Online world map: The best pubs and street bars
Anthony Bourdain wasn’t just the rock star of gastronomy, as the just published biography reveals “Down and Out in Paradise” can read. He also popularized the “Chowhound” movement. She searches the world for the best street eateries and pubs that don’t appear in any gourmet guide. The highlight was the evening when he met the then US President Barack Obama for noodle soup, dumplings and beer in the snack bar Bun Chả Hương Liên met in Hanoi. One fan has now started marking and making notes on a world map of all the locations Bourdain visited to film his 300+ TV shows. on anthonybourdainworldmap.com you can now find more than 1500 of these places. Document of a time when travel was still unlimited. Andrian Kreye
Music CD: Jazzissimo
“Jazzissimo” (genuine) with Matthias Well and Lilian Akopova.
(Photo: Genuine)
The words “light” and “airy” are easy to write down, but turning them into stirring, lively music on an instrument is a whole different challenge. The violinist Matthias Well and the pianist Lilian Akopova succeed on their CD “Jazzissimo” (genuine) in such a captivating and seemingly carefree way that it could not be otherwise.
The pieces in this program are full of pitfalls and pitfalls in terms of taste, stylistic confidence and ability. This means that both musicians must have an untroubled sense and direct joy in virtuoso performances, without seeking their salvation solely in fast runs, technical tinsel and rushing piano cascades. The arc spans from “Le boeuf sur le toit”, the ox on the roof, which Darius Milhaud had floated up there so weightlessly and diagonally in 1919, as if it were a paper airplane, to Maurice Ravel’s ingeniously calculated sonata with an almost exhausted as if under laboratory conditions Blues in the middle and the furious final perpetuum mobile. The elegantly slanted, capricious Carmen Fantasy by Alexander Rosenblatt begins, followed by Astor Piazolla’s Nuevo Tango, a “Porgy and Bess” song by George Gershwin that Jascha Heifetz once arranged, and a glittering “Kaleidoscope” by Vladislav Cojocaru as a world premiere recording . The whole thing sparkles with wit, ingenuity and an abundance of lightly dabbed, astonishing variety of tones.
Matthias Well’s violin playing never becomes sticky, kitschy or even corny, because he takes every piece, every phrase and every volte of this selection of music seriously without weighing it down with human or technical difficulties. Therefore, nothing sounds “mastered”, but everything is attractive and stimulating. So you can learn here what it means to make music in an airy, weightless and yet precise and serious way in the noblest sense. This is matched by Lilian Akopova’s gripping rhythmic elasticity and her pianistic punchline security. In any case, the troubles that this highly demanding album must have caused when rehearsing, the two artists have transferred into the most enjoyable musical tightrope walking and brilliant acrobatics without a double bottom. Harold Eggebrecht
Scary in the cinema: night of the living dead
They’re neither running nor hanging in tatters: the first cinema zombies still seem quite intact.
(Photo: imago stock&people)
$100,000 was enough for George A. Romero to write film history. The budget for his directorial debut “The Night of the Living Dead” was so low that he made his breakthrough in 1968 and launched a whole genre: the zombie film. Horror fans can now return to this cinematic birth. More than 100 cinemas in Germany bring the cult film a 4K restored version exclusively next Monday, for Halloween. Unlike the zombies we know today, Romero designed his first undead quite sparsely: with bleached make-up, they stagger in the dark forest in front of the survivors’ farmhouse. Because he wanted to save costs, Romero shot in black and white – very lucky from an aesthetic point of view. Definitely worth seeing, revolutionary also because of the black cast leading role. Joshua Beer
Square Art: Josef Albers Exhibition
The artist Josef Albers at work.
(Photo: John T Hill)
In the art cosmos, Josef Albers is probably by far the most important artist from Bottrop, one of the most important forerunners of Op Art and Color Field Painting. As a teacher at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, the craftsman’s son and Bauhaus student Albers influenced artists such as Robert Rauschenberg. Bottrop takes the importance of his older son into account in an exemplary manner, despite tight budgets. In the north-west of the city, since 1976, the year Albers died, there has been a museum dedicated to him, the square. It is named after his most important series of paintings, the “Homage to the Square” series, which began in 1950. In oil, offset and series graphics, Albers tirelessly explored the “color relativities” that arise in the eye of the beholder when different hues are put together, in the form of several nested squares.
Heinz Liesbrock, manager of the Bottrop Square since 2003, has now been able to open a 13 million euro extension to say goodbye to the house, the construction of which is mainly due to his own tirelessness. The building elegantly solves the problem of the notorious lack of space in museums. Designed by the Zurich architects Gigon/Guyer, it offers an additional 1,400 square meters of exhibition space on two floors, divided into eight rooms, in a color coordinated with the dark gray existing building on the outside. Light falls from above through a glass shed roof and from the side through large windows that provide a view of the surrounding park.
On the occasion of the opening, Heinz Liesbrock curated an exhibition that “bows to the square”. What the 160 works brought together from all over the world show is not so much a sequence of squares but, in a form that is as comprehensive as it is concentrated, an almost meditative investigation of the autonomy of color – of “color as the most relative art medium”, as Albers himself said . In addition to rooms arranged thematically according to color and their gradations, the geometric forerunners of the strict square series can also be seen, as well as a poem in Albers’ own handwriting about Paul Cézanne, whose exploration of color was groundbreaking for him. No museum director in the world could have given himself a more successful farewell gift than such a show in such a new building. Alexander Menden
Music from the cargo bike: DJ-Bike in Munich
Just before the winter break: Ian Jakab’s DJ bike.
(Photo: Fabian Neisskenwirth)
No, he had his to party DJ bike not developed, says Ian Jakab. Rather, the 34-year-old always wanted to play his music in public spaces. Jakab worked as a street musician in Chile, and he also wanted to show passers-by in Munich what the subculture has to offer in terms of music, the pandemic was the necessary impetus for this. That’s why, with numerous supporters, he converted a solar-powered cargo bike into a mixture of DJ console, sound system and mobile stage. The DJ-Bike has been delivering the “soundtrack for the city” since last year in the form of free pop-up performances at very different locations in the city, each time with different sound artists and musicians to listen to on the website. It is driving proof of how little it takes to redesign public space. Laura Weissmuller