High Tastelessness

Monday, October 4th, 2004

Heard of the latest new Russian pop music phenomenon? No one knows her real name; she’s known only as “n.A.T.o.” and is a self-professed “suicide bomber” musician, who performs in a full-length burqa (i.e. the all-covering Muslim female dress) and veil, singing in Arabic.

Yep, it’s apparently for real. I first got word of “n.A.T.o.” from Belgium’s De Standaard, whose De Kleine Parade feature always has short but noteworthy, even believe-it-or-not pieces of which I have made mention in this space before. But in this case there is thankfully even more extensive coverage available from an English-language source, namely Elizabeth Day’s article in Britain’s Telegraph. (more…)

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Another Hitler-Alert in Britain

Tuesday, August 31st, 2004

This is a first: if anything, EuroSavant is a “foreign press review” weblog, of course, but today’s entry is itself about a “foreign press review” article. There’s a new movie coming out of Germany that you are sure to hear much more of, if only from what has been heard of it already before it even opened in its home-market. It’s called Der Untergang (“The Downfall”), and its depiction of the last days of the Nazi regime in the spring of 1945 is based upon the book of the same name by noted Hitler scholar Joachim Fest, supplemented by the diary of Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge.

You can well imagine the consternation in Germany over the making of a film that depicts the Führer in even a remotely-human light. But this is a weblog with an international bent, and the point of the article in today’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung by London correspondent Gina Thomas (British Fears: Does Germany Forgive Hitler?) is that the British media are already getting upset about the whole thing themselves. This when the rights for showing the film in the UK haven’t even been bought yet!

(By the way, that photo – from dpa/dpaweb – is not of the real historical article, but rather of the movie’s star, Bruno Ganz.) (more…)

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The Concorde’s Not Dead – It’s Virgin!

Monday, May 5th, 2003

Did you think that the supersonic transport Concorde was going the way of the dodo bird, now that both the airlines that sponsored its development and ran trans-Atlantic Concorde flights for years (Air France and British Airways) have announced that they are retiring the plane? Not so. (more…)

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