The books i (should) read & "Off with their heads!"

This blog post is inspired by the reading challenge: 7 Continents, 7 Billion People, 7 Books - Reading Challenge 2013 and by the "It's Monday! What are you reading?" series, more about both, at the bottom of this post.



The books i should read vs. the books i read
Right now, my reads consist of 2 kind of books: the ones i should be reading, or rather: the ones i am reading, and thought i would finish, but need a pause from: there's Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood", and Granta's Pakistan anthology, which both are powerful reads, but rather on the intimidating side of emotions, with the senseless murders described in Cold Blood, the Kashmir tragedy, and a theme of lost lives running through all.

Alice In Wonderland
So instead of the "should finish first" books, i am taking a reading detour with "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" by Lewis Carroll. Like with The Little Prince and with Grimm’s Fairy Tale, i thought i'd remember the story, but when reading it, found so many things that felt new. And like Grimm's Fairy Tales, the Alice read is inspired by SciFi & Fantasy class - it's so good to read a book and parallel to that, listen to the literary lectures about it with themes like "About Lewis Caroll" (turns out, he was a professor of mathematics), "The Continuum of the Fantastic", or: "Thoughts on Language and Mathematics".- If you are interested, here's the lit course link, here's the book post that includes Grimm's Fairy Tales, and here are the pdf-link to the free e-books, both the version with illustrations: "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass".


Off with their heads.. 
While typing this, i noticed some curious cross-overs: here are the 2 books that are the "should-reads", and the Pakistan indeed has an almost fairy-tale-like cover...




...while in a twist of themes, Alice keeps reminding me of Cold Blood, with the Queen and her favourite order: "Off with their heads"! in scenes like this:

"Better not talk!" said Five. "I heard the Queen say you deserved to be beheaded!" "What for?" said the one who had spoken first. "That's none of your business, Two!" said Seven.

And following the tune, the Pakistan book has a short story that would please the Queen: "A Beheading.."
No escape from the dark side of things, it seems. So more about the 2 books from the colorful dark side, next week... and meanwhile, off to Romania in shorts, and then on to Mexico by train:

Never Mind the Balkans, Here's Romania
And as I want to read more globally this year, i looked for a books from East Europe, as Romania and Bosnia made cultural headlines yesterday at the international Berlin film festival: indie film from Romania won the Golden Bear. Here's an interesting prize-winner article at the Guardian: "Berlin film festival honours eastern European movie-makers": Two low-budget films, one from Romania and the other from Bosnia, take top prizes for portrayals of post-communist life." - and here's the film trailer: Child's Pose.
But back to books: Romania. Another country i never read something from, and when looking for detour sunday reads in the currently-for-free-e-book-list, i arrived at the "Here's Romania" book, which includes "58 short stories set in Romania, written by former BBC journalist Mike Ormsby. The preface of the collection consists of this single line: "These stories are based on fact. Spooky but true."

Ten Thousand Miles by Freight Train: A Memoir of Beauty and Freedom on the Rails 
Another book i came across while browsing said list is the Train Travel memoir by Carrot Quinn - i read into the first lines, and they made me think of "Wild" with their eagerness to get out there, despite lack of money and obstacles and all: "This is the true story of a young woman who sets out across the continent on wild freight trains in search of beauty, freedom and adventure. There is weather, wind, and peril; she becomes hopelessly lost; she lives for days in magical, forgotten forests." 
The first train ride leads to Mexico and back, and the second one, i guess i want to read that in a train.

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Global Reading Challenge
This blog post is inspired by a Global Reading Challenge, more about it here: 7 Continents, 7 Billion People, 7 Books - Reading Challenge 2013 The idea of this reading challenge is to explore the world by books from different continents and countries, and by visiting various world lists while planning the reads, to encounter unknown angles and facts about our world. This challenge is still open for anyone who is interested to join.

The link is also listed in the "It's Monday! What are you reading?" series that is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey, participating blogs are listed in this Linky Book List

Previous reading blog entries are collected here: bookshelf: currently  reading... there also is a visual bookshelf, just click it to get there:

And my own new book... is Worl(d)s Apart. True.

Paris metro sax, or: the difficulty of sound

while watching an online lecture on film and sound, i was reminded of my own experiments with video, and how difficult the sound dimension was sometimes when filming, in addition to the whole task of figuring out how to hold the camera still / or to find a good move to capture the scene. and going through the list of uploaded videos, i remembered this short clip that is all about sound, from my short trip to Paris in 2011.

and as counterpart, here's another mini-clip that is all about sound - yet here, the sound is a natural mountain stream:



things i didn't know about sound and film
the film online lectures starts with the silent black&white films of 1928 and then moves from there to sound and color. it's fascinating to get this glimpse behind the scenes of a medium that now is so all-encompassing. what’s especially fascinating is how the technical possibilties changed, and how this influenced film – in the time when there was no sound, film directors developed a way to film stories with speaking a lot in images. and they were very free in how to cut, how to show things, and needed to be experimental and innovative.

and then came sound, and you would think this would make things easier, but first it was harder: to film with sound, you needed to have the sound right there while filming, to tape it simultaneously to have it synchron. so if you had dialogue, you couldn’t cut the scenes. it had to be one take. and the cameras and camearmen needed to be in sound proof boxes (“ice boxes”) as otherwise you would hear the whizzing sound of the camera later. so it was like one step forward to add a dimension, and 2 steps back with restrictions that come with it. (here’s an image of that: film "ice box")

links... 
if you are interested, here's more about the film and black/white theme in this blog: Berlin / Hollywood, here's the course link: The Language of Hollywood: Storytelling, Sound, and Color, and here are more of my video moments (mostly from January)

Berlin, Hollywood

The Berlin film festival is on - and seeing the news and features about it brings back memories of Berlin, like this moment from the "Pariser Platz" - "Paris square", named after Paris not for romantic reasons, but due to the horse statue which once was captured by the French and brought to Paris, and later re-captured and brought back to Berlin:



And now, the Berlinale. the great thing about it is: even when you are nowhere near Berlin, it sparks film features and interviews - and one of the tv channels is running a film festival in their program, with Berlinale films from previous festival years. And of course, there are a lot of...

Interesting Berlinale links :

• official Berlinale homepage
• Berlinale Euronews 3-minute-clip with introduction & trailers: Cinema - Berlinale 2013 
• Berlinale 2013: Film Fest Spotlights Women and Eastern Europe
• Wong Kar-wai interview on "The Grandmaster" (the Berlinale opening film)
• Berlinale article in Berlin newspaper: Vorhang auf! Die Stars, die Filme, die Partys
• Bullett magazine: 10 most exciting Berlinale films
• twitterstream: #Berlinale
• mini-clip 1 from the red carpet: snow & stars
• mini-clip 2 from the red carpet: naked protest +  more in the Reuters news
• Berlinale article: A cineaste's dream: "Festival director Dieter Kosslick promises a mix of productions from major studios and independent filmmakers, a large selection of films from and about women and - in the great Berlinale tradition - globally sourced and politically committed works. .. Examples can be found in all sections of the festival, during which 404 films will be screened. A total of 19 productions are in the running for coveted gold and silver bears..."
• film review from the Hollywood Reporter: "The Act of Killing": "Joshua Oppenheimer’s artful confessional documentary gives fearsome killers the chance to re-enact their crimes as Hollywood gangsters... The result is a fascinating film not just about Indonesia but more generally about the corrosive after-effects of torture, political corruption and genocide. "
• PirateBay documentary on internet culture and copyright celebrates filmstart at the Berlinale - and online for free. Here's a  Verge-interview with director Simon Klose: "Four years in the Pirate Bay: director Simon Klose on why file-sharing is still political". More about the movie and where / how to watch it online, in the piratebay twitterstream. And below, the official trailer:

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Berlin, 90 years ago and still fresh, now in TV
Parallel to the Berlin international film festival, one of the TV channels is broadcasting a series of Berlin films. One of them is the silent film "Berlin. Die Sinfonie der Großstadt" - "Berlin. The Symphony of the Big City." by Walther Ruttman was first shown in cinemas in 1927, the same year that Fritz Lang released his now-classic expressionist film "Metropolis". In contrast to Metropolis, Ruttman's Visual Symphony is documentary, with an impressionist atmosphere, and even now feels modern. Here's a short sequence of the film:

 

There's a long version of the film up at youtube, too: Berlin. Symphony of a Great City (1927)
And here's a bit more about the film:

"As a "city symphony" film, it portrays the life of a city, mainly through visual impressions in a semi-documentary style, without the narrative content of more mainstream films, though the sequencing of events can imply a kind of loose theme or impression of the city's daily life. These films were conceived of in the mid to late 1920's amongst the "artistic" writers and filmmakers as an avant-garde, "new style" of early filmmaking that evolved from a script-free open narrative form that sought to show a clearer, less cluttered view of the world free from a real storyline or rigid structure." (wiki link)

 
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From Berlin to the language of Hollywood
Watching the Berlin film and other features about the Berlinale made me remember that i saw a note on a lecture-series on film and the language of Hollywood at Coursera, the online lecture website. So i went looking, and the class actually started just last week - and the first week is about the silent films of the 1920ies. So interesting to watch right now. The course includes 5-weeks, with 22 video lectures altogether, and a range of film examples that starts in 1928 and leads to 2002, here's the link: The Language of Hollywood: Storytelling, Sound, and Color

& some related links:

• Moments from Berlin + Berlinale film festival, with 12 film festival links + more
  that's from the first days of the Berlin film festival
• 9 film festival links: Oscars, Berlinale, Sundance..
  links to film festival websites and to trailer pages.

Below, the Berlin image, in full technicolor - it almost looks like a photo trick, with the radio tower in the background, but standing there in front of the Berlin Cathedral (which dates back to 1450), that's exactly the view you see