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"Don't waste other peoples time!" #iquotemyselfalot

There is nothing in particular that I feel I need to write about. I rather write comments on other peoples Blogs or, if there's really something that needs to be expressed by me ( 1:6.5 Billion People) - I'll write an article or a book in the future.

Saving you precious time.

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Opera Season 2009 Opens: Munich Salzburg Bayreuth

July 14
Opera Season Opens Munich Salzburg Bayreuth

In July and August it is 'Festspielzeit'. The time of year when the usual summer break hits the opera houses in many countries. There are hunderts of 'Festivals' all over the world, diverse in size and importance, often attached to a single artist and his or her power to gather friends and audiences, but there is only one Salzburg and of course only one Bayreuth.



The Munich Festspiele was a new young entry to the Festival circle a couple years ago. It had great success mainly because of Sir Peter Jonas "Staatsopernintendant", the main force and power to refresh the rather traditional, boring, conservative usual opera audience. It turned out, for the better, that the majority of the Munich Opera visitors were yearning for some innovations and fresh blood. They had of course always high class performers and the Orchestra and many performances were very good under the years of Wolfgang Sawallisch, as the General Music Director of the Bavarian State Opera from 1971 - 1993 and Opera General Director from 1982. When Sir Peter Jonas took over everybody was anxious and excited and the relationship turned out to be a love affair. He did all the things you would like to see and challenged his audience with new ideas and almost single-handedly resurrected the Baroque Opera's.


Kent Nagano - after a short back-and-forth - took over in 2006 as General Director and General Music Director. I loved Kent Nagano and his adventures in music for a long time. The diversity of his Discography speaks for itself. Him taking over my 'hometown'-opera house was very exciting news for me. Unfortunately I had to leave Munich, so I had not the pleasure to enjoy his recent works.


But Munich is just a 'smaller' sideshow. The big two festivals are of course Salzburg



and Bayreuth.

Stephen Wolfram - ANKS - Not a New Review -

A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Wonderfully printed, easy to read, marvelous to look at, pretentious piece of quack.



It was hard to pass the Introduction and the first Chapter, when you hear the author praising himself, his own importance and why literally 'everybody' in science and why science itself is 'wrong' and did not 'see' what very self-aware author sees, but nobody else.



The book is a massive piece of rarely to find print. I was self-published by the author to assure the quality of the printing. It has many black-and-white Illustrations and pictures to accompany the text. The text, when it is not about self-praising, is rather easy to read and easy to understand for non-academics. So what is it about?



It talks about the 'big' picture in nature and science. Stephen Wolfram is a well known 'Wunderkind' in theoretical physics. He made his PhD in 1979 at the age of 20. In the mid-1980s he founded Wolfram Research Inc. and invented 'Mathematica' the leading software for technical computing and symbolic programming.



Wolframs main thesis of the book and the solution he offers are easy to understand:

"... very simple programs produce great complexity. For all it takes is that systems in nature operate like typical programs and then it follows that their behavior will often be complex. And the reason that such complexity is not usually seen in human artifacts is just that in building these we tend in effect to use progtams that are specially chosen to give only behavior simple enough for us to be able to see that it will achieve the purposes we want" page 3

This is the crux of the book, there, luckily on page 3.



If you read the 12 Chapters (846 pages plus around 250 pages of notes and additional massive Index, than it is most likely, that you do it because you like an intellectual exercise or because you love books and don't mind the many times annoying voice.



I am not going to discuss the results of such a vast amount of research and work that went into proving and verifying his idea. There are plenty of scientists from his fellow theoretical physics to mathematicians and others that reviewed and challenged Wolfram's book over the past years. There is even a great discussion a the slashdot-forum that mocks the authors writing and is funny and hilarious to read for nerds like me. May reviews and articles are online and it is easy to find them, if you want to.



Beyond the Masters Voice, this is a lovely book to look at. An artifact in these times of trash-quality publishing. It is not a masterpiece of printing. You cannot compare it with bibliophile editions. But for science books, if you have seen a physical copy of it, it is more on the upside, which tells you where we are nowadays, when it comes to print.



There is a complete online-version of this book now available for free on the Wolfram Research Homepage. The whole thing. For the curious minds.


View all my reviews >>

"The Body of Pain, the Body of Flesh" Film Theory "An Officer and Gentleman" Part 2

An Officer and Gentleman USA 1982
Director: Taylor Hackford

Film Theory Part II

The Iconography of Pain and Flesh




A marble sculpture of ancient Greek wrestlers from 510 B.C. is part of an exhibition at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Scholars are discovering that the first Olympics were far from idealized Homeric epics.
Petros Giannakouris / AP

Zack Mayo leaves his father and applies for the basic training course at Port Rainier US Naval Air Station, the Naval Air Basic Training Command & Pre-Fight School. I am not going to discuss the accuracy of the training and instructions. Full Disclosure: I have not seen the Documentary "An Officer and Gentleman - 25 years later", in which the Director and the Actors discuss and talk about the film. I will just focus of some aspects I can touch upon, without that 'insider knowledge'.

Zack Mayo hides his tattoo on his right arm. He fears, he would not be accepted to the training. The tattoo and human body is also a wide subject I might discuss in another series, since it takes too much time and is only a brief moment in this movie. But every detail is important, that's one of the great things about good movies.







The drill Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley played by Louis Gossett jr. is standing in front of the cadets and the show starts. The purpose of this first weeks is of course to filter out who is physically and mentally capable to receive the expensive training that will be required to become a pilot in the Navy. But there is a deeper 'theme' attached to this part of the movie. Young men getting military training is maybe one of the oldest treats in human history. The 'Rite de passage' the 'initiation' from being a kid to becoming a man is paved with rituals through thousands of years and we know that every culture on this planet has or had some sort of initiation-ritual.



In todays modern society these old human male pattern are maybe cultivated but not totally hidden from the rest of us. The service in the military is full of traditions and the tradition to serve and become 'a man' is part of many lives. The female recruit "Seeger" in this movie is a comment on the recently changed laws, that allowed women as fighter pilots(?), but I am not going to dwell on this neither.

ancient Greek Olympic Games: wrestling match, detail of cup by Epictetus, c. 520 bc

My attention goes to the training. Young men (and women) have to train their bodies to be able to fly a jet or fight in combat. The training is full of pain and exhaustion. They have to run, they have to lift weights, they have to exercise until they have no more power left in their bodies, but they still have to carry on. It is demanded of them. They have to endure. Their bodies are transformed. The pain is part of the process to turn them from one state of being into another. They will have experiences they never had before. Their bodies will learn to prevail and surpass boundaries they thought were impossible to pass. This modern day suffering is reflected in old iconography. The Passion of the Christ for example is also tightly woven with the the suffering of his earthly body. His suffering and pain, the wounds and the destruction of his body was painted many a times by numerous artists throughout the history of art.






Another prominent christian figure that had to suffer a lot and was a darling in art, was Saint Sebastian http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Sebastian . He is depicted in art tied to a post and shot with arrows. There is a very secular fascination common people had with the paintings of him, the martyr that suffered. His nakedness, the pain and almost extatic look on his face, while he awaits his destiny. "Otherworldly" is an accurate description of his look. His pain was a sort of extasy. Of course it was full of sexual undertones, but nobody dared to speak of this publicly in earlier centuries. Many christian paintings were only losely themed with biblical stories, so the painters could doing what they liked the most, paint naked bodies. Through the suffering of his body he was closer to his God. The suffering of the martyrs is a well exploited genre in the history of fine arts. Of course, it is interesting and the kind of 'action movie' ordinary people otherwise would not see, except when they went to their local church. The paintings in the church were the only ones many would see in their lives.

Tiziano's Painting of Saint-Sebastian

The christian faith has a very strong opinion on the human body. It is considered 'dirty', unworthy, only a vessel for the divine soul that only had to endure to the day the soul would be rescued to the 'other world'. But the human body in the medieval and especially in the Renaissance and later on in Baroque/Rococo times, was also praised by many. The catholic church could not control all people all the time. Even within the church there were factions who loved not only the nakedness in art but rather fleshy forms too.

Titian - Venus with a Mirror, c. 1555 oil on canvas

This is just a draft. I am not a prolific writer in English nor am I interested to spend much time writing on a blog. So forgive my lazy quick'n'dirty style, which is no style at all. Still to come Part 3, where the relationships will be discussed and I promised some words about a very hot sex scene between Richard Gere and the young and lovely Debra Winger.

Holly Miranda, Marques Toliver

How many artists do you know who write their own newsletter to their fans? I don't know many. Actually I know only one, and that's Holly Miranda. 

After her Tour with her Band Members (incl. Marques Toliver) and AA Bondy she is finally back home and had some time to upload pictures from the tour and write a newsletter.

She will perfom in New York on July 25th @ 92y tribeca with Joan As Police Woman! She wrote "(holy crow.. seriously)".

So, if you are in NYC or in Jersey or Upper NY or ANYWHERE in America, go and GET YOUR TICKETS NOW!

It's $ 15 bucks, which is ridiculous! That's as much as a parking tip in L.A. or a 2 frappuchinos.

Don't miss it, because I sadly have to. Sucks to live so far away...

I am very much into 'relationship movies'

There are things I should not say publicly, but what the heck Internets: I love 'chick flicks', as in 'romantic comedies'. I could watch these kind of movies day in day out. 4 Weddings and a Funeral, Bridget Jones, Love Actually, ... or this one. On a side note, Jennifer Connolly finally could shine beyond her looks - a burden for a good actress - and show her comedic talent, by playing it 'straight'; still funny...

I have not read the book (2004) and I might read the excerpt on USA Today's Book Excerpts Page, but - to be honest - we all know these kind of books and movies. As a matter of fact, it is our everyday life that is portrait here, on bookpaper and the screen.

Why we like them and laugh at times is not just because we recognize ourselves in these movies and books, but we also can laugh and enjoy it because it is not us this time around that gets hurt or falls insanely in love (at least for 2 hours). The emotionally best way to get through them without starting to think about your own relationship or starting to cry at the end of the movie is, when you are "beyond good and evil". I leave to you, what that means.

The combination of Robert Altman kind of Episode filming (no, even he did not invent this technique using it effectively in "Short Cuts" (1993), it is rather old and started in modern novels, like Alfred Döblin's "Berlin, Alexanderplatz" 1929), combined with the genre of 'romantic comedy', works pretty well and Hollywood Executives are always willing to invest in such movies, because they know their target audience: Women over 3o. Afternoon screenings. And of course, movie nerds like me, lonely people, couples. Drew Barrymore co-produced the movie, showing her skills, like Sandra Bullock and other actresses, who know more than just to depend on her looks and film-scripts her agents hand to them once in a while. They are active behind the scenes, producing and encouraging young women to aspire in the movie business that was held too long by old white men. We as movie-goers don't see this side. Most of us only see the movies and the red carpet.

Although these scripts and movies know to be funny and witty and sentimental, the writers know exactly how to play to their audience. The plots are rather predictable and the outcome better be 'girl gets guy', but even in this cynical movie-business with 'target groups' and 'focus testing', there is something indestructible that goes back to the good old 'screwball comedies'. You can never beat Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, but you can try and come up with modern iterations of it.