Members of the Punk-Band “Feine Sahne Fischfilet” (Fishfilet with creamdressing) deliver a present to the “Organisation for protecting the constitution” in the Eastern Province of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

Why?!

The rather unknown musicians got famous in only a couple of weeks after the release of their last Album. The Organisation for protecting the constitution in Germany had condemmned the group for their “harming influence on youngsters”. The Punk Band is part of the movement against racism in Germany and takes part in a lot of Anti-Neo-Nazi actions like preventing Neo Nazis to do propaganda against asylumn seekers homes and similar activities.

The Organisation for protecting the constitution in Germany is part of the Interior ministry and has the duty to monitor dangerous political activities. The unit was harshly critisized this year for their support of fake whistle-blowers in the dangerous Neo-Nazi-Scene. The State researchers where more or less financing some single Neo Nazi groups.

German media published lots of reports about the one sided investigations on leftist activists like the Punk Band. That was a splendid advertisement. Feine Sahne Fischfilet’s clip got more then 111.000 clicks on Youtube until now and the last CD is sold out.

Surroundings of the amberFestival12 opening in Istanbul, November 8 at the Istanbul Technique University

Hymn to Beauty
O Beauty! do you visit from the sky
Or the abyss? infernal and divine,
Your gaze bestows both kindnesses and crimes,
So it is said you act on us like wine.

Your eye contains the evening and the dawn;
You pour out odours like an evening storm;
Your kiss is potion from an ancient jar,
That can make heroes cold and children warm.

Are you of heaven or the nether world?
Charmed Destiny, your pet, attends your walk;
You scatter joys and sorrows at your whim,
And govern all, and answer no man’s call.

Beauty, you walk on corpses, mocking them;
Horror is charming as your other gems,
And Murder is a trinket dancing there
Lovingly on your naked belly’s skin.

You are a candle where the mayfly dies
In flames, blessing this fire’s deadly bloom.
The panting lover bending to his love
Looks like a dying man who strokes his tomb.

What difference, then, from heaven or from hell,
O Beauty, monstrous in simplicity?
If eye, smile, step can open me the way
To find unknown, sublime infinity?

Angel or siren, spirit, I don’t care,
As long as velvet eyes and perfumed head
And glimmering motions, o my queen, can make
The world less dreadful, and the time less dead.

Charles Beaudelaire
Le Fleurs du mal

Landfall at Manhattan, the super hurrican Sandy flooding McDonalds, NYC, October 2012, uploaded by MARCI8876

Reflections on the post-industrial landscape

What role can contemporary photographic practices play in reflecting the issues of our time? FUTURELAND NOW is an exhibition of the photography of John Kippin and Chris Wainwright which will address key issues in our current society whilst reflecting on the unresolved issues of the past.

To say that the last few years of Gareth Dickson’s life have been tumultuous would be an understatement. In 2007 he fell in love with a girl from South America, packed up a few essentials from his life in Scotland, and moved to the Argentinian countryside. It didn’t turn all fairy tale at that point, however. While there he was shot at, attacked by dogs, and was involved in a very close call when the passenger plane he took to a little town in the Andes was forced down after an engine caught fire. The bullet missed, the aircraft landed, and the dog bites healed; he survived intact, albeit a little more aware of his own mortality, and a good bit more anxious.

“The bullet in all honesty was never meant to hit” he states calmly, it was a robbery gone wrong and he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The incident in the aircraft was far more terrifying because there was the agonizing time to think and reflect during the plane’s unintended descent. “It’s interesting to find out how you would react in that situation.” Dickson says. “Faced with the possibility that it’s really time up, I felt an overwhelming sense of this having been destiny, that it was impossible that I had boarded this aircraft by chance.”

These adventures are the reason that in the last 4 years Gareth has not managed to record a new album; the last two releases (Collected Recordings, Drifting Falling, 2009, and The Dance, Sleeping Man, 2010) being old material recorded before the trip. They are also the reason that a feeling of heightened alertness and anxiety pervades this new work. If Collected Recordings was in some way a study in melancholy, Quite A Way Away is a decidedly more anxious affair. “Adrenaline,” the first track on the album, opens with the lines “Distant beat, advancing feet, each of us wound within.” and in “Get Together” there is something of confusion, if not paranoia, in the speaker wondering “Who was here before now, were there only you and I all night?”

Read more at 12K

At SALT – Live performance in the Walk-Cinema at SALT Beyoğlu, October 17, 19.00.