Five Favorites of the Week – Culture

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Life as Comics: To the Peak of Power

It begins with the story of a maltreated child. A little boy who grows up in poverty and is beaten by his father. A boy who secretly plays football, sometimes steals mulberries from the neighbors or dreams of passing airplanes on warm summer days. It is the stuff of which heroic stories are carved, the way from the very bottom to the very top. But this is not a heroic epic, but the story of the rise of Turkey’s most powerful man: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Can Dündar is probably one of his most prominent opponents in this country. The journalist living in exile has come up with a trick and is presenting the book “Erdoğan” (published by Özgürüz Press), a graphic novel biography of the Turkish head of state. Erdoğan is not a fan of caricatures, as the foreword says. He brought a caricaturist who had portrayed him as a cat to court. “This book is supposed to be the caricature’s answer to him,” says Dündar in the foreword. In collaboration with the Egyptian caricaturist Mohamed Anwar, who also lives in exile in Berlin, they depict Erdoğan’s laborious ascent to the summit of power in pictures and words. They are striking black-and-white drawings, large areas, constantly playing with shadow and light, and yet only caricatures in the broadest sense. Anwar and Dündar have researched for years, sifted through pictures and documents, they proceeded in a strictly journalistic and fact-based manner. And their comic has succeeded in an impressive and at the same time accessible way. With tireless effort, the young Erdoğan swerves from his predetermined path, discovers Islam and politics for himself. Both together become his calculation of power in a country permeated by laicism. The little boy grows into a fierce and uncompromising fighter who strives to rise no matter how many times he falls, always knowing who is using him to get ahead. It is also the history of political Islam in the Middle East, which was long exploited by the West and then unfolded its autonomous and anti-democratic power. Dündar and Anwar take up these levels and, using Erdoğan as an example, show not how heroes are made, but how autocrats are made. Eileen Kelpe

Singing Actress: Christin Nichols

(Photo: Freudenhaus/Rough Trade)

Strictly speaking, in terms of cultural phenomenology, Christin Nichols is a singing actress like Zooey Deschanel or Marilyn Monroe. Although one could also say: Whoever listens to “I’m Fine”, the first solo album by the Berliner, notices her stage and film experience with every turn of the song. As part of the duo Prada Meinhoff she had aimed directly at the nervously dancing disco shoes. In her new incarnation, Nichols now cultivates an electropop that blends cool and sweetness, gruff post-punk and ethereal cloudplay in a way that seems as contradictory and oddly logical as a complex film reel. In addition to many great melodies and sounds, “Today I Choose Violence” is also a galling broadside against the media patriarchy. A glowing recommendation. Joachim Hentschel

James Benning Movies on DVD

Favorites of the week: Willem Dafoe in "O Panama"

Willem Dafoe in “O Panama”

(Photo: Edition Filmmuseum)

The Austrian Film Museum is continuing its series of James Benning DVDs with the early “Grand Opera”, 1979. Benning, famous for his elegy of scenic emptiness, shows us here where he comes from, in person, he films all the houses where he lived so far, from Milwaukee, 1942, to Del Mar in California, 1978, and cinematically, bringing four experimental film buddies in front of his camera, Hollis Frampton and George Landow, Michael Snow and Yvonne Rainer. Everything here is grandiose opera, personal memories, American soap, with love and miscarriage, the equanimity of the low pumps, the tragic comedy of William Shanks, who calculated the number π to 707 digits, but made a mistake at the 527th. And – suspense at Benning! – the blowing up of a house, which shrouds the city in a mushroom dust. Also on the DVD: “O Panama”, 1985, a young man alone in New York’s iciness, in a kind of psychological lockdown, played by Willem Dafoe (our picture). Fritz Goettler

Gendern in French: C’est compliqué

Favorites of the week: undefined
(Photo: Dictionnaires Le Robert)

Anyone who complains that gender is complicated should try it in French. It’s not enough to add “*innen”. No, off electeurs (voters) will, when addressed to men and women, électeur.ice.s, a mixed word from electeurs and electricity. The dictionary publisher “Le Robert” has now included a non-binary personal pronoun in the online edition. It’s called iel and exposes himself il and ell (he and she) together. Transgender activists are pleased, conservative politicians less so. However, the pronoun is not a universal solution: In French, adjectives are also adjusted – “beautiful” means belle or beautiful, depending on gender. And if être auxiliary verb, the past participle must also be adjusted. Elle est allee, she left, right il est allé, He is gone. Now gender-neutral verbs and adjectives still have to be found. Lots to do. Sophie Schroeder

Sergei Nevsky’s compositions at Ultrasound

Favorites of the week: Ultrasound Festival opening concert.

Opening concert of the Ultrasonic Festival.

(Photo: Simon Detel/rbb)

The Russian, a composer from Moscow who lives in Berlin, wants to break out – out of the art bubble, simply give up the gap between music and environment. What Sergej Newski, 48, composed is just seeing the light of day at the Berlin Festival Ultraschall. Unfortunately, as Wikipedia knows, the realm of ultrasound lies “above the audible frequency range”. And that’s exactly where the avant-gardists of contemporary music are working on their daring ideas and formats, outside the euphonic area, vulgo: Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms. Ultrasound is organized by two media institutions: Deutschlandfunk Kultur and Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg. And you can hear what the inventors of the musical innovation have come up with and broadcast live on the stations.

Sometimes the titles of the pieces make you sit up and take notice. The Hungarian Zsolt Sörés sees himself as a “Ghost Sonic Ontologist” and simply calls his ensemble piece, between performance and conceptual art, “Astro-Noetic Chiasm”. The Chinese Yiran Zhao strives for “physical movement”, talks about “light choreography” and composed “Fluctuation”. The American George Lewis focuses his thoughts, for six voices and live electronics, on the first Afro-German philosopher Anton Wilhelm Amo, who taught in Halle and Jena and died in 1759. Immanuel Kant could have met him, broadening his view of the outside world. The spectacular sextet of the Neue Vocalsolisten from Stuttgart then sang Sergei Nevsky’s documentary opera “The Simple Ones”, based on letters. That’s what the queer subculture of workers, employees and students called itself in the 1920s, in post-revolutionary Leningrad – “Homage to a fascinating generation that tries to maintain its dignity under extreme challenges of its time”. Art music, environment, history in the festival, ultrasound lasts until Sunday, the Berlin scenario of the living composers is fearless, in presence form with emphasis on struggle. The bird shoots, albeit digitally, off Stuttgart, where in the first week of February 46 composers make their music public in hybrid form over six days, the festival is called: Eclat. Wolfgang Schreiber

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