It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's Fear Pandering!

Did anybody notice the shamless pandering to 911 fears in the trailer for „Superman Returns“? The hero's high speed flight through the skyscraper canyons of Metropolis looking not so different from American Airlines Flight 11 crashing into the North Tower in the trailer for Oliver Stone's "World trade Center". The terrified masses looking up into the sky as seen in the numerous photo essays from that day. The burning, crashing plane tumbling towards the ground with the images of struggling pilots and passengers evoking „United 93“. The cathartic ascending of Superman and Lois over the Daily Planet's Globe, which looks like Fritz Koenig’s sculpture „The Sphere“ from the World Trade Center Plaza. The eerie resemblance of Planet Krypton to Ground Zero in the weeks after the attacks.

Maybe this is as oversensitive as the poltical correctness brigade’s search for traces of mysognism and racism in blockbuster movies. But hey, we live in New York after all. Just this morning some low-flying jets were following a bulky transporter plane in the skies over Brooklyn. Some fleet week air show partiot prancing of military hardware. Still - the sounds of non-civilian planes chasing each other overhead even got the bunch of burly construction workers across the street to look up rather worried.

P.S.: And now that they're still crusing around over our heads - enough already! It's New York City! We get NERVOUS, when you strafe us! And start to wonder what the FUCK you're lookin' at!

---
Watch the trailer for „Superman Returns“.

Watch the trailer for „United 93“.

Watch the trailer for Oliver Stone’s „World Trade Center“.

Website for the documentary „Koenig's Sphere“.

NY1 clip on the Fleet Week Overflights.

Simulacrum of Freedom and Democracy

Of course there are no surprises in an ‚American Idol’ season, just as there are no surprises in a new Starbucks drink or a Tom Cruise movie. Every new twist and flavor will be comfortably familiar. Which is exactly the point. So in this week’s AI final you had the two classic embodiments of Pop music – a white boy with severly challenged motor skills imitating black men and a high-strung brat who can well up on command. No question who was about to win (that princess behaviour just goes so far after all). The really scary moment was of course Ryan Seacrest’s ratings brag “63.4 million votes were cast - more than any US President in history has received", which was immediately taken as just another proof for the degeneration threatening the fabric of America by cultural pessimists from Huffington Post to the Chinese State Press Agency. Well, in a presidential election you can vote just once and so far there has always been at least one more candidate, so the correct comparison would've been, that this American Idol finale had more combined votes amassed by millions of teenagers texting verociously for four hours than any presidential election since before 1960.

Being that most pop phenomena are the perfect simulacra for freedom and democracy, with a choice of syrup flavors standing in for opportunities and a religious fanatic for a moral hero, “American Idol” is of course a wonderful substitute for your right to have your vote count. There we have it – all the excitement of an election year, real results and a clear winner without the consequences of having voted in an incompetent cronyist. There was actually one surprising moment – a bespectacled David Hasselhoff tearing up in the presence of another primetime idol ready for his very brief moment of glory with the prospect of spending your retirement on the German county fair and variety show circuit (yup, Kelly Clarkson made it to the Top 10 over there without being on the highest rated prime time TV spectacle for months on end ).

---
Watch a white boy imtating white dudes who imitated black guys.

Listen to Taylor Hick's pre-Idol music on Alabama's NPR affiliate WBHM's website, where you can download some of his songs like Soul Thing

Watch ambition to the point of tears.

Hear David Hasselhoff sing German on German TV. And if you must - watch him sing a German Christmas carroll looking like an odd mix between John Holmes and Al Gore.

David Spade on the AI finale.

World Trade Center # 7

So now there's the first fully functional rebuilt office tower at Ground Zero - World Trade Center number seven. There was a bit of triumphalism in the air, when Larry Silverstein cut the ribbon and Jeff Koons unveiled his exuberant "Balloon Flowers" sculpture. And since around Ground Zero every gesture's weight and meaning is automatically amplified a thousand fold, the gestures not made registered almost as much. Notably absent from the ceremony were all those politicos who just last fall had scrambled for podium time at the groundbreaking for the Calatrava terminal. Hillary and the mayor, the governor and even a minister from D.C. had talked in length about the grandiosity of rebuilding and how a strong New York means a strong America.

That was of course before they wrestled control over Ground Zero from Silverstein to prop themselves up as the can-do people in this swamp of inertia and paralysis. Sorry, as of today Mr. Silverstein is the first to come through with any promise down there on the ground. He was modest about it. Well, as modest as a billionaire with the air of an old-school New York City don can be. The building itself is triumph enough though. The David Childs designed monolith in mirrored glass towers over the gaping hole like a set piece from a Superman movie.

To get on good terms with the New Yorkers the much scolded Silverstein not only gave New York sculptures by Koons and Jenny Holzer, but also a lunchtime concert featuring seven New York City staples. Citizen Cope brought the appopriate despair. The Brazilian Girls stumbled through some shoddily looped tracks. Lou Reed sang 'Perfect Day' with such gravity that it sounded like it was his last, followed by a version of 'Sweet Jane' that he interspersed with cold cut tirades about McCain's infamous stump speeches at the graduation ceremonies at Columbia and New School. 'The same speech like at Liberty? Who does he think we are? Hillbillies?", he scoffed. "He'll never ever be elected by anybody with more than a 6th grade education." Reed was followed by enigmatic Suzanne Vega who dutifully sang 'Luca' and 'Tom's Diner' (she was a bit miffed about the rather lame audience participiation during the chorus, but hey, sorry, the 80s been over for a while now). Heartfelt highlight of the show was her brand new song 'New York Is A Woman':

New York City is a woman who's had a hard time,
but still is a heartbreaker.
She's every girl you've seen in every movie,
Every girl you've seen on late-nite TV,
In her steam and steel is the pain you feel,
New York is a woman who will make you cry,
Enter her and you're just another guy.

P.S.: Talking about symbolic triumphalism - one of the first tenants of World Trade Center Numver Seven is Chinese real estate tycoon Feng Lun who intends to use the top five floors for what he calls a business and cultural "China Center". Take that, old-school western economies!

Rocket Man

This of course makes William Shatner the godfather of irony.

Paris Is Burning

That Luc Besson produced action flic that had foreshadowed the Paris riots will be coming to American theaters in June. In 2004 Luc Besson of 'Femme Nikita'-'Fifth Element'-'Transporter' fame produced the film Banlieue 13, which told the story of gangs in a future, when the French government has erected walls between the ghetto projects and the communities of the affluent and rich. Not exactly French social critique, but surely a perfect summer flic.
---

Watch the US trailer for Disctrict B 13

Paranoia Nation

There was great alarm in Washington. Supposedly Jihadists had manipulated computergames to recruit the gullible youth of Arabia. The Defense Department got the Science Applications International Corporation from San Diego on a seven million Dollar retainer to monitor about 1500 militant websites by groups like Al-Qaida. SAIC’s major scoop was a clip from a supposedly modified version of the ego-shooter game Battlefield 2, which shows Islamist insurgents blowing up US military vehicles with an array of RPGs and remote-controlled roadside bombs, with a soundtrack made out of an insurgent talking about his way into Islamism, snippets from Bush speeches, anti-Iraqi televangelist quotes, islamist sermons and wild Arab pop music.

Which could’ve been the first give-away. Islamic fundamentalists are forbidden to listen to music, so the wild accordions would definitely be „haram“. If you were just a bit pop culture savy you also could have identified the voice of the insurgent as „South Park“ creator Trey Parker’s voice-over from the movie „Team America“. Just one google image search would have identified the „Sonic Jihad“ logo in the beginning as the lettering from rapper Paris’ album by that name. Some of the Islamists on the soundtrack are indeed authentic, but those videos they shoot during their attacks have been widely available on the web for a while now. So it turns out, this clip is one of the numerous mods created by gamers, modified game modes or sequences, that sometimes are like mini-movies.

This particular mod had been created by a gamer who calls himself Sonic Jihad and was published on the pages of the Planet Battlefield forum. Forum members of course had a field day. After all the mod had been presented before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence by a Pentagon specialist for public diplomacy by name of Dan Devlin.

Still, Reuters, Fox News and the Washington Post dutifully reported the potential threat from the world of gaming. Reuters closes it’s story with the stern warning: „Critics of the U.S. video game industry have long blamed the products for violence among American teenagers in civilian society, including high-profile shootings at public schools. SAIC executive Eric Michael said researchers suspect Islamic militants are using video games to train recruits and condition youth to attack U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq.”

---
Download the mod by Sonic Jihad

kick, push... coast

Any song that makes you feel like 15 again is a very likely contender for a summer hit. Here's the first of the season... "Kick Push" by Lupe Fiasco. He's a Kanye West protege from Chicago with an album scheduled for a late June release. "Kick Push" gott all the makings of an old-school summer classic - a hook remniscent of Naughty By Nature's "Hip Hop Hooray" and Fat Joe's "Lean Back", sentimental summer afternoon lyrics in the tradition of DJ Jazzy Jeff & Fresh Princes' "Summertime" and every other song by Jill Scott, plus golden hour harmony beats echoing A Tribe Called Quest's "Electric Relaxation" and Ill Al Skratch's "Where's My Homiez". Soon to be heard from a car window in your neighborhood.

Google Killed The Video Star

Gary Brolsma's "Numa Numa Dance" and those Chinese boys doing "That Is What I Want" was just the beginning. Now there's googleidol, where webcam stars compete for an induction into the googleidol hall of fame. First inductees - an interpretation of Aretha's "Respect" by Dutch duo Pomme and Kelly and Rockin the Bury from New Jersey doing "Eye Of The Tiger. Now German online portal Spiegel Online started their own webcan karaoke competition. And British band Motorettes is casting a video on googleidol.

---
Vote for your googleidol

Watch a German clip about the phenomenon and compete on Spiegel Online