Favorites of the week: recommendations and discoveries of the SZ feuilleton – culture

Javier Bardem as ham supplier

Because the great Javier Bardem can be seen in the cinema in “The Perfect Boss”: In the Arte media library there is currently a film from his early days with the title “Jamon, Jamon” (1992), i.e. twice “Schinken”, whereby once the ass could also be meant. In German it was then, not inappropriately, “Lust auf Fleisch”. The film is as raw and juicy as its title and vividly illustrates what Bardem meant when he once described his first casting: “They asked me to take off my shirt and then they gave me the part. I started out as a play flesh, and gradually became an actor.” Well endowed in every respect, Bardem plays the young chav Raúl in the hot “ham” by Bigas Luna, in demand as a underwear model and garlic-chewing Latin lover. As such, he also gets Silvia, who was promised to someone else, played by the then eighteen-year-old Penélope Cruz, who is of course a show. The film plays unabashedly with stereotypes and clichés and is so sexy that the screen shimmers. It wouldn’t be possible to shoot it like that today. But you can still look at it. Christine Dossel

birdsong

More than two hundred big names from music, literature, poetry, art and a few veritable Hollywood stars who deal with birdsong sounds like one of these megalomaniac producer projects. That is “For the Birds: The Birdsong Project” also at first. Would you like a small sample of the names? Nick Cave, Karen O, Tilda Swinton, and Kamasi Washington. a few more? Bette Midler, Beck, Jeff Goldblum, Jonathan Franzen, Laurie Anderson. All with exclusive pieces, readings, texts. Some have dealt directly with birds, like NEU! guitarist Michael Rother with producer Vittoria Maccabruni, who play over chirping audio tracks. Or the composer Anna Clyne, who wrote a piece for cello and birdsong for Yo Yo Ma. Others take the detour via cultural history, such as Elvis Costello, who wrote a cover version of the beatlesintertwined the song “And Your Bird Can Sing” with his own piece “The Birds Will Be Singing”.

Randall Poster, who put together the music for most of Wes Anderson’s films and a few hundred art house films and blockbusters, isn’t the only person behind the mammoth company. The Audubon Society started the project. This is the honorable American bird protection organization that brought together ornithologists and naturalists in 1905. Not only to take care of the survival of the species. They also promoted “birdwatching,” the amateur scientific bird-watching pastime that has survived from 18th-century England into modern times.

Five issues, each with forty to fifty articles, will appear monthly this summer. A magnificent box with 20 LPs will be released in autumn. You can also listen to it much cheaper on the streaming services. The third episode was released on July 29th. And it will again be like leafing through an album that has immortalized the presence of a very Anglo-Saxon pop intellectualism. Incidentally, the quote from Elvis Costello, which could be like a laconic motto of the campaign: “Without birds we would be knee-deep in worms, would be attacked by beetles and there would be no singing in the trees. The least we can do is to raise our voices in praise or lament.” Andrian Kreye

Joni Mitchell

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A few days ago, but a moment for eternity. The traditional Newport Folk Festival on the US East Coast, last weekend. Many stars have already performed and it is nearing completion. And suddenly Joni Mitchell is sitting on the stage. Incomprehensible. The woman, who has hardly been seen in public since her stroke in 2015, has painstakingly taught herself to play the guitar again with internet videos. And now she sings “Both Sides Now” with a dark timbre. It’s like an angel has returned, battered, tired, but still adorable. And because we live in the 21st century, thankfully there are countless recordings on the net and the wondrous, harrowing moment can be relived over and over again. And it can bring tears to your eyes every time. Max Fellman

Canned wine lyrics

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A chance find, on Tiktok: Poetry! More precisely: a poem by Marcel Lucont, the very French fictional character of the British comedian Alexis Dubus, who was soaked with heavy red wine – a four-day stubble, big, kind-hearted eyes, great, dark indie parting, unfortunately mostly barefoot and everything from the ennui bent a little towards cynicism. Anyway, this Lucont discovered on the So festivals in Compton Verney, England: canned wine. And it’s true, of all the signs that this species is going under, canned wine is one of the more infallible, so he wrote the poem “Wine In A Can.” There are parallels in the short work to Hawaiian pizza, Nazi memorabilia, and then the line that historians will use to trace the downfall of mankind: “As our history books chart the fall of man / They’ll read ‘Nixon’, then ‘Johnson’, then ‘Wine In A Can'”. Jacob Biazza

Colorful, surreal Moldova

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Of course, the East was always there, but have you seen it? How often has western man really let his gaze wander over the Oder and has he come as far as Moldau? Hand on heart: probably rather rare. But now it’s war, now you have to perceive Eastern Europe, and lo and behold, it’s wild and colorful and surreal. At least in the pictures by Andrea Diefenbach, who has collected her truths about the Republic of Moldova, “Realitatea of ​​Molodva” (Hartmann Verlag), over many years. Among them are still lifes with colorful oilcloth ceilings, landscapes with horses and wide rivers, brightly colored supermarket shelves and magnificent banquet halls. And again and again fluffy synthetic fiber blankets or photo wallpapers on which all the motifs are repeated, the flowers, the rivers, the horses.

A great calm prevails in these pictures, a waiting, if you will: a certain historical emptiness between the end of the Soviet Union and the move to Europe, between life on the fringes of empires and peace in the provinces. The people look at the camera calmly and without expectation: first graders in suits and sashes, workers in a factory, a waitress in a psychedelic red restaurant. Most of Diefenbach’s pictures were taken six, seven, eight years ago, when Moldova was declared the poorest country in Europe after a fateful statement by the World Bank. The fact that it is, depending on the statistics, but despite all the poverty also has its own abundance, a wealth, that it has a lot to offer in every respect is shown not only by Diefenbach’s pictures of watermelon mountains, but also by the integrated or inserted facsimiles : Newspapers reporting on protest and political unrest and a 1976 Red Book in which the Council of Ministers presented mammals, reptiles and herbs from the then Soviet Republic of Moldova.

And in addition, such a biting, self-critically ironic conversation among philosophers and writers, as if Diefenbach’s pictures could speak. It took a war for the West to take notice of Ukraine in all its diversity. How nice it would be if it didn’t take anyone else to let the heart fly to this picturesque, bitterly underrated corner of the continent. Sonja Zekri