Keys Corner

We visited the Documenta 12 in Kassel yesterday – with high expectations. The show is only held every 5 years, and when we last went, we spent two days there and could have spent longer. This time, I have to say that we agree with the arts correspondent of the Daily Telegraph: The worst art show ever.

I admit we didn’t visit everything. After just over three hours, having visited two of the main exhibition areas, we came home. The two pictures here are a couple of things we did like. The one above is by Lukas Duwenhögger and is called The Celestial Teapot – a large decorative tea pot with arms for the handle and spout, on top of a tower which is reminiscent of the supports for a long-gone British seaside pier. It is a memorial for Nazism’s homosexual victims.

The other exhibit was of 1001 antique Qing dynasty (1644-1911) chairs, which were scattered around the whole exhibition, for visitors to rest on. The whimsical chairs don’t look as if they would be very comfortable, but many of them were – especially if you are Ruth’s size, as I presume the majority of Chinese are!

We just got asked by a good friend whether we’d kept a copy of this joke (voted the best e-mail of 1997) – well we hadn’t, but thanks to Google it was easy enough to find.

It is worth another read (and your English had better be near native-level or you’ll not understand it!).

Here it is. ... enjoy!

His latest installation at Glastonbury.

A British publisher, Self Made Hero, has brought out a series of Shakespeare’s plays as manga comics with abridged texts in the original Shakesperian English. A second publisher, Classic Comics, has gone a step further, producing full colour comics in different versions. You can get them as abridged versions which use the original text, in modern English or in modern English for slow readers (i.e. with much less text).

I have seen several of Shakespeare’s plays in both English and German, and was suprised to discover that I much prefer to see them in German. Why? Because here when the plays are performed, the language is usually modern German. I understand that much, much better than Shakespearian English. So I wouldn’t be surprised if the comics are a big hit, especially with anyone having to study the plays as part of an English course.

(Spotted on Lenguas Entrelazadas, Carlos Ferrero Martín’s dual-language blog from Salamanca)

Op Art opened in the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt am Main yesterday. It contains optical illusions from the 1950’s and 1960’s by artists such as Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley, François Morellet, Julio Le Parc, and Gianni Colombo.

We’re definitely planning to visit it in the next couple of weeks. It’s on until 20th May 2007.

Carrying on with our idea of watching DVDs that have a Spanish and an English sound track to improve our Spanish, we watched Bandidas (Penélope Cruz / Salma Hayek in the star roles) last night – in English to get an idea of the story, before we watch it in Spanish again in a few days time.

The summary on the DVD cover calls it a “...hilarious action-packed adventure”, which is a little over the top. It is a funny – even silly – story, pretty much detached from reality. A bit like Thelma & Louise, but set in Mexico at the time of the Wild West, and shot on location. The two girls – Maria and Sara, in this case – come from very different backgrounds, Maria the poor farmer’s daughter who owns a remarkable horse that can play tic-tac-toe and understand spoken instructions, Sara rich and educated in upper-class European society, band together to revenge the killing of their respective fathers by the same man, the evil Tyler Jackson who owns many of the local banks. One of the scenes I particularly enjoyed was the sight of Maria riding her horse up a series of ladders to take up position on the roof of one of Jackson’s banks before they break in.

Not as good as Cruz’s previous film Volver, but it moves along fast enough that it is enjoyable and its saving grace is the cast – Cruz, Hayek and Steve Zahn and Dweight Yoakam, rather than the directing or the dialog. All in all: good fun, plenty of laughs, and we shouldn’t find the dialog too demanding in Spanish when we watch it again.

One thing I like to do when I have time is to follow links from one web site to the next exploring new connections.

Today, starting from Transblawg, I found myself after several clicks reading a longish paper on The Translation and Dubbing of ‘Fuck’ into Catalan: The Case of From Dusk till Dawn by Dídac Pujol of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. From Dusk till Dawn / Obert fins a la matinada, by the way, is a film made in 1996 directed by Robert Rodriguez. Amazing what some people find to publish papers about – and in this case, even quoting 18 references to back up their arguments!

We saw Volver last night, with our Spanish evening class (and a lot of other Spanish evening class groups, as the cinema was running a special evening class session). We really enjoyed it – see the summary here, to find out what it’s about.

You don’t get any choice by the way – as far as I know it is only available in Spanish with subtitles, which is why we went to see it. For some reason, most people there didn’t seem to find it a hassle, reading German subtitles and listening at the same time to the Spanish dialog… Recommended!

What connotations does “drop” have for you? As far as I’m concerned, they are negative – you drop a bad idea, for example. Or you might drop your drawers if you have to reveal that you have been caught out. Sales drop off, if a product isn’t successful. If you drop a glass, it usually breaks.

So why on earth would anyone want to call a platform to spread know-how Dropping Knowledge? My guess is, it was invented by non-native speaker of English. It sounds slightly more more positive that “Dumping Knowledge” I suppose…