What are you reading?
Dhe USA is currently ruling in all three requested disciplines. I’ve always read several books at the same time, in alternating cliffhanger dramaturgy, jumping from one to the other. Some also as research for projects. And definitely every few days at least ten random pages in a Ross MacDonald thriller. To me, this is Zen literature, a Californian dreamland where the world was as rotten and cursed back in the fifties and sixties as it is today.
Described using typical MacDonald character ensembles, each time a youngster has run away from his or her wealthy parents and patient detective Lew Archer must track them down. He consistently finds ancient generational dramas.
Next to it was until two days ago: “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist” by Jack El-Hai. On the basis of Rorschach tests and many discussions, the innovative US psychiatrist Douglas McGlashan Kelley tried in 1945 to analyze the mental state of the Nazi defendants in Nuremberg. He came particularly close to Reich Marshal Hermann Goering. He looked for the evil in people, searched for the “Nazi gene”, so to speak, but instead found another, more disturbing answer – and yet later perished in this search.
What do you see?
At least not series. No time for that. In Philip K. Dick’s, thank God, yet unfilmed novel “Ubik”, the people live a life that doesn’t really take place, because in reality they are sedated and attached to drips in huge warehouses. Sounds familiar? Yes, also from “The Matrix”, but the screenwriters have to get their inspiration from somewhere.
I’ve seen Oliver Stone’s JFK Revisited, sucked in it avidly. The details of the assassination sequence in Dallas in 1963 repeated over and over again – and did the fatal bullet come from the front after all? The CIA insisted that it was fired from the rear of the warehouse where Lee Harvey Oswald was said to be lurking with a rifle upstairs. But he probably wasn’t there at all. Jack Ruby’s then staged “act of revenge” on him buried everything under deadly silence for years.
Hair-raising details of the autopsy cover-up and manipulation of the dead body of the President, especially the massive head wound. Great, convincing, both ideological and factual lines of evidence by Oliver Stone for the CIA’s perpetration. Conclusion: In fact, the Civil War is still raging today, and it will continue to tear apart this huge country. A horrible sight. I doubt that German politicians will learn from this. Since the “Wende” in 1989, which went disastrously wrong, polarization has also ruled here as the primary political tactic and weapon.
What are you listening to?
Last year, 17 songs by US actress Karen Black, who died in 2013, were surprisingly released, sung between 1971 and 1976, most of them composed and written by herself, accompanied on the guitar and arranged by Cass Combs. They exude a Cohenian fado flair, are intelligently written, some are dialogues with lovers who have just passed away.
Her voice has an unbelievable range, from smoky baritone to eccentric screeching coloratura, she occasionally sings a duet with herself. The arrangements are acoustic, small and concise in order to let the voice radiate to the full. Amazed and entranced from the first hearing. As original, ironic, profoundly wistful as her playing in films like The Great Gatsby, Five Easy Pieces, Cisco Pike, The Day of the Locust. The penultimate title says it all: “I wish I knew the man I thought you were . . . (he’d tell me not to trust the man you are). “Surely speaks from the heart of many women.
What’s bugging you?
Feuilletons in newspapers and television are increasingly being hijacked by daily politics. Conversely, culture can be harnessed to the cart of politics everywhere. This shows the spiritual and material dependency. But films whose premieres are honored by the presence of whatever Federal President must have done something wrong. As movies.
#questions #Dominik #Graf #polarization #rules