As the former head of Deutsche Bank,
Hilmar Kopper was once the most powerful banker in Germany.
In an interview with SPIEGEL, the 76-year-old takes stock of his career and the current crisis shaking Europe. The three main constants he has seen in the world, he says, are "money, avarice and greed."
posted by chavenet
on Dec 30, 2011 -
21 comments
Until the End of the World was conceived over most of the ’80s, filmed on four continents (including video smuggled out of China), and foresaw a future abetted by such diversions as mobile viewing devices, proto-GPS and a highly sought-after contraption that records images for the blind. Starring William Hurt, Sam Neill, Solveig Dommartin, Jeanne Moreau and Max von Sydow among an international ensemble of actors, the film also skyrocketed to a $23 million budget and found its distributors — including Warner Bros. in the United States — requiring cuts that reduced it to barely a quarter of Wenders’s original vision. Later locked in at just under five hours, it’s the type of material that today would be a shoo-in for a cable miniseries that could probably win Emmys for everyone involved. Twenty years on, however, it’s relatively lost to the mainstream, with Wenders’s directors cut as yet unreleased outside two territories in Europe.
posted by Trurl
on Dec 10, 2011 -
50 comments
Despite appearing early in his career, Aguirre, the Wrath of God is for me the quintessential Herzog movie. ... It deals with possibly the most obsessed group of people in history, the Spanish conquistadors, and their desperate hunt for the most magic of all Grails, the elusive golden land of El Dorado – leaving destruction and death to millions in their wake. A few lines in an old chronicle is all that remains of the historical facts, thus leaving plenty of room for Herzog to employ his imagination and re-arrange the facts. In short: an ideal topic for a visionary director, tackled with just the right crew, and on a location guaranteed to make the shooting an ordeal in itself.
posted by Trurl
on Nov 24, 2011 -
40 comments
The “Copiale Cipher” is a 105 pages manuscript containing all in all around 75 000 characters. Beautifully bound in green and gold brocade paper, written on high quality paper with two different watermarks, the manuscript can be dated back to 1760-1780. [...] the manuscript is completely encoded.
[more inside]
posted by tykky
on Oct 3, 2011 -
15 comments
Udderly Amazing. [SLYT] 15-year-old German girl could not have a horse, so she trained one of her family's cows to become a show jumper. Luna the cow has come to navigate the pasture with equine ease.
posted by Fizz
on Apr 6, 2011 -
45 comments
Dr. Fuchs’s Donald was no ordinary comic creation. He was a bird of arts and letters, and many Germans credit him with having initiated them into the language of the literary classics. The German comics are peppered with fancy quotations. In one story Donald’s nephews steal famous lines from Friedrich Schiller’s play “William Tell”; Donald garbles a classic Schiller poem, “The Bell,” in another. Other lines are straight out of Goethe, Hölderlin and even Wagner (whose words are put in the mouth of a singing cat). The great books later sounded like old friends when readers encountered them at school. As the German Donald points out, “Reading is educational! We learn so much from the works of our poets and thinkers.” [more inside]
posted by cgc373
on Apr 6, 2011 -
16 comments
"
n arratives is a surreal, offbeat humour, low-key comedy cartoon show in amazing MULTICOLOURWIDESCREENMADNESSTECHNOLOGY." Apparently the first in a series. (SLVimeo; German with English subtitles.)
posted by ixohoxi
on Mar 21, 2011 -
7 comments
Unlike many cinematic exports,
the Disney canon of films distinguishes itself with an impressive dedication to
dubbing.
Through an in-house service called
Disney Character Voices International, not just dialogue but songs, too, are
skillfully re-recorded, echoing the voice acting, rhythm, and rhyme scheme of the original work to
an uncanny degree (while still leaving plenty of room for
lyrical reinvention).
The breadth of the effort is surprising, as well -- everything from
Arabic to
Icelandic to
Zulu gets its own dub, and their latest project,
The Princess and the Frog, debuted in
more than forty tongues.
Luckily for polyglots everywhere, the exhaustiveness of Disney's translations is thoroughly documented online in
multilanguage mixes and
one-line comparisons, linguistic kaleidoscopes that cast new light on old standards.
Highlights:
"One Jump Ahead," "Prince Ali," and
"A Whole New World" (
Aladdin) -
"Circle of Life," "Hakuna Matata," and
"Luau!" (
The Lion King) -
"Under the Sea" and
"Poor Unfortunate Souls" (
The Little Mermaid) -
"Belle" and
"Be Our Guest" (
Beauty and the Beast) -
"Just Around the Riverbend" (
Pocahontas) -
"One Song" and
"Heigh-Ho" (
Snow White) -
"Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo" (
Cinderella) -
Medley (
Pinocchio) -
"When She Loved Me" (
Toy Story 2) -
Intro (
Monsters, Inc.)
posted by Rhaomi
on Nov 12, 2010 -
31 comments
The Mistake on Page 1,032: On Translating Infinite Jest into German. "'The limits of my language are the limits of my world,' Ulrich Blumenbach quotes Wittgenstein as saying in a
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article to describe the challenges and inducements of the six years he spent translating David Foster Wallace’s
Infinite Jest (
Unendlicher Spass) into German — something he did without input from the author, who refused to speak to him."
[more inside]
posted by ocherdraco
on Mar 4, 2010 -
35 comments
Sites matching images to pregiven text have been
done before, but the texts are seldom as good as those used at
zweiterblick's sudelbild: the pictures are matched to (randomly selected?) aphorisms of scientist and all-around Enlightened fellow GC Lichtenberg (
about whom more). The relation is sometimes fairly
literal, sometimes fairly
opaque, but it's worth it for the idiosyncratic selection of aphorisms in any case.
posted by kenko
on May 12, 2009 -
7 comments
I both loved and resented that wealth of warmth which Elisabeth brought to me in those unexpected hours of the night. I was usually in the midst of a sound sleep when she got into my bed, and thrilling as I found the ministrations of her fat little fingers, it also meant my being kept awake for hours and hours. Besides, though in my conscious nature I knew nothing about what was going on, I must have had a feeling that my sister was bringing to my life as accomplished facts sensations whose real value to a boy was in their being discovered as part of the experience of growing up. She was presenting me with triumphs I should by right attain only by my own efforts in a much more restricted world… [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese
on Mar 20, 2009 -
11 comments
"To make off with hubby's fortune, yea, I think I heard of that happenin' once or twice around L.A. And… you want me to do what exactly?" He found the paper bag he'd brought his supper home in and got busy pretending to scribble notes on it, because straight-chick uniform, makeup supposed to look like no makeup or whatever, here came that old well-known hard-on Shasta was always good for sooner or later. Does it ever end, he wondered. Of course it does. It did. Thomas Pynchon's next novel, the 416-page
Inherent Vice, is
described by Penguin Press as "part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon — private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog." While we wait for its August 4 publication, we can read
an essay on the dystopian musical he co-wrote at Cornell or watch
a clip of that movie they made of Gravity's Rainbow.
[more inside]
posted by Joe Beese
on Feb 6, 2009 -
76 comments
At
One Minute Languages you can learn greetings, talking about names, counting, and more in
Catalan,
Danish,
French,
German,
Irish,
Japanese,
Luxembourgish,
Mandarin,
Norwegian,
Polish,
Romanian, and
Russian.
posted by sveskemus
on Nov 11, 2008 -
25 comments
Nazi German Bunker in my Garden: "[...] the previous owner told us that there was a tunnel built by the germans during WW2. He said it was big enough to drive into, [...]
So I traced some WW2 reconnaisance photos of the property, which appeared to show the entrance road to my bunker. [...] And that's where the quest began....." (
Original thread here, first link is to condensed but more readable blog.)
posted by orthogonality
on Jun 29, 2008 -
23 comments
Too pissed to drive? ("An interactive urinary experience - not to be mistaken with the Wii.") Those naughty but practical Germans have come up with a way to discourage men from driving drunk using a video game embedded in a urinal. I don't know how successful it's been in the real world, but it did win a silver
Clio award for
Innovative Use of Technology. If you don't plan to be in a Frankfurt bar any time soon, or if you lack the necessary
equipment to play, you can try the wee-free simulation
here.
posted by maudlin
on May 19, 2008 -
11 comments
The video of German electrofunkmeister Michael Fakesch's
On the Floor (via Daily Motion) might make getting to sleep difficult.
But it's awesome, and the guy sounds like a younger, angrier Prince.
[more inside]
posted by bwg
on May 5, 2008 -
9 comments
