Addiction of the Week IV

Mesut Özil

German soccer player

A true genius with the ball.

Impressed the soccer community during the World Cup in South Africa and was traded from the German Club Werder bremen to Real Madrid, one of the best Clubs in the world.

There, the 21 years young was thrown into the position of the playmaker, and up to now he has to fulfill on his to become the worlds best player.

For any non-spanish fan who wants to keep up with him, some youtubers keep track of all his actions.

The Silver Cat

I´m currently working through a couple of files that my father found in my grandfathers basement after his death. The files contain letters , company records from his time in Italy 1944-45, lots of photos and certificates. Those reach from the Nazi-Era over the occupation time to the late 90s.

While randomly skipping through a file I found a from an old friend of my grandfather, describing his struggles in post-war germany. The following excerpt shows pretty well how much violence was accepted among people born in the early 30s in Germany. Those people grew up being taught that violence is the best solution for anything.

"I found myself in a small village, and a local family hired me to watch over a castle which stood a few miles away from the village in the forest. It was probably a summer residence for some loval duke in the old days. Now I lived alone in this castle, except for a huge, silver cat. I quite liked this cat, it had a blue and a green eye and there were talks in the village that witches in the forest used it to perform magic (?). However, after a while the family started complaining, they said I didn´t behave like a real lord and didn´t have the right manners to live in a place like this. They fired me eventually. Before I left, I searched for the cat. We had lived together in this castle for so long and I was sure she couldn´t take the pain of my departure. So when I found her, I mercyfully released her from her sorrow with a clean shot in the head..."

Addiction of the Week III

Elvis Presley

American Musician

Legendary for a reason.

Addiction of the Week II

Chinese Propaganda

I´ve always been interested in propaganda. Those stylish, but simple pictures, that say so much without many words are just fascinating to me.

This applies to the chinese propaganda in particular, wich strikes me as more diverse and rich with symbolism.

A huge collection of posters, post cards and other propaganda swag can be found here.

Review: The Expendables

Going to a movie is all about expectation to me. Take for example "The American". It gets horrible reviews by the people because they didn´t expect that the movie would be as slow as it is. Trailers do their part in obscuring the actual style of the movie, and make it seem more action-packed or fast paced.

Now, "the Expendables" does not have to worry about that problem in particular. It is exactly what the trailer makes it seem like: A stupid action ride.

Still many people left the cinema disappointed, probably expecting a much more grand scaled action masterpiece. Also many people point at the many plot holes and the not-so-good directorial work of Mr.Stallone.

Here I wonder for what reasons those people went to the cinema. I agree on their points, but this is not an arthouse movie, it doesn´t claim to be clever or well made entertainment. It´s a rough hommage to the 80s action flicks, which doesn´t take itself very seriously. And if all those movie buffs can´t turn their trained eyxes from the technichal flaws of this movie, I feel sorry for them.

My friends an I had a ton of fun in the cinema, drinking beer and laughin our asses off.

6/7

A Prussian Slip

There was a saying about germans, which became popular durin napoleons better days:

The french own the land, the british own the sea, and the germans, the germans own the clouds

During this time, germans masters created the most beautiful pieces of music ever known to humankind and german poets were able to bring the clumsy and dry german language to a beauty previously unknown.

Nowadays however, germans excell mostly in another discipline:

Bureaucracy.

How efficient we bury any human aspect under paper became clear to me when I heard this story from my mum:
The mother of a friend of my mum, let´s call her Mrs.P, went to hopital and fell into a deep coma. Two weeks later, she died.

A week after that the daughter recieved a letter from the hospital.

It was a bill for two weeks of cantine food, around 13 Euro per day.

The daughter then called the hospital to explain that her mother never ate in the cantine. The lady from the hospital office then explained that Mrs.P had subscribed to the cantine upon arriving in hospital, and during her stay has never called the office to unsubscribe...

On making S.S.D.D. II

Making films is always fun, but it is also always a pain in the ass. Especially when you do it alone.

It´s just so limited, I can only have fixed amera angles as I dont have a tripod, and if I want to move, I have to film in POV. Also, the things I can do on my own are pretty limited.

So for the next film, I plan to have more people involved.

I already had plans for a biggeer film in April, a friend and me already worked out most of the plot details and a script was in the works, but we just never got to it.

So this time I will take some time to work out some ideas, and hopefully I can shoot in either beginning of December or end of January.

Addiction of the Week I

For me, often I don´t just like a certain object/artist/subject. Upon discovering something special, I get obsessed with it for a certain time, then lose interest, before it gets included into my canon of cool stuff. During this period my mind is mostly filled with thoughts about said thing, and I can´t help going back to it whenever I can.

This doesn´t have to be something completely new, sometimes I just stumble upon stuff I have been interested in before and I begin to dig into it deeper.

In this section I will introduce the object in question, in the hope you might see something that catches your interest in any way.

John Cale

British singer-songwriter. Writes beautiful music, mostly pretty simple, but not annoyingly dull. His 70s stuff is Pop-Music at it´s best.

"Paris 1919" is a very good example of the style of his work.