Saturday 3 October 2015

badenov, godunov

Though for some the names Mel Blanc and Tex Avery are more instantly recognisible among the luminaries of animation, there was another Man of a Thousand Voices that gave life to as many memorable characters during his long and varied free-lance career.

The name Paul Frees with mention of his collaborator Natasha Fatale and their mission to capture moose and squirrel for Fearless Leader probable starts to materialise right away, but there is an endless succession of equally jarring, cameo performances: Frees was also voiced Morocco Mole in Secret Squirrel (never realising those two phrases were associated with same actor), the Pillsbury Dough-boy, the Ghost Host of Disney’s Haunted Mansion, Toucan Sam, Burgermeister Meisterburger, the Tree, Rook and the Cat of The Last Unicorn, styled John Lennon and George Harrison in the Beatles cartoon series, various villains for the Superman, Aquaman, Banana Splits Adventure Hours, the Knight Rider’s nemesis K.A.R.R, plus countless other narrations and re-dubbing to clean up the garbled lines of other actors.

half a league, half a league, half a league onward

Though there are of course many historical pitched-battles and sieges that are received through careful scholarship that dissect the propaganda of the victors and the element of psychological warfare that’s always been upheld on the home-front, the first truly modern war in the way that we think of it, with embedded correspondence and mediated public sentiment was the international quagmire—from which we’ve never managed to extricate ourselves—that spanned from 1853 to 1856 called the Crimean War. For a war with so many modern elements, including explosives, rail-transportation and the concepts of triage and sanitation through hospital adminstratrix Florence Nightingale, it was very much rooted in religious contentions with the Russian Empire’s desire for crusade and recapturing the Holy Land from the Ottomans. Previous conflict, with collaboration among later belligerents, had established British protectorates for Christian enclaves, with the collateral control of the Suez shipping-lanes also under British mandate. Banking on continued support from the French and British (who had previously allied with them against French hegemony during the height of the Napoleonic Wars), Russia moved to attack the Ottoman territories and claim the Holy Land for the Orthodox Church, enraging Napoleon III, who felt he owed his legitimacy to papal allegiance—but the various controlling churches were pretty much pleased with the arrangements as they stood and had expressed no ambition to be liberated.
Despite confessional differences, France sided with Britain and the Ottoman Empire to rebuff the Russian advance. It strikes me as strange quirk of the march of history that Fredric Auguste Bartholdi’s work that would eventually become known as the Statue of Liberty was originally conceived to commemorate the to be dynamited Suez Canal, but due to the conflict she was sent to America instead. I wonder how that conversation went. As much as religious intrigues were brought down onto the mundane level and invoked as a casus belli and the home-front exposed to developments in real-time—something that the rear-detachment in England could really rally around, far greater than unmaterialised consequences and grand engineering projects. The immortal prosody by Lord Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” was interned in the public imagination nearly as quickly as the latest news dispatches and was an invocation, “Like Remember the Alamo,” that victory might be snatched from the hands of defeat—though the Franco-British powers had the upper-hand and were just ensuring that this advantage be retained. It is dangerous to second-guess the purity of one’s intent, but Russia—with access blocked to the Black Sea because of Ottoman control, had historically lacked routes for trade until the foundation of Saint Petersburg on the navigable Volga some one hundred and fifty years prior, the port built to better supply the British with raw materials, lumber, to build up their naval prowess. Having their export limited to this one centre of exchange, Imperial Russia embarked on a series of desperate but dogged overtures for the taking and keeping of the strategic stronghold of Sevastopol and thus access to the sea. The terms of surrender were rather humiliating for Russia in the end with all gains capitulated and Russia cut-off from international markets—at least to a large extent as only the inland routes of Saint Petersburg and the northern Baltic outpost of Archangelsk in the White Sea was not reachable in the Winter months and had been somewhat decomissioned in favour of promoting the city of spires and masts on the Volga—created to counter-balance the mercantile impositions. The Russian Empire was not allowed to keep a fleet in the Black Sea until the defeat of the Ottomans in War World I and the subsequent Bolshevik revolution that saw that Imperium reconstituted under new auspices. The immediate effects of this crushing commercial defeat further brokered the sale of Alaskan territory to the US—fearing that the lands would just be taken away as retribution by British-Canada, but if they sold, however unwillingly, at least Russia would get something out of the transaction.

Thursday 1 October 2015

hive-mind, motorcade

Hearing reports of the big trends at the Frankfurt International motor show (the IAA, die Internationale Automobil-Ausstellung) were finally broaching the potential of driverless-carriages and that markets may be losing interest in gilding lilies (though coverage was somewhat tarnished by other events in the industry).

Thinking along similar lines as this interesting analysis and projection from Vox magazine, while I would not necessarily embrace having the one remaining risky and frenetic activity that’s allowed to us anymore despite the potentially deadly consequences of letting a human pilot a massively over-engineered craft taken away from us—shedding yet another experience for something overly-safe and sanitised, I would nonetheless being treated to a special valet service, where I did to fret about my particular parking handicap and be dropped off curb-side and trust that my vehicle will find itself an orderly place to keep itself until summoned. Transporters could negotiate among themselves the logistics of double- and triple-parking. Civil engineering would need to reserve far less space for idle vehicles. There are always trade-offs, I suppose, and it does seem particularly worrying for teamsters, lorry-drivers, whose role in supply and shipping would be as quickly made redundant and the demographic shift for the labour market would be as monumental as change that results any more intelligent (but not reduced, I think, but rather the opposite) traffic. What do you think? Is it time to take off the training-wheels?

5x5

undersea kingdom: discovering a little known, imaginative Disney theme park in Tokyo

gazetteer: beautifully crafted maps for abstractions

the peasant-look: ethnography of Ellis Island immigration told through striking portraiture

votive-offering: celebrity prayer-candles

hen house: deluxe daycare facilities for pampered pet chickens

the devil and the deep blue sea

If you have not yet treated yourself to the absolutely edifying oblectation of Futility Closet series of podcasts, I strongly recommend you began with their latest instalment on the forgotten story of gentleman merchant raider of World War I, Felix Graf von Luckner. This swash-buckling villain has been overshadowed by other semi-legendary figures of the time—like the Red Baron, but was turned hero for his humanity and persecuting war without causalities. Posing as a Norwegian logging vessel, Luckner’s captained his crew of privateers in a somewhat anchronistic sailing ship called the Seeadler through the supply lines of the Atlantic, confounding materiel delivery and treating his hostages as friends—a sentiment that was reciprocated, but that’s only the barest outline of the tale. It’s definitely worth working backwards as well to catch up on all the engrossing episodes.