Goodbye and Hello: On the move

I decided to move this thing to another website so if you want to keep track about what I write take a look here: http://janblurr.wordpress.com/.

Polar Bears, Germany's new national mascots

For quite some time now Germans are stark raving mad about polar bears. Yes, polar bears. Those artic predators. Still most people would consider them to be very cute at a young age. It all started with a polar bear baby at the Berlin zoo which was seperated from its parents after his birth. There was one animal welfare activist who said in a newspaper article that the poor animal would be better off if it was killed which caused a huge uproar by the nation's biggest tabloid, the Bild-Zeitung. So the media caught on to the story and suddenly the small polar bear was a front page celebrity. Named Knut it soon got the masses streaming into the Berlin zoo to take a look at the little guy. Thsi went on for quite a few weeks and I really was glad when it finally all died down and the media attention shifted towards other things.
But then the Nuremburg zoo pulls out Flocke, the next polar bear baby and the whole thing repeats itself. Not with the scandal about the bear being better off when it is killed, but still there are tons of people roaming the cages in Nuremburg only to get a small glimpse of that white fur thing running around. And just when you thought it couldn't get any worse there's another polar bear baby, this time at the Stuttgart zoo. Frontpages, etc, you know the story. There's even documentaries on news television stations and I believe there was even a documentary which was shown at cinemas.

Quote of the day

"I believe in freedom of speech and I think it's very important but you don't do it in foreign countries and you certainly don't do it in public"

(Some redneck in the movie "Shut Up And Sing" giving a statement why he now hates the Dixie Chicks. God bless America.)

Eating Onigiri for the first time

I always wanted to try お握り (onigiri, japanese rice balls), but i never had the chance. My cooking skills are rather bad and somehow I never found the time to give it a shot. But fortunately a friend of mine had some visitors from Japan and they were kind enough to make some. We also had miso soup with the onigiri and that was all very tasty stuff. What I found very interesting is that I was stuffed after eating only two of those rather small rice balls. I still have some with me at home so I might end up eating them tonight while watching TV.
It's always interesting to try out something different and because I watch so many television series from Japan I became interested in the japanese cuisine. It's fascinating that they show people eating in almost every series and in almost every episode. That's something completely different from German television series. In germany one might see someone eat something occasionally, but then it's not specified what that person is eating. In Japan they always talk about food. Interesting difference in local culture, I think. I wonder what I should try out next...?

Smalltown Canada with a little muslim twist

This .... is brilliant. Wonderful. Great. I was introduced to this series at a wedding of a friend of mine. Her husband is from Canada and so was half of the crowd there and one of those guys talked to me about this series. It's set in the small (fictous) Canadian town of Mercy, Saskatchewan and the viewer is introduced to the problems and struggles a small muslim community is facing when it is trying to establish a mosque - in the parish hall of a church.
"Little Mosque On The Prairie" is a very funny program that I found very entertaining. Of course what we get to see is all cliché all the way. There's Baber, the fundamentalist ecomonics professor who wished that his daughter wears a head scarf. There's the convert muslim wife Sarah, who just can't seem to fit in with the crowd at the mosque. There's her husband Yassir, the contractor who only set up the mosque so that he can have a bureau for his business for free. There's his daughter Rayyan, a doctor who although she is wearing a head scarf is calling herself a muslim feminist. And it doesn't end there. There's the smalltown idiot who just pokes his nose into everything he can find. There's the bigot radio chat show host who senses danger in everything which he can't understand. And there's the understanding priest who gets along pretty well with the liberal iman of the muslim community.
This series has all what it takes for a classic. There is something similar on German television, a series called "Türkisch für Anfänger" (Turkish for beginners). The setting here is a multicultural couple and their four children, who have to cope with each other while living in one house. The Turkish children and the German children stumble into hilarious situations all the time and there's trouble in every episode. I still found "Little Mosque..." a little bit more sarcastic, something that I really like when it comes to topics like this. The way the characters are portrayed really gets you into the story. There is no overlaying storyline, instead each episode is one closed story in itself. But there's always some very dark and hard punchline that just leaves you laughing out loud. I recommend this to everyone who is fed up with all the "terrorist" or "war on terror" headlines. It's some nice 20 minutes of relief.

Campaigning for election in Japan: A documentary

I zapped into a documentary by chance last night which was shown on the German-French culture channel Arte. It was about some guy named Yamauchi Kazuhiko who was told by his party to run for a post in the local city council in Kawasaki. I don't really know if the constituancy he was running for was named Miyabae or not, as I said, I joined the program as it was already running.
So this poor Yamauchi-san tries the best he can to get the best resuult for his party and the documentary accompanies him on his way. He's meeting up with old friends of his at a hotel room. The friends are very confused when Yamauchi-san's wife tells them that she has to refer to herself as "kanai" (housewife) instead of "tsuma" (wife) because some party officials told her so. Yamauchi-san's party is the LDP, the governing party in Japan. They have been in power for almost all the time after the 2nd World War and this documentary is set during a time when Koizumi Junichiro was still prime minister. They seemed to have quite a few elections going on their, so when the prime minister was joining the campaign the main candidate - I presume she ran for a place in parliament - poor Yamauchi-san had to stand a whole lot lower than the other candidates.
Also what was very confusing was that there was almost no talk about the program the guy was standing for. It seemed like he had none. He had to built up a base of supporters from out of nowhere (something which was done by supporters of another candidate from the same party) and he had to pay for the campaign all by himself. There's one scene when he and his wife are driving home and she complains that some old guys of the party told her to quit her job. She's afraid that they won't have any money left if Yamauchi-san fails to win the seat in the city council.
There seems to big a huge difference in how both political systems of elections work in Germany and Japan. the Japanese way looked rather loud and colourful when the German way of campaigning relies mostly on speeched and arguments. Perhaps that's because there is proportional representation in Germany. Well, I've never seen a candidate standing in front of the train station wishing each passenger who enters the station a good morning and a safe travel. This was very interesting.
The original title is "Campaign" and the film was done by Soda Kazuhiro, a filmmaker born Japan who is now living in New York.

Documenta XII - A visit

I visited a good friend the past weekend and since she lives in Kassel I grabbed the opportunity to stroll around the art exhibition which was taking place. The Documenta is organised once in five years and because of that a lot of people invade the small city to have a look at the latest in modern art. This not only takes place in the museums but there are also installations all over the city, some even remain from former Documenta editions. E.g. German artist Josef Beuys planted a lot of trees all over the city as a work of art and Swiss musician and artist Dieter Meier made a plate which was build into the floor in the inner city which was saying that he would be standing there at a certain time on a certain day in the future. Which is what he did when the day and the time arrived. So this is Documenta and I took the chance to pay it a visit. This is what I saw...


The first thing you notice - but that might be because of the weekend - are the masses who are running around the place where most of the museums and public installations are located. Since the Documenta takes place every five years the attendance rate is very high. People stream into Kassel from everywhere, from all over Germany and Europe. Some even travel from across the oceans to see the art displayed in the museums. Now I wouldn't consider myself to be someone who really knows something about art. I stand in front of something and I have my own opinion on it but I don't feel like I can talk about the whole thing in detail. I just percieve it as beautiful or ugly. Or just "there". But there's other people who can't stop talking about what is in front of their eyes and sometimes it gets hilarious when they talka and talk and talk and they sound like a bunch of weirdos who are just trying to sound cool because they think they understand what the artist wanted to express with his work. And, you might have guessed it, there were lots and lots of people like that everywhere around Kassel. When walking past some installations or pictures I was able to overhear a few conversations. I had to surpress a loud laughter at times.
Oh, the thing in the middle in the picture on top is a poppy field, by the way. Yes, this is art as well.


So when you buy your ticket at one of the numerous shops which are located at all central parts of the city (you can get day tickets, two day tickets, group tickets and so on) you get these plans to guide you around Kassel and the Documenta. As you might be able to see the different places are located at one central place, but there are also some places which are farther outside of the city. I didn't visit those since I didn't have that much time. This should just give you an impression on how huge this whole thing is...


This is another installation. That thing you can see in the back of the picture. I guess it is supposed to be some point where you can have a view on something and this thing there is supposed to be a frame for the picture you see.
The thing in the left back is the Documenta Hall, the first museum I went into. There was a moderate queue in front and I had to wait for about 30 minutes to get in. Inside was stuff this...





Don't ask me who the artists are, I have no idea. But what struck me was that I waited for half an hour to see just one rather small room full of art and packed with people. The most fascinating thing was a room competely in bright red light with a buzzing sound. I didn't make any pictures because it was impossible to capture that experience on film. That was the only thing that was interesting there, as for the rest, well, it's art, huh?
So I moved on to the Aue-Pavillion



Located at the former residence of the local ruler in the 18th century, the Orangerie, this was rather easy to get in to. Still there were lots of people inside, as you can see here.


This was bigger than the one I've been to before, but because there was so much to see I somehow had a slight information overload. Here are some impressions.













That's just random stuff that caught my attention. I won't go into detail, just have a look and decide for yourselves. The next one's were the one's in found most interesting...


This was a room in which there were only those guitars with amplifiers. While watching them I was thinking why they all had those round things on top of the strings, but, hey, it's art, right? So while I was trying to take the picture exactly at the moment I was pressing the shutter the guitars make sounds. The round thing had a plectrum and there were capodasters so each guitar played a different chord. That sounded almost like bells and chimes on chrches. But only with a guitar sound. This was great.


The other one was a video installation which showed little asian kids being sprayed with a white liquid. Although this might sound a bit cruel it was fun to watch since the children were laughing themselves when they were hit by the liquid. I don't know whether it was milk or paint. But the funniest thing were some of the reactions by the spectators. Although you can clearly see that the children knew that they were about to be covered by something some of the audience was disgusted saying that they hope the artist will experience the same thing sometime in the future.

So, off I went to explore the location and it turned out to be a beautiful baroque garden with a channel and a lake. Here are some impressions.





The most interesting thing though for a football maniac like me was the stadium located behind the building of the Orangerie.


I went on to visit one more museum, the Neue Galerie, but that was definetely too dark to take any pictures in there. By the time I got there I was tired as hell and I just went through the rooms rather quickly. There was an interesting installation though, a movie which had Harvey Keitel reciting something, but I didn't really get what it was. But it was a huge thing, almost like a cinema.

The thing that I enjoyed more was the exhibition me and my friend went to the next day. The "Caricatura" was a display of caricatures by different German writers. Great stuff. We took a very close look at each one of the pictures hanging there. This was completely different from what I had seen the day before because each picture actually had a meaning and it was easy to understand. Well, at least most of them. There were three different rooms with lots of stuff to see. On the top floor they had a small documentation about what caricatures can cause when they are misunderstood. This was a nice way to end the exhibition.

Great days in a row.

Honestly, the past few days have been the best in a long time. I had so much fun spendingt ime with the guys of The Gaslight Anthem who we had the honour to play with on monday. We talked a lot after the show, I then met the guys on tuesday to give them a short tour of the city which they seemed to have enjoyed. And then yesterday I spent the evening with them watching movies, going to a bar and talkeing and talking for hours and hours. I left at 5 in the morning with a smile on my face. This is what punk and hardcore mean to me. Meeting new people and just communicating with them. Broadening your own horizon by listening to their stories and opinions, getting new perspectives on different things, just having a good time sitting together somewhere. This is what you need every now ad then to remind yourself of why you're in this whole thing for such a long time. I know it happens every now and then, but you never know who you'll come across. And when you meet such nice people like Alex, Alex, Brian and Ben you know that it was worth the wait.
I really hope I can meet up with those guys again on ther stay here in Germany. And if not I'm going to fly over there some time in the future to have Ben and Alex teach me some Baseball techniques.

And thanks to those guys I'm listening to Bruce Springsteen all the time now...

The strange story of an old punk turned model in Japan

So I never had a morning like this. I was waorking as usual and while there was nothing to do I was looking at spiegel.de which is one of the (if not the) biggest German news site. And guess what I find there. An article about a friend of mine. He went to Japan to study there for a few semesters and now he's a model there. Something we all here were going nuts about. That guy is anything but a model. He always looks like he's way too tired, he always sneaks around like nothing can bother him, he always wears old clothes, worn out sneakers, and so on. But he's a really nice guy and he's a very good friend of mine.
So some guy I know from my internship last year did an article about him and his story which can be found here >>> Big in Japan: Wie ein Altpunk zum gefragten Model wurde (German). It's kind of funny to read a story you have heard and told a million times before. Yes, he was "casted" off the street. Yes, he didn't have any interest in modeling at first but was persuaded by a friend who was visiting him in Tokyo at that time. Yes, he's worked for very big names. And, hahaha, yes, he is an old punk! This is great, if there is one guy who deserves this attention it's him. Congratulations, David!

Meanwhile his roommates back in Cologne are going crazy because the media is calling them. Apparently they there are more newspapers who want to do an interview with him. Maybe the fairy tale continues over here...

Still up and running: Takeshi's Castle on German TV

A few years ago a German sports channel was showing "Takeshi's Castle", a game show from Japan which aired from 1986-1989. This was all more like a live video game where actual people try to find their way through different tasks, some requiring physical strength, some skill, some just pure luck. Behind this was Japanese director, actor, painter, musician, writer ... Kitano Takeshi.

In a way it can be a fun show to watch, but what makes it horrible is the German commentary. It is now shown on RTL2, a station known for its rather... well... they are not known to show high class intelligent television, if I may say so. So the commentary during the show I was watching a few days ago was just racist, frankly speaking. The guy speaking there was going through all the clichés and prejudices Europeans have on asian people. There were derogatory remarks about their height, lots of jokes about the colour yellow, it was just stupid.

I have no idea how that show was percieved in Japan but I guess the comments on the show were not quite as bad as they are on German TV.

Wild life in the city

I can remember that when I was young there were a lot of animal documentaries on German television and the two main characters were Heinz Sielmann and Bernhard Grzimek. They were the masters of animal documentaries and were awarded a lot of prices yet at the same time there were a lot of impersonations of them in comedy shows. There were always those sentences that "right now we are looking at animal XYZ in its natural environment and this is what it usually does and look at how it is learning to cope with the environment" and so on.

So ... today I am waiting at the train station for the subway to take me home from our rehearsal session. And while I am waiting there a young man goes up and down the platform. He's casually swinging his keys which are on some sort of strap band, whatever. While he is doing this he is obviously very anxious and nervous. At least his walking up and down - which he dind maybe 10-15 times while waiting the 10 minutes for the next train - looked like he was.
Suddenly he notices a garbage can at the bottom of the escalator. He starts kicking it and he notices that it swings. What follows next can be compared to little children who find out that certain actions cause a reaction by the object. Our young fellow was now experimenting with his environment. He started kicking the garbage can numerous times, trying to get a huge swinging effect. Then he starts walking up and down again, returns to the garbage can and starts kicking it again, this time with his heel.

This was very interesting to watch. It really gave me a smile after a long day.