tapmag

On Tuesday, October 21, French Academy Award winning-filmmaker Michel Gondry honored the Hammer Museum in Westwood, Los Angeles with his presence. Gondry is known for his experimental music videos with Björk, The White Stripes or Daft Punk, as well as for his films Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep or his latest work, Be Kind Rewind. Hammer invited the artist to talk about his recently published book You’ll Like This Film Because You’re In It: The Be Kind Rewind Protocol and to discuss his own conceptual and technical approach.

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Precisely one week ago, Obama declared that “change has come to America,” as he became the first black president of the United States. On the very same day, Nov. 4th, 2008, the state of California voted yes on Proposition 8, legally restricting the sanctity of marriage to heterosexual couples only.
“Just how much change can a nation take in one day?” I’m ironically tempted to ask…

Prop 8: Like Icing on the Change?

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Today, Friday, the U.S. government announced the highest unemployment rate (6.5%) since 1994. October marked the 10th consecutive month of decline on the job market. Since August, the U.S. economy has lost 651,000 jobs, October accounting for 240,000 jobs alone, totaling 1.2 million lost jobs so far this year.

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The US Presidential elections 2008 are historic in many ways - A black man had to beat a woman to claim the nomination of his party, the campaigns already spent more than a billion dollar to persuade voters, the final month of the election coincides with the collapse of the credit markets and the global economic system is threatened in its entirety.

Also, this election is increasingly fought out not on the TV screen or in newspaper editorials and op-eds, but on the Internet – which adds another historic element. German journalist Tobias Moorstedt has travelled the US to find out more about this development and the changes, challenges and criticisms digital campaigns evoke. He touches on all of these questions in his new book and in the following interview with tapmag (you can also read the interview in German on my private blog).

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At eleven forty the crowd slowly becomes bored and people start to entertain themselves. “Yes, we can! Yes, we can!” An interpreter for the hearing-impaired is still on stage, who raptly joins in. She clenches her right fist to nod with it, brings it to her chest with her index finger out, then clenches both fists and stems them toward the ground - Yes, we can! Back and forth, the crowd and the little woman in a summer dress are firing each other up; all just to lure him, the Democratic Presidential Nominee, savior and general hopeful on to the stage. To no avail. Barack Obama sets his own timetable.

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tapmag has been reporting frequently on different religious views and their intertwinement with politics, especially apparent during election times. But religion does not only come into play when it is time to chose a new leader, and to figure out if the candidates match one’s own ethical views, or faith. In many areas of conflict, religious feelings or tradition play an important role, and set a border for political ambitions (in Germany, a prime example is the 24/7 opening of stores, which is still prohibited for the reason of a “sacred” Sunday). But the two main denominations in Germany, lutheran and catholic, also struggle with declining membership and financial problems.

In this article, I explore a different kind of church. Please excuse that for now it is only in German.

Go to article here.

The US Presidential elections are finally entering the homestretch after a seemingly endless qualify season. USA Today has laid out the last meters in great detail. They describe how the campaigns try to prepare in advance for the events they know about and how they react to all the unscripted surprises that might happen before it’s all over November 4th. Prime example are the Olympic Games, during which both candidates will find it hard to generate substantial press coverage of their campaigns.

Here’s what fills the calendars of both John McCain and Barack Obama.

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Thank God Obama stuck to guns and religion, when trying to illustrate the big bind America has gotten itself into over the last years. One can only imagine what would have happened, if he had been deemed elitist for stressing an even (literally) bigger one: obesity. The Mister Softee jingle (“Bubblicious RMX” feat. Celine Dion and Enrique Iglesias) would go triple platinum, Ronald McDonald would clinch a last-minute nomination and pull home an election landslide, and Coca-Cola would break the NASDAQ after announcing its plan to fuse with leading water providers to deliver sparkling soft drinks fresh from the tap.

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Yesterday, it meant do or die for Hillary Clinton. The Democrats in Vermont, Rhode Island, Ohio and Texas voted for their presidential candidate, and once more, it was super-close.

Surprisingly, she won Ohio, Rhode Island and Texas. So, Hillary is back in the race. These primary elections were crucial for her, since her political career (and rumors say her marriage, too) was said to be in free fall after Barack Obama had won eleven states in a row. Obamania (some say Obamamania, but that looks ridiculous to me) has been spreading all over the country and all over Tinseltown. [Read more]

Call him the Black Kennedy, the Tiger Woods of politics, or the Second Coming. The epithets used to describe presidential hopeful Barack Obama (D-Ill) are a testimony to an election that is so much more than politics. There is something close to biblical about rain, when the skies give way to an almost cathartic downpour, draining off the drudge, sins and conversation-residuals clogging the streets. In any Hollywood movie (especially considering the writers’ strike) it could have been a Second Coming scenario, yet it was an unassuming Monday with weather more befitting of an unassuming British city pronounced Gloomster (but probably spelled Gleucmcester) in the midst of Berlin. The prophesized savior of American politics, Barack Obama, drew close to a 100 people, who sought shelter in the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung on this rainy, borderline-suicidal Monday evening, to learn about the self-professed harbinger of a new era – in a country so far from theirs.

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