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Der Spiegel, From ‘Anschluss’ to ‘Zyklon B’. New Dictionary Highlights Nazi Words to Avoid:

“But there is another, more subtle, linguistic trap which both Germans and non-Germans can easily fall into — and which is far worse a faux pas than a mere slip of the article. Mention that you’ve found the “Endlösung” (”final solution”) to a problem you’ve been grappling with, or that you’ve made a “Selektion” (”selection”) from a number of possible alternatives, and you will quickly find yourself the target of disapproving stares.

The reason is simple — the aforementioned words are so tainted by their use by the Nazis that they are now completely taboo. To modern German ears, “Endlösung” will forever be associated with Hitler’s genocidal “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” while “Selektion” is now verbum non grata due to its use to refer to the death camp practice of “selecting” inmates to be executed.”

Eitz, Thorsten, Stötzel, Georg - Wörterbuch der “Vergangenheitsbewältigung”

‘Yeats made these recordings for the wireless in 1932, 1934 and the last on 28 October 1937 when he was 72. He died on January 28 1939. The photograph shows him sitting before the microphone in 1937.’ (YouTube)

Via Smashingtelly.

Enlish Russia, WW2 Like Reconstruction:

“A few days ago an anniversary for the blockade of St. Petersburg city during the World War 2. For more than two years the city was in the tight circle of German troops. The front line was already in the suburbs and the downtown was bombed constantly. People suffered from the hunger and illnesses. Tens of thousands died. For those who survived it’s a great day, and those guys dressed in WW2 uniforms dedicate this show for them, the heroes of the blocked city.”

VPRO’s Tegenlicht: de integrale versie van het interview met Michael Pollan.

Tegenlicht uitzending: De toekomst van ons voedsel: landbouw of laboratorium? (maandag 28 januari 2008, 21:00 Ned 2)

The New Yorker, The Choice. The Clinton-Obama battle reveals two very different ideas of the Presidency:

“These rival conceptions of the Presidency—Clinton as executive, Obama as visionary—reflect a deeper difference in how the two candidates analyze what ails the country. Obama’s diagnosis is more fundamental: for him, the illness precedes the Bush years and the partisan deadlock in Washington, originating in a basic failure of politicians to bring Americans together. A strong hand on the wheel won’t make a difference if your car is stuck in the mud; a good leader has to persuade enough people to get out and push. Whereas Clinton echoes Churchill, who proclaimed, “Give us the tools and we will finish the job,” Obama invokes Lincoln, who said, “As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.””

Gerrit Komrij, Weer eens nieuwe tijden:

“Dat eerlijke mensen die een fatsoenlijke mening aanhangen nu verguisd worden, weten we. Hoon valt de man ten deel die de boel bij elkaar wil houden. Gematigdheid heet slaapverwekkend.
Dat de stemmen levendiger en schriller zijn geworden en de beledigingen zich opstapelen, weten we. Gespierde taal wordt met wagonladingen over en weer geslingerd, de lucht is er vol van. Hoe extremer de mening, hoe groter de aandacht.
Dat is niet het bijzondere van onze tijd. Het bijzondere van onze tijd is dat de sympathie van hoog tot laag uitgaat naar die drastische meningen. Openlijke sympathie, heimelijke sympathie. De sympathie is er bij de domoren, wat te verwachten viel, maar de sympathie is er ook bij de intellectuelen. In hun discussies en hun debatten. De overgrote meerderheid van onze samenleving lijkt het er over eens dat de brave en fatsoenlijke colonne maar bleekjes afsteekt bij de tetterende marskramers in meningen.”

Lucifer in het Hooi.

Update 26 jan: De video van de complete film is niet meer beschikbaar, dan moeten we ons maar behelpen met de oorspronkelijke trailers van Helvetica aaneengeplakt tot één YouTube video:

‘Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture.’ (Helvetica Film)

Via Milo.

Installation of the exhibition, January 2008

Fresh Air, Michael K. Williams: He’s Only Playing Tough:

“On HBO’s The Wire, actor Michael K. Williams plays Omar Little, a stick-up guy who robs only drug dealers.

Omar has a scar running down his face. That’s not a prosthetic scar; it’s real. Williams tells Terry Gross the story behind his scar — and lots of other stories about himself and Omar.

Williams’ other TV credits include Law & Order, CSI, Boston Legal and the TV movie of Lackawanna Blues; he’s appeared on the big screen in Gone Baby Gone.

Williams tells Terry Gross that he initially had a hard time figuring out how to be as hard and frightening as the script calls for Omar to be.

“Anybody that really knows me … knows that’s very far from my character, so I just had a hard time finding a believable state of mind to execute the character,” he says. “I just kept going to laughter.”"

‘Shipwreck timber littering coast’ (BBC). Photo: pip aka flipflop :) (idem)

Eric G. Wilson, In Praise of Melancholy. American culture’s overemphasis on happiness misses an essential part of a full life:

“I for one am afraid that American culture’s overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I further am concerned that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations. I am finally fearful of our society’s efforts to expunge melancholia. Without the agitations of the soul, would all of our magnificently yearning towers topple? Would our heart-torn symphonies cease?

My fears grow out of my suspicion that the predominant form of American happiness breeds blandness. This kind of happiness appears to disregard the value of sadness. This brand of supposed joy, moreover, seems to foster an ignorance of life’s enduring and vital polarity between agony and ecstasy, dejection and ebullience. Trying to forget sadness and its integral place in the great rhythm of the cosmos, this sort of happiness insinuates that the blues are an aberrant state that should be cursed as weakness of will or removed with the help of a little pink pill.”

Eurozine, Watching David Attenborough:

“We are looking at something that probably not one of us has ever seen before. We are staring in perfect colour close-up at the slow, rhythmic uncoiling of a slimy proboscis. But what are we to make of the strange and oddly beautiful sight before our eyes? The camera pulls back a fraction. The answer is revealed. We are looking at a snail. A familiar garden snail. And as our recognition dawns, the background music, a gently impelling blend of harps and violins, fades slightly, and we hear the characteristic hushed intensity of one of the most famous voices in the world. “We don’t often see a snail that way”, says David Attenborough. “And that’s because we’ve only recently had the tiny lenses and electronic cameras we need to explain this miniature world.”

We are entering, burrowing into, the first part of Attenborough’s most recent BBC series, Life in the Undergrowth: by the time the five episodes are over another four hours of screen time will have been added to the ninety or so hours of extraordinary television footage that he and his various teams have compiled for television viewers over the last 30 years.”

The Daily Telegraph, The South Bank Show: you can’t please everyone:

“Did he wonder whether he was exploiting the painter Francis Bacon by showing him drunk? ‘But we were both drunk! Plastered. By the end of the day the room was spinning. We had started drinking at 9am when he came out with Bollinger, then we carried on drinking and filming over lunch and into the evening. But curiously I was asking things that were OK. I looked like, well, what I looked like, but I thought keep it in, keep it in.’”

Voormalig Belastingkantoor, ontwerp van G. Friedhoff, aan de Wibautstraat. Nu Philip Kohnstammhuis genaamd.

De 100 monumenten van Herrema:

“Welke bouwwerken uit de naoorlogse periode behoren tot de top van de Amsterdamse architectuur en stedenbouw?”

Zie verder Inleiding Top 100 en Negen Amsterdamse objecten door minister aangewezen als rijksmonument.

Electro, Eclectro Electo 2007 - de uitslag:

“Na dik 100.000 stemmen, uitgebracht door bijna 20.000 stemmers uit 17 landen, is de eindstand bekend van Eclectro Electo 2007. De uitslag leert door zijn eerlijke stemmethode, hoge aantal stemmen en internationale achtergrond veel over de voorkeuren van de wereldwijde dancescene. En de winnaar is…”

Feltron 2007 Annual Report

Timewatch’ Omaha Beach in CGI. (YouTube - via)

Timewatch:

“One of the most fun parts of filming is for the computer graphics (CGI) sequences. Timewatch has its own team dedicated to CGI (Neil Wilson, Steve Flynn and Colin Thornton) who have come out to Normandy with a car laden with Rangers’ uniforms and fake plastic guns.”

Slate, Jean-Claude Vrinat. Remebering the world-class Paris restaurateur:

“Jean-Claude Vrinat, who died from lung cancer on Monday at the age of 71, was France’s greatest restaurateur, and his passing marks the end of a particular form of hospitality. Vrinat was the star attraction at his venerated Paris restaurant, Taillevent, but he was not its chef. Instead, he presided over the dining room and left the cooking to someone else (a very talented someone else, of course). In the era of globe-spanning celebrity chefs, this allocation of labor and limelight was nothing short of antediluvian. But having a chef tethered to the kitchen and a revered owner in the front of the house had its advantages: Taillevent commanded a loyalty like no other luxury restaurant in France, and Vrinat’s death has prompted an outpouring of grief, not just for the man but for the breed of restaurateur he represented.”