishing endeavour is some sort of cult or pyramid scheme: I recruited another writer to join #60pages and I got no stinkin’ shirt. Just the gratification that my friend’s great ideas will be heard and read by people. Which, nice, [more]

NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” is in its 39th season now. The show has many rules – most of them laid down by evil Buddha Lorne Michaels. The two most important ones seem to be that 1) every episode hosted by a woman of color will be strong and [more]

I stayed up all night to watch the YouTube Music Awards, because I’m supposed to talk about them on the radio in, oh, three hours and also because I wanted to know. I found them to be a quite depressing affair, but exhilarating at times. They took place [more]

So Koestler spent time in Paris in 1946 – right when Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote a scathing parody or review of Koestler’s “The Yogi and the Commissar” for “Les Temps Modernes”, the magazine founded by Sartre. Camus was around, of course, as was de Beauvoir. They all hung out. [more]

It is the word “etap” that gets me. I know that word – I know it from Solzhenitsyn, I know it from Applebaum, I’ll probably soon know it from Shalamov. I know it from history. And there it is again, today. Etap was the transport of prisoners from [more]

No plants on TV anymore. When did that stop being a thing? After “The Tonight Show” moved to Los Angeles Johnny Carson always was surrounded by green stuff. A forest, a jungle even, sometimes the cheesy wallpaper that it just was. “You have to understand, it was the [more]

I’m in a room and Jim Jarmusch is in the same room. My inner teenager screams: in the same room, the same building, the same city. The same planet. (A slightly fake looking globe like in “Night on Earth” probably.) He’s trying to make tea. There is no [more]

This is maybe the nicest thing about “Ravenous”: only after 80 minutes or so does it start to suggest that its main subject – cannibalism – might be a metaphor for something. I’m not sure for what though – homophobia, slavery, Manifest Destiny, all of the above. It’s [more]

Some wisdom from my childhood: apart from the really obvious, the worst thing you can call somebody is “Stalinist”. (I grew up in Pankow, the wall had just come down.) To this day my mother insists on this, not just because Stalinism was a dictatorship, it was also [more]

To honor the dead is not to pretend they haven’t died, or that nobody has died, ever, or to make sure they’re safely buried or to think that a few gentle words and two coins on their eyes alone make for a proper send-off. With that in mind [more]