tapmag thinks that the Eurovision Song Contest is a far too complex concept to be understood in American terms of entertainment shows. Americans watch American Idol to see good acts and funny rejection clips. Europeans tune in to Eurovision for a lot of reasons, but not to discover awe-inspiring new singers.

We want pseudofolkloristic bands in nonsense costumes, eurotrash glam from the Balkans, a sense of socially shared television moments that has been long gone since the Internet arrived, and of course one of the last places being reserved for Germany.

The Eurovision Song Contest is meta-show that allows us Europeans to reflect on our own awkward cultural backgrounds, giving us a chance to come to terms with the lowbrow elements of European culture. By laughing about our neighbors’ ridiculous ideas of a good show, we establish connections that foster understanding and solidarity which transcends borders.

But of course, it’s far easier to denounce this expression of humility, humanity and the understanding of dignity that arises from it as the simple lack of musical talent. Kent Jones, a little humbleness suits everyone, especially Americans.

The very first seminar hosted by the tapmag crew has seen a few sessions already, so it’s time for a short update! Preparing the course has kept us all busy, so please excuse the low frequency of postings at the moment.

Highlights from “Reporting America” so far:

• We had Michael Dobbs of the Washington Post visit the seminar. We are still thankful that he took the time to meet us and shared anecdotes and insights with the seminar. More on his visit will follow, stay tuned.
• The first two workshops turned out great as well. We had an introduction to blogging, wordpress and the like, and recruited about ten new members to the blogosphere. The results from our first writing exercise will also be published soon.

The next few sessions promise to be interesting too:

• Next week the marketing and PR directors of CNN Germany are at the JFKI (see poster above).
• In three weeks time we will have Joerg Wolf from Atlantic Community join the seminar.
• In the following sessions Scot Stevenson of USAerklaert.de, Jerry Gerber from Democrats Abroad Berlin, and Dalila Nadi, an Al-Jazeera reporter, will meet the seminar. For more consult the syllabus (pdf).

If you are interested to attend, stop by at the John-F.-Kennedy-Institue, each wednesday, 4-6 p.m. at room 201. See you soon.

It is highly recommended reading for everyone trying to keep up with transatlantic culture, global politics, and European and American perceptions of the significant other. Edited by a three men team, including an alumnus of the Free University of Berlin, Atlantic Review has drawn a sizeable audience, as evidenced by the lively discussion surrounding each post in the comments.

tapmag: Who’s blogging on Atlantic Review? What is your background, are you American, European, or both?

Joerg: One American (Kyle Atwell, California) and two Europeans (Nanne Zwagerman, Netherlands and Joerg Wolf, Germany)

tapmag: Which topics do you write about? Who do you write for?

Joerg: All things transatlantic, but especially security issues (NATO, Afghanistan, Russia) and US commentaries on European policies and what Europeans say about the US.

Nanne: We don’t have a detailed concept of a target audience. We write for anyone who is interested in transatlantic relations. I think the blog does a good job of staying accessible but also a bit serious, and I know we have a lot of interesting readers.

tapmag: Why are you blogging? Why did you start in the first place?

Joerg: To promote critical, but fair analysis about the United States and Europe, which is needed to strengthen transatlantic relations in the 21^st century.

tapmag: Soccer or Football?

Joerg: Soccer.

Nanne: Snooker for watching, pool for playing.

tapmag: Which one is your favorite article on “Atlantic Review”? Which one is the most clicked?

Nanne: Our top two posts are about murder rates in the US vs. Germany and a youtube video from the EU that shows European sex. This only shows what people who come to us through search engines care about.

Our third most clicked post is also one of my favourites, and that’s a detailed post about how a German passenger was defamed in the ‘United 93’ movie. This is about addressing stereotypes that exist on both sides of the Atlantic, which is also an important part of what the Atlantic Review has done.

tapmag: Jesus or Obama?

Joerg: Nope, Forrest Gump it is.

Nanne: You’re sure you don’t mean Senator Fulbright, Joerg?

tapmag: Which question would you have liked to answer?

Nanne: Can German bands rock?

Joerg: Can the Dutch win in soccer?

tapmag: Tatort or The Wire?

Joerg: Neither for me.

Nanne: I haven’t watched The Wire.

tapmag: What is your favorite blog?

Nanne: talkingpointsmemo.com by Joshua Micah Marshall & team. This is actually the first blog I started reading, which was in 2003. It’s an example of how far you can take blogging and one of the best sources on DC politics.

Joerg: Tapmag, of course. There are so many blogs that I like for different topics and moods. Here are some of them: New Atlanticist, The Moderate Voice, USA Erklärt, Lifehacker.

tapmag: Thanks.

You can find all blog posts of this series on transatlantic blogs here.

Die Tagesschau rühmt sich derweil, das Video mit den letzten Minuten des Täters nicht gezeigt zu haben – wohl aber ein verstörtes junges Mädchen – während das ZDF erklärt, das “Fälschen im Internet kinderleicht” sei (Video). Na sowas. Fast alle Medien haben inzwischen Fotos des Täters, Bilder seines Elternhauses, nennen teilweise die Adresse eben jenen Hauses, und Bild schießt wie immer den Vogel ab und druckt am Tag nach dem Amoklauf Bilder angeblicher Opfer (!!).

Viele Politiker ergehen sich ganz betroffen in Verbotsideen – Sportwaffen verbieten, Ballerspiele verbieten, Einlasskontrolle an Schulen. Einige dieser Ideen mögen sinnvoll sein, doch die tieferen Ursachen einer solchen Tat berühren sie nicht. Wie es mit 17 war, daran können sich viele scheinbar nicht mehr erinnern.

Die “richtigen” Journalisten haben trotzdem nichts besseres zu tun, als auf den “Pöbel” (stern) zu schimpfen, der seine ungefilterte Meinung und – oh schreck! – unbestätigte Gerüchte über Twitter und andere Plattformen verbreitet. Das machen die “seriösen” Medien natürlich nicht. Dem ist eigentlich nichts hinzuzufügen, doch einige haben es immer noch nicht kapiert.

Nachtrag, 16.3.: Die letzten Tage reichten offenbar nicht zur Selbstreflektion. Der Spiegel setzt nochmal einen drauf, mit Tim K. auf dem Titel. Wenn das mal keine verantwortungsvolle Berichterstattung ist. Natürlich aus reinem Informationsinteresse, nicht etwa aus Voyeurismus (siehe Bild 3 und 4). Da sind die Fotografen des Spiegels nämlich viel besonnener als andere Medienvertreter. Man weiß zu berichten:

“Am Freitagmorgen kam es dort [an dem Ort, wo die Opfer aufgebahrt waren] nach Polizeiangaben zu einem pietätlosen Vorfall: ‘Reporter versuchten, sich den Särgen zu nähern’, sagt [der Leiter der Kriminalpolizei Waiblingen] Michelfelder. ‘Es kam zu sehr unschönen Momenten.’”

Gut, dass der Spiegel sich dem nicht angeschlossen hat. Oder so ähnlich.

Nachtrag, 21.5.: Der Presserat hat die Bild-Zeitung und Bild Online für ihre sensationsheischende und pietätlose Berichterstattung gerügt. Meiner Meinung nach hätte praktisch jede zweite deutschsprachige Zeitung und/oder deren Internetableger eine Rüge vertragen. Aber die Bild, immerhin.

It is these misconceptions and misunderstandings Scot W. Stevenson likes to target with his blog USA erklärt. Scot explains everything from humoristic differences, administrative particularities, and popcultural references that Germans have a hard time to understand. Post after post, using his (and his parents’) wide knowledge about German and American culture, his readers are lead towards a more accurate picture of America.

Whatever he discusses, he never fails to entertain on his one-man quest to bring cultures together and to proof that literally anything can be explained using Buffy quoations. Scot W. Stevenson was deservedly nominated for the Grimme Online Award in 2007 and the Golden Prometheus in 2008.

tapmag: Who’s blogging on USA erklärt? What is your background, are you
American, European, or both?

Scot: I’m a 40-year-old American who has been living in Germany since he was six. I live near Berlin, Germany with my wife, two kids, and an old, friendly cat.

tapmag: Which topics do you write about? Who do you write for?

Scot: I try to explain the United States to Germans, as far as it can be explained. So I’ll do a little piece about Halloween, about what the President can or cannot do, why root beer isn’t beer, who the Lone Ranger is, or why you should never, ever put sugar on your popcorn.

When asked, I’ll always say that I write for people who are interested in the U.S., with the ideal of not picking sides—if you hate America, you should be able to find background here just as if you love it. There are enough pro/anti-American blogs out there, and I wanted to do one that just presents the facts.

However, I really write for myself, because…

tapmag: Why are you blogging? Why did you start in the first place?

Scot: …it is so much fun. I’ve learned an enormous amount about the U.S., because the blog has forced me to read all the stuff that I always avoided. I get to make terrible word puns and spend pages talking
about the Swimsuit Issue of Sports Illustrated. I started—well, my excuse to start—were all the mistakes that people kept making about the United States. Somebody should do something about that, I thought
to myself, and since there was nobody else around, I figured I’d have to do it myself.

tapmag: Soccer or Football?

Scot: Football. American Football, that is.

tapmag: What is your favorite article on USA erklärt? Which one is the most clicked?

Scot: My favorite article is about Halloween. I think it captures a lot of what makes this such a special holiday and explains why it is spreading throughout the world.

The most popular one is “Warum Amerikaner (Briten, Kanadier) nicht sagen, was sie meinen” which explains why Americans, Brits, and other English speakers don’t always say what they mean and mean what they say. This is a big thing for Germans, who are honest to a fault.

tapmag: Jesus or Obama?

Scot: Jesus.

tapmag: What question would you have liked to answer? And what would be your answer to it?

Scot: Why do you put all those Buffy references in your blog?—Because it is a great show to explain stuff with, because the humor is great, and because it gives me an excuse to watch old episodes without giving the impression I’m obsessed. Well, not too obsessed, that is.

tapmag: Tatort or The Wire?

Scot: I’ll have to go with Tatort since I haven’t gotten around to The Wire yet. I haven’t even gotten around to most of Navy CIS yet … in fact, I’m still missing lots and lots of Futurama episodes.

tapmag: Your favorite blog?

Scot: I Can Has Cheezburger. Of course, I don’t look at the pictures, I only read the text.

tapmag: Thanks.

Scot: Thanks for having me.

You can find all the blog posts of this series here.

Feininger had been a student at Bauhaus and never meant to become a photographer. Initially he was trained to be a cabinetmaker and then later worked as an architect with Le Corbusier. At some point he gave up on architecture itself and focused on its photography, which led him to become a key photographer at Life magazine for over 20 years.

When he immigrated to New York in 1939 he found his urban utopia, a place even more bursting with life than Paris and Stockholm, where he had lived before. Besides his work as an alround photographer capturing everything from fashion events to car accidents, he found time to walk the streets of New York and portrait it in all its facettes. But unlike Henri Cartier-Bresson or Robert Capa he never waited to capture the one decisive moment. He rather tried to built the perfect impression by craftfully staging the picture he had in his mind.

As one of a few photographers of his time he was capable of successfully mastering craft and techiques with art and design. He considered craftsmanship to be the basic tool for his artistic expression—he saw the camera as the photographer’s typewriter. And this, in the end, made him an expert among experts. He wrote a number of standard references to photography, one of which you will probably know if you ever got serious with this artform: The Complete Photographer from 1978.

His work continues to define the image we have of New York until today. This probably explains the nostalgic feeling of ours when we saw the exhibition. If you have ever been there or not – Feininger’s pictures still feel strangely familiar.

Andreas Feininger
New York in the Forties
18.02.09 – 18.05.09

Bauhaus-Archiv
Museum für Gestaltung
Klingelhöferstraße 14
10785 Berlin

[Show as slideshow]

tapmag: When did you start “The Yes Men” and what’s your concept?

Mike: We started in 1999. Originally, we were doing an anti-corporate corporation called RTMark. We were setting up fake websites for other companies, trying to make fun of them. One of the fake websites we set up was for the World Trade Organization (WTO). We found that people were coming to the website, not realizing it was fake, and inviting the General Director of the WTO to conferences. Of course, we weren’t the General Director of the WTO but we offered to send a substitute to their conferences and then we just started going. We started pretending we are the WTO and making outrageous lectures that made fun of their ideas, basically. We made fun of the policies of the WTO that were hurting people in the developing world, mostly.

tapmag: Did nobody object?

Mike: No, you know the surprising thing is, no matter how extreme our presentations got, because we were the most powerful people in the room, nobody wanted to oppose that. They accepted these really strange ideas […]. We suggested that workers in the Third World get controlled by managers using a […] golden phallus—basically a penis that they wore on their hip—that the managers could use to administer electric shocks.

It was completely bogus, completely absurd. And yet people bought it because they thought we were really important and powerful—and that was the lesson we learned there: If you are in a position of power, you should definitely use it for good rather than bad.

tapmag: In your new movie, you pretend that you are the spokesperson of one the biggest chemical corporations in the world and you admit to wrongdoings in the past and that you are going to pay compensation for that. Why do you think it is so funny when you see a corporate spokesperson on the air saying: “O.K., we did something wrong and we have to take responsibility for it?”

Mike: That kind of thing is shocking because it hasn’t happened. I think a lot of CEOs probably want to say those things. They want to do the right thing. They learned right and wrong when they were children, just like the rest of us, and they know the difference. But they also know that if they say those things, their stock price will go down. And they are also obligated to keep their stock price up. It’s this catch-22; it’s contradictory.

Our whole point of this movie and what we have been doing for years is that we have to bring the system in line with our sense of right and wrong. We have to have a new system that is accountable to our moral and ethical values. Otherwise, the world is going to basically end. I mean we can see it coming: Climate change is guaranteed to cause massive catastrophes; pollution is guaranteed to continue to grow. At ten percent growth a year, the planet is eventually going to get used up; there is no denying that. We need to change sometime; it should be right now.

tapmag: What are your thoughts on the financial crisis? Do you have any friends who are investment bankers? What about the “Jump, fuckers!” photograph on the exhibition website?

Mike: I think they’ve done themselves in. [… ]We don’t have anything in particular that we can do to them or with them. We are just going to keep fighting for the right kind of regulation that will control what they will do in the future.

tapmag: From that, I draw that you are more an activist than a comedian. Do you have a set of political demands that you fight for and that you would like to see introduced into the political discourse?

Mike: I think that the discourse has lot of things in it already. […] Right now, we’re just interested in seeing change happen, because if it doesn’t, the predictions of scientists will probably come true. Sorry, I am a little out of it.

tapmag: That’s O.K. Thanks for talking to us and enjoy your stay in Berlin.

And of course, it’ll be much less fun without you! That’s the point of online self-exposure, after all, isn’t it?

Therefore, join us on twitter to check out our brandnew feeds and tweeds. Additionally to thoughts and instances of genius (hopefully) you’ll find out where the tapmag editorial team will hang out, which means you can meet us in real life, too (remember, that weird non-virtual state of being?).

Of course, social networking in the internet age isn’t complete without Facebook. Tapmag already has a group on there, but now we’re taking it up a step: Instead of just becoming a group member, you can become a fan right here.

Also, check out the event calendar on tapmag.net, which you can follow via RSS. Same is true for posts and comments, so keep yourself in the loop and involved in the discussion.

We’re looking forward to discussions, feedback and more!

Obamas’s staff is planning a visit for the days following the NATO summit in early April. The President will be joined by his Secretary of the State, Hillary Clinton. Obama wants to thank the Berliners for their help during the election, the Focus assumes.

Back in July 2008, in the midst of the election, Obama drew a massive crowd to the Siegessäule, but did not deliver a particularly historic speech. The event will be remembered more for the passion he did spark with Berliners and maybe even for the provincial debate around the question where Obama will speak. His words were more directed at the television viewers and voters back home than at the 200,000 Berliners in front of him.

If he returns in April, there is no election holding him back on formulating a new understanding of transatlantic relations in the 21st century. Everything he might promise to the European public will be more than a campaign pledge; Obama’s word will carry the weight of his office. All that is a big if—it all depends on Obama’s intention to deliver more than a mere thank you note.

As the days of George W. Bush as President of the U.S.A. draw to an end, every part of the transition process takes on historic proportions. Nobody knows how many people will turn out on January 20 to see Obama take over the White House. It will probably be the biggest crowd ever at any Presidential Inauguration, which will also make it the costliest Inauguration ever. We tell you where to watch the celebration in Berlin!

Still-President Bush has declared the state of emergency for the District of Columbia during the weekend. 11,500 troops are assigned inaugural duties, aided by another 8,000 police men.

Meanwhile, Obama merchandise is in hot demand and might qualify as an economic stimulus. The Washington Post will print almost three times as many copies as usually and raise its cover price from 75 cents to $2 for the Inauguration issue. Needless to say, finding a a place to stay in D.C. borders on impossible.

Luckily, there are lots of alternatives in Berlin to join the festivities, so you can fall into your own bed at the end of the night.

UPDATE
I added the CARTA event, because they also screen the Inauguration.

• “Der Digitale Präsident” – Carta Diskussionsveranstaltung
  Haus der Bundespressekonferenz, Raum 0107
  Schiffbauerdamm 40
  10117 Berlin
  With live screening and a panel featuring:
  - Björn Böhning, Bundestagskandidat SPD
  - Mercedes Bunz, Tagesspiegel Online
  - Tobias Moorstedt, Journalist and Author (we interviewed him last year)
  6.00pm, free admission but you need to RSVP
  more info
• Inauguration Celebration of the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy
  Amerika Haus Berlin (at Bahnhof Zoo)
  Hardenbergstraße 22-24
  10623 Berlin
  > 4.00pm
  doors open
  > 4.30pm
  Panel discussion on the significance of President Obama for Germany and Africa
  > 5.30pm
  Screening of the Inauguration
  > 7.00pm
  Panel discussion on the significance of the Obama’s presidency for the global African diaspora
  >8.30pm
  Concert, Jazz, R&B
  free admission, more info
  
• Democrats Abroad Inauguration Party
  GOYA ClubNollendorfplatz 5
  10777 Berlin
  > 4.30pm
  Doors open, projection of the entire ceremony on a large screen
  > 4.00pm
  Ceremony starts and ends at 20:00 (according to a press release from Washington D.C.)
  > 8.00pm
  Guest speakers from the different American abroad organizations. There is the POSSIBILITY the Governor Mayor of Berlin will make an appearance. THIS IS NOT CONFIRMED AT THE MOMENT!
  > 9.00pm
  Live Music from FOLKADELIC
  > 10.30pm
  DJ “Daddy-O,” Funky Soul Classics
  Tickets: 10-,€,  6-,€ after 21:00
  To reserve a ticket send a message to chair@demsinberlin.de
  There will be an after party at SURPRISE Club & Disco. A shuttle vehicle will be available for door to door transport from 10.00pm till midnight. Entrance and shuttle ride is free when you have a ticket for the Event in GOYA.
  more info
  
• Obama Kaffeklatsch at the JFK Institute
  Caféte at the John F. Kennedy Institute
  Lansstr. 5-9
  14159 Berlin
  There will be cake and coffee.
  free admission, starts 4pm
• Your place
  You can simply stay home and watch the Inauguration online. Read here where to access live streams of the ceremony and of several Inauguration parties in D.C.