Die Welt 22.08.2007

Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt has just opened an art exhibition on New York and Eckhard Fuhr is not exactly impressed. "Exhibition curator Shaheen Merali is obviously anxious to make the HKW a stage for contemporary art in Berlin. Whether Berlin needs this is one question. Clear is that it won't work as long as art is understood to serve as cultural pedagogy, as a collection of objects presented with a lot of curatorial text that is intended as a visual narrative on a particular theme, in this case: New York and globalised modernity."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 22.08.2007

Following a Neonazi attack (more) on Indians in the Saxon town of Müglen, Regina Mönch searches for causes. "It's well known that the extreme right scene doesn't just talk big and train its fighting hordes; it also performs everyday functions, organises kids' parties and holiday camps. These can't just be countered with anger, disgust and the police; we have to offer concrete alternatives – other kids' parties and free-time activities."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 22.08.2007

Urs Schoetti reports that the former Portuguese colony Macau is becoming the "Las Vegas of Asia." Unlike in China and the neighbouring city of Hong Kong, gambling is legal in Macau: "It is true that there are hundreds of million people in China for whom a one-hundred Yuan note is a rarity. But a lot of money is circulating in the Middle Kingdom, and this escalating gulf in wealth is endowing a minority with great, great purchasing power. What is more obvious for Macau than to use the suspension of the casino monopoly to tap into the world's biggest potential of gamblers. The Big Boys from Las Vegas have seized the opportunity and are establishing themselves by building gigantic palaces in Macau."


Die Tageszeitung 22.08.2007

In a travel feature published in the culture section, Austrian writer Katrin Röggla introduces us to the Caucasus republic of Georgia, which is hardly known in the West: "Conversations with friends who have been to Georgia are dominated by a sense of curios and calamity, which seem to define the place in our eyes. It is a country that for most people needs to be disentangled from a geographical knot; even though Russian rockets take care of this again and again on our television screens, they do so only for a moment, and then the country disappears again. Something blurry seems to cling to it, as if a trouble spot kept dancing around and right through it; a trouble spot that many people here cannot relate to and whose name is alternately Southern Ossetia, Abchasia, Mount Karabach or Chechnya. Very few people know its precise location, and it is indeed difficult to locate it once and for all, as geography is a relative matter, dependent on and shifting according to political and economic circumstances. Gone, in any case, are the times when farmers took a plane from Tiflis to Moscow to go to the market or when German expats went to East Berlin to go to the hairdresser."

Cologne-born reggae singer Gentleman, who has just brought out a new album, speaks in an interview about German-Jamaican music, the logic of reggae in the Rheinland (where chords were already falling on the two beat in the middle ages) and his attraction to Jamaica's spirituality, as the son of a protestant minister. "In Jamaica, 86 percent of the population is officially protestant but the rasta movement is gathering steam. I find that when people have to really work to put food on the table, they have another closeness to God, to the spirit and to themselves. If I look around in a cafe in Berlin, 27 of 30 people are sitting there with a laptop. If I ask someone: "Want to have a tea with me?" he's likely to say: connect me with MySpace. This poetry album for grown-ups. This whole Web 2.0 thing makes me nervous. If you take these people – who think they're OK within the system – and put them on their own, the problems start after five hours."