polar flare: examining every map projection and how it distorts our world view at once—see previously
simon says: a vast archives of electronic handheld and table-top games and consoles from decades past—via Swiss Miss
fabian society: capitalism coexists with constructivism in Czech city of Zlรญn
hello world: the newest Martian probe beams back its first images
Declaring that geometry preceded the origin of things and “was coeternal with the divine mind” and supplying God with the patterns for creation, our old friend Johannes Kepler was eager to insert and integration harmony and mathematics into the accepted world view and contrived a model that the famed astronomer believed would fully describe the Universe through a set of perfectly aligned shapes within one another.
Born this day in 1699, Johann Zach (†1773, also called by the Czech equivalent Jan) was a versatile Bohemian composer, violinist and organist who helped bridge musical traditions from the old Baroque style to the emerging Classical one, punctuated with counterpoint (the clavier vs the orchestra) and the so called style galant, and importantly incorporated Italian influences with folk music from his native land—though his eccentricities and difficult personality made it hard for him to secure employment or keep a positon for long. Despite this reputation and temperament, Zach did hold the office of Kapellmeister for the court of the Prince-Elector and Archbishop of Mainz for over a decade which were among his most productive years, including the performance below of his Stabat mater (a hymn to Mary, setting to music the first line—the incipit—from the Council of Trent’s liturgical sequence, Stabat mater dolorรณsa—the sorrowful mother was standing).
letterpress: an appreciation for Peter Pauper publishing
no retiring wall flower: a fascinating look at the hydraulics of star fish
truly toastmasters: learn effective communication techniques from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology lecture honed over four decades
jindลich halabala: rediscovering the classic furniture and signature style of a Czechoslovakia designer
via di propaganda: the history of the street in Rome speaks to design and dogma
hot off the presses: Distributed Proofreaders celebrates the uploading of its forty-thousandth volume
Debuting in theatres on this day in 1970, the cinematic adaptation by director Jaromil Jireลก of the eponymous 1935 novel Valerie a tรฝden divลฏ from Czechoslovakian surrealist writer Vรญtฤzslav Nezval, the disorientating horror film is considered a pioneering part of the scene’s New Wave movement (see also). This exploration sexual awakenings through a vampiric lens blends in elements of classic folklore structure, including a talisman in the form of heirloom earrings, stolen, bartered-over and ultimately swallowed for protection. Below is the movie in its entirety dubbed into Italian and with English subtitles.
mega project: unrealised plans from the 1930s to divert the Thames and reclaim land in central London—via Things Magazine
crying wolf: a misinformation training exercise (see also) in Nova Scotia goes awry—via Super Punch
sea of seven colours: a tour of a pristine island reserve off the coast of Colombia
minuet: ะะพัะพะฑะตะนะฝะธะบะธ was not Tetris’ only theme tune
karlลฏv most: deconstructing and rebuilding a fourteenth century bridge in Prague to span the Vltava
Visiting a small harvest festival nearby held on Germany Unity Day, H and I looked for some autumn accents for the house and found several stalls selling traditional onion braids (Zwiebelzรถpfe).
Sometimes also incorporating garlic bulbs, the braids adorned craftily with dried wild flowers were not customarily only for decorative and storage, preservative purposes but moreover for the notion that the power of the talisman would stave off illness and harm from hearth and home. Right now we can all use all the help we can muster. Singly, onions were worn as amulets in medieval times to ward off the plague, and a New Year’s Eve custom (divination from onions is called cromniomancy—see also) in various regions, especially in the Erzgebirge, called for the dicing of an onion into twelve sections and sprinkling each bowl with salt to forecast the precipitation for each month of the year to come as the moisture drawn out of each section by the next morning would predict that month’s rainfall.
Via Plain Magazine, we are alerted to conclusion and showcase of superlative snapshots from dotArt Urban 2020 photo awards and exhibition in partnership with Trieste Photo Days.
Shifting through over ten thousand submissions split among different categories—street, people, etc.—the jury has selected a number of finalists to contend for the top prize to be announced in October which will meanwhile be available to peruse on the contest’s online gallery. We especially liked this black-and-white picture of a scene in Prague from the perspective of a bicycle rack from Gabriele Altin, which really evokes the art in the sense of extending flรขnerie. Champion your favourites and find much more to explore at the links above.
nestbox: Czech firm designs a modular trunk extension to turn any car into a camper
kintsugi court: a rundown basketball blacktop restored with the ancient Japanese art that cherishes the cracked
your 2020 bingo card: researchers discover a population of sharks thriving in an undersea volcano
earth science: a treasury of minerals mapped out—via Maps Mania
green tea ice cream: Linda Diaz’ soulful rendition wins the NPR Tiny Desk competition
cosmic architechtonics: multipart exploration of Eastern Bloc monolithic housing estates
Courtesy of Weird Universe, we are introduced to the portfolio of retired Czech filmmaker Jan ล vankmajer through his surreal 1982 stop-motion Dimensions of Dialogue.
Lauded by those who claim ล vankmajer as their influence and inspiration including Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam, the award-winning short features first ornately articulated Arcimboldo-like visages that engage in eternal conversation, hybridising and then wearing down the ornamentation and reducing one another to constituencies of efficiency and economy. The second and final segments explore other avenues of interlocution and have equally consumptive, bluntingly transformative outcomes. Other works include re-animating lost and everyday objects to tell stories from Edgar Allen Poe, Lewis Carroll and others.
The second day of Bright Week—the Octave of Easter, is a public holiday in Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia as an extension of Eastertide and events sometimes traditionally include egg races and other activities to use up, put away the festoonery—a pretty practical idea, which in parts of central Europe, including parts of Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary and Ukraine they had down to a science, once at least though the practise seems to be less and less common.
Called in Polish above and Oblรฉvaฤka in Czech, “Wet Monday” (or simply Dyngus Day by diaspora) was chance for adolescents to throw water on each other and flirtatiously beat each other with willow branches that made up traditional egg trees and decorative boughs. With suspected roots in pagan fertility ceremonies and the welcoming of spring countered by Christian missionaries trying impose their religion on the natives, linguists conjecture that ลmigus refers to baptism—an involuntary or unwanted one at that, going all the way back to the conversion of Mieszko I, the Duke of the Poles in 966 (coincidentally also on this day)—and Dingnis—from the old German for ransom—refers to the tribute that one can pay in leftover eggs to avoid getting doused or whipped.
Though never a serious contended to replace the Cyrillic variant of the Ukrainian alphabet, several times throughout history Latin scripts have enjoyed compelling fashionability and, always politically fraught, prompting studies into ornithological reform (see also) and sometimes the outright Romanization of the language.
A generalized Latin script called ลatynka was proposed and precipitated an intense public debate, the War of the Alphabets, especially along the country’s western frontier regions where there was an abrupt divide between writing traditions in the mid-nineteenth century and again became en vogue during the early years of the Soviet era—at one point some seventy new scripts were adapted for the Uralic, Iranian, Slavonic, Mongolian, Korean and Chinese written languages of the USSR, following the lead of Turkey. Publications, mainly for the benefit of border communities, during that phase—until development was halted and reversed by Joseph Stalin—incorporated letters from Czech and Polish alphabets and was called Abecadลo.
With illustrious alumni including H, Angela Merkel, Robert Schumann, Friedrich Nietzsche, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Tycho Brahe, the University of Leipzig is one of the world’s most storied and preeminent institutions of higher learning and second longest in existence only to that of Heidelberg (1386) in Germany and was officially founded on this day in 1409 to provide a new alma mater to German-speaking academics that had fled the reformation movement agitated by Jan Hus in Prague with the endorsement of the papacy.
To ensure the university’s independence and scholastic freedom from state influence, the founders gifted the institution first three then a total of eight nearby villages as sources of revenue, an arrangement that continued through the nineteenth century. Pictured here is the Paulinerkirche, which served as the university’s anchor since the beginning, until its demolition by the government of East Germany in 1968 but rebuild in modernist style in 2012 as the Paulinum (das Aula und Universitรคtskirche Sankt Pauli) with the former dormitory high rise—meant to suggest an open book, now City-Hochhaus beside. The above motto translates, (from) a tradition of crossing borders and was one of the first institutions to allow female guests to audit classes, eventually awarding its first doctor of jurisprudence degree to a Russian graduate student called Anna Yevreinova in 1873 and during the transition period of the decline and eventual dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, many from the newly independent republics turned to Leipzig as an administrative and educational model.
We’re getting ready to hang up our Moravian stars as the first festoonery of the season and the process of constructing the lantern and piecing together the paper cones is always an engaging ritual.
The decoration and design originated in the 1830s in a Moravian church (see also) boarding school for boys near the town of Gรถrlitz to impart students with a lesson in geometry—the twenty-six-sided star being called a rhombicuboctahedron. Around 1880, an alumnus of the Pรฆdagogium made the stars and their instruction manuals for sale in his bookstore and his son went on to open a factory in 1897 in the village of Herrnhut under the auspices of the church that makes and distributes the stars to this day.
Commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of what had been inscribed on calendars across the globe as International Students’ Day, when in 1939 Nazi forces stormed the University of Prague and arrested over twelve hundred pupils and professors, the series of demonstrations that precipitated from this gathering, massing to a half a million people, turned against the Communist ruling party of Czechoslovakia.
The first large-scale and enduring rally since the Prague Spring, the peaceful Velvet Revolution, riot police often rebuffed with flowers and the spirit of change being something quite infectious and not limited to the metropolitan areas, the name for the movement being selected by the dissident students’ translator Rita Klรญmovรก (*1931 – †1993) and later the country’s last ambassador to the US before splitting into its constituent republics, and continued through the of the year, unseated the ruling Old Guard, opened the borders and brought about the first democratic elections held in the country since 1946 with rebel poet and human rights activist Vรกclav Havel (*1936 – †2011) voted into the office of president on 29 December.
Via Weird Universe we are introduced to this rather intriguing and ingenuous business architectural feature in the June 1948 issue of Popular Science and left wanting to know more. Only a few column inches are dedicated to this structure with a corner office that moves up and down the building’s fourteen storeys (the rest of the staff used paternosters) located in Zlรญn but we were able to find out a bit more.
The town itself urban utopia (see also) and a manufacturing anchor of the Moravian region in large part due to the shoemaking factory founded by siblings Tomรกลก, Anna and Antonรญn Baลฅa in 1894, the skyscraper was build as the administrative headquarters for their successful footwear brand. The third tallest pre-war building in Europe executed in Constructivist style, it is now known as Building № 21 (ฤรญslo 21) and cherished as a cultural monument, houses offices of the regional government. Going abroad during the World War II, the boss never had a chance to use his mobile office and there’s unconscionably no indication whether this seeming unique idea was ever tried anywhere else or why such an idea was abandoned.
Founded on this day in 1969 in a lodge on a popular hiking trail through the Swabian Jura (Schwรคbische Alb), the Europรคishce Wandervereinigung, the European Ramblers’ Association, la Fรฉdรฉration europรฉenne de la randonnรฉe pรฉdestre was formed by founding members representing walkers’ clubs from West Germany, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg and Belgian. Now headquartered in Kassel and with offices in Prague, more than fifty-eight area- and regional-organisations from thirty European states sponsor regular outings and maintain, marking and signposting a vast network of long distance hiking trails (some seventy thousand kilometres worth across an active membership of some three million individuals, see previously). The so called E-Paths are not for virtual exploration, but rather are trails that cross a minimum of three countries.
To prevent further exodus to the West Germany via Prague, the government of East Germany closed its border with Czechoslovakia on this day in 1989 after some seven-thousand political refugees had camped out on the grounds of the West German Embassy and were granted safe passage on special trains bound for the BDR. The Velvet Revolution is fomenting at the same time as unrest in Berlin, Leipzig and elsewhere ensues and once the border is reopened a month later, another group of East German asylum-seekers cross into Hof, a West German frontier town.
On this day in 1969, to commemorate the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the founding of the DDR, the iconic structure also known as the Urania World Clock (for the Uraniasรคule that was destroyed in the war which it replaced as a public timepiece) was unveiled to the public in East Berlin’s Alexanderplatz as part of a plan to modernise the square and make it a showcase for the world. Envisioned by Czechoslovakian designer Erich John, the metal rotunda supported by a twenty-four-sided column representing the main time zones of the Earth displays the current time for one hundred forty eight cities, periodically updated to reflect contemporary geopolitics. The turret mechanism is in constant motion but it is imperceptible except in time-lapse.
After the storming of the Legislative Council building on the 1 July anniversary of the 1997 return of the former UK crown colony of Hong Kong to China, protesters have embraced non-violent ways of continuing to express their displeasure and fear that the residents of territory will see liberties erode further.
Taking a cue from the Lennon Wall in Prague, activists have canvased any available space with colourful self-adhering notices, an outlet that’s passive and anonymous enough to keep most individuals out of danger but still one that the authorities cannot easily ignore and now the symbols themselves incite rallies around pro- and anti-government camps. The title refers to the spontaneity of the walls as “blossoming everywhere.” These mosaics, with tens of thousands of missives advocating for freedom and democracy, originate from a central display in Hong Kong five years earlier, erected during the Umbrella Movement, a seventy-nine day occupation of the city to demand transparency in municipal elections—which were perceived to be controlled by Beijing. Protesters carried umbrellas to shield themselves from tear gas that the police lobbed at them to break up the crowds.
