Die Tageszeitung, 15.06.2006

An historic head has rolled at the French newspaper Liberation, writes Dorothea Hahn. "Serge July – co-founder and director of the paper for 33 years. Of all people, the person who toppled him was the man July himself had recently made chief shareholder, in a move to assure the newspaper 20 million euros in capital. 'Edouard de Rothschild has asked me to leave,' July explained on Tuesday before an icily silent editorial committee. July added that he hoped his departure - and that of his manager - would open the door for an urgently needed injection of capital. Since then, a mood of catastrophe has reigned in the paper's editorial rooms on Paris' Place de la Republique."

Tom Holert watched Jörg Kobel's documentary portrait "Kippenberger - the film", about the German artist who nine years after his death is so en vogue, with major retrospectives of his work in London and Dusseldorf, and whose live hard die young lifestyle was "just waiting to be made into a film". The film fuses original footage and interviews which will provide many a revelation for fans of Kippenberger's work, such as what became of the art work "Capri by night": "The collector goes into his garage and with all his force pushes out an old Ford Capri into the yard.... It is painted with a dull rusty sausage colour which is mixed with oats. The collector is clearly proud of his ugly car and its 'material aesthetic' because the Capri was a favourite model of Kippenberger's and appears in countless paintings. in 1982 Klippenberger gave it the new paint job, together with his friend Albert Oehlen."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 15.06.2006

Serbian author Bora Cosic lists one reason why he became a writer, and not a footballer: "My mother was a bitter opponent of the game. First of all because she was afraid that I'd start sweating too much if I played with the other kids on the field behind our house and, all heated up like that, that I'd drink a lot of cold water which would promptly give me pneumonia. Into the bargain she found that the other little footballers all swore too much when they played, which would be my moral ruin. And on top of everything else she had no sympathy for a game where so many people ran around after a single ball, instead of everyone having their own."
See our feature "Journey to the Alaska of my past" by Bora Cosic.

Jonathan Fischer still can't stand rapper Busta Rhymes, but he is wowed by his new album "The Big Bang": "Because of Dr. Dre's ingenious funk minimalism. Because of the adrenalin-soaked old school beats by Erick Sermon and J. Dilla. Because of soul numbers like "Been Through the Storm' and 'The Ghetto', in which Stevie Wonder and Rick James do so much more than just the obligatory accompanying vocals. Maybe Busta Rhymes should remember his childhood idols a lot more often than he does. It's been a long time since he's done such cogent work as 'New York S***' and 'You Can't Hold The Torch'."


Berliner Zeitung, 15.06.2006

Gay filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim has been a professor at the Konrad Wolf film school near Berlin for six years. Now he reveals his teaching methods. "I sent, with the help of the TV channel Arte, my first directing class to Hollywood where the group made nine wonderful short films. Last autumn I sent my spoilt students off to the poorest city in the world, Calcutta, and the results were fantastic. Then I put my nine students in a disused prison in Neustrelitz. Each had their own cell and had to make a film in total isolation with just one actor. I watched over the work in the prison corridor, looking every now and then through the food slots to see if everything was okay."