Sunday 5 May 2013

apfelsinn or yes, we have no bananas

Several weeks ago, the excellent retro-repository and all-around Wunderkammer, Collectors’ Weekly featured an engrossing article on the seemingly accidentally romancing of the mango, elevating the exotic fruit for the people of 1968 China to a cult-like reverence.

The craze, propelled wildly by troupes of true-believers, was borne of a simple gesture (re-gifting really) when the Chairman distributed a case of fruit among the Republic’s factors, a present from a visiting dignitary and displaced the traditional Chinese fruity symbol of the peach for wealthy and prosperity.
The rather bizarre adoration of a piece of fruit reminded me of the relation, sometimes contrived and sometimes meant in a derogatory way, of the banana and East Germany.
The symbolism is not parallel but the banana was likewise an ideological hot-potato, representing by turns the excess of the West, the closed markets of the East and the ungood of such aspirations and appetites.
I did not experience all the subtleties of the days of scarcity and plenty myself and don’t know what politics and shrewd trades were going on behind the scenes of real and stereotypical jonesing for not fresh-produce, but rather bananas in particular (going on for decades, untold, though starting around the same time, and not just a passing fad), creators black-markets, et also by party elite and an enduring symbol of divides still being bridged.

Thursday 2 May 2013

hamster dance

On the last day of April twenty years ago, computer scientist in residence at the laboratories of CERN, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, gifted the world with the platform and language to host the internet—or rather the W3 as the world-wide-web was then known as. The original web page propagated to the public on that day has lapsed out of existence, but CERN has faithfully reproduced this exponential catalyst—really a patchwork of intranets and other projects released to the public, as an important look back at the sophisticated and hopeful origins of revolution.
Maybe this curation, including the earliest software and hardware and a retrospective study on the nature of legacy itself, will help the intent, of open dialogue and no claims of ownership on the medium (not something jealously guarded by an antiquated studio system and stubborn mandates) and aspirations to change society in positive ways not yet realised but maybe already anticipated, also to avoid lapsing and being taken for granted.


Wednesday 1 May 2013

paperback writer or a book by its cover

I’ve seen a lot of cool vintage exemplars of illustrated book covers in English-languages editions, but German publishers were and are just as adept. It’s an unusual repre- sentational-rate to try to capture the expected thousand words with some abstract art and always results in this strange of sort brutal and non-glossy look. I wonder if a certain publishing house was responsible for this movement or if it was a certain and deliberate reflection of the reigning style of the day.

axis mundi or you got to pick up every stitch

I won’t say that May Day (der Tag der Arbeit) is a subdued affair beyond the land of the Franks by any means (there are quite a lot of protest rallies and demonstrations happening—which I was curious to see but I don’t think I should go looking for trouble today), but I did not appreciate the clear demarcations of customs and traditions and the holiday rather snuck up on me, without the Maypoles (Maibรคume) being set up.
It makes some sense, however, jenseits (this side) of the Limes—the limits of the Roman Empire and thus the civilised world, that conquests would have tamped out some heathen celebrations. The follow-on missions of Christianity did not attempt to totally quash but rather integrate and co-opt such behaviour. No one really knows the origin of the beams, temporary totem-poles, regaled and danced around, but some theorise that the tree represents the axis on which the world turns or the cosmological Yggdrasil that connects the nine worlds of Norse mythology. The bit about the ruckus of the night before, Walpurgis, might be a religious conceit, saying that witches gather to dance with their gods or commune with the devil—although it must have always been observed in some manner and with meaning (though now lost) as a cross-quarter day, exactly half a year on towards the harvest festival of Samhain (Halloween). Superstition holds that one will meet a witch on May Day, which old witch and probably why it is a good idea not to go looking for trouble since it knows where to find you.