To ze Germans with Liebe

© Angeliki Tsapatsari

Der Himmel über Berlin

© Angeliki Tsapatsari

Kultur macht frei

    What is a “guilty pleasure”? We read on Wikipedia that a guilty pleasure is something one enjoys and considers pleasurable despite feeling guilt for enjoying it. When it comes to art and tastes, then, why should anyone feel guilt? Calories are not involved, and guilt cannot be associated with any wrongdoing towards other human beings in this context. If it gives you pleasure, why should it make you feel guilty? And why should you feel so exposed and insecure admitting that you really enjoy something you consider low quality? Two articles I read recently made me ponder on these questions and the possible answers to them.

    The acclaimed Greek journalist and author Alexandra Tsolka has dedicated one of her past articles on the tendency of imposing “good taste” and sneering at what we think is bad taste, commenting on the participation of Greece in the Eurovision song contest and the outcry it usually causes among local “cultural elites”. In her article, she comments on the aphorisms of the “cultural elite” towards categories of people that happen to enjoy the lightness and kitsch of the Eurovision song contest or Hollywood production musicals, by labelling them as “superficial” and “ridiculous”. The so-called “cultural elite” often launches Spanish Inquisition-like assaults on everything that is happy, colourful, youthful and gay, by any means of the term. She goes on to provide a historical and social comment on such behaviours: “In societies in crisis, like the Greek one right now, the sullen Robespierres and defenders of Stalin and Goebbels shall prevail; people that excommunicate other means of expression that don’t match their taste. In these societies, anything diverse, even if it’s just a whisper, is dangerous. It’s just an excuse for them to insult and feel superior to others that enjoy listening to ABBA, Celine Dion, Johnny Logan or Domenico Modugno.” She concludes by reminding us that times change: “The ones who label music should bear in mind that cultural elites through the ages where with the side of Salieri and not Mozart, with the Beach Boys and not with the blues that, at the time, were considered underground music for poor and marginalized.”

    Indeed, times change. These are times of multiculturalism. On Wikipedia, we read:  “Multiculturalism is seen by its supporters as a fairer system that allows people to truly express who they are within a society, that is more tolerant and that adapts better to social issues. They argue that culture is not one definable thing based on one race or religion, but rather the result of multiple factors that change as the world changes.” In an ever-changing world, where different cultures co-exist and can be found as close as the office next to yours or the flat opposite yours, how can it be explained that there still are people that condemn and aphorize the cultural and artistic tastes of others?

    This kind of unflinching dedication to “good taste”, where every exception is a sin, and the need to indoctrinate all “infidels” to its mysteries or else spiritually pelt them, is akin to another kind of fanaticism, I am sure many members of a “cultural elite” would abhor: religious fanaticism. I have seen fanatically secular people living under the influence of these remains of religious guilt, where the God of Good Taste ordains and they have to obey. I have seen young people apologizing  for having danced to or sung bubble-gum-pop music, because for a moment they chose not to listen to their favourite alternative rock band and decided to have some light-hearted, light-themed fun for a change. I have seen people vehemently renouncing soap operas in public, but then stealthily enjoying them on their couch.  In these cases, superficiality is usually punishable with one week of self-flagellation and non-stop listening to death, loss and social isolation-themed music.

    To be fair, one should undoubtedly recognize the hard work of all people that get involved in the Arts, either professionally or as amateurs. One should admire the countless hours that art-lovers and artists spend and all the toil and effort towards achieving their goals, be it a piece of music, a sculpture, a movie or a painting. I’ve been there: several years of amateur involvement in Arts as demanding as e.g. classical ballet have taught me that nothing is achieved without persistence, hard work but, above all, belief in what you are doing and its artistic value.

    And it’s maybe the awareness of this artistic value that slightly or largely blinds people to a very important distinction: work is work and fun is fun. Even if a piece of art seems to us “easy” to produce, we should never forget that man-hours of work are behind it as well. And we should not forget, that after work, comes the fun. Important works of art are characterized by the fact that they can search into the depths of our existence and make us think. But don’t we need a break from all the soul-searching? Isn’t it getting too dark some times? What about then? As Alexandra Tsolka puts it in her article, are we expected to wake up in the weekend mornings and kick off our day with some Béla Bartók?

    I recently read another opinion reinforcing the work/fun distinction. A question was posted on the column of a popular Greek blogger and columnist, submitted by a young musician, to the following extent: after the description of her studies and qualifications in music, she asked whether there is a generally accepted definition of aesthetics or this definition is subjective.  The reader gave an example asking “can we consider Bach and Miley Cyrus as equals just because certain categories of people listen to them?”, stating that she gets upset when people reply that “it’s a matter of taste”. The musician also quotes her father as her source of inspiration, whose answer to that particular question is “let the people have their fun.” The answer the columnist gives I found particularly telling: there are and there have been people much more qualified than us here that have given answers to these general, philosophical questions so maybe we should try to keep a lower profile regarding our studies and qualifications. The responsibility of the young musician is not towards the “people” but towards music itself. So, we should let people have their fun even if we might not like it. Nobody wants Crusaders and martyrs of “good taste”. And, may I add, as the Monty Python have succinctly put it, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

    But some will object: what if I can’t have fun with pop music? What if I can’t relax and enjoy myself with rom-coms? The answer is simple: live and let live. My right to abhor David Lynch is equal to your right to abhor Britney Spears. It doesn’t make you or me an inferior person or even a person with inferior tastes. Oscar Wilde in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” says: “Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.” Aristophanes puts it even more laconically: “Let each man exercise the art he knows”.

   Very common is also the tendency to automatically label anything commercially successful as an artistic product for the “masses.” Why so much eagerness to distinguish ourselves and self-elevate to the Pantheon of the “cultured people”? And if it is that we hate anything commercially successful, can we then sincerely believe that we respect humankind? As Leo Tolstoy puts it in his essay “What is Art?”: “Art […] is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.” I am not saying here that commercial success is synonymous of “good taste” or high artistic value. As Immanuel Kant was saying, “good taste cannot be found in any standards or generalizations, and the validity of a judgement is not the general view of the majority or some specific social group. Taste is both personal and beyond reasoning, and therefore disputing over matters of taste never reaches any universality.” Montesquieu summarized this argument very well: “Art provides the rules and taste the exceptions.”

    As is obvious, many great thinkers have given us answers on what constitutes Art, Good Taste and Aesthetics but of course no general consensus exists. Let’s use this as a reminder next time we feel the tendency to berate a person or an artistic product as culturally inferior and let’s try to be as respectful as possible. Nietzsche said that: “We possess art lest we perish of the truth.” Art is an escape route from our levelling reality; choose your own and let others ramble freely on theirs.

Bend it like (Victoria) Beckham

In the year 2014, sexism in the Western world is still very much alive and kicking. Be it in the context of professional or family life, our societies still have a long way to go before achieving gender equality. During the last few decades though, it is undeniable that there has been progress. Nowadays people would generally be more reluctant to crack a sexist joke or to engage in discriminating behaviour in the workplace. But the ugly truth is that it is impossible to eradicate centuries of oppression and sexual discrimination from the common subconscious in a few years’ time. Deep-rooted prejudices always find the way to re-surface.

    A place that provides for plenty of fertile ground to the re-surfacing of such deep-rooted prejudices is the world of sport. Almost two years ago I decided to make a year-long wish come true and joined a female soccer team. My experience in this one-year and a half has been telling of the level of sexism that still exists in our society.

    My team participates in two different leagues:  a regional league, competing against other female teams and a mixed league inside our workplace, a European organization. In the regional league, as is normally expected in a Northern European country, it is considered socially acceptable and unsurprising for women to be playing football. Most of our opponents have been practicing the sport since a very young age. The only discrimination one could fathom would be a social discrimination, with kids of higher social status opting for hockey, leaving football for the less well-off and more street-smart. But that’s a different story.

    Things change considerately when it comes to the mixed league. “Mixed” though would be an overhyped term: the league is absolutely male-dominated. Women started joining some of the teams some years ago and it was five years ago that the first exclusively female team was formed: the one I have joined. Given the fact that the majority of our opponents are educated male adults, one would expect a behaviour that respects women and considers them equal as fellow sportswomen. One would expect fair play to apply, taking into account the differences in biology, stamina and years of experience in the sport. This is indeed the case for many of our opponents, including our coaches. Nevertheless there is an equal if not larger number of opponents that do not respect these principles at all. 

    There are various prejudiced approaches towards a female football team and I have experienced them all. One of the most common instances is paternalization. There are plenty of men out there willing to show us “how it’s done”. One would get the impression that there are as many football coaches as there are opponents. The prejudice resurfacing here pushes them subconsciously to view women as children that need guidance. But trying to transmit to us their wisdom after years of experience on the pitch, they tend to forget something important: nobody asked for this piece of advice.

    You also get plenty of “fake kindness”. This kind of “chivalry” is manifest when your opponent makes room so that you can score a goal ridiculously easily. Or, after he has scored his zillionth goal against your team, violating any notion of fair play, turns to you and sincerely apologizes. I wouldn’t go as far as calling this behaviour an attempt of denigration of my intelligence and capabilities; nevertheless it is definitely telling of a kind of person brought up based on an oxymoron: you always have to be respectful and gallant towards women, but of course that doesn’t mean they are your equals.

    Another approach is downright irony. Instances of opponents smirking throughout the match or stultifying our complaints by laughing at them are not so rare as one would think. Here it is not only about sexist prejudice; it is about persons lacking any decency. These people would probably behave the same way towards male opponents that would happen to be weaker than them.

    The list could go on and on but my bewilderment would remain the same: how outrageous and deeply disappointing is it that highly educated friends and colleagues succumb to offending simplifications and prejudice? I have no background in psychology in order to assess to what extent one’s upbringing influences one’s future prejudices, but what I know for sure is that educated adults ought to do their best to apply their critical thinking on everything they have learnt to take for granted. Unfortunately, when the feet get kicking, it’s usually all about the balls; not the brain.

    And why are all the above-mentioned behaviours a paradox? I will give you a striking example: in Europe, the public is hardly aware of any female football players. In most European countries, girls would very rarely to never be encouraged to join a football team, while on the other hand they are strongly encouraged to join volleyball or basketball teams. On the other hand, in the United States, football -or soccer- is socially labelled as a “female” sport; a sport mostly practiced by kids and women, in contrast to the male-dominated American football. The US national female soccer team has won two World Cups and four Olympic Gold medals in the last twenty years. How is it then that educated European men, who travel often and socialize frequently with people from around the globe, cannot see the paradox?

    There is no doubt that the position of women in the Western world has improved exponentially in the last few decades. There is almost no profession, no matter how male-dominated, wherein women have not found their way. Many studies have explored the sense of anxiety before the unknown and the perplexity that this change in social roles has caused to men. In Europe, football is definitely one of the last “fortresses” of manhood, inside which men love to devise war-like strategies and congregate in tactical formation in order to face the “enemy.” Women are still seen as the intruders, people that, even if they can be allowed to join the “fraternity”, still cannot be taken very seriously.

    But maybe the future is not so gloomy. The recent examples of Michael Sam and Jason Collins, the first two openly gay NFL and NBA players respectively, give us reason to believe that in the future, sports will cease being an arena for competing testosterone-levels. The road is still long and winding as far as gender equality and sexual orientation issues are concerned, even in the Western world. But let’s not forget that it was as early as 396 BC that Cynisca from Sparta, became the first woman in history to win at the Olympic Games. Let’s start from raising the next generation of boys and girls with respect towards each other. 

Wolfs inside and out the Animal Farm

Banking, ratings, stock exchange, recapitalization, off-shore companies, government bonds, euro crisis: terms very much “in vogue” for the past few years, especially in European media and everyday conversation. To cut a long story short, for the past few years, not a day goes by without the media extensively delving into the financial sector and it’s inner workings.

But what do these terms stand for? What about the people behind these words? The people that manage those banks, set up those companies and close those deals? How are they like? The latest movies by Martin Scorsese and Costa Gavras are trying to answer that question, under different perspectives that sometimes converge.  The two films give us an insight as to the lifestyle of the “flora and fauna” of the financial sector.

The main characters of both movies are professionals of the financial sector – a banker in France in Costa Gavras’s “Le Capital” and a stockbroker in the US in Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street”. Scorsese’s film is based on a book, which is based on a real story; and that’s what makes it even more unsettling. So, if 180 minutes of decadence and debauchery are not enough to affect you, then you’ll certainly be amazed by the fact that the “Wolf of Wall Street”’s main character was released from federal prison just after 22 months of detention served, having been convicted to a reduced 4-year term due to his cooperation with the FBI. Cooperation basically meaning double-crossing former associates. The “Wolf of Wall Street” is honest in its directness and lack of sophistication. Money is spent on hookers, lobsters and ludes: nobody would try to use their index finger to hide behind. It was the middle finger they would use. And they were damn proud of it.

Gavras’s story is not real, but, regardless of the poetic licenses of the film, could well be. What is disturbing about the bankers in “Le Capital” is this feigned sophistication in their lifestyle, behind which all wrong-doing is hidden, in contrast to the raw debauchery of “The Wolf”. I won’t go as far as to attribute this divergence to the differences between French/European and American lifestyle; probably the American counterparts of the Phenix bankers would share the same lifestyles. I wouldn’t even attribute it to the difference between the more “institutionalized” role of a banker in contrast to the profit-hunting stockbroker. It’s a whole different approach on money-making.

In the “Wolf of Wall Street”, the main characters are former middle- or even working class people. People that are bright or at least street-wise or just happen to have the “right” connections and no ethical scruples. They wanna make money fast, lots of it, and spend it as fast as they can in a purely hedonistic way. Monkey parades in the office, dwarf throwing competitions, hookers of all price ranges: all symbols of a category of greedy, visceral money-makers that more than often end up losing control of the situation and getting busted (even though the results of their “prison tennis court” correctional treatment might be far from what someone would expect).

In “Le Capital”, on the other hand, the approach on money-making is garnished by a lifestyle of sophistication to the maximum: Opera houses, art exhibitions, respectable educated wives. It remains a very hedonistic lifestyle, but hidden behind a curtain of social and professional respectability. As it is conspicuously stated on a banner in a fashion show hosted by a famous Parisian museum that the Phenix Bank CEO attends, “Luxury is a right”. The bankers in “Le Capital”, and the professional class that they represent, try to maintain what they already have and strive to gain even more – in money and status – with swift and ruthless moves in this “unjust, cruel, but […] worldwide” game. There is a dialogue, though, between the Phenix CEO and his wife that illustrates that it’s not only about the money for the money’s sake: “- I do not give a damn for their [the shareholders] respect. – Then, what do you wish? – Money. – Money, why? – So that they will respect me”. The only way these people might get side-lined from the game is in case they have not understood well how the game is played: maybe they are not useful to others anymore or they let their guard down just for one fatal second. But these are just exceptions: the rule is impunity.  

In a recently published article by the Spanish newspaper “El País”, is was revealed that Dutch, German and French banks exacerbated the euro crisis in 2010 by failing to honour agreements on Greece made in the IMF. The Spanish economist Jose Carlo Díez described the article as the latest evidence of “the immorality of the entire euro crisis.” Who could doubt that gambling at the expense of millions of citizens across Europe is indeed immoral? And if the crisis is immoral, so it follows that the institutions that are involved in it are also immoral. But moral judgment is reserved to human beings: banking institutions, rating agencies, intergovernmental institutions are all made up of people.

Is it then really the people behind the euro crisis who are immoral? Having watched these two movies, once is convinced at least of this: that’s not a business for everyone. One needs to possess vast inner reserves of insensitivity, endurance and a limitless desire for power in order to advance in the world of finance. After all, as was cynically proclaimed in a BBC interview that went viral about three years ago, “governments don’t rule the world; Goldman Sachs rules the world.”

The ending of both films is rather pessimistic as to the conclusion both Gavras and Scorsese draw: the conclusion is that that’s the name of the game. The “Wolf of Wall Street” ends with a humorous touch as to the “downfall” of Jordan Belfort’s still far from penniless existence. “Le Capital” ends with a touch of surrealism and black humor, when Marc Tourneuil, the Phenix Bank CEO, triumphantly declares before the board: “My friends, I am a modern Robin Hood. We will take from the poor and give it to the rich”, only to be followed by a thunderous applause. And this is exactly when the ending of Orwell’s “Animal Farm” comes to mind: “Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” 

The Great Beauty

    There is no denying that cinema has by now infiltrated our collective sub-conscious, our dreams and day-dreams, actions, reactions and vocabulary to a tremendous extent. Paraphrasing Shakespeare’s famous quote, I would take it one step further: the art of cinema is the stuff that dreams are made of.

    Drawing inspiration from the title of Paolo Sorrentino’s most recent movie, Oscar-nominated “La Grande Bellezza” (“The Great Beauty”) I wonder: where lies the Great Beauty of cinema when it comes to our personal tastes? Is it to be universally accepted that a critically acclaimed movie should be considered a “good” movie? Or does it boil down to our personal likes and dislikes in the end ?

But first, let me get this straight: I am neither a qualified cinema critic nor a journalist. As to the pure artistic value of movies, other people are more qualified to speak. What is important to me is the following question: what is it that makes a movie speak to our heart?

    A primal reason we relish the chance to watch movies is that they can be our getaway from reality. Whether it be the boulevards of L.A., the deserts of Tatooine, the valleys of New Zealand or the snow-covered Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, movies work as a magic carpet that sweeps us off our feet, out our living room and carry us away to places never seen before or not even existing. It is thanks to the imagination of those people working behind and on camera that we have found ourselves, more than once, oblivious of everyday problems and routine, lost in another world or another era for a couple of hours. A good movie grips you so tight and engulfs you into a world that you cannot quit thinking about not just after leaving the theatre but for days and days to follow. Of course, as Robin Williams’ quote from “Good Will Hunting” goes, “I bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling”; a video can never substitute a real-life experience. But movies can be the poor man’s travel agency: I’ve met people of very limited means to whom the streets of New York look familiar. And, even though we’ve come down to taking it for granted, this is priceless.

    But movies can also work the other way round: they can help us better connect to and understand our problems, as they can also make us live through our worst fears and watch them projected on screen. In the first case, a movie plot can help us clear our minds and put things in order when it comes to troubling personal issues. As for the latter case, artists like Alfred Hitchcock became masters of this kind of experience. Many cinema goers have complained of several sleepless nights after having watched films like “The Sixth Sense”. Suspense movies can function as symbols of real-life situations, much in a way similar to that of Pi Patel in the “Life of Pi”: he had chosen to symbolically disguise his tragic story using animals, instead of humans, when obliged to recount it. A movie plot can therefore also work as a cathartic experience, as a reminder that other people, in other times or other places, share humanity’s common fate with us.

    Movies can also be an inspiration. When watching a movie, you can see your own aspirations and your own dreams being achieved by someone else. And it’s not always just fiction. Touching real stories, like the one of “Erin Brockovich” can only pump us up with extra doses of courage and assertiveness. Fragility, doubt, the battle between good and evil within each one of us, the will to overcome obstacles in order to succeed, fear of failure, triumph and decadence, in short, everything that makes us human: it’s all there. How many times haven’t you stumbled upon a piece of news so astounding that convinced you that movies indeed are surpassed by real life? Cinema represents life on the silver screen and we are the spectators of our own fears and dreams.

    Movies can also be crucial to our critical thinking. Films on politics, ecology, the economy, films that help us think out of the box, agitate our conscience and trigger our reaction. Movies like “The Three Days of the Condor”, “Missing”, “The Strawberry Statement” up to the recent “Le Capital” offer to wide audiences a different perspective to political events and the economic status-quo, a perspective often much different to the one offered by mainstream media. The importance of political films was standing out in relief especially in the ‘70s or ‘80s where the flow of information in the pre-Internet era was much more limited. “The Killing Fields”, “A Dry White Season”, “Under Fire”, “JFK”, “Frost/Nixon”, among others, managed to reach large audiences and inform them about social and political issues, our knowledge of which is usually a half-truth. I won’t be shy to say the following: these movies help us become better persons, by providing us with incentives to search more, to analyse more, to doubt more and to think more.

    But what about the protagonists? Those chameleonic artists have the ability to transfigure into a different person each time they appear on screen. Sometimes it’s hard to remember with precision an successful actor’s full filmography; this, at least in my case, is due to the fact that the actor becomes the role to such an extent that, in my mind, it takes a few seconds before being able to separate the real person from the role. The oxymoron is that those people that feel so familiar to us, as if they were sitting next to us in our couch, seem, at the same time, so distant and inaccessible, as if they were not human anymore, but a species of perfected humanoids whose lives differ from ours as the one of “S1m0ne” from her creator’s. Or this is what the showbiz wants us to believe: because, no matter how their lives might differ from ours, actors are still real people, whose lives happen to have just a tad more of glitter and magic – at least on the outside. So, there is reason enough for this strange feeling of familiarity and empathy towards people we have never met: if it really is our own dreams and fears projected on the silver screen, then the actors are our mirrors, reflecting the way we see or should see ourselves.

    But, in the end, you will ask yourselves, what makes movies so special? So special so as to set them apart from all other forms of art, who of course do possess the above-mentioned qualities? Movies are a combination of several other forms of art, be it photography, music, etc. Our experience and liking or disliking of these individual forms of art may influence our cinematic experience with much importance. For example, a great piece of music always sounds different when combined to a, climactic or not, movie scene. Our perspective towards the famous aria “Nessun Dorma” from Giacomo Puccini’s “Turandot” changes completely when providing the musical background for a scene in “Mar Adentro”, “The Sum of All Fears” or “Bend it Like Beckham.” Usually, the soundtrack is part of the backbone that supports our cinematic experience and has the power to lift up or demolish a scene. Goran Bregovic’s Balkan-inspired work on “Queen Margot” has been criticized as not fitting the 16^th century France ambiance of the film.  On the other hand, there have been several critically acclaimed movies with little or no music at all, e.g. “No Country for Old Men” or “Cast Away”. The absence of music seems to increase the naturalistic point of view of these movies, but it couldn’t work in the majority of the cases. Just pause and think: how complete would our cinematic experience be, having watched “Dirty Dancing” without the emblematic scene where “I’ve had the time of my life” is masterfully danced to or “Casablanca” without the masterpiece “As time goes by” and its tender piano melody?

    One could name several more reasons why cinema has grown to be so close to our hearts and minds. In the end, as it is in every form of art, it’s all subjective and you can find as many varied opinions as the number of people on this planet. But no-one could deny that a good movie is like a good journey that we cannot help but profoundly enjoy. And, borrowing one of the closing lines of, again, “The Great Beauty”: “Our journey is entirely imaginary, which is its strength.”

    To all you cinema-goers, I wish safe travels. 

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom

lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says
we are for each other: 

then laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

                    -e. e. cummings