June 2011
1 post
Cold war TV drama gets premiere 37 years on |... →
May 2011
2 posts
SEHEPUNKTE - Rezensionsjournal für die... →
This looks worth a look
BBC News - Holocaust survivor preserves Treblinka... →
April 2011
2 posts
Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and... →
a compelling read!
BBC News - The evidence that backs up World War II... →
cowardice and brutality
November 2010
1 post
Im Gespräch: Peter Handke - Du mit deinem... →
October 2010
1 post
Jeffrey Herf, The fetuish Enemy. Nazi Propaganda... →
Compare and contrast with Boaz Neuman’s article?
UL Record
http://hooke.lib.cam.ac.uk/cgi-bin/bib_seek.cgi?cat=ul&bib=3342083
September 2010
2 posts
Captive Minds by Tony Judt | The New York Review... →
Russia in color, a century ago - The Big Picture -... →
August 2010
1 post
Der deutsche Heimatfilm 1947-1960. (Book, 1973)... →
Inter-library loan a go go
July 2010
6 posts
Remembering the Past is Like Imagining the Future →
Interesting.
Hume has something to say about this, if I imagine/remember.
Does this mean that cognitively speaking fantasy and memory are pretty much identical?
Also: if memory is what furnishes our identity… yeah you got it.
It Will Not Go Away | The New Republic →
I have issues with this review. Bookmarked for later perhaps.
Fair Use Victories on the DMCA | Center for Social... →
A small step in the right direction.
UK Government shuts UK Film Council →
Well. So banks get the bailout and everyone gets the shaft. lovely.
Captive Minds, Then and Now | The New York Review... →
Tony Judt cuts to the chase.
1954: Das Wunder von Bern as seen in the DDR
How 1954 in Bern was received in the GDR
An interesting document of Nationalism against itself. Perhaps the true marker of a Nation’s bearing on another is the reaction to success rather than defeat?
June 2010
1 post
Allied push for Berlin Film Festival →
Alfred Bauer, the author of the Film Bible until the CineGraph reformation!
May 2010
2 posts
Philosophy students and staff suspended | Save... →
This is utterly sickening.
Please if you have time add your voice and if you have one, your institutions’ voice to the opposition to such vandalism on the part of Middlesex University’s blinkered and incompetent administration.
http://savemdxphil.com
Kickstarter - Decentralize the web with Diaspora →
Diaspora looks pretty amazing. It should kill facebook, if there is justice and good in the world.
September 2009
1 post
Install Snow Leopard on Your Hackintosh PC, No... →
nifkin:
Two weeks ago I detailed how to build a Hackintosh with Snow Leopard, start to finish, with a little Terminal work. If you’re not comfortable with command-line hacking, you can now install Snow…
January 2009
1 post
Remains of 1,800 German civilians found in wartime... →
November 2008
2 posts
BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Red Army Faction boss... →
Am I being cynical when I view this as a publicity stunt?
Architectural plans for Auschwitz have been... →
The blueprints of genocide. Gruesome discovery in a Berlin Flat. Mass Murder rendered in plan and to scale, straight lines and precision. All on the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht.
September 2008
4 posts
Kate Connolly on the new film about the Baader... →
This podcast by Kate Connolly is pretty cursory but is notable for a number of factors, mostly omissions. Firstly, I don’t know how in the contemporary discourse of German film they manage to miss mention of Das Leben Der Anderen and instead point to earlier films like Untergang and Goodbye, Lenin! I can see the point that is being made that the ‘toxic waste’ of 20th Century...
How Sweden Solved Its Bank Crisis - NYTimes.com →
Funny how this would never fly in the USA.
Taxpayers can take the burden whilst the Banks get that most unholy absolution and don’t even have to say a hail mary.
So what’s this about the failures of Socialism again? How about the failures of Capitalism? It leaves most of the planet on starvation wages and benefits fools who get so greedy they kill the golden goose. It’s ok...
Humberto Solás, 1941-2008 →
Fiery and intense Cuban film director, probably most famous for ‘Lucia’, a triptych of Cuban historical eras with stylistic turns to match, Humberto Solas also adapted Alejo Carptentier’s historical epic ‘The lost steps’ in 1991. Most recently he championed ‘no budget’ digital film making, setting up a Festival in Cuba for this self-styled ‘Cinema...
BBC: Compact and bijou - the slums of tomorrow? →
The alienated pod revealed. As usual real-world design has more to do with what profiteering corporate building contractors can get away with to increase those profit margins. Like proverbial toads in a kettle we’ll just take it - mainly because we can’t afford not to and frankly have never expected anything better.
The siege mentality that comes from having such small defended...
August 2008
4 posts
BBC NEWS | World | Europe | East German spy swap... →
The stuff of spy fiction and tales of derring-do in the frosty mornings on a bridge in the deepest winters of cold war Berlin. I wonder how many secrets he took with him to his grave? Fascinating man. RIP.
BGH-Urteil - Ex-RAF-Terroristen müssen nicht in... →
Terrorists from another era of terrorism seem so benign, so idealistic - naiive, even.
But I remember the photographs at the post office in West Germany. Square, black and white blurry images of hard faces, women with strange contemptuous gazes. All presented in a context of fear next to the gaping maw of the Rabies poster.
Kafka, überscharf - NZZ →
“Doch steckt die Kafka-Forschung schon seit längerem nicht mehr in den sechziger Jahren und kann man solches in zahlreichen Publikationen nachlesen, wenn man denn will. Kafka aus dem Hermetismus der Hermeneutiker «ausbaggern» zu wollen, ist schon recht, doch dazu muss man zuerst der Grube der eigenen Vorurteile entstiegen sein. Warum es so menschelt gerade in der Kafka-Forschung, wäre ein...
Alexander Solzhenitsyn dies at 89 →
Cantankerous, maverick, eccentric or ultimately plain old nuts. There has to be a marking of his passing. In the tradition of Tolstoy and the grand romantic deluded aristocrats in a republic he was the cultural face of Russia when all we had otherwise in the west was sleet and tanks endlessly parading before the politburo greys at the kremlin. He gave voice to the Gulags, the immense crimes of...
July 2008
5 posts
Times Higher Education - All the privileged must... →
Grade inflation, or how an american university education is worthless.
I saw this myself when visiting Harvard 2002-2003. Money runs the show and nobody gets a a C average anymore. I thought Oxbridge was bad in terms of over-privileged brats. Frankly, they could not hold a candle to the Harvard crowd. Getting to Harvard ensured them a lifelong ticket to success, just being there was adequate. A...
A lost heritage: Nazi pictures reveal full... →
Before the bombs fell and the rebuilding in the image of other ideologies took place.
In Praise of Kipple #001
The Sejin SPR 8695 Mini Keyboard.
PS/2 (but runs fine with a USB adapter) Simple, reassuringly two-tone beige and grey like all computers should be in their souls and utterly nondescript.
Stamped out in some Korean factory by the hundreds, stacked high in backrooms, or in cardboard boxes with countless cables and ethernet cards. The staple filler of electronic junk salad in tiny...
Raphael Grignani - Thoughts →
Really great news, My friend Raphael can walk unassisted as of today. A horrible snowboarding accident literally tore his reality from under him. In the time it took him to recover, our daughter Clara, walked. A sobering thought.
Yes, file under mortal and personal observations.
Good luck with the rest of your recovery, Raphael!
Lost Metropolis footage could finally make sense... →
A glorious critical and (un)popular disaster for Fritz Lang, but this was decades, maybe centuries ahead of its time. Every dystopian nightmare-scape from Brazil to Blade Runner to Alphaville owes it a debt beyond measure, and I’m not even including the legacy left to post-apocalyptic anime greats like Akira Now the film is complete,or as complete as it can ever hope to be. I cannot wait....
June 2008
5 posts
DEFA 'Befrieung' DVDs out (Not that you care)
befreiung.mov (video/quicktime Object)
The Liberation of Europe in Mega-Epic style brought to you by the people who (yes, yanks you will hate this, but it’s true) actually liberated Europe.
Bruce Schneier: Are photographers really a threat?... →
Bruce Schneier points out the Elephant in the room or the naked monach - whichever you prefer. The Mythology of public fear as enacted by cinematic cultural tropes: like the spy cameras, the fake tourist. The Camera under terrorised conditions is a suspect device. I think it serves another purpose - the Camera, once that symbol of easy-giong feel-good snaps - that ‘kodak moment’...
French elite declare the Bobo extinct | World news... →
So this is it?
Maybe. It’s perhaps fitting that the Mai 68.ers are into thier 60’s and their Bobo kids are, like me, into middle age. Perhaps Boboism - with no small debt to that raving neo-conazi David Brooks - was a misnomer. 68ers had the priveldge of a form of self-definition. BoBos. Well it was always pejorative and it was always inevitable. Hypocrisy, as ever is reserved for...
Fears grow that Obama can't win | World news | The... →
Is this vaild reasoning? If so, the USA can forget democratic/liberal presidents for the next 2 decades. The only silver lining to Bush winning 2004 was that the Iraq War debacle wasn’t pinned onto a Democrat President. It seems Bush is made of Teflon - or just plainly does not give a shit - giving McCain an in where he should be vilified for his pro-war stance. If the white working-class...
May 2008
6 posts
15th Anniversary: The Brian Eno Evolution →
his life haunted by the ghost of Bush
Pfeile gegen Flugzeug - sueddeutsche.de →
“arrows against aeroplanes” It’s hard to be optimistic about the fate of these people now that ‘we’ have found them. Leaving people alone does not seem to be in anyone’s nature. Any number of Christian evangelists and corporate marketeers are figuring out the angles as we speak. I get the feeling that they will be idealised and reified by the left and made into...
On the Road: Clintons Very Bad Day - The Caucus -... →
Bullet, meet foot.
President Fratboy →
The art of the Obvious
Does it make it more convincing now that Scot Maclellan tells us it was all a lie? The point seems to be people are beyond caring. Why should they? There aren’t any dire consequences for America. Seems like the perpetrators of illegal invasions need to be conquered for any Nuremberg trials to take place. McCain will pardon Bush et al once he gets elected if there are any charges....
