All Picks posted by Hanno Hauenstein
There have been some delicte debates about the strange liaison between memorial sites and the common exercise of smartphone-selfies. Ariel Efraim Ashbels and Romm Lewkowicz for instance collected online a series of supposedly seductive profile pics for the gay dating-platform Grindr. You see muscular topless men posing within [more]
Writing about things, you would have wanted to, but didn’t actually see, seems extraneous. If I would have made it to Rotterdam this weekend, I’d have watched what they call Vertical Cinema. Why even speaking about the menace of cinema in the age of Youtube, and all the [more]
I’ve been absent here for a little while – I went through the world without a laptop, a situation, which, even though I didn’t choose it, felt relieving in some ways. Anyway, since I’ve met many Israelis in Berlin over the last years and since I started writing [more]
Wandering between texts I should have written, bits and pieces in my apartment I should have fixed, and dinner-appointments, where the question, if what was deferred to infinity was the actual dinner or the friend I wanted to have it with, seems blurry, I got stuck on Youtube [more]
I learned: politics is all about how to spend your recourses. And – at least in the German model – to stick to some assumed combination of integrity, transparency and emotional readiness (Volksgeist). Otherwise people will tear you apart. In my personal list of “Relevant Things”, nationality sits [more]
He held his eyes closed. Dash, Dot, Circle, set into stone with a chalk. A boy and a second boy drawing symbols in front of a castle, excerted by drizzling rain, wearing caps and masks, their scriptures hardly visible, down on the gound, gleaming, set in concrete. When [more]
People have told me I have an indefensible lack of knowledge when it comes to American Pop-Culture. Something like a week ago – with a poor deferral of almost 15 years – I started watching The Sopranos. The way it sometimes goes with those episodes, it (totally) occupied [more]
One might guess, that the combination of being under 30 and living in Berlin should amount to some widened knowledge on the panorama of fetish, the extended range of desire (at least in the arts). Moving to Berlin – about ten years ago – exposed my to film-makers [more]
I’m hardly in touch with old people. I mean, people above the age of 70. Recently, on a train ride in the Ringbahn, I got in touch with one: A woman, who must have been 80-something. She had noticed me reading a text in Hebrew. “Oh is this [more]
People told me, my posts here tend to be quite personal and revealing: not always in a good way. Yet I feel I should write this: 2013 wasn’t a good year. Losing a friend (plus, finding out about it via Facebook) was one of most sad and formative [more]
Fake blood, rotating circus screams, cake-sex-Nazi-fetish – more Nazi-fetish – a fortiori Nazi-fetish: I finally made it to the Kunstwerke-exhibition today, a three-floor-wide video-panorama of Schlingensiefs visual legacy. Since I was caught on some sort of seemingly unavoidable December-flu this week, I was quite weary while walking through [more]
The place I grew up in is an epitomized fairytale. Things are clean, people civilized. Narrow alleys bear the ambience of the middle-ages. Seats in cafés are standardized, so that no one gets confused with the distractions of modernity. It’s a place one finds “boring” when growing up [more]
Two days ago I managed to throw a glass of Darjeeling tea over my laptop. The incident, which later caused an eternal breakdown of my silver 4-year-old (I guess the sugar slowly wandered into the filament), in the beginning affected only the keyboard, that is: the letter “A” [more]
Yesterday I fell in love with Joy Wellboy, a band, that is: a girl and a man, who quickly managed to transform the impression of two clashy antipodes into a remarkably charming performance (them standing in front of a magical image of estragon might have contributed to that). [more]
There is no such thing as the drug. Drugs exist in all colors and shapes. The charts of attributes the word drug entails range from natural, chemical, hard, soft, stimulating to consolidating, sometimes deadly. Yet the semantic instructions to separate the medical from the mundane or the endogenous [more]
Der Posten des Gesundheitsministers ist besetzt. Diesen Sommer sah es eine Weile aus, als würde Jens Spahn, das geschliffene Jungeisen der CDU, es werden: Er hatte die nötige Portion Chuzpe, die SZ nannte ihn einen „Mann wie eine Walze“. Geworden ist es Hermann Gröhe, einer der, Pardon, aussieht [more]
Irgendwann Anfang der Nuller Jahre mutmaßte ich erstmals, „der Kapitalismus“ sei etwas Schlechtes. Die Mutmaßung pulverisierte im Bauchgefühlsartig-Verbunden-Sein mit Betroffenen, mit Musik, mit Freuden, mit mir selbst. Im Grunde war „der Kapitalismus“, mit mehr oder weniger Distanz betrachtet, mit mehr oder weniger komplizierten Sätzen beschrieben, doch negativer Geburtshelfer [more]
Kreuzberg vor zwei Stunden. Ich bin auf dem Weg in die Uferhallen, dicke Nebelschwaden über der Schlesischen Straße. Was als Performance zu Sex-Arbeit angekündigt ist, entpuppt sich als öffentlicher bzw. halb-geheimer und trotzdem irgendwie öffentlicher Live-Stream-Chat. Die Frau der Stunde kniet auf einer inszenierten Matratze – im Video [more]
There’s a hammer hanging in Nimrods room – a judges’ hammer. Rumors circulate about that solid piece of wood. Some say Nimrods grandfather stole it in a UN-meeting. Others say it stems from the time of Israel’s foundation and actually belongs to a museum. Recently on Skype we spoke [more]
Today I read a personal report in the Guardian by Bim Adewunmi reflecting on her current Berlin-experiences. She describes how people here grabbed and insulted her for the fact that she’s black. Bims expectations of the city boiled down to the point where she cannot wait for her [more]
Viel ist gesagt, geschwallt, enthüllt worden über Gurlitt, die Raubkunst, die Deutschen. “Wir können viel nicht wiedergutmachen, aber wir können Kunstwerke und Wertsachen, die auf unredliche Weise nach Deutschland verschleppt wurden, an die Nachfahren derer zurückgeben, denen sie einst gehörten“, schlussfolgerte Götz Aly – logisch. Unabhängig davon, ob [more]
Maryam (Zaree), Hi! You tied me to a movie I haven’t seen. But after I read your text and saw the trailer I feel a need to catch up. Not just because I fell for some of Fellinis movies, also because the topic you speak of – the [more]
Der Waffenmarkt steht vor einer Revolution – behauptet zumindest die Münchner Firma Armatix. Die Seite des Herstellers sieht nicht anders aus als erwartet – phallische Grafik, schnittiges Design auf schwarzem Grund, „Perfektion aus Prinzip“. Im Video spricht Generalleutnant a.D. Jörg Schöhnböhm, der neben seinem Bundeswehr-Inspekteurs-Job auch CDU-Politiker ist [more]
A magazine I write for (attention, explicit advertising: REVUE) came out today with its new issue on rituals – “People commonly engage in rituals with the intention of reaching a desired outcome such as reducing their anxiety and boosting their confidence, alleviating their grief, performing well in a competition, [more]
Some days ago someone was tested positive. Unluckily for me, she’s a good friend. More than that, I was first to get the message. After half a bottle of whine and me sending out some pathetic Video-Messages to another place in the world, I started researching things I [more]
One of my favorite rap artist’s name – correction, my absolute favorite rap artist’s name – is an anagram of that American-Intelligence-Token, which recently attained quite an amount of media reputation over here. Guess who. Right, it’s NaS, born Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones. His voice accompanies me [more]
I have a fetish for print. I actually enjoy touching paper. Doesn’t it sound like a tale from the realms of magic: The fact that reading a book – inanimate signs on paper – can get you into this internally buzzing, thudding, cavorting state of mind (body)? Read [more]