Eine bewegende Geschichte aus der letzten Folge des Storytelling-Podcasts This American Life.
Archiv der Kategorie 'people'
Im Freitag schreibt er anläßlich der Veröffentlichung eines Interviewbandes zu Polts siebzigstem Geburtstag [via]:
Polt dagegen hat seine Arbeit, wie er es im Interview vorführt und bekräftigt, stets als gefährliche Tätigkeit begriffen. Gefährlich, weil der parodistische Mime stets kurz davor steht, sich ganz in seine Rolle zu verwandeln. In Polts bekanntesten Sketchen, etwa über die Katalog-Ehefrau „Mai Ling“ oder „Herrn Tschabobo“, den prototypischen Fremden, der Untermieter bei einer fiesen Familie, wird das auf beunruhigende Weise deutlich. Dass diese satirischen Miniaturen einfach nur den Alltagsrassismus deutscher Spießbürger aufs Korn nehmen, wäre eine zu harmlose Deutung. Vielmehr sind sie mit ihrer emphatischen Bösartigkeit, welche die routinierte Fremdenverachtung nicht einfach anprangert, sondern in den von Polt verkörperten Figuren zu sich selbst kommen lässt, zugleich eine Provokation des im politischen Kabarett üblichen Moralismus, der immer klar zwischen Gut und Böse meint unterscheiden zu können und sich von vornherein auf der sicheren Seite wähnt.
Im neuen Film von Abel Ferrara soll Gèrard Depardieu Dominique Strauss-Kahn spielen. In einem Interview hat er bereits seine Meinung über DSK kundgetan, die wenig mit dessen jüngsten Fehltritten zu tun hat.
„Because I don‘t like him, I‘ll do it,“ said Depardieu to Swiss Radio Television (RTS). Having said that, the actor then went to town on both Strauss-Kahn and also almost everybody in France. „I think he’s a little like all of the French, a bit arrogant. I don‘t like the French very much…He’s very French, arrogant and smug, so he’s playable.“Würde DSK sich doch ein Beispiel an Nicolas Sarkozy nehmen, über welchen Depardieu im gleichen Interview sagt:He went on to add that it wasn‘t Strauss-Kahn’s compulsions that bothered him, but „the way he walks around with his hand in his pocket,“ which, taken idiomatically, goes back to arrogance.
„Every time I ask Sarko to do something, he has responded straight away. When I had problems with one of my foreign businesses, he did everything he could to solve the problem straight away. When I call him, he calls me back within a quarter of an hour. He’s the president of the republic, I‘m just an actor, and he rings me straight away. He’s extraordinary.
Suleika Jaouad schreibt darüber in ihrer Kolumne Life, Interrupted,:
Where cancer is concerned, it’s safe to say there’s no such thing as good timing. But having a life-threatening disease in your 20s carries a special set of psychological and social challenges. It defies our very definition of what ought to be. Youth and health are supposed to be synonymous. If only I could sue my body for breach of contract with the natural order of things.Cancer has forced me to pause my life at a time when my peers are just beginning theirs. For my friends, most of them young adults in their 20s, this is an exciting time as they look forward to starting new jobs, traveling the world, going to parties, dating and finding love, and all the rest of the small and big milestones that are part of early adulthood.
Like my peers, I have yet to fully define who I want to become. But as a young cancer patient, it’s difficult to see ahead when I’m fighting for my life. I don’t know what the future holds. I just know I want to be there.
Dank Christopher Hitchens bin ich auf dieses, leider immer noch aktuelle, Zitat von George Orwell aufmerksam geworden. Es stammt aus seinem Essay Notes on Nationalism aus dem Jahr 1945.
The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China.
KONY 2012 ist eine Kampagne für die Festnahme von Joseph Kony. Christopher Hitchens beschrieb ihn 1996 in einem Artikel für Vanity Fair folgendermaßen [via]:
Kony grew up in a Gulu Province village called Odek. He appointed himself the Lord’s anointed prophet for the Acholi people of northern Uganda in 1987, and by the mid-90s was receiving arms and cash from Sudan. He probably suffers from multiple-personality disorder, and he takes his dreams for prophecies. He goes into trances in which he speaks into a tape recorder and plays back the resulting words as commands. He has helped himself to about 50 captives as „wives,“ claiming Old Testament authority for this (King Solomon had 700 spouses), often insisting—partly for biblical reasons and partly for the more banal reason of AIDS dread—that they be virgins. He used to anoint his followers with a holy oil mashed from indigenous shea-butter nuts, and now uses „holy water,“ which he tells his little disciples will make them invulnerable to bullets. He has claimed to be able to turn stones into hand grenades, and many of his devotees say that they have seen him do it. He warns any child tempted to run away that the baptismal fluids are visible to him forever and thus they can always be found again. (He can also identify many of his „children“ by the pattern of lashes that they earned while under his tender care.) Signs of his disapproval include the cutting off of lips, noses, and breasts in the villages he raids and, to deter informers, a padlock driven through the upper and lower lips.
Nachtrag: Kony 2012: a viral mess