Stage designers is developing more and more into the most important element of stage productions. It is set designers or ?spatial artists? like Johannes Schütz, Muriel Gerstner, Stéphane Laimé and Olaf Altmann who are ?to blame? ? they are the ones who can turn an evening at the theatre into a total work of stationary art....
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The Hungarian Quarterly | Portfolio Financial Times | Eurozine | The New Yorker | The Guardian | New York Times | Espresso | The Economist | The Spectator
The Hungarian Quarterly 01.08.2008 (Hungary)
The English-language magazine publishes an interview from 1993 with Magda Szabo, Hungary's most translated writer, who died last November. She tells how her first manuscript made its way out of the drawer, where it was hidden from the secret police, and into the hands of German publishers. "Mirza von Schüching told me she had the means to get the manuscript to a childhood friend, an expert. 'May I ask what makes your friend an expert?' I enquired. 'Does he have a good knowledge of literature?' 'Well, some,' she replied. 'You may have heard of him: his name is Hermann Hesse.' Hesse was a publisher's reader at Fischer's. 'Fine,' I told her, 'so we'll put the manuscript in the lap of God and see what happens.' Hesse told the publisher Insel that if they were prepared to buy Mrs Szabo, they should buy her lock, stock and barrel, including her unwritten books. And that is what happened. It was unusual for a book from a socialist country to let fly at the class struggle, the peace priests and the denounced Calvinist church-not to mention portraying the party secretary of a theatre as an idiot. So the German publishers said: 'this woman was made for us; she's as daring as the devil and incredibly impertinent.'"
There is also an interview with Liszt biographer Alan Walker who in 2002 brought out the unpublished diary of Franz Liszt's student Lina Schmalhausen. It tells a very different, if highly subjective version, of the composer's last ten days. "It contributes to the idea of Liszt as a kind of King Lear, being caused endless grief by his nearest and dearest. The story had to be told, because what had been said in the earlier biographies about his death was preposterous and absurd - and we all believed it for much too long."
Portfolio 01.08.2008 (USA)
"The Last Media Tycoon" of the article's title is a woman: Katharine Weymouth, granddaughter of the legendary Katharine Graham and now her successor as publisher of the Washington Post. The newspaper crisis is raging here in on a scale which is still unimaginable in Germany, reports Lloyd Grove in a detailed portrait. Thus the interaction between the newspaper and its website, which previously functioned completely separately, is now of prime importance. "The corporate and geographical separation resulted in two very different and clashing cultures. Now the two entities for the first time report to the same person -Weymouth." And she is highly optimistic that something new can emerge from this. "Think about the record companies,' she told her staff. 'They've all been in this position, and some have survived it and some have not. Apple completely reinvented themselves. IBM did not. TiVo did not. Microsoft constantly reinvents itself. Google has sort of a one-hit, brilliant wonder and is now trying to look for lots of other revenue streams but really hasn't, in my mind, succeeded. So I wish I could come up with what the iPod is for us.'"
Financial Times 21.07.2008 (UK)
Maybe there really is a recipe for the survival of newspapers in the age of the internet. Trevor Butterworth portrays the editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick, for the Financial Times: "Remnick has much to celebrate after 10 years: circulation of The New Yorker has risen by 32 per cent, to more than 1m copies a week; re-subscription rates, at 85 per cent, are the highest in the industry; and despite the conventional wisdom that young readers don't have the attention span to do more than blog, text and twitter, the magazine has seen its 18-to-24 readership grow by 24 per cent and its 25-to-34 readership rise 52 per cent." So the recipe for success is just ambitious articles for a young readership, which are also partially available on-line!"
Eurozine 14.07.2008 (Austria)
Does the Netherlands produce great literature, and what does it say about life today? Margot Dijkgraaf presents (in English) key Dutch authors - Willem Frederik Hermans, Gerard Reve (both deceased), Harry Mulisch, Cees Nooteboom, Hella S. Haasse, Adriaan van Dis, Arnon Grunberg, Geert Mak, Annejet van der Zijl, Frank Westerman, Abdelkader Benali and Hafid Bouazza. One of the best-sellers of recent years was Jan Siebelink's novel "Knielen op een bed violen" ("Kneeling on a bed of violets"). "It is the remarkable story of a nurseryman who falls under the spell of an orthodox Calvinist sect and ends up not only ruining his business, but also completely alienating his wife and two sons, right up until his dying day.". Religious belief has long been a taboo in the Netherlands explains Dijkgraaf, but "This book demonstrates the enduring sway of a deep-rooted and even God-fearing faith in the Netherlands. Fashionable notions such as 'secularization', 'globalization', and 'global village' are a far cry from the world of this novel."
The January edition of the magazine Mittelweg 36 featured previously unpublished correspondences from 1967-8 between the then 25 year-old theology student Hans-Jürgen Benedict and Hannah Arendt. Eurozine has now made the the scanned originals available online. In them, Arendt presciently denounces any kind of World Police pretentions of the USA, her adopted country. "Concerning the latter, without question, it concerns us when 'ignoble conditions' prevail in Iran, Vietnam and Brazil, but it is truly not up to us. It appears to me to be a kind of inverse megalomania. Try doing politics in Iran once, and you'll soon be cured of trying again."
And two Norwegian women who wore the headscarf after converting to Islam in the 1980s, explain in an interview (again in English) why they have now rejected it.
The New Yorker 28.07.2008 (USA)
In his Letter from China, Evan Osnos presents a new neoconservative and nationalistic student generation who strictly reject the West. "The students in 1989 were rebelling against corruption and abuses of power. 'Nowadays, these issues haven't disappeared but have worsened,' Li Datong, an outspoken newspaper editor and reform advocate, told me. 'However, the current young generation turns a blind eye to it. I've never seen them respond to those major domestic issues. Rather, they take a utilitarian, opportunistic approach.'" Later, a student gives the reporter food for thought when he tells him: "Chinese people have begun to think, One part is the good life, another part is democracy. If democracy can really give you the good life, that's good. But, without democracy, if we can still have the good life why should we choose democracy?"
Further articles: David Samuels investigates how marijuana for medical purposes is changing the cannabis market. James Wood offers a portrait of Sarajevo-born author Aleksandar Hemon reviews his new book "The Lazarus Project" (Riverhead).
The Guardian 19.07.2008 (UK)
The quandary of quantum poetry! When poet Nick Laird was paired up with astrophysicist Paul Murdin and asked to contribute to an anthology of "space poems", he found himself in a bit of a black hole. "In general modern poets have taken more easily to Freud than Darwin, for reasons obvious enough: Freud's work privileges the human, Darwin's does not. But the remit of science is forever widening. Neuroscience is asking what the self is made from. Evolutionary biology seeks to explain behaviour. Quantum mechanics overturns notions of causation. Astronomy attempts to discover the texture and origin of the universe. In these inquiries, the 'hows' become the 'whys'. Just as Emerson called for a new kind of poetry that was commensurate with America, and Whitman obliged, should we hope for poetry capacious enough to map the new countries of science?"
New York Times 20.07.2008 (USA)
For the Sunday Book Review, Howard Hampton reads a "moderately mad" study of the influence of Heavy Metal in the Middle East and North Africa. Author Mark LeVine gets involved in jams and festivals and finds a real form of resistance:"'Heavy Metal Islam' turns the notion of irreconcilable differences between Islam and the West on its head, appealing to the universality of youth culture as 'a model for communication and cooperation' in the Internet age (...) LeVine reckons the likes of Metallica and Slayer provide a brute lingua franca that knows no borders, opening up breathing room in cloistered societies, gradually undermining rigid belief systems — a benign, bottom-up brand of globalization as opposed to the ruthless corporate or state-sponsored kind."
L'Espresso 18.07.2008 (Italy)
In a wonderful article, Roberto Saviano, the author of "Gomorrah", remembers his journey to the Cannes Festival, where he travelled with a group of amateur actors from Naples who performed the roles of the new generation Camorra in the film of his book. When asked at the press conference, whether they might have joined the Mafia had other alternatives not presented themselves, one of them answered: "No, you are mistaken. Me, a Mafioso, never! Aside from the money, they have a terrible life. And my mother is still crying from having seen me being shot dead in the film. Guess what, it happens for real!"
The Economist 18.07.2008 (UK)
The music industry seems to be slowly emerging from its file-share shock-freeze and is starting to show interest in the data of evil. It has started to pay, as this article reports, for information that file-sharing provides into consumer preferences. "For every song that is bought legally, in shops or online, around 20 songs are illegally downloaded, according to BigChampagne, a firm based in Beverly Hills, California, that compiles and sells statistics about file-sharing. Its customers can find out how many times, and where, a song has been illicitly downloaded, for example, what the figure was five weeks ago, what other music its fans like, and so on. ... Such information can help managers promote their artists. Jennifer Bird of Red Light Management, a management agency in Los Angeles, says her agency knows the names and geographic destinations of the 7.5 billion songs swapped in 2007. That is a big help if you are trying to work out whether people are raving about an artist - or merely about a song. And planning joint tours is easier when you know what other music an artist's fans listen to."
Further articles address the role of Islam in France and Turkey. The supplement focusses on the fate of al-Qaeda. Expert Anton La Guarda asks "Victory or defeat?". Another article believes that the group's practice of indiscriminate killing will be its downfall.
The Spectator 18.07.2008 (UK)
The sporting contest at the Olympic Games in Bejing is at best a sideshow to the real Olympic competition - the battle to define how China is seen by its citizens and the world outside, writes Mark Leonard: "In the past, we have defined surveillance as the powerful monitoring the powerless; the use of information technology by state institutions to monitor individuals. But increasingly, the availability of new technology allows individuals to monitor the state institutions themselves. In an interesting new book, 'Owning the Olympics', the academics Monroe Price and Daniel Dayan use the phrase 'sousveillance' - French for monitoring from below - to capture a new phenomenon where the powerful can be filmed and held to account for their actions in the court of public opinion. Sousveillance famously made an appearance with the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, the hanging of Saddam Hussein in 2006 and the protests in Burma in 2007. But the Beijing Olympics could take this to an industrial scale."
Further articles: Lloyd Evans takes part in a ritual Falun Gong exercise opposite the Chinese Embassy and concludes that it demands "a degree of meekness that is alien to my nature." David Tang observes the preparations for the Olympic Games in Bejing.
RSS
Portfolio portrays the dark prince of Wall Street, who saw the storm coming, while the sun was still shining. In the Guardian, Jeanette Winterson explains why a tough life needs tough words. Polityka criticises the Catholic ideology officers monitoring Polish schools. Magyar Narancs is concerned about Hungary slipping back to the Stone Age. The New Republic eyes the collection of forceful characters on Obama's staff. And in Monde diplomatique, Juan Villoro describes a Mexico in the grip of a drug-induced here and now.
Who will be India's Obama? asks Outlook. The New Yorker looks at the tricky relationship between Obama and civil rights activism. The Guardian is stunned by the seething cauldron of neuroses that was the Wittgenstein family. Tygodnik Powszechny stares into the eyes of Polish Jews on film. Al Ahram introduces the ambitious online project of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina on Egypt's history. In Radar Rodrigo Fresan puts bestsellers in the dock. Vanity Fair meets the top news provider of the future: Bloomberg.
Shortly before his death, Studs Terkel calls for more reg-u-lat-ion in the Huffington Post. The Spectator shines a light on the China Poly Group - an arm of the People's Liberation Army, with a strong interest in art. The Observator Cultural compiles a dossier on the writer Mircea Nedelciu. The New Statesman looks into Chinese-Muslim relations in Kashgar. Umberto Eco finds suicidal tendencies in Italian terrorism. The New York Times portrays Lauren Zalaznick, the creator of "layered" TV for savvy urbanites. And in the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith sounds the death toll for lyrical realism.
The new Slovakian internet magazine Salon translates articles from Miroslav Kusy, Rudolf Chmel und Gaspar Miklos Tamas on the tension between Hungary and Slovakia. In Portfolio, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen tells newspapers to scrap their print editions. In Le Point Emmanuel Todd foresees the return of Marx and Bonaparte. The Polish papers report on the Kundera affair. The TLS introduces lit crit as practised by a militant pro-capitalist. In the Weltwoche Paul Scheffer talks about the boomerang effect of immigration.
In Nouvel Obs, Oliver Roy explains what fundamentalists of every stripe have against culture. In Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan celebrates the golden age of journalism (we're in it). In ADN cultura, Paolo Coelho says we should look at Britain's history to worrying about internet piracy. For Commentary, the financial crisis is the fault of the state. For the Economist, the Milan Kundera case is just a drop in a toxic cloud.
The Observator Cultural introduces Stelian Tanase, a world champion of storytelling. In ResetDoc, the Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas recites his credo. In Lettre International, a Russian woman describes her childhood in a labour camp. In Esquire Mikhail Khordokovsky describes the Russian nomenklatura as the result of a process of natural annihilation. In Dissent, Carlos Fraenkel talks about teaching philosophy in Indonesia. In the Guardian Margaret Atwood sings the praises of Alice Munro. The Walrus visits Josef Skvorecky. Przekroj introduces Jacek Duka, the new Stanislaw Lem. And the Economist answers the call of nature. 
Protect investors from themselves, cries the New York Review of Books, in tune with George Soros. Teach the Roma how to work, calls Nepszabadsag. In La vie des idees, Historian Roger Chartier shows how the digital age has returned the book to its medieval state. The Economist thinks it has seen the light for the music industry. In Standpoint, tenor Ian Bostridge pops a rock 'n' roll bubble. Jonathan Littell goes to Georgia for Le Monde. Bollywood is to India what Dante was to Italy, says Outlook India. And the New York Times visits a rosy-cheeked Kleiner Perkins. 
In the Nation, Joseph Stiglitz is not buying anything the Bush administration is selling. L'Express introduces the "black book of publishing". The Times Literary Supplement warms to the unlikely Ukraine defender, Archduke Wilhelm Franz von Habsburg-Lothringen. Literaturen travels to Kamering with Austrian author Josef Winkler and his pepper spray. HGV has the end of lonely thinking in sight. And The Economist is keeping a beady eye on Total Information Awareness.
Portfolio portrays the billionaire Raymond Harbert who is knocking ever louder on the New York Times's door. In Espresso, Umberto Eco has a good old chuckle about downgrading. In the Gazeta Wyborcza historian 
Rupert Murdoch is fantasising about reaping sweet revenge on the New York Times, Vanity Fair believes. The New Yorker describes the sticky situation of the Putin-critical radio station Ekho Moskvy. The Spectator describes the impossible situation of bloggers in Iran. Le Monde diplomatique prints a posthumous text by Jacques Derrida about rogue states and how to outfox them. Outlook India celebrates India's rise to nuclear standing. And the Atlantic thanks the Met's Philippe de Montebello for never underestimating the public.
The New Yorker tells the tale of a hero, police officer James Zadroga. In El Pais author Javier Cercas seaches for happiness, boring as that might be. Le Figaro explains the difference between a snob and a dandy. Nepzsabadsag is amazed at how Serbian nationalism is moving with the times. In the Gazeta Wyborcza, political scientist Ivan Krastev admires the power of the paper tiger. Przekroj harbours the secret of the Westerplatte. The London Review of Books examines the malaise of party politics. And in L'Espresso, Umberto Eco calls for a new law on naming streets.
The New York Review of Books explains how Russia sent a message to the Ukrainians and the Balts. In Le Point, Bernard-Henri Levy awards Monsieur Putin a gold medal for his cynicism. Prospect meets the world's best and fairest society. Rue 89 asks whether France was waging a revolutionary war in Rwanda. Elet es Irodalom prescribes an "Operation Paprika" for Hungary. Gazeta Wyborczy remembers the Polish Danzigers. Folio goes on a dream holiday. And the Nation describes how New Orleans came close to reinstating segregation.
The Hudson Review tells the story of the boxing film "The Set Up" which was based on an epic poem from 1928. Wired plugs into the future of electric cars in Israel. In The New Republic, Joseph Stiglitz looks at the impact made by the Great Depression 2008. Tygodnik Powszechny tells the Catholic Church to wake up and smell the environment. In Babelia, novelist-turned-publisher Javier Marias explains how he ended up working for the afterlife. In openDemocracy, Ivan Krasten looks at the fatal consequences of the war in Georgia for Russia. And in the New Yorker, John Updike follows Max Factor on his journey from wigs to bee-stung lips.
The Atlantic holds up the termite as a paradigm of bio-efficiency. The New York Times investigates wine classification in Bordeaux. In Tygodnik Powszechny, writer Marek Nowakowski outlines his strategy for accommodating communism. Letras Libras misses the hawkishness of Roberto Bolano. Outlook India portrays the new Bollywood star Aksay Kumar. In Rue 89 Michel Wieviorka warns about burgeoning racism in France. And in L'Espresso Umberto Eco smells fear and regression in Italy.
In Die Welt, Victor Erofeyev collects his thoughts on Solzhenitsyn's life and work. The New Republic laments the Europeanisation of American cities. In the Gazeta Wyborcza, theatre directors Monika Strzepka and Pawel Demirski are pining for the equality that neoliberalism has abolished. Prospect magazine covers the re-emergence of character in Britain. Przekroj magazine covers both Sarkozy and heavy metal, albeit in separate articles. And Roberto Saviano tells us in L'Espresso why Italy's boxers will be packing a punch with Southern gusto.