None of the Above
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No one man should have all that power
Read MoreComics Are for Everyone: Less Capitalism, More Telepathy Please
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Recently, I dived back into reading comics (thereby neglecting my movie watching) and my collection of comic examples has become crazy huge, so today I’ll celebrate my 300th blog post (seriously, 300! 280,000 words! But who’s counting?) with an extra-long comic edition. And if you think “I can skip this one, I don’t care about comics”, please give it try anyway, maybe you’ll see that it doesn’t always have to be about superheroes.
Read MoreUncredited Terrorists
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So, I read this really fascinating article at GQ about Arab American actors being typecast as terrorists. At first, this seems like an obvious story, nothing that would surprise you, “Of course they mostly cast them as terrorists, so what?” but the story pointed out some aspects even I wasn’t aware of.
Read MoreNightcrawler (2014)
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(spoilers ahead)
Nightcrawler is a brilliantly intelligent movie, centered around an amazing performance by Jake Gyllenhaal following a very focused and clever screenplay and direction by Dan Gilroy. The movie knows exactly what it wants to do and what it wants to talk about. Every aspect of the movie caters to that goal, the captivating nighttime images by Robert Elswit, the beautiful score by James Newton Howard and John Gilroy’s editing. It’s an exceptional movie in the way it presents its story, its tone and in its protagonist. It warrants a deep analysis and while this will be long, it doesn't even come close to everything the movie offers.
Read MoreMusic Box: Gang of Four's "Entertainment!"
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After Marie Antoinette I couldn’t help but wonder, why I haven’t written anything about Gang of Four’s Entertainment! before. This is one of my most influential albums that is so bold in deconstructing our society and goes beyond the “everything sucks” ideology of many punk albums. This is post-punk, of course, and while there are other political albums in music’s history, at least for me nothing achieves what this album achieves. It’s angry without being loud, it’s intelligent and challenges the listener because it doesn’t provide easy answers. It’s simply brilliant, lyrically and musically. If I ever need inspiration for change, for doing something, I put this one on and get going.
Read MoreLooking for Easy Answers in the Marysville Pilchuck High School Shooting
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I’m always fascinated (not in a positive way) by school shootings, not so much because of gun control issues (that’s a given, I guess), but because I can’t help but wonder how terrible living in our culture one must feel to decide to kill others. Especially young people. You can’t explain it away with psychological disorders or video games because it happens too often and the perpetrators are too different to allow simple categorization. All of them have one thing in common (and this includes people who have been doing this decades ago), they live in this society, in this culture. The 14-year-old boy who started shooting in the school cafeteria in Washington on Friday is no different. He is different from other shooters and I wonder if that’s a reason that this shooting is not as publicized in the media as others.
Read MoreThere’s a Movement in Town
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After reading about the anniversary protests in Turkey at the moment, I wondered that this has been featured so strongly in German media. Sure, Germany has a higher interest in Turkey than in most other countries but it reminded me again how one-sided and hysteria-driven the media can be and mostly is. Because at least since the Arab Spring and Occupy in 2011, protest movements have become as strong as they haven’t been since the 60s. Especially since they happen all around the world and cannot be centered on one idea but reflect the general unhappiness of people with our society. So I wondered if those protests in Turkey are really the only ones worth reporting about right now. Well, they’re not. So I googled “protests” in GoogleNews and here’s what I found on one day.
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