Favorites of the week: Please don’t hang up! – Culture

Cultural History: Bye Telephone Booth

The recent scavenger hunt at the seven-year-old’s children’s birthday party showed how quickly old cultural techniques and the hardware required for them are forgotten: The next clue, according to a piece of paper Dad had hidden, is where you can exchange coins for good conversations. Great helplessness. Even when the scavengers were standing in front of a hard-to-miss piece of street furniture – gray with a pink, no, magenta-colored roof and sticker-covered door. The fact that you can urinate in this little house couldn’t be overstated. That you can also make phone calls in it, really with a handset on a cable – great surprise.

However, the birthday party can mothball her newly acquired knowledge right away: starting Monday, the payphones that are still connected to the network in Germany will be “deactivated,” as Telekom announced in a blog entry. “Be brief” was once written in the telephone booths, but they themselves had staying power: The first telephone kiosk was put into operation in Berlin in 1881, i.e. 142 years ago. They survived the introduction of mobile communications, flat rates and smartphones – there are still 12,000 in the republic today. However, their telecommunications law was changed in 2021, and the “obligation to operate public telephones” no longer applies. End of a long era: The last one should be dismantled in 2025.

For years, film and television producers have been playing with annoying typing noises, displayed chat histories and video calls when protagonists interact from a distance. However, the digital form of communication no longer offers a physical setting: as in “La Boum” and “True Romance” people kissed and fumbled in telephone booths, how Harry Potter and Trinity mysteriously disappeared with telephone booths in “Matrix”, like the little houses in ” The Birds”, “Dirty Harry” or “Murder on Call” became a horror and crime scene – All of this is shown in a contribution from the “Blow up” series in the Arte media library.

“Don’t hang up!” people want to shout in view of the impressive cultural-historical significance of the telephone booths. But I have to admit: The reason why you could hide clues for scavenger hunts in them so well was that nobody uses them. And that’s why the danger is zero that someone removes the note for the children’s birthday party. Moritz Baumsteiger

Poetry volume: “in the darknet all cats are meow”

The connection between cat content and Internet culture is, as the saying goes, well researched in terms of pop culture – but a book of poetry is always good. Et voilà: “on darknet all cats are meow” by the Vienna-based poet and performance artist Jopa Jotakin. The poems come along lazily and crouched, they purr “through the/ fiber optic cable/ away from the world/”, only to jump at you the next moment while reading, sometimes angry with laser claws, then friendly triumphant, for example in the demand that all of Salzburg should be concreted over and “in its place a huge intercatzional will be installed/ a catedral/ or simply/ a huge/ scratching post landscape/ and perhaps/ instead of concrete/ simply/ a bed/ simply/ bedding/ cord”. What should anyone who has already been on the Internet or in Salzburg add? Philip Boverman

Movie: “Batang West Side”

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The snow is dirty in Jersey City’s winter, and the chill creeps out of all the frames in ‘Batang West Side’, 2001, the first feature-length film by Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz (DVD Edition Filmmuseum): five hours of patient, thrilling observation. A boy was shot on the street, he hadn’t been in America long, he got involved in drug deals. The cop Mijares (Joel Torre) is looking for the culprit, he is an opaque guy himself and has to save face. It’s about Lav Diaz flow the reality he senses in all great works, from Joyce to Tarkowski. Only dreamlike memories have a certain warmth because they are black and white. And singing karaoke (which may have been invented in the Philippines). The young gang leader is also there, he especially loves “Because of you”, the ultimate love song. Fritz Goettler

Classic CD: Carolin Widmann’s “L’Aurore”

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The world of classical music has internalized something like a measure: experimentally shaking up concert programs, creating mixtures of historical epochs and musical styles. Because there has to be a new or at least different way of listening – Mozart goes Mambo. No one has ever measured so many centuries of music history on a solo violin as the violinist Carolin Widmann, who was born in Munich. Her brother Jörg Widmann is one of the prominent composers of so-called contemporary art music. Carolin Widmann has made such “New Music”, which is not so easy to conquer and listen to, her preferred stage and playground, without displacing Schubert, Mendelssohn or Schumann. After all, she is a violin professor at the Musikhochschule in Leipzig.

What she is now performing on her Guadagnini violin, which is exactly 240 years old, can surprise, despite the normality of ambitious programming. The composer with whom Widmann opens her course is Hildegard von Bingen, born in 1098. The Benedictine, abbess and naturopath from the Middle Ages, also a poet and composer, is celebrated to this day as a mystical prophetess. Her short antiphon “Spiritus sanctus vivificans vita” can beguile in the violinist’s internalized playing, the monophonic melody flows unadorned, only to rise to the great song. Above all: After three more modern pieces, the violinist plays the three-minute music a second time, this time slightly modified – as a ritual that means life help: “It cleanses the spirit, and then one is open to the music of the whole next millennium .”

The Fantaisie concertante from 1932 by the Romanian composer George Enescu, who is still underestimated, seems improvised, while the three filigree miniatures by the British Messiaen student George Benjamin, composed in 2002, shine in Carolin Widmann’s fine art of shading. The fifth sonata by the Belgian Eugène Ysaÿe gives the ECM recording the beautiful title: “L’Aurore”, the dawn. Johann Sebastian Bach’s second Partita, with the legendary Ciacona, confirms the path of a violinist who distrusts virtuosity, takes nothing lightly, but can think very intensely. Wolfgang Schreiber

Literature: Ana Marwan’s “Green Toad”

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Very seldom is there a text so clear and beautiful that one becomes sad that it is not an image. One would like to hang it on the wall, walk past it constantly and wonder and admire it. Such a one won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize this June, the author Ana Marwan was not very well known before. Her story “Green Toad” is an image of the striking symmetry of pandemic fear of loneliness and the fear of a woman’s loss of autonomy who might have a child. The Salzburg Otto Müller Verlag has now published it: in two languages, German and translated into Marwan’s mother tongue, Slovenian, bound in midnight blue linen, from which the deep black toad, bufo variabilis, emerges. In this way, the story also becomes a beautiful object, almost framed. Marie Schmidt