Neubau

The NY Times takes on Wien's hip and trendy seventh district: Vienna's Neu-Wave Corner

Happy Rosenmontag!

Hope you had a wonderfully bawdy Rosenmontag. Happy Mardi Gras tomorrow!

The Musical is Back!

One last note on the Oscars 2009. As a bit of a theater geek myself, I was thrilled to hear about Hugh Jackman and Beyonce Knowles musical performance last night at the Oscars. If you have not seen it, definitely check out this Broadway tribute/montage below:



Also, here's Hugh Jackman's opening song as host. (Compare with Billy Crystal's popular opening video in 2004). Congratulations to all the winners!

Sunday procrastinations

Thought this was appropriate for a Sunday afternoon, as students around the country struggle through piles of assignments, papers, and homework for the upcoming week. A friend provided this link, and the tune is so catchy that I couldn't help sharing.

I don't want to work either.

The Obligatory Oscars Post

The Academy Awards Ceremony is this Sunday (ironically this year only a few days after Wien's own red-carpet ceremony, the Opernball). Everyone has been blogging about the nominations, their favorites, and their speculations. See A.O. Scott or David Carr "The Carpetbagger" for more details. In regards to the top award, the nominees are as follows:

Best Motion Picture:
“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.)
“Frost/Nixon” (Universal)
“Milk” (Focus Features)

“The Reader” (The Weinstein Company)
“Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight)

I have not yet seen "Frost/Nixon" or "The Reader", though I have heard great reactions to both. "Milk" was phenomenal, and I would be content if they snagged the top prize. Sean Penn's performance certainly deserves an Oscar for Best Actor.

But I admit, I was rather surprised to see "Benjamin Button" receiving a top nod. Don't get me wrong, it was a very nice movie, but I left the theater with the feeling that it had all been done before. Funny or Die captures my sentiments best: The Curious Case of Forrest Gump (Thanks for this link, Kodachrome Quixote!). Also, I was not very impressed with Brad Pitt. And it was a bit too long and not at all related to the Fitzgerald short story. All in all, it wasn't a bad movie, but Best Picture caliber? Really?! And with 13 nods, being offered the most nominations?!

I admit, along with most of the Hollywood community, I am enamored with Slumdog Millionaire. There's been a decent amount of controversy in India surrounding this film (here, here, and here for example), especially because of its use of the derogatory "slumdog" in the title and its portrayal of slum life. Today's NYT featured opinion piece provide fascinating insights into Dharavi, the "slum" near Mumbai that was used in the filming. According to their editorial, Dharavi is a safe, resourceful, and incredibly industrious city. Others are offended by the slang of "dog", but as Chitra Divakaruni points out, most of those employing this critique have probably not seen the movie. "Slumdog" is never a term used to refer to all the slum dwellers, but instead only spoken in specific instances by characters who play an antagonistic role opposite our hero, Jamal. Others feel that the movie heaped on too much of the extremes, including everything possibly bad and horrific to be solved by a material goal--in the words of Jamie Rhein, piling "on bad news in huge helpings with only one solution to address the mess--win gobs of money and get the girl."

These are all valid critiques, and yet I still strongly support "Slumdog Millionaire" for Best Picture. Unlike every other film on the list as far as I am aware, "Slumdog Millionaire" takes us to a world that would be unfamiliar to most everyday American viewers. There are no big-name American stars or faces that we recognize, yet we are drawn into this story and relate with the characters. This is not a documentary, and of course it is not entirely factual--the extremes must be taken with a grain of salt. Yet it is a beautifully painted fairy tale and might serve in a small way to push everyday viewers beyond their comfort zone, to gain a glimpse of a beautiful and unfamiliar culture that is different from their own, and yet the same so many ways.

New Layout?

For anyone who's been paying attention, any thoughts on the new layout? My HTML skills are limited, so I couldn't be too fancy, but I wanted to add a personalized banner. I'm picky, so it took me a while to decide on a new template. Like it? Hate it?

The picture is mine, taken from the castle in Ljubljana, Slovenia in February 2008.

Kindle 2: Not Yet the New iPod

As anyone who has recently visited the Amazon home page can tell you, the second generation Amazon Kindle has been announced. For the most part, this e-book reader seems pretty similar to the first, with tweaks to the software, a sleeker design, and text-to-speech capabilities.

But as the Economist points out, the Kindle is not yet the "new iPod" as Amazon hopes. Instead, it is a device for passionate readers (it can hold up to 1,500 books) and those who want the convenience of being able to purchase and read a new title in a matter of seconds. I've seen a few of these devices on the subways on New York City, held by professionals on their long commutes rather than carrying multiple (heavier) printed books. Publishing professionals long for the day when the Kindle or a similar e-book reader could be a manuscript reader (or is it already?), to make it easier to wade through the hundreds of heavy pages of solicited submissions. (Forget the slush pile).

However, in the end, I really don't see the Kindle having mass appeal just yet. Amazon has been very closed about their sales figures, so no one really knows how popular the Kindle really is. But they have been promoting their device like crazy, calling it a "revolutionary wireless reading device". I don't know about revolutionary, just maybe the most well-known and well-funded. There have been many e-book readers before, so it was bound to happen that a stronger company would undertake the challenge. All in all, it seems to be a rather conservative device and pretty much what one would expect from an e-book reader.

What comes next? I really don't see any e-book reader replacing the comfort of curling up with a printed book any time soon, but it is a convenience if you need to read (and carry) a lot of books around. Perhaps if the Kindle is able to add highlighting capabilities, it will make great strides in the arena of scholarly books, appealing to students who are tried to purchasing hundreds of dollars worth of textbooks that they rarely use. Or perhaps I'm wrong, and with all this publicity and the huge push behind the device, consumers will decide that it really is popular and buy it for themselves.

Personally, I'm waiting to see if Apple will have a rebuttal for this new leap in technology. They've already enabled the iPhones to download and read public domain books for free. Will they unveil a separate device, the iRead perhaps, to really revolutionize the field?

Alles Gute zum Geburtstag, Jakov Lind

We have a special birthday to celebrate today. Jakov Lind, lauded as one of the greatest contemporary German writers during his day, would be 82 today. In German-speaking lands he's right up there with Günther Grass and Thomas Bernhard as one of the best of the best. However, nowadays this great writer has drifted to become an international unknown, as his German pieces are virtually unavailable in English-speaking countries. (Thank goodness for Open Letter! They will be publishing a paperback translation of his Landscape in Concrete next month).

Jakov Lind, the name inscribed below these great works of fiction, lived a fascinating life of many names and languages. He was born to an Austrian-Jewish family as Heinz Landwirth, but escaped to the Netherlands in 1938 and took on the name Jan Gerrit Overbeek. He actually spent most of the war in Germany, hiding in full view as a Dutch laborer. After the war, he became Jakov Chaklan and lived briefly in Palestine. Returning to Vienna and finding his birth-city still overrun with Nazis, the man instead went to London and there began to write at last. Though many of his works are in German, he struggled greatly with his mother tongue, considering it a murderer's language. Later he mastered English and published works in this his fourth language; thus he is sometimes considered a British writer.

His writing style reflects his tumultuous, wandering life. Often compared to Kafka, Lind successfully pulls the reader into a wild and crazy adventure, but you can never quite trust his narration, his characters' biased perspectives, or know what is truly going on. In Landscape in Concrete, there is a sense that the end comes full circle with the beginning--Bachmann is still wandering, still alone, and still looking for his regiment. So much has happened in the pages in between, but readers feel a sense of symmetry and frustration, completeness and fragmentation, insufficiency and clarity. Definitely worth the read.

There are many treasures that have fallen through the cracks thanks to the ruthless advance of time, but Jakov Lind is one of the gems glittering between the floorboards.

The Day the Music Died

In memoriam: Fifty years ago today , the small plane that was carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson crashed in rural Iowa. Don McLean later immortalized this loss of some of rock 'n' roll's brightest stars as "The Day the Music Died".



And the three men I admire most:
The father, son, and the holy ghost,
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died.