Tag Archives: anselm kiefer

international society of savage customs

What evil lurks in the heart of man? Maybe it doesn’t lurk, rather it dances, it teases, it flatters, it cajoles, it manipulates and end up getting its way. How? The dynamics must be complicated.Especially when evil gets under the … Continue reading

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sailing against idiot winds

…Chris Hitchens would have disagreed, but the question can be posed nonetheless as to whether reason can accept Divine Revelation, the proposition that god can, and does communicate with the individual? To the believer, reason is no obstacle to the … Continue reading

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tears and fears: RIP (through) holy land

Attack Jerusalem? Launching rockets on the eternal city? Imagine the irony if a Hamas rocket hits the Dome of the Rock? Recoil time to play in the rubble. Something here about Walter Benjamin’s idea of children playing in trash and … Continue reading

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grass roots

Nihilism and anarchism? If, as you read a book, you feel that the author hates you and all the fabric of your life, that his chief purposes in writing are to communicate to you his loathing and his scorn, and … Continue reading

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fantasy on the life of the hybrid

The Tin Drum. At first sight this monstrous book looks as thought it might be a satire on the life of Germany during the Hitler era, the war, and the postwar boom. Its hero has a German name and thinks … Continue reading

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ghosts of remembrance: of things past

The docudrama. It was awful as commercial cinema. In fact it was a form of propaganda. But in its own inscrutable way, the newsreel style, the efforts to depict reality and achieve political goals in West Germany through cinema were … Continue reading

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obey

Obey.  If you put them in a line, will they just keep going? Are they brought up that way? Obedience.  The question might not be centered around perverse pleasures and sadism, but of placing oneself in view of the all … Continue reading

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when the grim reaper won’t leave

A bit problematic to be German. Still. The long arc of history is easily within an arm’s reach of the old Germany, tortured, and with a romantic sensibility of subject confronted with a bleak Germanism that marked the new realism. … Continue reading

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scorched earth policy: the burning fiddler

The dull oppressive heaviness of Nazi neo-classicism. The scorched earth policy. Everything to repress regeneration and to seal off the gases of expressionist madness that could escape and find their way into the water. It was a meaningless world. If … Continue reading

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burying the dead ends

The avant-garde revolution was over. Ironically, their work also signified the end of avant-gardism  and the onset of post-modernism. The avant-garde had become history. Its contradictions, the emptiness, the triumph of form over substance, essentially its transformation into rote kitsch … Continue reading

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