Favorites of the week: recommendations from the SZ editorial team – culture

Illustrated book: “The Office of Good Intentions”

Comedian Groucho Marx joked: “Anything you can’t do in bed, you don’t even have to start.” But Hugh Hefner, inventor of the playboy-Imperial and also a comedian, got serious about it. In the 1960s he converted his famous bed – no, not into the definitive sex stage, but into a pioneering achievement in modern office architecture: equipped with all sorts of media and littered with work utensils. Today the time has finally come: The office occupant of the present in the home office has become half Marx and half Hefner. So of course you meet both actors in the formidable book “The Office of Good Intentions – Human(s) Work” (bags.com), in which the architects Florian Idenburg and LeeAnn Suen, together with the photographer Iwan Baan, trace the history of modern workplace architecture on almost 600 pages. All the main currents in the relationship between space, people and work are collected, illustrated, located and discussed in a stimulating manner. It is, given the pandemic hybrid reality, the book of the hour. Gerhard Matzig

Audiobook: “Instructions to become someone else”

Patrick Güldenberg’s reading of Roman’s “How to Become Different” by Édouard Louis is one of those not-so-common strokes of luck where an audio book adds a whole dimension to the written text. Güldenberg makes a veritable theater monologue of enormous vocal amplitude out of the strict, syntactically at times even monotonous, almost hammering original. This ranges from whispering, doubting soliloquies to wild, loud accusations, includes dialogues with those who are absent – the father, the best friend – but also shines in cold, sociological analysis. The inner tensions of the nascent self that Louis portrays can be experienced almost physically.

The “Instructions” is a story of ascension that leads from dramatic poverty bordering on neglect to the highest heights of wealth and refinement; from a northern French village to luxury Paris apartments; out of ignorance into the elite school “École Normale Supérieure”. French society, which is divided into classes, even castes, is completely traversed in the process. The first-person narrator must undertake a self-transformation that encompasses all psychophysical aspects of existence, from clothing and eating to speech and physicality, including extensive tooth repairs. Eddy becomes Édouard, the speaking surname Bellegueule (pretty face) becomes the elegantly neutral “Louis”. Much of this was already known from Louis’ earlier stories, which methodically follow the first-person stories of Annie Ernaux and Didier Eribon. The new book is the sum, the conclusion of a self-rescue that turned the despised gay laborer child into a literary star.

Completely unsentimental, not even concealing the human costs, Louis tells it in a combination of almost self-injuring Rousseauistic sincerity and an analysis of the rules of social habitus trained on Pierre Bourdieu, or, to use a German comparison: as a bitter Felix Krull story. Cheating as self-defense against the violence of class society. It’s educational and hilariously entertaining. Gustav Seibt

Documentary: “Black Far West – not all cowboys were white”

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“In 1845, one in four cowboys was black,” she explains Documentary “Black Far West – not all cowboys were white”, available in the Arte media library. She de-romanticizes American settlement history and exposes it as a Hollywood product of European settlers and their descendants. As the film explains, part of the fairy tale of the Wild West is also the reduction of Afro-Americans to their role as slaves in official historiography, which means that their history ends with the Civil War, so to speak. As sheriffs, trappers or stagecoach drivers, they pushed ahead with the settlement of the American West. The documentary introduces real-life heroes and heroines and uses their stories to show how perfidiously the European settlers played the Afro-American population against the indigenous population. Very interesting and insightful. Lilly Brosowsky

Classic Album: Igor Levit’s “Tristan”

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When the music falls into the clutches of the night, it loses consistency, form and the will to want and to complete. All of this is captured by a famous chord that stands at the beginning of Richard Wagner’s night and love parable “Tristan and Isolde”. This is a minor chord already used by Ludwig van Beethoven with an additional note in the bass, which creates an atmosphere of heavy longing, of motionlessness, darkness and brittleness. This Tristan chord has fascinated many musicians, including the Wagner-skeptical Hans Werner Henze, who 50 years ago developed a 50-minute, six-movement meditation and brooding for piano, tape and orchestra from the chord and its night-dark disability is played.

The grandiose 35-year-old pianist Igor Levit, known to be active in the green-left political scene, is world-famous and early on published a complete recording of Beethoven’s sonatas. He uses his fame to constantly tempt his mainstream record label Sony to take risks. Levit has, which pleasantly distinguishes him from all his world-famous colleagues, always brought monstrous things out of the niche Frederic Rzewskis hour-long breakneck variations”The People United Will Never Be Defeated!” recorded, as well as the 90-minute “Passacaglia on DSCH” by Ronald Stevenson. These are musical great moments.

Levit is now adding his hardcore album “Tristan” to these, which opens and closes with Franz Liszt and combines the Henze concerto with the “Tristan” prelude and a piano version of the slow movement of Gustav Mahler’s Unfinished. The same search shows up everywhere, without it being clear what for. Apparently, composers are at work in their most vulnerable hours, testing how much will music needs in order not to fall apart completely. Igor Levit embarks on these experiments with this strictly constructed concept album, his tone is chiseled hard and refuses any pandering. The pull of these nocturnal sounds, which are far removed from any esotericism and reflecting on the dangers of life and art, is all the more subtle. Reinhard J Brembeck

New single from Peter Fox: “Future Pink”

Peter Fox is back and he may even be a feminist now. That would be a bit surprising because with his main band, seedso far rather underbelly full and – in the most beautiful sense, please, in nuances of chubby – dancehall and reggae music. Solo everything was a bit more orchestral and a bit more thoughtful. And now: “Zukunft Pink”, his new single, and first of all a murder (“I killed my avatar / because I want to go to the party myself”) and then a short empowerment (“Women rule the world / see the future pink”). Very pleasant groove as well, fine club swish, bouncy thuds from the synths, flattering bass accents. Unfortunately, Fox has not yet revealed whether there will be an album. But he’s playing a couple of big festivals in 2023. That could be an indication. Jacob Biazza