let's go to the Republic of Zubrowka!

Some make-believe places are so special that they have the power to materialize and they keep changing as long as you remember them!  check out trip advisors' reviews on the Grand Budapest Hotel, here. Enjoy your trip!

new question

Can a man still exist if no one remembers him as the artist he is or will his artistic non-existence delete him from his own life?

slow is the new black

I just heard of the new Norwegian TV Hit, it's not a program it's a channel, it's Slow TV. Slow TV is a new kind of reality TV because it's not "fabricated reality" it's just real-time television. It's the broadcasting of "normal" events like travelling or watching fire or fishing... for 12 hours. No editing, no dramatic directors' cuts... just life happening on TV. The first transmition was a 7 hour train trip and the ratings were amazing, over 20% of the Norwegian population saw it, and you can see it too!

Not only did people enjoyed experiencing these events as if they were there, but in some cases they were there! People got out of their houses and when to the places where the shooting was being made, being from there on a part of the "program" themselves! You can't get more interactive then that!  

Could it be that the Norwegians, more then wanting to know all about the glamorous life style of celebrities or the answer to the question "how will people behave in this situation", just want life on TV? Normal, regular, simple life? Are they so sick of fiction and other people that they rather just slow down and watch time go by on a TV-screen?  

Apparently some american network is already negotiating to buy this concept, so globalization of real-time-reality will soon happen... I wonder what events will the Americans choose to show.

what will "tradition" mean in a few years?

Helder Guimarães, a Portuguese world renowned magician, says that Portugal is not a country for magicians, "it's a cultural issue", he says, "cultural programmers see magic shows as secondary, inferior (to other performing arts)". He was voted by 3.500 people for the second year in a row, as the "world greatest magician", nevertheless there's no interest in buying his shows in Portugal, so he moved to the US... 

He's right, there is little tradition in Portugal of attending magic shows but there's also little tradition of attending performing arts in general. Should we just stop thinking about this, because... there's no tradition? For whom are we "creating" these countries (yes, plural, there are many other European examples) where culture is just what people are "familiar with". 

When I read these news of people going overseas (or abroad) to seek the recognition they can't get "at home", of cultural policies being made based on economic statistics only, I always remember Churchill's remarkable words when asked to cut down cultural funding to help the war effort: Then what would we be fighting for? We keep cutting and mending and struggling to "go on", get trough these hard moments, but what will we have to show for as "tradition" in a few years?

Maybe we'll need more then Helder's Small Miracles...

the "if only I could" museum

David Walsh became a millionaire by inventing a mathematic system to gamble in horse races. Then we was bored, then he made his own museum – The Museuam of the New and theOld – MONA. To put it in simple terms, according to its founder, it’s a “perverse Disneyland” where he gets to call all the shots based on “because!”, “because I want to” and “because it’s fun”. But make no mistakes, it’s not a joke, it’s an amazing building, in a fabulous location, with beautiful and rare art pieces, very well managed by a professional team of experts. Besides the museum, there's also a restaurant, an hotel and... you can also be buried there!

I want to go there! Don’t you? 

the liquid life

can we still find room for beauty?

photo Rebeccah Dean

Look for the numbers!

How come brilliant Swedish health students know less of the world than chimpanzees? It’s easy: chimpanzees have no pre-conceived ideas of the world or of human beings! So… maybe we should look for the numbers to know the world better, we should look at people without our personal “filter” of what we think of “them” – and by doing so we could at least know the same as apes do!

This is a 2006 Ted Talk on Health and Economy, but if we were to do the same questions related to culture, would our answers be any different?