The Berlin Edition of the New York Feuilleton (fɶ'yə-tôɴ')

The life of a writer - a journalist especially - is these days largely spent squinting at the computer screen, researching articles, making pitches, conducting long-distance interviews via skype and fact-checking. Which is perhaps the reason why now, more than ever, I consciously try not to fill up my leisure time with soaking in web-based attractions and entertainments, like YouTube and GoogleVideo. Whereas the younger me saw the internet as the greatest and most sophisticated toy the world had ever devised, I now see it as a wonderfully useful tool that needs to be put away every so often.

This past week, however, it was particularly difficult to tear myself from my computer for too long. I can't remember the internet ever being this much fun and rewarding.

First off, there's Wes Anderson's Hotel Chevalier, a 13-minute prologue to the upcoming (or is it already out in NY?) The Darjeeling Limited, available as a free download on iTunes. Don't want to set up an iTunes account? You can watch it on the web at http://cinemascope.co.il/?p=738.

I've never been much of a Wes Anderson fan. I appreciate his attention to detail and the quirky sensibilities he brings to all his movies, but I find his work since Rushmore incredible thin on substance. Still, I'm impressed with how he's managed so quickly to define his own unmistabkable style. While I have absolutely no proof of this whatsoever, I've always suspected that he's learned a lot from Peter Greenaway: the obsessive attention to minute detail; the heavily saturated colors and color-coding; the wide shots and fluid camera movements; the love of calligraphy and cataloging. If anything, I feel that Anderson has successfully brought all these elements into the mainstream, creating a hyper-stylized feel-good cinema with a cast of quirky characters in lieu of Greenaway' grim, Jacobian sensibility.

Hotel Chevalier shows the full range of Anderson's creative powers and distills into 13 minutes. Perhaps its bite-sized nature makes it easier for me to stomach that the Life Aquatic or Royal Tanenbaums. I was less irritated by the picture-perfect shot compositions and the camera's fetishistic gaze than usual. It actually seemed appropriate for a short story to try and pack so much into so little space. Perhaps best of all, it prominently features the Peter Sarstedt pop-ballad "Where Do You Go To My Lovely."



Secondly, Radiohead's new album In Rainbows began streaming through the internet on Wednesday. In a radically new anti-marketing scheme, Radiohead is offering the album exclusively as a pay-what-you-can MP3 download. A deluxe box set of the album will br released in December. Until then, the download is your only option.

I tried unsuccessfully to download the album on Wednesday. Whether the failure stemmed from a spotty internet connection on my end or simply too much traffic on the radiohead site, I do not know. I finally succeeded on Friday morning: 50 pence later, I was listening to the 42-minute, ten track album on a loop.

That Thursday, before I had heard the album, I asked a couple of friends to give me an impromptu review. One told me he thought it was the band's strongest album since Kid A. The other called it the "anti-Kid A" and branded it "too listenable." Needless to say, such contradictory reports left fairly uncertain what to expect.

Having finally listened to In Rainbows, I'm not entirely sure what to make of it myself. It plays like a signature Radiohead album, so much so, that I kept having deja vu (or deja écouté) moments that sent me searching through the hard drive to see if I had any of the album's tracks on an EP or a bootleg.

I'm a firm believer in waiting to see how an album holds up over time, so I don't want to say too much at present about the album's merits and failings. Who knows, tomorrow I might feel entirely different about In Rainbows than I do today. Some general comments, however, are in order. Structurally speaking, the album does bear a resemblance to Kid A. However, aside from the signature radiohead sound, the comparisions pretty much stop there. Most if not all of the tracks have regular time signatures; there's not much in the way of instrumental or electronic experimentation going on; the songs are infectiously driven and compulsively listenable, without being pop-y. To sum up these initial impressions, I would say that Radiohead has chosen an exceptionally strong batch of new material and given it the best possible arrangement, without much of an eye to innovating. If you can live with that, go ahead and download it. It's as cheap or as expensive as you want it to be.


Kudos to Shane Anderson for directing my attention towards New York Magazine's rundown of the 10 Most Incomprehensible Bob Dylan Interviews of All Time. I'd like to give Dylan the benefit of the doubt here and say that he's either too high to speak straight or just making enormous fools out of these reporters, but it IS shocking how inarticulate and nonsensical this great singer / songwriter comes off.

When I got back from the Philharmonie on Thursday night, my attention was diverted from the homepage of Berlin's Largest Second-Hand English Language Bookstore in Berlin, "Another Country" and towards a link on GoogleVideo that contains a complete rip of Michael Moore's 'Sicko." I had been meaning to see the film with a pre-med friend over the summer, but hadn't had the chance. I found it hard to believe that a first-run film was up for grabs on GoogleVideo, so I followed the link. To my surprise, it was no joke. I was overjoyed with my discovery and so hooked by the film, that I lay in bed until 2am watching the 123-minute-long-documentary.

Watching the film as an American living abroad reinforced my apprehensions about settling in the States...and filled me with the overpowering urge to marry the next German / French / British girl I saw. For the health benefits.



The other, by far cleverer, video I came across was the little-seen and ultra-rare 1940 version of Lord of the Rings, starring Humphrey Bogart as Frodo Baggins, Sydney Greenstreet as Gandalf and Marlene Dietrich as Galadriel. Peter Lorre and Joseph Cotton also provide winning cameos.

It is my sincere hope that this post serves as a useful guide to discovering the manifold cultural wonders that abound these days on the world wide web so that we may all lead richer, more meaningful lives.

Believe it or not, this drawing is printed on the second page of concert guides at the Berlin Philharmonic. The message is fairly obvious in any language, but the text beneath the drawing reads:

"Dear Concertgoers,

The acoustics in this hall are so good that even parasitic noise is perfectly audible to all. Coughing hinders the artists' concentration and the enjoyment of the listeners. Please try to avoid coughing and throat-clearing during the concert (cough drops!) - [whose] volume can, by the way, be significantly lessened by the application of a handkerchief. We thank you in advance - and Vicco von Bülow for his drawing!

Your Berlin Philharmonic"

I don't know if Berliners find this request nearly as humorous as I do. I must say, however, that it is a very sensible request to make in any concerthall, but especially in the Philharmonie. Unfortunately, as any frequent concert-goer knows, coughing is a perinnial annoyance that one simply needs to learn to put up with. No amount of preaching, begging or politely asking will every change that sad reality.

The most forceful injuction against coughing that I've heard came from the wonderful yet fussy french pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard. During a recital at Carnegie Hall back in 2005, he interrupted a piece dy Debussy to issue a stern admonishment: "A cough is like death to music." The comment was greeted by some laughter and scattered applause. For the duration of the concert, not another cough was heard.

Despite the drawing in the Berlin Philharmonic's program, however, an elderly couple in the row in front of me fitfully coughed their way through Thursday night's concert of Mussorgsky and Shostakovich.

Vladimir Ashkenazy led the orchestra in the BP premiere of his own orchestral arrangment of Pictures at an Exhibition. Also on hand was the stunning Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili for Shostakovich's first violin concerto.


For the opening Nocturne, Batiashvili opted for a strongly masculine sound that was at odds with her lithe and delicate appearance. Her playing was assured, rugged and very even. Impressively, she reined in her most impassioned, virtuosic and weeping passages which often culminated in piercing, crystal-like high notes. She alternated between a tight, firm grip and a quick, light clasp. Her determination and control was as ravishing as her beauty. Ashkenazy seemed entirely under her spell. He conducted broadly like a captain steering a ship. There was not a shred a tension between soloist and orchestra.

Many conductors, including Leopold Stokowski and Walter Goehr, have tried their hand at arranging Mussorgsky's solo piano piece Pictures at an Exhibition for orchestra. By far the most famous and freqeuntly performed version, however, was produced by Maurice Ravel. Ashkenazy's faithful arrangement is itself over 20 years ago, but it has yet to emerge as a challenger to the Ravel.

A distinguished pianist, Ashkenazy sticks close to the original piano score, including the sections omitted by Ravel. His version worked best when it bring outs unexpected elements of the score, such as a Jewishy folk melody in the second picture, "Il vecchio castello." Where it suffers most is those places where Ashkenazy tries most forcefully to react against Ravel: for instance in the brass-heavy orchstration of the leitmotivic promenade the unaccompanied horns start to sound vulnerable and exposed. Ashkenazy also scales back significantly on the strings, with unfortunate coloristic consequences.

The overabundence of brass (the scoring includes three trombones) affected the finale - The Great Gate of Kiev - most adversely. It had a vulgar, brash, Hollywood sound, especially given the Philharmonie's accoustics. Nevertheless, it did make for a situation where one could cough with impunity.

This past weekend, Berllin's formerly-great Schiller Theater was jam-packed for what might have been the first time in 30 years.

Located on the elegant Bismarkstraße, the Schiller was once West Berlin's premiere theater and presented performances from the likes of Samuel Beckett. In the 1990's the theater's funding ran out. Since then, the dilapidated space has hosted out-of-town acts and one-night-only events.

On Saturday night, however, a visit from Israel's Russian theater troupe "Gesher" seemed to attract half of Berlin's well-to-do Russian-Jewish community. The play was "Die Späte Liebe" or "Late Love," which was described in the German program as "A fantasia based on stories by Isaak Bashevis Singer." The event apparantly had as its media sponsor the publisher of a number of Russian- and Jewish-interest publications. In the halls of the theater, stacks of free magazines and newspapers awaited the elderly crowd. For their benifit as well, flimsy Russian signs lined the walls.

The performance was a fundraiser for "Neue Namen," a party running in the upcoming Jewish Community Parlimentary Elections. At 40 Euro a piece, the tickets were quite costly...although they were rumors circulating that many - if not most - of the attendees had been comped in an effort to buy their votes. In any event, I couldn't get clear on which direction the cash was flowing.

Inside the packed theater, it smelled comfortingly of baby-powder and hairspray. To my chagrin, the performance was entirely in Russian without any form of translation. Still, I was able to make out the play's general contours. It dealt with a trio of Holocaust survivors living in present-day Miami, and with the doomed love that develops between two of the characters. But neither the stilted acting nor the nonstop comedy set the audience up for the play's tragic ending.

In the main role was Emanuel Vitorgan, a nearly 70-year-old actor whose long filmography includes the classic 1980 Soviet gem "Marta the Pious Woman." As the love interest, the beautiful and youthful Klara Novika made for an unconvincing elderly widow. Rounding out the cast was a neurotic yet bland Leonid Kanevsky. An actor best known for his work in the Israeli film "Late Marriage," Kanevsky's finest hour was actually in 1975's heartwarming family film, "A Taste of Halva."

As directed by Yevgeny Arye, the actors gave exaggeratedly mannered and comedic performances, in the quaint old-fashioned style of boulevard theatre.

The audience lapped it up wholesale and were curiously uncritical of Elina Ofer's production, whose more amateurish aspects included garish, unimaginative lighting and some truly inexplicable video animation (including clip-art cars, palm trees and an origami boat!!!??). Massive applause accompanied each entrance and exit, and peals of laughter rang out constantly. In one of the evening's sillier moments, the crowd enthusiastically clapped along to a shoddy rendition of Hava Nagila.

Initially, the crowd's unbridled enjoyment was baffling to me. It soon dawned on me, however, that to them what mattered was not so much the quality of the actual performance, but rather that a cultural space existed where they could be comfortable and at home as Russian Jews. If only for an evening.

I've only been out of school for five months, but already I deeply miss being a student. Perhaps it's because I'm surrounded by so many philosophy MA candidates.

Until I decide whether to return for an advanced degree, however, I'm taking measures to keep my philosophical mind sharp. I recently joined a weekly Wittgenstein reading group. We meet every Sunday to discuss a handful of propositions from the Philosophical Investigations. Prior to this, the only Wittgenstein I'd read were the Lectures on Aesthetics, last spring in Lydia Goehr's Modern Survey of Aesthetics.

I was recently revisiting some essays I had written on aesthetical matters. Reopening my college archives, I had a sinking feelings: they seemed homeless and unwanted. I determined to find them a home, finally deciding to post them on one of the other blogs that make up the Feuilleton blogring. Accordingly, I redubbed the blog "Bilderverbot" (the name refers to the ban on graven images in traditions such as Judiasm) in light of the subject-matter of the freshly-posted papers.

So, it gives me great pleasure to invite you to check out what may be the only Aesthetics Blog on the web, Bilderverbot. Until I have the time to contribute brand-new material, the blog shall be a holding site for my critical essays on art, philosophy, literature, film, music.

Currently up on Bilderverbot, you can find essays on a colorful cast of characters, including Hume, Adorno, Schöpenhauer, Wagner, Rossini, Gandhi, Ibn Khaldun, Popper, Collingwood, Goodman, Kracauer, Benjamin, Lucaks, Brecht and many, many more...

As always, I appreciate any and all comments!

I recently unearthed this article from August 2003, which was my first summer in Berlin. I was an intern at the sadly-demised German-Jewish, translatlantic, bilignaul paper Der Aufbau. Due to the brevity of my trip, I had the opportunity to only contribute one story to the dying paper. Still, I can now boast about having joined the ranks of Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig and Albert Einstein, all of whom contributed to the paper during its heyday in New York in the 1930s.

Sadly, I never saw this article in print (it did run, I've been told), nor did I ever recieve payment (20 Euro?) for it. In this highly-ditigal day and age, it's hard for me to conceptualize a newstory having disappeared so completely from the face of the earth. And so, I proudly present my sole contribution to Der Aufbau, a mere four years later. Enjoy...

---

MENDING FENCES, JOURALISTICALLY
By Adam Joachim Goldmann
August 2003


Had you been at the Schoß Wendgräben on the night of July 30th, you would have witnessed a rather bizarre spectacle: a group of young Israelis in Mercedes Benzes and Jaguars, zipping around the palace grounds for a good part of the evening. The Israelis had arrived at the Schloss for a seminar with young German journalists, half-way through a program run by journalists.network titled “German’s Media Landscape.”

Under the patronage of German President Johannes Rau and the support of Allianz Group, the program brought a dozen young Israeli journalists to Germany for a trip geared primarily to their professional needs.

Of the ten German journalists, only a couple had had serious contact with Israelis before. Arriving at Schoß Wendgräben, an hour’s drive south of Berlin, the Germans were taken aback by the joyriding antics of the Israeli participants. This craze for German cars was one of the several surprises that the German journalists were to receive that evening.

The loud, public arguing of the Israelis stunned the mild mannered Germans. One of the German participants, Kirsten Grieshaber, the newly-appointed news assistant for the Berlin bureau of the New York Times, was shocked when an Israeli told her a Holocaust joke.

Although the members of the two groups quickly became friends, the seminar was marked by some slight discomfort on the part of the Germans, whose reserved and extra cautious – lest they offend – demeanor clashed to comic effect with the brashness of the Israelis. While the Germans eventually could be heard laughing along with the Israelis at Holocaust jokes, the awkwardness was never completely dispelled.

Karin Keils, a freelancer for DPA, the German Press Agency was riding the S-Bahn when her partner Nurit Felder suddenly drew attention to the fact that she, a Jew, was riding a train in Germany. Puzzled and in no small measure disturbed by the comment Ms. Keils said it drove home how both Germans and Israelis of her generation are affected by the “burden of history.”

Perhaps the single most awkward encounter was the group’s meeting with the German-Jewish journalist Richard Haim Schneider. Talking about the mid-east conflict, Mr. Schneider send several of the Israelis into a rage by using very strong language to criticize Israeli policy. A couple of Israelis stormed out and still others stayed to hurl accusations at Mr. Schneider. Throughout the meeting, the German group was absolutely silent.

Nor was this discomfort exclusive to the Germans. Prior to meeting with the Germans, the Israelis spent time in Munich and Leipzig. Meital Jaslovitz, who works for Israel’s Channel Two, was particularly disturbed by something she saw on the group’s visit to Dachau.

Overhearing a German teenager tell the Holocaust survivor she was escorting through the Camp that “the Holocaust has no effect on my life” prompted Ms. Jaslovitz to wonder, “Does this girl symbolize the entire German youth?” Ms. Jaslovitz was glad that the trip was taken without the Germans; had they gone together, she said, it would have been extremely unsettling.

Some Israelis confessed to being perturbed by seeing “Dem Deutschen Volke” adorn the façade of the Reichstag. Others were likewise affected at the sight of the enormous Bundesadler in the Bundestag.

Despite all these hurdles, Shir Uzad, a researcher for Channel Two’s morning show “Zehavi at Seven,” found the trip to be ultimately therapeutic: “I always wanted to visit Germany because two of my grandparents were born in Berlin, but I was still ambivalent about traveling there for a vacation, so this was a chance to deal with a lot of the questions I had.”

Reconciliation, however, was not the raison d’être of this trip. In the words of the program’s founder, Michael Anthony, 28, “The purpose of the trip is to establish professional contacts. The reconciliation aspect is secondary.” The meeting at the Schloß was an orientation of sorts to the reporting program in Berlin, where the German participants served as news assistants - organizing interviews and translating - for the stories the Israelis were writing for their papers back home.

The topics chosen by Yuval Karni and David Baron were standouts. Mr. Karmi, a political editor for Yedioth Acheronot, wrote about comparing the Berlin wall and the security fence Israel is currently building, whereas Mr. Baron prepared a story for Ma’ariv on ex-neo-Nazis trying to reintegrate into society.

This autumn, the Germans will travel to Israel for a week in November, where they will attend seminars and work on stories for their papers in Germany. For Yifah Elazar, a senior news editor for the Internet-news site Ynet, downplaying the reconciliation aspect made the trip all the more effective: “We have not so much discussed reconciliation as experienced it: The very encounter with German people, mostly our own age, helps to mend the parts still broken in every Jew and Israeli - even in the third or fourth generation after the Holocaust.”

Commenting on the program’s professional goal, Mr. Elazar said that establishing contacts was a definite, referring not only to the prominent personages he met with but also to his German contemporaries “If I ever need information about Germany,” Mr. Elazar continued, “I now have German friends that could assist me.”