Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is very much a film that could only have been made in 1920’s Berlin, where the decadence of the cosmopolitan elite rubbed against the struggles of the working man like salt against a razor wound. Where gentlemen clubs existed off of Unter der Linden based around the concept of gang sodomizing, then consuming geese; where helmet-haired starlets pranced naked in winter down Friedrichstrasse, clad only in mink and garters; where the saying went that cocaine replaced water from the flowing faucets of Charlottenberg’s penthouses; and where, beneath all this excess, the working class seethed, wanting some semblance of sanity restored to their lives as they did everything humanly possible to keep their families’ heads above water.
Eventually, this schism between working class and decadence would cause otherwise sensible people to think Hitler’s ultra-conservative (and ultra-crazy) Nazi party might have the right idea. The point is, the film — undeniably a masterpiece — is a sci-fi extrapolation of the times. It isn’t a vision of the future: it is the class warfare of 1920’s Berlin extrapolated to its logical — but not historically accurate — conclusion.
Even if you don’t buy all of that, Metropolis is a classic: a film perfect unto itself, that Hollywood shouldn’t touch. No one else could be Maria than Brigitte Helm. No CGI could be more spectacular than Eugen Schüfftan’s art deco modern cityscapes. And the Moloch Machine should never be touched: it is a mechanical industrialpunk god utterly nonsensical in a computerized age.
But Hollywood has never cited necessity as inspiration for its terrible ideas. So why be surprised that producer Thomas Schuehly (responsible for the execrable Alexander) is planning on remaking Metropolis. And no doubt ruining every single thing that has made the original so timeless. Maybe Hollywood itself is the modern-day Moloch Machine.
As an arrogant Frenchman, I will not let you tarnish a proud part of France’s glorious colonial advertising past. The tirailleur sénégalais (tirailleurs sénégalais were Senegalese soldiers enrolled in the French army back in the 19th and 20th centuries) on the Banania ad is definitely not eating banana custard, but rather drinking chocolate milk.
I am relieved to hear it. A stereotypical African eating a dessert made entirely of bananas might have pushed the boundaries of social taste in a way that a black person smacking his lips over a tin can full of chocolate milk would not. Chocolate milk! It’s dark milk for dark people!
Banania is a cocoa powder brand still popular in France. Paradoxically, the ingredients never included bananas in any way, but the name must have sounded exotic at that time.
The slogan “Y’a bon” means “It is good” in petit-nègre (literally : little nigger) which is the French equivalent of broken english.
Again, let’s congratulate the French on their progressive stance towards renaming their linguistic dialects.
Due to legitimate complaints, the current Banania ads are slightly less racist.
I was in Dijon a few weeks back. No joke: I stumbled across an entire licensed shop selling nothing but vintage Banania memorabilia. There, I bought a cafe au lait cup larger than my hydrocephalic head with the “Y’a Bon” guy on it. I love it, but let’s face facts: obviously, they are still cashing in on this guy.
No, seriously, thanks Guillaume for setting the record straight. This is the best comment we’ve gotten all week.
A folio detailing my adventures as a house renter in Berlin would be filled with the most curious illustrations of art I have encountered in the pre-furnished tenants I have sublet. You are all, of course, familiar with the giant vagina hanging on the wall of my last apartment in Kreuzberg (the picture’s bad; it does not detail the lurid pinkness of the horizontal slit very well, nor does it show it’s horrifying depth. Trust me on this: skeptical house guests have all agreed with me it is, and only could be, a vagina). This same apartment had a very curious picture of two giant blue extraterrestrials, leaning in for a homoerotic kiss; this proved to be a theme, as the bathroom of another penthouse I inhabited for two weeks in Kreuzberg was decorated with a photograph of the pudendum of another cerule-colored alien, this one a woman, which afforded me many opportunities for excretionary contemplation on the divine nature of Neptunian motherhood.
I have just moved into yet another apartment in Prenzlauer Berg, and I thought you might all like to see the culturally sensitive vintage advertisements and magazine covers which tastefully adorn the kitchen walls.
Never in the spectacularly pheremonal history of homosexual ecstasy-loving Berlin ravers has there been a man more impressive than Glowstick the Barbarian. It’s like the end of Buckaroo Bansai gone gay and technoviking. Footage from the Fuckparade, natch.
In the most recent issue of Vanity Fair, writer Rich Cohen documents the trials and tribulations of growing (and sporting) what has come to be known as “The Hitler.”
Obviously anyone wearing the infamous moustache is going to immediately be compared with Hitler. It’s simply one of the icons the fuhrer stole and warped for all time. Attempts at reclamation result in derision or mockery. I occasionally spy the local hipsters with a “Hitler”, attempting to be clever or ironic and accomplishing neither. Derision and mockery (thinly veiling the shame of being unable to grow one myself) generally follows.
Cohen’s article is fantastic, not only documenting his personal experience with the most famous of moustaches but the history of “The Hitler” itself.
An excellent find: a scan of a poster produced in Germany in 1941 detailing future transportation technology in a world where they won World War 2. Note the senescence of the city streets below. Once you eradicate the subhuman mensch of a “Master Race” dominant world, you have empty streets populated entirely by blond, genetically in-bred Mongoloids. I wouldn’t like to live in this paleo-futuristic vision of the 1950s: I like my streets to bustle with gypsies, Jews and homosexuals more than I like the overhead hoverings of gyrocopters. I might give up the French for this underground “Diving Torpedo” train though.
I would like all of you to take a good, hard look at the “painting” you see above. I used the word in quotes not to disparage it, but because it does not actually seem to be painted at all, rather being some form of canvas-like sculpture. Please tell me what you see. Because what I see is a six foot tall vagina hanging on the wall of my new Berlin apartment.
A word of explanation: one of Ectomo’s readers actually hooked me up with my new Kreuzberg pad. It is utterly gorgeous, and Mark himself is a super guy: one of those supernaturally kind and giving people who makes you feel like a boorish asshole just by standing in his presence. The apartment belongs to one of his friends (also a wonderful and generous guy) and it is fully furnished, with several pieces of art hanging on the walls.
The art is, perhaps, not my style, but that’s okay, since I’ll only be here a few months and taste in art is a highly personal thing, which no one short of its owner needs to love. And, in fact, I do take a certain joy out of some of the art’s aesthetic absurdity. The apartment is lousy with decapitated gold Buddha heads. I have infused the apartment with my own personality for the time being by putting fezzes on them. A shrine to Ganesha, the implausible Indian Elephant God, prominently adorns one corner of the flat, and it delights me just by dint of its surreal presence.
But my face immediately lit up when I walked into the apartment and, surveying it, noticed that a gigantic jelly hole was bolted to the wall. Now my days are spent staring at it and wondering if it will suddenly gush a stream of uterine fluid before the massive bloody crown of a gigantic fetus’ head rips the painting in twain. I am also considering cutting triangles out of construction paper and putting them on each side of the equatorial slit, turning the vagina into a giant vagina dentata for the duration of my stay here.
I’m not sure if I’m not reading too much of my own Freudian complexes into this. It could also, I suppose, be representative of a butt crack. Other interpretations are either a giant number 1 (a declaration of superiority on my landlord’s part, maybe?)or a capital letter I ( a masterwork of solipsism). I turn to you, o readers, to restore some semblance of objectivity to my interpretation.
My new BBFFs — Christian and Mark — are going to see Call of Cthulhu next Wednesday in Berlin. It’s going to be playing here — presumably with English intertitles bottomed by German subtitles, if we’re reading it correctly — at the Bar 25 at the Holzmarktstr. 25. Showtime is at 9:30, but we’re thinking of showing up at 9 for a few introductory drinks and to kick enough old women in the face to get good streets seats (streets? huh?).
It is very possible I have already exhausted Ectomo’s Berlin readership, but if anyone else wants to come, let us know, we’re going to try to preorder tickets.
More street art right down the street from my new apartment in Kreuzberg. Again by Blue, this time it’s a massive giant congealed from the flesh of a million naked pink humans. I move on Sunday. I can’t wait.
Incidentally, I know we have a few Berlin readers here. I’m moving there pretty much not knowing anyone. Any Germans (without mullets but with moustaches, please!) care to take pity on me and come out for drinks?
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
