Quarter Life Crisis
The world according to Sven-S. Porst
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Apart from a family visit, travelling and partying this weekend also contained some reading. It’s strange how there seem to be weeks when your weekly paper is brink full with interesting articles while in other weeks things seem to be relatively boring. And somehow they managed to bombard me with interesting stuff this week: Ranging from a number of articles on food touching things like dieting, genetics, ‘functional food’ and its corporate parents and the gazillions of health promises that exist for various foods. Then they had a bunch of articles on stuff like copyright and DRM (not available online) which I considered to be surprisingly clueful for old-school print media. It’s rare that people actually write down the obvious truth that being less hassle than P2P file sharing is a sine qua non for any commercial media selling endeavour.
Mildly connected to that is that they had a short column on Gus van Sant some of whose films I find incredibly brilliant. Not only did it list his older films but it also pointed out that his early 2005 film Last Days will finally come to Germany. If media distribution businesses want to be worth any of the money we throw at them, they should provide good service. Which in many cases would be nothing but fullfilling the simple requests I want it all
and I want it now
. And guess what? – If those American film makers are too clueless to provide translated versions of their films right away, then just let us have the original version of the film. As film translations turn out to be, errr, less than ideal, at times, many people prefer seeing the original version anyway. And, yes, thanks a lot – English may not be our mother tongue, but usually we know enough of it to understand a film. The benefit of English being the lowest common denominator of global communications these days. [Yeah right, flame me for that! But I have wondered many times why exactly I had to wait for months to see a half-assed German translation of a film that I would have been happy to watch in English to begin with.]
Finally, an interview with German comedian Hape Kerkeling (OK, he is quite German in style but at least his film Kein Pardon is hilarious) – and the article’s headline has the vague sound of the Arctic Monkeys album title. And to top things off – a review of a new Glenn Gould book. Let my obsessions rule…