Bert Vandecasteele

Category: Blog

  • Books!

    I’m back from the USA — and apparently people want me to list books or else I’ll face the wrath of some sort of a bucket of ice or books or whatever. (I feel so out of touch with the internet.)

    In no particular order:

    – 1984: I read this on a long train ride and was so immersed I cried out when the conductor suddenly asked for my ticket.
    – The Stand (Stephen King): Read this sitting under a tree in Bourgogne, France, instead of getting drunk on awesome wine. While the ending is kind of meh, the first 700 pages are the best set-up to an apocalypse I’ve ever read.
    – Watchmen (Moore & Gibbons): The first time I connected fascism and superheroes. My world has never been the same since.
    – 20th Century Boys (Naoki Urasawa): My great obsession during university. Funnily enough, I cannot for the life of me remember who the enigmatic “Friend” turned out to be in the end, but the constant tension in this manga was awesome enough to make it on a list comprised of books.
    – Vallen (Anne Provoost): I read this for Dutch class when I was 14 and I still consider it one of the best Dutch books I’ve ever read. Oddly enough, when I read it nowadays it’s a completely different novel – I must’ve ignored the political side of the story back then.
    – Momo (Michael Ende): First book I read in German. It’s awesome (and so much better than the never-ending story – sorry!)
    – The Golden Compass (Philipp Pullman): While I think The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass veer too much into philosophical discussions, the Golden Compass is to me the perfect mix between religious critique and pulpy fantasy.
    – The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Michael Chabon): I think this is the best book I’ve ever read. Also it makes me feel smart because it won a Pulitzer.
    – Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (J.K. Rowling): What can I say? I love pulp! The moment Cedric Diggory dies was one of the greatest in the series – in two sentences, child literature grew up, with no forewarning. All the impactful plot twists of the later books never achieved the pure shock this moment caused.
    – Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom): Of all the books listed here, this one connects most to me personally. There’s something about the intimacy of Morrie’s slow descent that gets to me everytime. Together with Kavalier and Clay, this is the only book ever to cease to be fiction and to just turn real.

    So there you have it. You can put your buckets away.

  • Train

    Two jolly old women enter the overfilled train.

    “I’m going to sit here”, says the fat one, poking  a guy with a huge suitcase.

    “I’m going to sit over here”, answers the one with the glasses and motions a tiny Filippina.

    The train rearranges itself. They sit. The train settles down.

    They look at each other through the aisle. Inconvenient.

    “Or maybe we can ask that man?” asks the one with the glasses to both the fat one and due to loudness the man.

    “Maybe he’ll let us sit together?” asks the fat one, only with a period instead of a question mark.

    They look at the man. The man looks back. They open their mouths. “Excuse me sir, are you a christian man?”

    “I’ll get up”, says the man, only without words but just by removing his butt from his chair and, weirded out, moving up the aisle.

    The women sit next to each other and they will live happily ever after, though they never will get answer to their question.

  • Strawberry Woman

    “Four ninety-five please”, says the scrawny woman at the strawberry stand.

    “Here you are”, I say as I hand her a fiver, straightening a dog-ear on it.

    “That’s polite”, she says, taking the money.

    “My mom told me it’s impolite to give people crumpled bank notes”, I say, smiling politely.

    “My kids don’t do that”, she says as she pockets the fiver.

    “It’s never too late to teach them”, I answer.

    She stares blankly ahead. “Sometimes, it is.”

  • Father and Daughter

    One of the most touching animated shorts ever.

  • Four masters

    Here’s Belgian comic book authors Franquin, Péyo, Morris and Roba doing something magical together.

  • The Writing’s on the Wall

    OK Go has a reputation for awesome video clips. After threadmills, a one-shot fanfare and the most elaborate paint-shooting construction I’ve ever seen, their newest video is so close to capturing the magic of MC Escher I can almost see my seventh grade math teacher drooling.

  • The World Cup, or: How I stopped worrying and love the flag

    I arrived in Germany in the fall of 2006, right after Germany hosted the football world cup. Immediately, my first roommate told me I had arrived three months late – the Sommermärchen was over, there was nothing to experience in Berlin, the Winter would be long, cold and painful.

    Back then, I didn’t get this – how could something as trivial as a world cup be so exciting? Of course, Belgium hadn’t actually qualified for a cup since 2002 – where it was unanimously decided they had to rethink the entire team from the ground up and invest in their youth.

    2014-06-26 21.53.50

    Then came 2010. We watched Germany play in the dffb cinema. Everyone was cheering for the Germans as they obliterated Australia (and later, Argentina) with crazy numbers and cliched efficiency. Every one of my fellow students knew the players’ names by heart, and I was sitting there awe-struck at one simple realization: For 90 brief minutes, everyone was pulling in the same direction. They all wanted Germany to win.

    To me, this feeling was completely new. How could people with an actual education and aspiring a degree in the arts watch this shit? And: Why was I enjoying this so much? What was suddenly so awesome about seeing the German flag in places besides creepy NPD-ridden rightwing Datschas?

    2014-06-26 21.22.57

    I happened to be in Belgium last week as the Devils were playing South Korea. Everywhere I looked: Belgian flags. An entirely different experience: A year prior, the Belgian flag was a things hung by Belgicists in Brussels, people who wanted the politically troubled country to stay together against all odds. Unlike Germans, the Belgian flag-wavers were rarely right-wing. Same same, but different.

    2014-06-26 21.53.38

    Listen – I’m not fooling myself. I know how this stuff works. I know the German flag will be back to its nutjob self by the end of next week. And hence, the Belgian flags will be gone by the time we properly lose the Argentina this Saturday (Yes! I said it!).

    And we’ll go back to being cynics.

    We’ll all be (rightfully) pointing fingers at FIFA for their decadence and their Saturday morning cartoon evilness. Being proud of your country – “Nationalism” – will go back to the extreme one-liners from before: A gateway to Nazism in Germany, financial and cultural ruin in Belgium. It will not be a term to describe rooting for a silly team in a meaningless sport – or, in other words: “Having fun”.

    But like every World Cup, I have a the tiniest bit of hope that a little bit of that excitement, of that thrill of togetherness, will remain. It usually doesn’t. But I know that come 2018, everyone will dig their fancy shirts out of their dressers and go: “Oh, I remember that. That was fun. Let’s do that again. Let’s go to a bar, get pissed and chant Origi, Origi, Origi!”

    Looking forward to that already.

    2014-06-26 21.38.47

  • Wagah

    Time for another movie, he said, and then started typing, so here’s “Wagah”, an endearing short by director Supriyo Sen about three kids and a fascinating ritual at the border between Pakistan and India.

    Click!

     

  • The Hero Movie

    The internet is filled with movies. Thought I’d make watching them a bit easier by selecting the good ones. That way you can safely enjoy seventeen hundred three-second films of guys who get hit in the nuts without having to worry about accidently clicking on one about guy who gets hit in the butt.

    Anyway, without further ado, have every superhero movie ever: