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Chris Petit
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Chris Petit wrote a piece on Kraftwerk before Computerworld came out. “Am Diskö with Kraftwerk.” His interview with Robert Mitchum was a total failure until the moment he asked Mitchum about the hardest drink he’d ever had. The response filled five pages in Time Out. During the outbreak of the volcano Eyjafjallajökul Chris came to Zurich to visit Georg and me, from Buenos Aires––where he showed a retrospective of his work–– which took him more then two days. Most of the flights were cancelled because of the ashes. Chris just said, “The big lesson learned was never queue, because the person everyone is waiting to see doesn’t know anything either. So it became like an initiative test.” We both like slow motion. His friend and collaborator Iain Sinclair called him “J.G. Ballard on foot”. In January three years ago we went to Auschwitz. We didn’t know that January 27, the day we arrived from Berlin by car, was the anniversary of the liberation by Soviet troops in 1945. And we didn’t find the SS resort Solahütte on the Sola river, where Josef Mengele, Rudolf Höß, and Josef Kramer spent their weekends. We asked around in the area but everybody sent us somewhere else. The only thing we found was a pub called HATE. Chris Petit came to Johannesburg and we walked to Miniland. His latest ideas are the Museum of Loneliness and GooglemeGod. His first film was Radio On, his bestseller The Psalm Killer. His film Chinese Boxes from the mid-80s with Will Patton foresaw the fall of the Berlin wall. First the criminals reunite. I’m not sure but I think Chris does a lot of daytime TV: “I am always surprised at how sophisticated a lot of popular television is, not in terms of content, which no longer exists, but how much thought has gone into the format.”

People
Chris Petit