… actually, it’s about “the season” long past, the way I remember it when I grew up in Germany. Not all that many years after WW II, when people didn’t have much money, when there wasn’t much to buy even if one did, when ingenuity and inventiveness more than made up for lack of commercial goods.

When I was a kid, Christmas was magical and full of delight. It started with December 1st, the beginning of the Advent season. I received an Advent Calendar, a little stiff paper picture decorated with sparkling silver glitter. It would show a modest scene of some angels decorating a Christmas Tree, or some deer in a snowy forest. Every day one had to open a tiny window with a star, a candle, a snow man, or a similar symbol behind it. Every opened window would bring us impatient children a little closer to Christmas. Do you remember how long a day used to be, when you were five or six years old?

On the night from the 5th to the 6th Saint Nicholas stopped by and filled our shoes with nuts, apples, foil-covered chocolate, and small presents. Sometimes he would show up in person at some social gathering, but I didn’t like this so much. He was some scary dude, huge and fat, with a white beard and wild white hair. With him came his helper “Knecht Ruprecht”, a skinny, wiry guy who’d caper around, threatening us kids with a bunch of twigs he’d wave through the air. But unlike St. Nicholas, he was funny; one didn’t have to take him all that serious. He was all bark and no bite, pulling little presents out of St. Nicholas’s big sack and handing one to each child.

The Sundays in December were special because that’s when the four candles of the advent wreath would be lit; starting with one candle on the first Sunday, and then two on the next Sunday, and so on. Again, this was a device to shorten this time of waiting, although it would simultaneously make the time stretch like taffy. It felt as if Christmas would never come…

But then, it did. The big event for which we kids had been waiting was Christmas Eve, the evening of December 24th. That’s when the Christ Child would bring the Christmas Tree and the presents. The Christ Child wasn’t like Baby Jesus or some other version of Christ really; it was more like a childlike angel. It (the German language assigns the neutral pronoun “das” [it] to children) spent the whole day in the living room decorating the tree and arranging the presents, so the room was locked from the inside and we were not allowed to enter. Our parents were inside too, helping, and would only emerge to give us a quick bite to eat. This was easily the longest day of the year! Waiting became almost painful, but then, about an hour after sunset, we heard the tinkling of a tiny silver bell — the sign that the doors would open…

And there was the Christmas Tree in all its glory, illuminated by burning wax candles. Electric lamps were turned off, and the room shimmered and glowed with the candle light that was reflected in shiny glass ornaments and silvery tinsel. I remember the moment of awe and delight, when there was nothing else to do but admire the beautiful sparkling tree. And after this moment, of course, the presents demanded attention!

Like all civilized countries Germany celebrates Christmas for two days, with December 26th being a holiday when stores, offices, banks, even movie theaters, are closed. Christmas Trees and decorations are kept up until January 5th, the Three Kings Day. Now, THAT’S the season…

Rarely if ever have I seen a film that displays so much beauty because it shows the truth — the one with a capital T. Whoever reads this needs to agree with me that Truth is always beautiful, that it has a profound impact, and that a work of art which reveals Truth adds something significant to the world, something enriching. Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut has nothing to do with conventional beauty, and the truth it imparts is quite simple: nothing more or less than the human condition, life between birth and death, its dreams, ambitions, failings, longings, constantly vacillating between grandeur and decrepit misery. In typical Kaufman fashion, this is cloaked — veiled, rather — with complex symbolism and amazingly clever imagery, resembling a House of Mirrors.

Synecdoche, New York is puzzling right away, with its name that one doesn’t know how to pronounce. I had to look it up at Wikipedia, and broadly speaking, it means the substitution of a part for the whole, or vice versa. It is also a clever play with phonetic sounds, because much of the film takes place in the city of Schenectady, New York. We follow the life of theater director Caden Cotard (brilliantly played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) and the relationships he has with a number of significant people — his estranged wife (an excellent Catherine Keener), his daughter, and two other women he is in love with, among many other people who are part of his life.

Some critics use adjectives such as surreal, confusing, and hallucinatory to characterize this film. I found it actually extremely realistic, in the sense that one’s own life rarely has the linear progression of an Agatha-Christie novel or a typical Hollywood movie. On the contrary, it is full of time-warps, dreams of grandeur, disappointments, frustration, and surprises, with rare moments of pleasure and happiness. The people who are part of Caden’s life seem to be externalized parts of himself, and they get further reflected by the fact that he has them played by actors, including himself. This self-referential repetition is more chaotic and less mechanical (hence, more beautiful) than an image of fractals; at one point, Caden changes roles with the cleaning lady who takes his place as the director of the gigantic play he is staging.

The film is deeply moving because of its humanity and honesty. And if that isn’t enough, it’s chock-full with superb performances, while the intelligent script makes it almost necessary to see this work of art more than once.

While the little video is a bit cheesy and simplistic, the intention of the producers is indeed laudable: to bring awareness to the fact that giant corporations hide behind a facade of being concerned about the environment. The most unbelievably outrageous case I’ve seen recently is mentioned in the New York Times on November 25: Michael Mack, CEO of Swiss agribusiness giant Syngenta, claimed in an interview that compared to pesticides and genetically engineered seeds, “organic food is not only not better for the planet. It is categorically worse.” He also said the federal government has given its seal of approval to pesticides, which according to him “have been proven safe and effective and absolutely not harmful to the environment or to humans.” And — get this — he stated that if consumers do not believe that pesticides are safe then they do not trust their government, according to NYT. “Once you go down that path, I don’t know where the guard rails are,” he said, according to the Times.

Although Syngenta isn’t on the list of corporations that are doing the most to sabotage effective action on climate change, it’s still worthwhile to cast your vote for the Angry Mermaid Award. First, watch the video:

and then go to the website Angry Mermaid Award, read about their eight nominees, and choose the one who you think is the most culpable when it comes to blocking effective action to stem climate change.

I have a stack of about twenty issues of the German art magazine art, most of them from the early nineties. Gorgeous reproductions, well-written articles, and interesting subject matter keep these magazines relevant and informative; every once in a while I like to pick up one of them and go through it again. So this morning: I wanted something to look at while having breakfast, and I randomly grabbed an issue.

Portrait of Anita Berber, 1925

Its focus was the German painter Otto Dix, one of the founders of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) movement. His amazing paintings made me want to learn more about him and his art, so I read the main article — only to find out that he was born today 118 years ago, on 2 December 1891! Strange coincidence…

Unlike other expressionist artists, Paul Klee for example who declared that the true nature of things lies behind the visible, the surface, Dix was convinced that outer reality contained everything else. The inner world will be revealed by a faithful rendition of the outer. He didn’t embellish what he saw; on the contrary, he deeply shocked many of his contemporaries with his brutal honesty. Not afraid to paint the ugly, the depraved, the broken, the miserable, the wounded, he held up a mirror that many couldn’t bear to look into.

Prager Straße, 1920

He had joined the First World War because of a compulsion to experience and witness everything, no matter how horrible, but what he saw was so gruesome and disturbing, that he was deeply traumatized for over a decade. The paintings and etchings he produced about his time as a soldier got him in trouble with the bourgeois authorities even before the Nazis gained power; they also firmly established him as perhaps the most powerful and radical anti-war advocate of modern art. I wish that our President would see Dix’s paintings.

To learn more about this artist and to see more of his paintings, please follow these links:
Otto Dix (1891 – 1969)
Otto Dix — German Political Art
Otto Dix Paintings
Otto Dix Gallery
and
Otto Dix’s Der Krieg [War] cycle 1924

Not so long ago, a friend told me that she’d go hunting over the weekend. Upon my shocked reaction, she assured me that she wouldn’t shoot any animals herself (leaving that to her hunting companion), but she does appreciate the meat which they’ll share because she’ll help in other ways. I had only ever seen her eating vegetables, and she’s certainly not your typical meat eater, so I had to ask her why she didn’t object to hunting. Well, she said, to her it’s all one big cycle — creatures are born and they die; plants bloom and they wither; one life (a mouse for example) sustains another life (a cat).

I can’t agree with that. Why should it be acceptable to kill an animal, but not a human being? Where is the dividing line, and who draws it? It may seem that a human life is way more precious than the life of a rabbit, but only from a human perspective. Sure, a human is smarter, has more capacities, is immensely superior when it comes to cognition and understanding, but the right to life is independent from such qualities. Otherwise it should be o.k. to kill a paraplegic or an individual with Down Syndrome. In fact, human capacities such as the ability to make decisions based on moral values should make us responsible for the wellbeing of weaker creatures — not eat them.

Something happened today that made me remember the conversation with my friend. When I took my dogs for their walk, we came across the carcass of a dead elk. A pile of furry skin, an almost meatless skeleton, and not far off the head — obviously the left-overs of a successful hunt. A sad sight, even more so because I had seen a live elk not so long ago on the same walk, a majestic elk with huge antlers. I only saw him for a few seconds; my dog started barking and chased him away. The elk could have bashed her head to pulp with his hooves; instead, he bolted. Maybe this was the same animal; not majestic any more, just heaps of garbage. Sad.

In less than two weeks, people will sit down to give thanks, and they will consume almost 50 million turkeys in the process. 50 million deaths — for one day. That’s not only sad, that’s crazy.

This was a total bull’s-eye shot in the dark.

I didn’t know anything about this movie, or about other Hungarian films for that matter, but writer-director Nimród Antal’s feature debut Kontroll, shot entirely in Budapest’s subway system, kept me spellbound. No healthy sunlight ever falls on the motley crew of underground ticket inspectors who are employed to ensure that nobody steals a free ride. Almost inevitably this system creates a game or sport whereby some passengers try to outrace the controllers.

Racing becomes a multi-faceted symbol in this film: it can mean a dangerous dare where the participants put their lives on the line; it can mean trying to escape from one’s past, like in the case of our protagonist Bulcsú who needs this underworld existence in order to come to terms with his former life. And there is Bootsie, a young man as fast as lightning who likes nothing better than to have a bunch of controllers run after him — a tragically meaningless chase. The Underground itself is highly symbolic, with its collection of weird characters being held in a state of limbo, as it were.

Stark contrasts race each other at breakneck speed: from dark, shadowy tunnels we emerge into bright, glaring fluorescent light; from a deadly serious phantom killer who pushes passengers in front of running trains we switch to a sweet girl who always travels in a bear costume. Add to this a fantastic soundtrack by somebody called Neo, and exceptionally beautiful cinematography, and you have a film that has it all: mystery and romance, humor and drama, fantasy and gritty realism. And all this was made with a budget of eight hundred thousand dollars.

If this first film is anything to go by, the name Nimród Antal is something to watch out for.

Somebody pinch me, please — surely, I must be dreaming. According to the British Telegraph, a recent film about Charles Darwin (Creation, chosen to open the Toronto International Film Festival on 10 September) didn’t find an American distributor because — his theory of evolution is too controversial for American audiences. Christian websites apparently denounce Darwin as a racist and father of Nazism, declaring that evolution is blasphemy, that the bible is right and God created the Earth in six days. And it’s only some 6,000 years old and not, as scientists claim, 4 1/2 billion years. How do they know this? The biblical record is accepted as a reliable historical basis of interpreting empirical data. I’m not kidding; follow the link at your own risk — you’ll find some mind-boggling nonsense.

But back to the movie which received excellent critical reviews and is based on a book by Darwin’s great-great-grandson, Randal Keynes. It explores the relationship between Darwin and his daughter Annie whose early death deeply affected his views on religion. Apparently, an Indie distributor finally picked up the movie, and it is to be released in the U.S. in January 2010. The controversy surely will increase revenues at the box office.

Still, the fact remains that religious beliefs, and extreme ones in particular, play a huge role in American culture. If you look at some of the comments to the Telegraph article or at the IMDb message boards, your blood starts curdling. What makes this seem so hopeless is the fact that rational arguments, by definition, are useless in the case of belief cults. Theirs is a stupid God, and he always needs to have the last word.

Ok, here goes:
The first video shows former Polish president Lech Walesa, who gives the official push that starts the tumbling of the wall of dominoes, accidentally being pushed himself by some reporter…

And here is a “slice of life” from a bystander, showing the excitement when the dominoes fall down — but it’s over so quickly… have to watch the rest on the giant screen…

Here is a beautiful collection of images and footage with music inspired by Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Wish I could be in Berlin today (well maybe not, I can’t handle crowds). As soon as I find a video of the domino-wall being toppled, I’ll post it here.