Englischsprachig wird diese meine Erzählung über mich den damals 21jährigen auch deshalb sein, weil ich damit dem Sprachenmix der Sixtinischen Pages entgegen komme, wo ja durchaus eine Menge Texte auf Englisch zu finden sind. Und zwar auch von deutschsprachigen Autoren, oder? Um aus dem bundesdeutsch, langweilig Provinziellen somit [more]

that’s why – all those files must be loaded to display the archive page (09.10. 19:48) and I do love to read the filenames – they tell a lot about the people posting here.

A few days ago, David described our email-conversation as “blind tennis with net and balls but without seeing how they fly.” This post is not about tennis but about ping-pong. In 2007, I worked at Art Basel. Gianni Motti was invited to give a talk about his work [more]

After learning that he had won the Nobel prize for predicting the existence of the Higgs boson particle in 1964, Peter Higgs vanished on holiday without a mobile phone and now seems as hard to detect as the particle itself. Higgs’ statement on winning the Nobel prize mentions [more]

From Orson Welles Volume 2: Hello Americans by Simon Callow: Agnes Moorehead was perhaps the most remarkable of all the actors in the Mercury stable. Like many of the others, she had first worked with Welles on radio…In addition to the high spirits and technical skill of the other [more]

As Told by the Holy Woman in Her Own Words A Hundred or So Years after the End of the World I came to lying flat on my back with all the women gathered around me. I had twirled for six hours straight, one of them told me. [more]

Das Hemd ist auch sehr schön geworden:        

My grandfather once got in a fight with Helmut Qualtinger. They were in the same Schanigarten in the Vienna Prater, equally piss drunk, and my grandfather furthermore pissed that Qualtinger had temporarily left Vienna to live in Hamburg. So he walked up to him and expressed his disdain. [more]

on my way to vilnius to talk about this in the series “New Realism in Contemporary Art”: Adopting a semiotic model, one could differentiate between three regimes of realism. Firstly a realism of the signified (predominant in 19th century literature and art), trying to depict reality, understand it [more]

If you are interested in business cycles, you may wonder what their duration could be. Two years ago, Deutsche Bank published a research note where they claimed that the business cycle has become shorter in recent years “because cycles were artificially long in what Deutsche dubs the ‘golden [more]

You don’t need me to talk about Gomorra, do you? Matteo Garrone’s movie out of Roberto Saviano’s bestseller debut novel won the Jury Prize in Cannes 2008 and becon the icon of Italian neo-neo-neorealism worldwide. It’s a great, powerful portrait of South Italian criminal disaster.  Other directors have [more]

Bruch Violin Concerto, played by Jacqueline Audas

America is big. America’s cars are big. The streets are broad. The underground garages are so vast that you get lost, searching for the exit, until finally another car shows up, and you eagerly sneak up from behind in the hope that it will lead you to the [more]

For some time now I suffer from back pain. Hard ache in the lower intervertebral discs. Nothing can make the pain go away besides back muscle training (which I don’t do) and the amazing Thermacare heat belts. The belts constantly and very slowly release heat that causes pleasant [more]

Berlin. It’s queuing an hour and a half before Berghain on a Tuesday night, to see Darkside, aka Nicolas Jaar and Dave Harrington, knowing that the show is sold out, but there are fifty tickets left at box office. It’s counting the people in the line before you, [more]

It starts at the airport, more precisely at the boarding gate for the evening flight to Paris. Men suddenly do look better. And they look at you, they even look into you eyes. First I was irritated. Is there something on my face, maybe salad from the sandwich [more]

Leben mit Pop ging zu Ende und die Kreativen ergreifen wieder die Macht über das Design und Kapital und erschaffen neue leere, gereinigte Räume! Danke dafür!!!  

I started to read Simon Schama’s book The Story of the Jews. There was a place called Elephantine where there was a Jewish community avant le livre. * I realised once again in what kind of globalised world we live. I was buying presents for my godchild which is Japanese [more]

Everything alright, thanks. Business as usual. Opening windows, drinking pils beer, and the soccer museum.

MoL is employed in finding out as little as possible about Miley Cyrus, not for any reason, just because it is good to take evasive action sometimes. In the meantime, MoL enjoys a good scandal, especially involving the BBC whose senior management has been giving huge pay-offs to [more]

This is the sound of the bell in a prefab high-rise in the East: [jwplayer config=”audio” mediaid=”5828″] From the time when Germany was still divided. The bells in the West might have had a similar nasty tone. In these times Siemens (and the colour Siemens Beige) ruled the [more]

One. There is no reason to wait for any literary prize, any time, let alone the Nobel. Two. Prizes are modern day shamanism. Three. And as such not totally untrustworthy. Four. It can be like watching a volcano; you may not like it, but there is nothing much [more]

Animals, plants and humans have a way with Tiergarten. Everyone can establish her own territory, around the clock. The malleable boundaries, constantly negotiated, are moving and overlapping. Animals, plants and humans have a way with Tiergarten. Everyone can establish her own territory, around the clock. The malleable boundaries, [more]

STRESSED INACCURATE FALSE STRESSED HIGH TENSION EXTREME TENSION NOT SURE INACCURATE HIGH ANTICIPATION INACCURATE HIGH TENSION FALSE TRUTH INACCURATE HIGH ANTICIPATION NOT SURE FALSE PROBABLE FALSE INACCURATE INACCURATE INACCURATE PROBABLE FALSE FALSE SUSPECTED STRESSED

This afternoon, I walked through my old Berlin -Mitte neighbourhood. I had forgotten some things about Berlin. 1) Max Raabe can never be a real superstar in Berlin. His concert announcements in Mitte are not very well placed, one is located in strange corners at Borsigstrasse. Raabe used [more]

I don’t have eyes like a swan, the boy used to tell me. But I persisted. Initially, I was unsure. Too feminine of a word to use it as a compliment for the boy? But it was true, eyes like a swan: dark round brown, definite against the [more]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wE3fmFTtP9g

Living in this way, taking so much and still being given more, fulfills its own prophecy. The glass is always half full, my faith in humanity at an ever eclipsing all time high. Prosperity, it would seem, is upon us. It is easy damn it.

Thinking is critical when it abandons the ground of certainties and starts referring to a truth beyond its consistencies. It escapes the temptations of idealism by subjecting its irrationality to a certain reflexive inquiry. Apparently thinking can neither be reduced to the idealism of rationality, nor to the [more]

Life is good.

From My Lunches with Orson, edited by Peter Biskind: Interviewer: Dorothy Comingore, another fresh face, was so great as Susan Alexander, Kane’s mistress and second wife, the one based on Marion Davies. How did you find her? Orson Welles: Chaplin, you know, told me about her. Interviewer: What [more]

Uups! Unerfüllbare Pläne, unerfüllbare Liebe?? Unerfüllbar? Wie in jener post-pubertären Entwicklungsphase des hochsensiblen 21jährigen sich diese Liebe zu der aus dem Polnischen stammenden Mutter in eine hysterisch-todessehnsüchtige Liebe zum Volk und Land der Polen sublimierte, mich zu der Entscheidung veranlasste, mich auf den besagten Wochentrip ins damals noch [more]

Is it the greatest, the most incredible, most influential of all piano recordings ever made? Live … It is not a record. It is simply the greatest achievement for any pianist by any pianist. In my opinion. Sviatoslav Richter, the titan, the icon, the most magnificent of all [more]

[jwplayer mediaid=”5733″] Operndorf

In my backyard there is a chestnut tree. I like how the tree changes with the seasons coming and going. When it starts to bloom in spring with beautiful flowers and slowly growing green leaves on the branches. In its full blossom during summertime with huge marvellous green [more]

As Told by the Holy Woman in Her Own Words A Hundred or So Years after the End of the World How I whirled like a dervish in the ladies’ religious house and sang at midnight I found myself in the biggest room I had ever seen in [more]

In my feverish dreams of last night the infinite and interweaving soundtrack was Miley Cyrus, “We Can’t Stop” and Bryan Adams’ “All for Love” from the 1993 Musketeers movie. Thanks a lot, brain. I can only explain Miley’s appearance with the rhyming homophony of Cyrus and virus. Words [more]

Scialla is the first film as a director of famous Italian screenwriter Francesco Bruni. It’s a nice, well built comedy about a fifty something school professor who is forced to live with a lazy student dropped in his house by a fugitive mom while he’s writing the biography [more]

In 1934, an already middle-aged wunderkind by the name of Norbert Wiener embarked on a journey by ship from California to China via Japan. He had been invited to teach mathematics and electrical engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing, by a former MIT graduate student of his by [more]

I was really positively surprised by Valeria Golino’s directorial debut – who was chosen for Cannes’ La Semain this year. Style-wise, it doesn’t look like a debut film… It doesn’t look Italian, too. And when I say it doesn’t look Italian I am speaking of that macro-genre which [more]

c/o of Maureen Dowd

out in october

  7 a.m. A bench serves as a perch for two boys wrapped up against the cold, a brass plaque indicates that it was discarded in memory of a long forgotten citizen. The boys’ gaze is at once distracted and meticulous. A storm has left debris fluttering across [more]

[jwplayer mediaid=”5680″]         and then sleeping in Luxembourg

I just came back from Venice. One main thing I wanted to see was the Venice 2013 version of Szeeman’s 1969 exhibition. It was boring. Only the Fred Sandback was really good. And Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings. I rather like this attitude: It’s a piece by Kristin Albrecht [more]

Packing my suitcase once more turns out as exceedingly difficult. This time it is even more complicated as I’m going to three different locations with very different weather situations for four different events. I’m sitting in front of my luggage right now taking a little break thinking it [more]

Il faudrait être un Œdipe pour deviner ce que cela veut dire. Je ne suis pas un Œdipe. L’énigme reste irrésolue. Œdipe Removed from the official French dictionary    

Ž (from the archives of 80*81) a) On the phone we tell Slavoj Žižek we’ll wait in the “Bar Platana” on Kongresni. “I must know where it is, I know everything!” he says and picks us up by taxi. b) “Nonsense. This is stupid enlightened humanism!” c) “One [more]

It is a song of the death, this existential ballad, it is a night without end and a sleep with no coming back, it is red like the moon and dark like the sun, it is Büchner and it is rock’n’roll, good and plain, with a voice full [more]