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Music, Performance, Cinema

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Dubai Speed: Inside the Bubble

  • Author: Christiane Peitz
Posted by brb ⋅ February 6, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

In the spring of 2007, Michael Schindhelm, the luckless former director of the Berlin Opera Foundation, left the German capital for better shores. As the newly appointed Cultural Director of Dubai’s Culture and Arts Authority, he had high hopes — as well as seemingly unlimited resources. His goal was to construct an exquisite cultural landscape, complete with an opera house and a Museum of World Cultures. Then came the financial crash, and arts and culture were no longer a priority. In his book ‘Dubai Speed’, Schindhelm chronicles his experiences in a city that embodies “not merely a race against time, but an objection to time itself”. While there is much narcissistic navel-gazing in Schindhelm’s book, reviewer Christiane Peitz still finds that, through Schindhelm’s gaze, the scintillating bubble that is Dubai becomes a bizarre reflection of modernity itself.

A New Grammar of Images

  • Author: Laura Kolbe
Posted by brb ⋅ November 24, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

German filmmaker Werner Herzog — this year’s President of the International Jury at the Berlin International Film Festival 2010 — has long been as famous for his statements about film and culture as he has been for his actual movies. In his book ‘Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo’, Herzog chronicles his experiences between 1979 to 1981 while shooting (or, more often, waiting to shoot) his acclaimed film about a bombastic anti-hero in the Brazilian jungle. The journal form, writes reviewer Laura Kolbe, may well be the genre to which his writing is best suited: it provides an inherent structure, in which seasons change, personalities clash and reconcile and clash again, and budgets dwindle.

Where Techno Lives

  • Author: Norbert Niclauss
Posted by brb ⋅ November 17, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

After a much publicised boom in the 1990s, Berlin’s club culture has received comparatively little attention in recent years. However, as reviewer Norbert Niclauss writes, a new book by Tobias Rapp (“Lost and Sound”, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 2009) shows that, despite its reduced ‘surface visibility’, the culture of techno music in Berlin is alive and well. Indeed, Niclauss argues, Rapp’s book should not only be of interest to aficionados of techno music, but also to cultural policy-makers, since the current flourishing of medium-sized clubs and venues can only be understood against the backdrop of the wholesale failure of earlier urban redevelopment efforts.

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