A video with a walk through IM WEISSEN ECK and a musical medley from the concert by
Felix & Manüla featuring Anna Fasshauer & Sepp Löbert
check out for more:
http://neocollective.com/powerbuero/
and:
http://www.powergallery.de/

RAEKWON Only Built For Cuban Lynx II

The first one had it all and came to the rightest of time, the third release in the first wave of WU-TANG solo efforts, directly after the stellar ODB shit, and it blew heads open like none other with its hard hitting crime stories, more wide-screen than even KOOL G RAP. Then Raekwon released two or three mediocre Albums, it was the draught that befell the whole Clan, the end of that period marks the death of the greatest entertainer EVER, the magnificent Ol Dirty Bastard.  And ODBs death seems to have shocked the other Clan members back into producing worthwhile shit, as we´ve seen remarkable Solo-Albums from RZA, MASTA KILLAH, METH& RED in the past year as well as the VERY GOOD (grows with each listen) WU-TANG LP Chamber Music from early summer. Despite being produced by 13 individuals, OBFCL2 feels very homogenous, in fact its got much of the same feel as the original, I can put it this way: if the original is BLADE RUNNER in that it sports a multi ethnic mix in a postapo rainy athmosphere, surprising in its diversity and intermingling, than pt.2 is BLACK RAIN, even more heavy on the Crime and Blood and Guts. To make out hits is easy: “House Of Flying Daggers” prod. by J Dilla is classic Wu-Gambino material in a vein with “Triumph”, “Cold Outside” tops “Rainy Days”, “Black Mozart” and “New Wu” feature above the mark RZA shit but for this listener the best from the Abott this time is “The Fat Lady Sings” because of its illness. I don´t see no real misses around, other outstanders include “10 Bricks”, the chilling bonus “The Badland” and the uplifting endpoint “Kiss The Ring”. If you thought the Wu couldn´t produce tight woven big screen material any more, you´re wrong, every skit here is carefully laid out, we got another classic here, thank you, CHEF!

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EVANGELISTA Prince Of Truth (& Hello, Voyager)

I did listen to 2008s  HELLO, VOYAGER (I totally missed this release) for the first time a day or two after inhaling PRINCE OF TRUTH and was a little disappointed by the new LP at the initial listen, I expected more of a Rock Thing, a follow up to the mind bending EVANGELISTA from 2005 – but, silly rabbitt me, all of the expected and more is to be found on HELLO, VOYAGER – bringing the gothic, dark, lyrical Rock thing to an endpoint with the awesome, hair-raising title track that features all of Bozulichs Rock-intentions destilled 100 proof. So the new album had to go somewhere else, and that it does! The starting point “The Slayer” picks up immediately after “Hello, Voyager” still rocking and screaming with some of Bozulichs best lyrics ever: “am I here just to think – it matters what I do  - I can never really be – yet I don´t mind if I do – take the pennies from my eyes – let me kiss the friends I knew” – prime, cathedral stuff, yeah – and from there the music segues into two great softspoken ballads picking up tempo again with “You Are A Jaguar” where Bozulich defines a new style for metal-singing, falling back for two more great ballads with fantastic musical ideas and crescending with “On The Captains Side” another prime example of Bozulich AND crews ability to build their noisy art to opera-kindalike grandeur. The musicians collaborating with Bozulich can´t be thanked enough for their restraint in this endeavour, this is so concentrated a performance I´ve seldom listened to in the field of free music, I bow my head before each one of them, and after listening to both albums for 10 times each I can´t say that one is better than the other or the first, equally great Album from 2005, this is prime-time experimental avantgarde, kudos.

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CHRISTOPH WALZ is the big star here, its the tour de force of his lifetime, and he sure is great in each and every frame he’s in, BUT from a directing point of view it seems too overpowering, to put it better: there is an OFF balance at work here, the Sherlock Holmsian character Waltz is portraying has no strong opposite, BRAD PITT is NOT his Dr. Moriarty, he doesn’t even come close, and he’s not meant to be from Tarantino’s final cut. The title-giving INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS and Pitt as their apache leader are not given enough room to shine at all, they are broadly introduced early on and left out in the cold for the rest of the movie, their potential only scratched – how fukking awesome would an updated version of SGT. FURY AND HIS HOWLING COMMANDOS have been – Pitt has zero presence in this motion picture (could be the slang problem, look above), all around the Basterds we see some nice ideas being set up but then not followed up upon (Pitts scar from hanging, a whole troop of commandos being spoken to in training but never seen again, TIL SCHWEIGER never executing his team speciality etc.), but biggest omission is those Basterds NOT having the least of a bit of group-interaction – it almost seems that a lot of Basterds footage has been cut to make room for…other scenes…?

What we do get are episodic scenes of BIG TALK, we get a plot that holds these scenes together following the escaped jew girl Shoshanna to Paris, where she owns a movie theatre, meets DANIEL BRÜHL, in another stellar performance, who is a german war hero turned actor, trying to impress the girl with setting up his movie premiere in her theatre, we get a nice double plot involving the Basterds in blowing up the same premiere UNDERCOVER, because the top brass of NAZIs is attending, including HITLER himself, and Shashanna planning to burn the Nazi swine to hell by herself – all this is straight out of LUBITSCH or CHAPLIN comedys of the time – we see Walz always one step ahead of the game and we get a culmination of all that in a nice showdown. All this is done well and is quite humourous, in fact it is more of a spitting comedy most of the time, there are VERY well done scenes, like the cellar bar one or everything involving Hitler and Göring, being played as full blown Clowns. But this IS NOT GENRE DONE STRAIGHT, this is a satire, a spoof, its a lot like Monty Python, after the First half of the film the SERIOUSNESS is gone.

And then there’s the promises… like the movie in the movie starring Brühl, wich is just fantastic in reversing propaganda, there’s hints of great Gore when Hitler is being shot, while the rest of the movies violence is quite tame in that we have already seen it so often that its lame, there’s some fantastic dialouge throughout the movie, especially the stunning opening sequence promises what this movie could have been…

Tarantino’s previous films all played in present time, carrying pastiches and swipes to the extreme, but delivering a new hip-ness to those same trite elements, updating Genre moments, making them sexy again. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS can’t do that and seems unready to me in its final execution, I get a feeling there that his trademark efx in hip talk, in polishing up trite, often seen standarts, didn’t work to par in a period piece like this and Tarantino knew it, I think Quentin got to a point where he threw all of his ideas for Genre overbord and went for straight CAMPINESS, you can tell by those out of sync moments when Stiglitz is introduced in 70s lettering or when A bad David Bowie song is heard without any connection to whats happening. You can tell that he was in problems when you see a great action szene being set up and not executed as in the otherwise fine cellar talk.

I could go on, but my point is: I was entertained like hell again, there was not a dull moment throughout those 2 1/2 hours, there were moments I shook my head and there was a LOT of laughs coming from my mouth. This ain’t Tarantino’s best movie, but it sure ain’t his worst (that honour goes to RESERVOIR DOGS in my book) – the film is NOT changing our perspective about WW2 like some dumb journaillist said, it’s NOTHING NEW and formally it is a step back, DEATH PROOF was visually more grabbing and in terms of Genre-bending forwardness it stands in the shadow of KILL BILL. I now wait for the usual Tarantino Post-Theatre-Works, I do hope we will get another cut for the DVDs, hopefully with more BASTERDS in it, I want to see the english version, as this will surely nudge it up a point or two, and I’d like to see Quentin try his hands on a WAR MOVIE, like he originally promised, with blood & guts and big dirty men – but even more I’d love to see him go FORWARD to do a new film set in contemporary time, and fill it to the brim with hardcore violence, superb dialogue and perhaps even…some… SEX???