Sunday 14 June 2015

presumptions or tabloid press

Explorer, missionary (of dubious efficacy since he achieved not a single lasting conversion) and abolitionist (also dubious as the slave-trade continued and arguably his heroic exploits inspired European colonialism and the scramble for Africa) Doctor David Livingstone was elevated to his mythic and sometimes saintly status by an American newspaper conglomerate, who harboured fiercely anti-British and anti-European sentiments (shared by much of the US public and manipulated readership at the time in the aftermath of their civil war, which portrayed Europe as either meddling or coldly indifferent), wanting to create the human-interest story, a departure from the hard-reporting and muckraking that was the daily digest. When the eminent adventurer had gone “missing” and was feared dead, the newspaper’s editorial board elected to bank-roll an expedition across the dark heart of Africa to find and rescue Livingstone, whether he wanted it or not, since the British government was doing little in the meantime to save their own national treasure.
Wagering that copy sold to follow such a harrowing mission would far outstrip any costs incurred with funding the venture—whether the search-party ever discovered Livingstone or not, the editors approached a Welsh immigrant, free-lancer and perhaps soldier-of-fortune, first fighting for an Arkansan regiment of the Confederate Army (ironically whose stance on manumission and the ethics of exploitation fueled the business of slavers in Africa and was the chief motivation for Livingstone to go there in the first place) and then for the Union after his capture, called Henry Morton Stanley. Stanley was untested when it came to safari but that didn’t seem to matter much—and given an unlimited budget, and as to how the expedition was to draw on these funds also did not seem to matter much to the newspaper, they embarked in 1871 on a journey of over a thousand kilometers through central Africa from Zanzibar to a village on the shores of Lake Tanganyika (soon to become German East Africa and today Tanzania) where some old white man was rumoured to be. Not much was heard from the correspondent during the actual trek that lasted over a year, which elicited some ire from the investors, and probably caused a lot of embellishments to be added to the later account, but it was brutal, punishing and nearly fatal to all involved. Contemporaries attest that Stanley was very callous to the slaves that were employed as porters, some two hundred souls initially, to execute his mission, shooting some deserters who left when matters got very desperate and Stanley himself suffered many bouts of malaria, which made his leadership questionable. Finally the expedition arrived with much fanfare and a bearer marching ahead with an American flag at the village where they hoped to find the object of their quest, and reportedly summoning up all his native British reserve and protocol for such occasions, asked of a wizened and baffled (what was all the fuss about?) old white man, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Through thrust back into the lime-light, Livingstone declined to be rescued and brought back to civilisation until his work was complete and continued to search for the source of the Nile. Circulation exploded for the newspaper that sponsored this journey and Stanley went on to work with European powers to establish colonial outposts in savage wilds.

shelter-in-place oder white-flight

While captialising on the fears of rich, white people is a legitimate business model and a fool and his money are soon—nay eventually, since there’s so much of it, the reports that luxurious doomsday bunkers are being outfitted somewhere in the hinterland of Germany for a select number of high-paying clients to ride out a nuclear holocaust seems a bit over the top. Fortunately, we have not had the occasion to test the effectiveness and security of such entombment under realistic conditions, but it seems no matter the material wealth at one’s command, surviving an event that brings the rest of the world to rack and ruin bivouacked with those who tipped off the downfall in the first place (and are now the self-appointed rebuilders of civilisation) is a very appealing notion. Such money is better spent on an ark in space before we get to the point of burying our heads in the sand.
The articles never say where this secret compound, built in the corridors already hollowed out by the state apparatus of the East German government at the height of the Cold War (which surely has keys to the rear-entrance) and I suppose that location cannot be maintained undisclosed, especially when the Apocalypse is nigh and the peasants come clawing at the door with the torches and pitchforks that ought have appeared much earlier, and while there are several candidate sites, my money’s on a place called Prenden (a part of the community of Wandlitz in the state of Brandenburg—the cavernous bunker here being sufficiently unassuming and isolated, expect that it’s conveniently close to the construction site of the much delayed Berlin-Brandenburg international airport (BBF).

Saturday 13 June 2015

es war einmal oder forms of transmission

H and I decided to revisit the town of Lohr am Main to take a moment to properly appreciate the castle’s denizens’ role for inspiring a fairy tale, which rather uniquely as far as we know stands out among the folk-stories collected and studied by the Brothers Grimm as some thing based in fact—that is, as far as we know. Before visiting what is known as das Schneewittchen SchloรŸ (Snow White’s Castle), however, and wondering how the oral-tradition of story-telling from generation to generation embellished historical happenings, we first crossed a field that dealt with communication in a thoroughly modern fashion.
Along the way, just outside of the town of Hammelburg by a German army installation was a giant array of satellite dishes. This ground station (Erdfunkstelle) beams data and other telemetry to the constellation of orbiting satellites, space probes and the International Space Station, plus probably for other applications besides civilian. It is quite an impressive and unexpected site in rural Frankonia. Next, we strolled through the storybook cobble-stone streets of the old part of Lohr and made our Snow White’s Castle—the tale being loosely based on an actual personage and event (though license was given and taken) in this town once known for its manufacture of mirrors.
At the neck ditch (Halsgraben, a dry moat that does not go all the way around) of the castle, there was another surprise of contemporary grammar, which often becomes inseparable from one’s locus and trajectory, a geo-data reference point, fixed coordinates employed to calibrate positioning systems and correct for drift. The juxtaposition was pretty thought-provoking and we were given to wonder how course-correction and detours into the fairy tale archetypes are both guiding factors.

5x5

viewer-discretion advised: graphic and unsettling no-nukes animation from 1956

how can you have your pudding if you don’t eat your meat: 90% of food-crops in the USA are genetically modified

this just in: how the hammering in of the Golden Spike for America’s transcontinental railroad marked the beginning of breaking news

purl 2.0: artist incorporates chunky stitches for maximum comfort

figleaf: the cyber attack on US government workers is bigger than anyone is letting on, having targeted security clearance questionnaires

Friday 12 June 2015

instinct and individuation

It could be said that pioneering Swiss psychotherapist and collaborator of Sigmund Freud, Karl Gustav Jung, was patently his own first patient—but that can be said of most professions. Freud and Jung had an intense and productive relationship but differences in interpretation and emphasis became magnified and this strife over the nature of the psyche and best bedside-manner grew to an irreconcilable rift over a lecture tour that Jung undertook in the United States on behalf of their shared ideas.
Though Jung had his own divergent ideas about what was formative for the character and personality (de-emphasizing the role of libido and repression, Jung thought that one’s private being was a shared and public one with the collective-unconsciousness and spirituality was important component as well) he was accused of misrepresenting Freud’s theories while speaking at Fordham University (auf Deutsch to boot) but may have chosen to censor-out the sexiest bits, considering his possibly prudish audience. After the schism that formed separate schools of thought, Jung distanced himself from Freud’s thinking and shamefully denounced that favour of psychoanalysis as the Jewish science—ironically, Freud had found a great spokesman and advocate in the younger Jung initially because he came from outside that circle in Vienna and lent that the practise not be stereotyped as such: Nazism, beyond persecution, baptised many causes and individuals as undesirable even when the affiliation was in name only. Following this judgment, which understandably cast a pall over his body of work, Jung turned towards inter-disciplinary studies, in sociology, alchemy and astronomy, and embarked for years of extensive travel—trying ostensibly to get a better grasp of those shared archetypes and common-fates in mythology and creation accounts that he posited from different perspectives (modern practitioners re-branded them as the objective psyche), but to Jung’s credit, his sojourn had more humane motives, I believe, and set out to prove what was wrong with the familiar and secure Western world during the decades of the 1920’s and 30’s.