The 2024 Best Iceberg Music

 

Golden Iceberg, Little Dark Age, MGMT

Silver Iceberg, The Glorious Land, PJ Harvey.

Bronze Iceberg, The Spins, Marc Miller, Empire of the Sun.

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4, Angel of my dreams, Jade.

5, The Safety Dance, Men without hats.

Ecstatic Truth

From early on in my work, I was confronted by facts. You have to take them seriously because they have a normative force, but making purely factual films has never interested me. Truth does not necessarily have to agree with facts. Otherwise, the Manhattan phone book would be The Book of Books. Four million entries, all factually correct, all subject to confirmation. But that doesn’t tell us anything about one of the dozens of James Millers in there. His number and address are indeed correct. But why does he cry into his pillow every night? It takes poetry; it takes the poetic imagination to make visible a deeper layer of truth. I coined the phrase “ecstatic truth.” To explain that fully would take another book, so I’ll just sketch out a few lines of it here. It’s on this question that I have sought public conflict with the proponents of the so-called cinema verité who claim for themselves the truth of the whole genre of documentary films. As the auteur of a film, you are not allowed to exist, or not more than a fly on the wall anyway. That creed would make the CCTV cameras in banks the ultimate form of filmmaking. But I don’t want to be a fly; I’d rather be a hornet. Cinema verité was an idea from the 1960s; its representatives nowadays I call the “bookkeepers of the truth.” That got me furious attacks. My answer was “Happy New Year, losers.”

The French novelist André Gide once wrote: "I alter facts in such a way that they resemble truth more than reality."

 

Werner Herzog, Every man for himself and God against all.

The meaning of your life

Once upon a time, there lived two elephants. One was yellow, and the other was speckled. They lived happily. They adored picking flowers. Sometimes they played badminton. They hopped and jumped, and they loved meadows. And here came the Terribly-Big Meaning. And he said to them:

"Listen to me, my good elephants. Is that what you really want?".

The elephants were confused. They never thought about things like that. And they didn't know what to want and what not to.

"Good", said the Terribly-Big Meaning, "then answer me one more question, what is the meaning of your life?".

And the elephants started thinking again. The yellow elephant had been thinking for so long that he turned green, and the polka-dotted one hid under the bed.

Oh, elephants, poor little elephants. They could not answer any of the questions. They exhausted themselves and were about to die. They would probably have died if they hadn't recalled in the morning that they wanted to play badminton, pick flowers and chase bees in the meadow. They burst out laughing and went on with their business.

Anna Dovhan.

La jerarquía del partido

Ignat Yúrovich era apuesto y parecía animoso. Echaba un vistazo a su alrededor con mirada maliciosa. Unos rizos canosos salpicaban su generosa calva; sus cejas pobladas coronaban su rostro y le otorgaban un aspecto desafiante; su nariz era un poco ganchuda y, mientras hablaba, su dentadura postiza crujía en alguna parte de su cráneo. En las solapas de la americana lucía varias medallas al mérito en el trabajo y de congresista sindical. Estaba recostado sobre la cama, que estaba sin hacer, con el traje puesto y la camisa blanca almidonada. Calzaba unas chancletas de goma, que contrastaban con todas aquellas medallas de trabajador ejemplar. Tanto el traje marrón como las insignias le conferían un cierto parecido con William Burroughs si este hubiera sido miembro de la Unión de Escritores de la URSS. Junto al director jubilado, sobre un taburete pintado toscamente de azul, estaba sentada una sanitaria corpulenta y pechugona a quien Ignat Yúrovich llamaba Natasha y a la que mortificaba de forma expresa, sin que la presencia de extraños lo impidiera. Natasha, por su parte, todo hay que decirlo, respetaba escrupulosamente la jerarquía del Partido: con mucha paciencia, le servía al viejo ron en una taza metálica, llenaba de tabaco su pipa repujada en plata, espantaba las mariposas que se posaban sobre su calva, le hacía friegas en sus piernas decrépitas con perfume francés y le quitaba de las manos las revistas pornográficas. Y todas aquellas cosas las hacía sin pronunciar palabra ni mirar siquiera en nuestra dirección.

Serhiy Zhadan, Voroshilovgrado.

Los mejores libros del Iceberg 2023

 

 

Iceberg de oro, Radetzkymarsch, Joseph Roth.

Iceberg de plata. East West street, Philippe Sands.

Iceberg de bronce. Say nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe.

 

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4. Una novela rusa, Emmanuel Carrère. 

 

5. Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck.

The best 2023 Iceberg music

Iceberg de oro: Pregaria a la Santa Madre de Dios, Anna Gavrilets.

Iceberg de plata: Immensità, Andrea Laszlo.

Iceberg de bronce: Moral of the story, Ashe.

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4, Shchedryk, Mykola Leontovych.

5, Outlawz, Rick Ross.

The 2023 best Iceberg Movies

 

Golden Iceberg: Being John Malkovich, directed by Spike Jonze.

Silver Iceberg: Faust, directed by Jan Svankmajer.

Bronze Iceberg: Do the right thing, directed by Spike Lee.

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Generación low cost, directed by Julie Lecoustre & Emmanuel Marre.

Schnell und nachdrücklich zu vergessen.

Damals, vor dem großen Kriege, da sich die Begebenheiten zutrugen, von denen auf diesen Blättern berichtet wird, war es noch nicht gleichgültig, ob ein Mensch lebte oder starb. Wenn einer aus der Schar der Irdischen ausgelöscht wurde, trat nicht sofort ein anderer an seine Stelle, um den Toten vergessen zu machen, sondern eine Lücke blieb, wo er fehlte, und die nahen wie die fernen Zeugen des Untergangs verstummten, sooft sie diese Lücke sahen. Wenn das Feuer ein Haus aus der Häuserzeile der Straße hinweggerafft hatte, blieb die Brandstätte noch lange leer. Denn die Maurer arbeiteten langsam und bedächtig, und die nächsten Nachbarn wie die zufällig Vorbeikommenden erinnerten sich, wenn sie den leeren Platz erblickten, an die Gestalt und an die Mauern des verschwundenen Hauses. So war es damals! Alles, was wuchs, brauchte viel Zeit zum Wachsen; und alles, was unterging, brauchte lange Zeit, um vergessen zu werden. Aber alles, was einmal vorhanden gewesen war, hatte seine Spuren hinterlassen, und man lebte dazumal von den Erinnerungen, wie man heutzutage lebt von der Fähigkeit, schnell und nachdrücklich zu vergessen.

Joseph Roth, Radetzkymarsch.

[Por entonces, antes de la Gran Guerra, cuando ocurrieron los hechos relatados en estas páginas, todavía no era lo mismo si una persona vivía o moría. Cuando un habitante de la tierra se extinguía, otro no ocupaba inmediatamente su lugar, para hacer olvidar al muerto, sino que quedaba un hueco donde este faltaba, y los testigos cercanos y lejanos de su desaparición callaban cada vez que veían aquel hueco. Cuando un incendio arrasaba una de las casas de una calle, el lugar permanecía vacío durante mucho tiempo. Los albañiles trabajaban lentamente y con cuidado, y los vecinos cercanos y los que pasaban por allí recordaban la forma y las paredes de la casa desaparecida al ver el solar vacío.  ¡Así era entonces!  Todo lo que crecía necesitaba mucho tiempo para crecer;  y todo lo que perecía, tardaba mucho en olvidarse. Pero todo lo que alguna vez estuvo allí, dejó su huella, y por entonces la gente vivía de los recuerdos, del mismo modo que hoy vive de la capacidad de olvidar rápido y con énfasis.]

This Vermont God

The service did my heart and I hope my soul some good. It had been long since I heard such an approach. It is our practice now, at least in the large cities, to find from our psychiatric priesthood that our sins aren't really sins at all but accidents that are set in motion by forces beyond our control. There was no such nonsense in this church. The minister, a man of iron with tool-steel eyes and a delivery like a pneumatic drill, opened up with prayer and reassured us that we were a pretty sorry lot. And he was right. We didn’t amount to much to start with, and due to our own tawdry efforts we had been slipping ever since. Then, having softened us up, he went into a glorious sermon, a fire-and-brimstone sermon. Having proved that we, or perhaps only I, were no damn good, he painted with cool certainty what was likely to happen to us if we didn’t make some basic reorganizations for which he didn’t hold out much hope. He spoke of hell as an expert, not the mush-mush hell of these soft days, but a well-stoked, white-hot hell served by technicians of the first order. This reverend brought it to a point where we could understand it, a good hard coal fire, plenty of draft, and a squad of open-hearth devils who put their hearts into their work, and their work was me. I began to feel good all over. For some years now God has been a pal to us, practicing togetherness, and that causes the same emptiness a father does playing softball with his son. But this Vermont God cared enough about me to go to a lot of trouble kicking the hell out of me. He put my sins in a new perspective. Whereas they had been small and mean and nasty and best forgotten, this minister gave them some size and bloom and dignity. I hadn’t been thinking very well of myself for some years, but if my sins had this dimension there was some pride left. I wasn’t a naughty child but a first rate sinner, and I was going to catch it.

I felt so revived in spirit that I put five dollars in the plate, and afterward, in front of the church, shook hands warmly with the minster and as many of the congregation as I could. It gave me a lovely sense of evil-doing that lasted clear through till Tuesday. I even considered beating Charley to give him some satisfaction too, because Charley is only a little less sinful than I am. All across the country I went to church on Sundays, a different denomination every week, but nowhere did I find the quality of that Vermont preacher. He forced a religion designed to last, not predigested obsolescence. 

 

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in search of America.

The 2022 Best Iceberg movies

 

Golden Iceberg: The power of the dog, directed by Jane Campion.

Silver Iceberg: Atlantic, directed by Jan-Willem van Ewijk.

Bronze Iceberg: Don't look up, directed by Adam McKay.

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El buen patrón, dirigida por Fernando León.

Boiling Point, directed by Philip Barantini.