Stolper Steine – Stumbling Blocks

On Monday night I attended a presentation by Leora Auslander at the American Academy in Berlin. She is Professor of European Studies at the University of Chicago, but is a Fellow at the Academy this semester. She gave a great talk about the effectiveness of memorials. Her focus was on monuments, memorials, and museums focusing on the Shoa in Germany, but it served as an interesting think-piece on what makes a successful memorial.

She mentioned one of my favorites, the Stolper Steine by artist Gunter Demnig. His work is quite subtle. Most German sidewalks are still made up of cobblestone. Demnig will go to the listed address of Jews that were murdered during the Holocaust, and replace a cobblestone in front of the door with a brass block that gives the name, date of birth, date of arrest or deportation, date of death, and the concentration camp in which the person was killed. You can find these all over Berlin now, and apparently he’s also placing them in many other European cities.

Like any memorial, most people walk past them once they’ve embedded them into their mental map of their environment, but these “stumbling blocks” are more effective because looking at them will force you to focus on them. It can’t be done while in motion, or simply passing by.

Some houses had many Jews in them. One of the most depressing things is to see that families were arrested on the same day, but killed in different places at disparate times. I cannot even begin to imagine what it must have been like when children were taken from their parents…

I will try to contact Demnig. My father was born here in Berlin, and he lost his grandfather, his uncle and aunt, and his cousins in the Shoah. I would love to put some stones down for them in front of their house… especially now that my third son carries one of their names.

In-Game Obama

Reason number whateverhundred I like Obama better than McCain: he’s buying in-game advertisement.

What’s that, you wonder?

Video games have become very sophisticated virtual environments, and the console manufacturers (Microsoft and their XBOX, Sony and their Playstation 3) are enabling advertisement that runs inside the video games. Seeing as a lot of games either mimic sports, or some kind of urban setting, it’s pretty easy to have billboards (or virtual video monitors) inside the game’s landscapes.

So if you’re online pretending to be a Formula One driver, you’ll go racing past a billboard for Foster’s. That’s not just there for realism, it’s actually paid for by the beer-maker. And what’s cool is if you race past that same corner a few weeks later, the same sign will now have an ad for sportswear, or pizza, or whatever the typical gamer might be interested in buying.

So what’s up with Barack Obama? His campaign bought ad space in nine different video games this month… mostly sports and racing games. So if you’re cruising the data-streets at night breaking virtual laws, you will be reminded to vote for the Democratic candidate.

The game consoles are permanently online these days, so it’s easy to update the game code. Even cooler is that they can target it regionally, so it’s only being shown to owners of these game systems in swing states.

Here’s a screen shot from the dubious Burnout Paradise:

The rest of us will be shown Cola ads I guess.

Klassik Radio

I’ve got a number of radio stations programmed in my car, and pending my mood I usually try and underscore it with the appropriate music while I drive. I don’t always succeed though. There’s a number of good stations in Berlin, which is a lot less rigidly formatted than the U.S. radio market. But often I can’t get the right groove, or I just don’t find the available music to be intellectually stimulating.

So I end up listening to a lot of talking radio. I purposely don’t use the phrase Talk Radio, a uniquely American media product in which angry people talk about issues without consideration of facts, in an effort to get other people just as angry. No, I listen to Info Radio,  a 24-hour German news station, or to NPR World-Wide, which broadcasts here in Berlin. I try BBC periodically, but I just don’t need that much information about African politics. The question of whether I listen to English or German programming is really only driven by whom I’m having a meeting with next – I speak both languages throughout the day, and sometimes it helps me get my linguistics oriented before entering the room.

Occasionally, I will also listen to one of the two local classic music radio stations. Much like Los Angeles, we have two stations in this market – the rather high-brow Kulturradio, and the more plebian Klassik Radio. Both these stations are well programmed. Kulturradio doesn’t just do classical, they’re actually quite close to the U.S. NPR-style mix of programming. They have some good talking radio, but like a lot of mid-market Public Radio stations it features a solid block of classical music as part of its repetoire.

The other station is the aforementioned Klassik Radio, a guilty pleasure for me. I know it is considered low-brow, and I have to admit their breathy slogan spoken in that quasi-sexy spa commercial voice “Bleiben Sie entspannt” is a real turn-off. Sometimes they make it seem like classical music was the original New Age hot tub music.

There’s a lot that a true classical music fan disdains about the station. Forget for a moment that they pick-and-choose their pieces. They won’t play entire symphonies, but instead only the Greatest Hits movements – those minuets or allegros that are well known and loved. And then there are pieces like Ravel’s Bolero, which gets a work-out more often than is comfortable. Worse, they’ll only play accessible composers, none of that difficult stuff or over-complicated arrangements.

But their worst transgression in the mind of an aficionado – and the ultimate reason I like them – is because they play film soundtacks. I hear my dear readers gasping as they reel at the implication of what was just written. John Williams mixed in with Josef Haydn? Danny Elfman intermingled with Franz Schubert? Michael Kamen on the same playlist as god ol’ Freddy Chopin? What is the world coming to?

It’s actually not that far fetched. Allow me to take a personal detour here: It begins with a curmodgeonly record store guy with hairy ears, back in the late 1970s. As an adolescent boy I had recently begun buying music, and was at the Europa Center in downtown Berlin, trying to buy a certain record at Bote & Bock. Let’s forget for a moment that I was trying to find the rather embarrassing “Hooked on Classics”, a remix of everyone’s favorite orchestral pieces as nightmared by Niles Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, resulting in a treble-intense mash with hints of David Shire’s “Night on Disco Mountain”… So, with a wave toward the wooden racks at the center of the store, the hairy-eared musicologist manning the manual cash register explained to me that calling “all of that” Classical Music was a mistake – you can’t just bunch several centuries of non-Pop and non-Jazz onto one long shelf, and declare it a genre.

He had a point. There are infinite variations, and Renaissance music (for instance) has little to do with the large complex music being created by Russian composers at the beginning of the 20th Century. And his classification stuck with me over the years. What frustrated me about classical music was how seemingly stagnant it appeared. In some way, a certain segment of the listening audience obsesses over playful nuances the way two Grateful Dead tapers might discuss a Garcia solo – these are differences virtually inaudible to a casual participant. Dealing with a grey crowd of grown-ups was somewhat daunting, too. My father helped a lot when he decided to kick-start that particular part of my education by buying me a copy of Who’s Afraid of Classical Music.

On the flip side of the usual crowd, you have music being composed by contemporary musicians that is really hard to listen to. I had dinner with Sean Sheppard a few months ago. He had just conducted a series of pieces here in Berlin that he had written, and in one of the program notes he poked fun at himself – he wrote that he “might commit the ultimate taboo, making the music pretty.” Well, God knows he managed to avoid that particular trespass successfully, but he never told me exactly what would be so terrible about writing pretty music.

So on one side you have stagnant repetition being listened to by the geriatric set, and on the other you have music for the intellectual in-crowd that eludes the rest of us.

Well, a few years ago, when I was still living in Los Angeles, a friend made a rather bold late-night wine-fueled argument that LA is the most important city in the world for classical music. Oh really? His argument was simple – most classical music nowadays is the large orchestral kind, and nowhere in the world are there so many working orchestras as in Hollywood. Why? Well, they’re scoring all the feature films and big TV series. And further, he argued, that Hollywood is the only place where a composer can stretch his creative wings and really write some interesting music.

So I began listening to soundtracks differently, and with newfound respect. I’m not sure whether the need to underscore a story provides the greatest creative opportunity, but the chance to conjure up an original work within certain confines is always a challenge. I have to admit I’ve come to love certain pieces, and would gladly go to see some of them performed live. A family favorite has always been Michael Kamen’s Don Juan De Marco score, and now that the boys are so deeply into the Star Wars lore, I have found new affection for John William’s score. “The March of the Emperor” is now the ring tone reserved for calls from my wife.

Go dig out Hans Zimmer’s Gladiator score, and see what I mean. It’s pretty cool.

The Daily Beast

I’m pretty excited. Tina Brown’s new site finally launched. It’s called The Daily Beast, and seems to be a modern linky mix of Vanity Fair and Perez Hilton, with some heavy A+L Daily for that extra braininess. I guess it’s our lefty version of Drudge, but for people with the required attention span to read, and a desire for design.

Here’s what the FT had to say:

Another scoop for Tina Brown as she swaps print for web

The struggling US magazine industry is losing one of its biggest cheerleaders to the web as Tina Brown trades the glossy pages and lengthy essays of her past career for the hyperlinks and blog entries of a new site called The Daily Beast.

The former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and the short-lived Talk launched a trial version of the site, funded by Barry Diller’s IAC new media empire on Monday.

Named after a fictional Fleet Street newspaper in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, the site is pitched as both a home to original commentary and a “curator” of other sites’ highlights, putting it in competition with an ever-growing list of bloggers and news aggregators.

According to Ms Brown, however, her site has appeal because of the very fact that the market is so crowded.

“What’s been lacking for the overwhelmed but smart reader is an intelligent guide,” she said in an interview. “The time is right to do a site which cuts through the noise and cuts through the clutter.”

Rather than worthy “eat your peas news”, The Daily Beast will offer political, cultural and celebrity coverage with “a unique editorial sensibility”, she said.

Ms Brown’s fabled networking skills have pulled in contributors including Nigella Lawson, the British celebrity chef; Christopher Buckley, the US satirist; and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch politician.

Her foray into internet publishing, which she admits was “terra incognita” before she started work on the site in July, comes as many online outlets are seeing the same pressures on advertising revenues as have weighed on print publications.

Talk, the magazine, book and film venture she launched with support from Hearst and Miramax in 1999, folded in the post-9/11 advertising slump, but Ms Brown said she was “as confident as anybody can be” about The Daily Beast’s prospects.

She would not disclose what investment Mr Diller had supplied but said The Daily Beast would sit alongside a portfolio of “emerging” internet businesses within the “new IAC”, created by this year’s spin-off of companies such as Ticketmaster and Lending Tree.

Caroline Marks, general manager of the site and a former Comcast Interactive Media executive, said it would rely on advertising and sponsorship revenues, but would benefit from promotion from Ask.com, IAC’s search engine, and traffic deals with other portals.

The site, edited by Edward Felsenthal, a former Wall Street Journal deputy managing editor, would target “higher end advertisers . . . who have a natural affinity with publications where Tina worked before,” Ms Marks said.

Mr Diller’s proposal for the site was put on hold for two years while Ms Brown finished The Diana Chronicles, her biography of the Princess of Wales. She is now working on The Clinton Chronicles, and remains a consultant to HBO, the premium television channel.

But the “open beta” launch, after which users can recommend improvements, has been brought forward as Ms Brown chafed at having to watch an unfolding financial crisis and the US presidential elections from the sidelines.

“You don’t know how it killed me not to be up during the primaries,” she said. “It may be a horrible economic time, but it’s a wonderful journalistic time.”

Been reading it while eating Sauer-Scharf Suppe, which I consider a salute to the tone of the new site. Huzzah, I wish you much success!

Women are Heroes

I’ve never really been a fan of grafitti, even as a teenager it struck me as primitive. I understood that certain elements were tribal, that it was a way of letting everyone know exactly who’s ‘Hood they were in, but it also had something desperate about it. “Tagging” was somehow canine, a dog marking his favorite route.

But Street Art is a slightly different thing – it is usually less destructive and less scattershot. I guess you could also consider it Environmental Art, in the sense that it gets placed into our everyday surroundings.

But what I really like about Street Art is that it eschews the usual cycle of mega gallerists, celebrity artists and big money collectors. Simply put: you can’t really own street art.

One project I really admire is called Women Are Heroes. It’s done by a 25 year-old artist who goes by JR. He photographs women across the world, in this case in countries like Sudan, Sierra Leone, but also Cambodia and Laos, as well as Brazil. Then he prints extreme enlargements of the images, and wallpapers the sides of buildings in the neighborhoods of the women he documents… but then also posts them in a very large format in Western cities.

As the site explains:

The Women project wants to underline thier pivotal role and to highlight their dignity by shooting them in their daily lives and posting them on the walls of their country.

On the other hand, by posting the same images of these women in Western countries, the project allows everyone to feel concerned by their condition and connect through art, the two different worlds.

Check these out:

…and here’s one in Brussels…

These images are all from a favela in over Rio called Providencia. Check out JR’s site to learn more. Really impressive work.