Monday 4 October, 2005

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 04.10.2005

Paul Ingendaay describes the desperate strategies of the Africans, intent on scaling ever higher barbed wire fences in the Spanish enclave of Melilla in Morocco, to get into Europe. "There were so many would-be immigrants that the border guards lost control of the mass. Ladders were all thrown against the fence at the same time, the people all climbed up simultaneously, they all threw themselves against the barrier at the same time in the knowledge that some of them were not going to make it. Even more than the secret landing of dinghies on European coastlines, this assault emphasises that people are the only resource that poverty-stricken countries in Africa have in abundance. This is why some of these people are on the road for a year or longer. And this is why they get caught up in the barbed wire where they are simply trampled over, where they fall back unnoticed, tear bits of flesh off their bodies or get struck down by bullets."


Berliner Zeitung, 04.10.2005

Sebastian Preuss reports on the success of the once so provincial seeming Art Forum in Berlin. "'It was crazy,' says Alexander Sies of the gallery Sies+Höke in Dusseldorf. He sold eight sculptures and photographs by Florian Slotawa whose ready-made sculptures made from everyday objects are certainly not easily digestible. He also sold several photo works by Uta Barth at between 15,000 and 20,000 dollars a piece. 'Almost all our buyers were new to us,' Sies explained happily."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 04.10.2005

Patrick Roth asks American film director Terry Gilliam about his filmic fairy tale, "Brothers Grimm" which hits movie screens this Thursday. "I think Grimm's fairy tales are responsible for my absurd optimism," the 64-year-old ex-Monty Python member told Roth. "I see them everywhere, a kind of base coat shining through daily reality. Witches don't live in gingerbread houses any more, but  studio bosses do." According to Gilliam, Hollywood big shots Bob and Harvey Weinstein are definitely good fairy characters. "Bob and Harvey are no Hollywood bureaucrats, they're passionate film producers," he says. "We began the project with MGM, researched filming locations, were sat in Prague and wanted to start. Then the call came: MGM had bailed out, the film was dead in the water. 24 hours later – by this time the team had split up and were back in London, Paris, New York – I got a call from our producer Chuck Roven. He told me Bob and Harvey were taking over the project, filming would start the next day."


Saturday 1 October, 2005

Süddeutsche Zeitung, 01.10.2005

Star sociologists Anthony Giddens (more) and Ulrich Beck (more) have published an appeal in all EU member states to try to jolt Europe into action. Nation states and the European Union, according to their central thesis, are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary: "Let us start to think of the EU not as an 'unfinished nation' or an 'incomplete federal state', but instead as a new type of cosmopolitan project. People feel afraid of a possible federal super-state and they are right to do so. A resurgent Europe can't rise up from the ruins of nations. The persistence of the nation is the condition of a cosmopolitan Europe; and today, for reasons just given, the reverse is true too. For a long time the process of European integration took place mainly by means of eliminating difference. But unity is not the same as uniformity. From a cosmopolitan point of view, diversity is not the problem; it is the solution."

On October 3, the Germans celebrated 15 years of unity. The author Ingo Schulze talked to the paper about his new novel and the end of the DDR. "In East Germany words concealed figures, which is why the whole system collapsed. In the autumn of 1989 the meaning of words reached their peak, just think of the slogans in Leipzig. People called out something and it happened, the world was falling apart. Then events accelerated and words could not keep pace. And suddenly it was all over. Suddenly there was the Deutschmark. From then on it didn't matter what people said, now it was things that counted."


Die Welt, 01.10.2005

Unusually for a such a conservative broadsheet, one unnamed online reviewer has failed to follow in the footsteps of other positive reviews and is highly critical of the new Mao biography by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday because it fails to probe deeper into the Chinese communist leader's philosophy: "Going like a bull at a gate, Jung Chang's and Jon Halliday's "Mao" is not just an awful read because of the barbarity and the crimes the biography (subtitle "the life of a man" and "the fate of a people") describes . What is also awful about this book is its narrowness; the authors make no attempt to actually explain the reasons for Mao's evil character. As a result, the 'Mao Myth' remains intact. It is a situation which mirrors that of Stalin, whose subcutaneous standing in Russian society remained pretty much unbroken, as was visible at the recent celebrations marking the end of World War II."


Frankfurter Rundschau, 01.10.2005

Elke Buhr took a look at the exhibition of current South Asian art, "Politics of Fun" in Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures) and liked what she saw. The exhibition opening, she decided, did real justice to the title. "So roughly, this is how we imagined South Asian art: a hybrid of tradition and the modern, a vibrating mix of spirituality and High Tech. Now Bangkok artist Michael Shaowanasai has done us a big favour. His video 'Artist of the Moment' is admittedly no real documentary about his work, rather a highly amusing fake guide to the Western art world for up-and-coming Asian artists."