basti fantasti

Whilst arguably at least a nominal improvement over a regime that seeks to denigrate and defund those institutions that promote the arts and humanities, Vienna’s museum board is nonetheless within their rights to protest the misappropriation of the motto of the Secessionist Movement—co-founded by in 1897 by symbolist painter Gustav Klimt—by Austria’s ascendant right-wing government, under the leadership of Sebastian Kurz.
Der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Freiheit (as seen on the Secession Hall, which houses some of Klimt’s iconic works) means “to every age its art and to each art its freedom” which the cultural wing of the ironically named Freedom Party and ruling coalition (under the People’s Party) has co-opted, which in this other context sounds rather sinister like another pithy German saying that’s not said any longer, Jedem das Seine, to each his own.

österreich entscheidet

Polls close in Austria mid-afternoon local time today and the some six million eligible voters in a country of nine million seem posed to elevate foreign minister and ÖVP (Österreichische Volkspartei, the Austrian People’s Party) chair Kylo Ren Sebastian Kurz to chancellor and head the coalition of conservative, anti-immigration and anti-EU factions to form a government, dispensing with the need for seeking cooperation and compromise with minority liberal voices in the Bundesversammlung. This snap-election is the conclusion of a series of inconclusive votes that occurred last year and were revisited over the summer but failed to break a statuary threshold needed to validate the outcome. The thirty-one year old Kurz has pledged that his party’s platform reflect his personal crusade and frightening coincides with Vienna taking the helm of the rotating European Union presidency—and just as Brexit arrangement are finalised, associates of a single opinion that Brussels meddles far too much in national affairs and that the UK is better off outside of the customs bloc.

toblerone

Amusing Planet educates us about an unusual geological formation that occurs in South Tyrol in the hinterlands of Bolzano, Rifiano and Merano called earth pyramids (piramidi di terra in Alto Adige, Südtiroler Erdpyramiden).
These tall pillars formed out of the moraine clay deposited by retreating glaciers during the last Ice Age and regularly alternating periods of drought and torrential rains that wash the soil away. The boulders atop these spindly, precarious-looking structures prevent the soil directly underneath from being eroded away, and especially in sheltered Puster (Pusteria) and Toblach (Dobbiaco) valleys where they are protected from the wind make some truly outstanding scenery. The spiky confection is a Swiss product and has a different inspiration—a portmanteau of the creator’s name (Theodore Tobler) and a type of Italian nougat whose shape is meant to recall the Matterhorn (Il Cervino). I think we will definitely need to make a special detour on our next trip south to marvel at these uniquely frozen landslides. 

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all the lonely people: the backstory of Eleanor Rigby and a chance to own a rather macabre piece of Beatles’ memorabilia, via Nag on the Lake

nuda veritas: the murals of Gustav Klimt re-enacted with live models, via the Everlasting Blört

poker face: lessons from a professional player that apply to life outside of the game

weblog: eulogising Jerry Pournelle, who was not only the first to write a book solely on a computer but also one of the pioneering bloggers

field guide: understanding the symbols of hate may prove empowering in shaping the trajectory of society for the better

enduring mystery: those claims of having deciphered the Voynich Manuscript were a mix of unprovable claims and already surmised details  

a more perfect union

From the conclusion of World War II through the Cold War era there were fears of occupied Germany—both divided and reunited—becoming too powerful and growing resurgent with its domineering tendencies and in part the European Union and its antecedents were created as a framework to contain Germany, but we had never come across this radical, radial proposal to politically unite central Europe by parsing it into twenty four cantons.
Each ray contained one major city each on the continent and emanated from a central capital, Vienna reflagged as Sankt Stephan after the city’s landmark cathedral, but no member was a nation state in the traditional since as the bands included parts of at least two countries and in most cases took in a broad spectrum of language, culture and heritage. The map and model government, which called on for a rotating presidency and shared administration of colonial lands, were proposed in 1920 as the world was still coming to terms with the horrors of World War I, with the authors confident that allowing boundaries to be drawn along ethnic lines (their Esperanto-speaking utopia broadly classified four constituent tribes of Europe: Teutons, Slavs, Magyars and Romans—and each canton was configured to mix the groups) was an obstacle to lasting peace.

miktion

An upcoming meeting of a Niederösterreicher Green Party (die Grünen) chapter will be teaching woman how to urinate whilst standing—a talent that’s taken for granted, until confronted with a lack of facilities or woefully unsanitary ones.
Far from a frivolous topic, hygiene is a huge issue in developing countries especially and directly impacts women’s health—with a toilet and adequate plumbing being part of the dowry and condition of pre-nuptial agreements even in places where females might not have had much of a say in such matters. One of the councillors organising this summit laments that they’ve always brought up important and controversial issues but haven’t garnered this much attention in the dozen years that they’ve been hosting these gatherings.

gischt

Designated as a Führerstadt along with Nürnberg, München, Hamburg and Berlin, the city of Linz had a formative connection to Adolf Hitler as his place of residence in his teen years and resolved to bestow the city with a gift in the form of a bronze by noted Nazi sculptor Wilhelm Wandschneider to adorn a rotunda in a park, pledging to make the city the cultural capital of the Reich.
Considering his patronage, most of Wandschneider’s works were melted down after the war—among the few exceptions being a 1913 commission for Saint Louis, Missouri called “The Naked Truth,” but this statue escaped that fate for sixty years until some art students realised the provenance and it was sequestered in a museum warehouse since 2008. Linz’ mayor has, not without controversy, decided to restore the bronze of Aphrodite (from the Greek word for sea foam, die Gischt)—with a detailed plaque explaining its history. What do you think? Especially against the backdrop of some places in America going in the opposite direction in taking down memorials to the confederate states, does this seem like historic sanitation or otherwise? The mayor defended her plan to put this uncomfortable heritage back on display to make an “active effort at remembrance.”

(s)alt çoğunluk

Whilst the sentiments of Turkish citizens voting abroad from embassies in Germany and Austria were solidly in favour of constitutional reforms that would give the country’s executive broader, consolidated powers more in line with those of the president of the United States, there was no clear majority among domestic polling stations.
Though the election commissioner is expected to release in ten days, the party of Erdoğan is already claiming victory with a bare fifty-one to forty-eight percent majority in the contested referendum. The opposition party is to launch an investigation over voting irregularities. With campaign pledges certain to derail any hope of Turkey’s pending membership in the European Union, it would seem that the expatriate community would not vote against their own self-interests but with relatives and in some cases whole families left back in Turkey, I suppose these voters are also among those that could be easily intimidated, just enough to nudge the outcome.

trial balloon, probefahrt

Although allowing a foreign government to play in Peoria to its diaspora (many of whom left their homeland for fear of political reprisal) would be without precedent, the refusal of Germany and Austria to permit the regime of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to campaign at venues in those respective countries with sizable Turkish populations has garnered much angry and caused further tensions between the outlier and EU member states.
In mid-April Turkey plans to hold a referendum not on EU membership but rather on changing the country’s constitution to invest the office of the president with greater executive powers, more akin to those of the president of France or the US rather than the largely ceremonial, soft-power that Erdoğan enjoys now. With rallies in Turkish communities, the administration is hoping to persuade (or perhaps intimidate) the expatriate population to vote to strengthen the presidency—while many outside Turkish jurisdiction probably harbour the exact opposite sentiments. While in Austria the denying of a platform is coming from the government directly, the federal government of Germany, who has seen continual strained relations for some time now, insists it’s played no part and local venues are wholly cancelling engagements at their own volition without the government’s influence. As stated, it would be highly irregular to allow a foreign politician a pulpit from which to bully exiles in a power-grab—Obama passing the mantle of leadership of the free world to Merkel is something quite different, though these are quite irregular times—but perhaps this refusal is a sign that other institutions will stand up to America’s Minitrue and Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda when he and his minions try to through European elections.

lösegeld

Guests and management of a luxury hotel and ski resort outside of the village of Turracherhöhe that bridges the states of Styria and Carinithia recovered from its latest in a spate of ransom-ware assaults by paying a moderate but not insignificant sum of bit coins.
This was the third and final incursion against the hotel’s cyber-infrastructure and management regretted giving into extortion since (as partners in the tourist industry have pointed out, though also plagued with the problem) it only encourages the crime—sort of like the Danegeld, the tribute that the English paid to the Vikings for not raiding their villages, but the last attack was rather more off-putting and potentially dangerous for wealthy guests—this storied establishment originally only hosteled lumberjacks: the electronic key-card system was hijacked where not only could no new key-cards be issued or programmed, guests could neither enter or leave their rooms. The bit coin ransom was paid and the hotel made itself impervious to further attacks but reinstalling good old locks and keys—and not of the skeuomorph kind whose dividends maybe running low.

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condominium: uninhabited islet switches sovereignty on a semi-annual basis

bright lights, big city: breath-taking nocturnal aerial photography from Vincent LaForet

bless this mess: encouraging, compassionate steps to take for better house-keeping

mid-west world: a small Iowa town is a draw for Chinese tourists wanting to experience the authentic American bread-basket, via the always brilliant Super Punch

cosmogram: an assortment of some of NASA’s best photographs of the past year, via the forever marvellous Nag on the Lake

brooding: long incubation periods may have contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs

bodensee: the international borders of Lake Constance mean different things to each nation that shares it

postfaktische o post-verità

Whether the European political status quo can weather the trends that first emerged with the Brexit with the encore number, dénouement of the Trump ascendancy will see its first stress test this weekend with the run-off election in Austria and a contested referendum in Italy that could spark a constitutional crisis equally if it passes or fails. Even if the concept of polling hadn’t lost all its credence, the outcomes of both votes are highly uncertain.
What sort of precedent has already been struck and what would this shift bode more broadly? If elected, the conservative candidate of the Freedom Party Norbert Hofer will hold a plebiscite on continued EU membership, touted as Öxit. This protracted drama was too close to call in April of this year and a second vote was called for October—but delayed until now due to an issue with the glue on ballots mailed out. Meanwhile in Rome, Matteo Renzi’s government is pledging to dissolve itself if a sweeping reform bill engineered to reduce the gridlock that’s inchoate in the Italian parliament by divesting one chamber of its veto power. Even though that does smack as pretty much antidisestablishmentarian, populist elements oppose the change and its failure (and the resignation of the incumbent) are seen as an opportunity for social and economic conservatives to gain control.

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art deco revival: Paris’ 1920s Hotel Bachaumont is reopening with all its former grandeur after four decades

sequoia: the puzzling phenomena of the albino redwoods provide a glimpse into how trees communicate and support one another 

travelling far to see the sky: Yoko Ono’s Sky TV installation in remote Japan, via the always discerning Nag on the Lake

suburbia: New York City is getting an underground park complete with Victory Gardens

transhuman: the first Cyborg Olympic Games are being held in Zürich

nightliner: with competition from discount flights and long-haul busses killing romance, Austrian railways are trying to save the sleeper berth

luminophore: self-charging, glow-in-the-dark bicycle and pedestrian paths in Poland 

vox humana

As Nag on the Lake informs, a team of researchers in Italy have reconstructed the voice-box, wind-pipe and vocal-cords of the frozen caveman Ötzi, discovered in the Italian-Austrian Alps a quarter of a century hence (this week in 1991 by a pair of German hikers) and subjected to a battery of probing and prodding over the years—and found that, unlike Neanderthals, who were determined by a similar imaging process to be possessed of rather silly falsetto voices, our Iceman had a gravelly, masculine way of speaking. The voce umana is a resonator on a pipe organ so called because of its resemblance to the human voice.

old dutch master

There is a curious museum in Vienna dedicated to counterfeit works of art right across the street from the very genuine Hundertwasser Haus, that I regret we missed, but will be sure to visit next time—if for nothing else by the even stranger case of one of the museum’s contributors, Dutch painter and forger Henricus Antonius van Meegeren. A skilled but perhaps uninspired painter in his own right, van Meegeren’s contemporaries dismissed his work as too derivative and unoriginal, and so the artist turned to making copies of masterpieces. While Europe was embroiled in World War II, the Nazi command was acquiring enormous amounts of treasure and art work from all over Europe, and reportedly there was somewhat of a rivalry between Hitler and Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring to amass the finest collection.
Göring was surely pleased as punch to have acquired a Vermeer from an art dealer in Amsterdam before his boss. After the war, this painting of Christ and the Adulteress was traced back to van Meegeren, who was summarily thrown into prison for collaboration and for selling a priceless piece of the Netherlands cultural heritage to the Nazis. This crime carried the death-sentence, but in his defense, van Meegeren proclaimed, “I didn’t sell that dirty Nazi a Vermeer, since I painted it myself.” The authorities were doubtful because art experts had vouched for the painting’s authenticity, but van Meegeren was allowed demonstrate his talents with an easel, canvas and palette brought to his jail cell. Experts reexamined more supposed Vermeers—including some hanging in the Rijksmuseum purchased dearly by the Dutch government to prevent them from falling into enemy hands—and found that van Meegeren had duped dozens of people out of millions of guilders. The charges for forgery and fraud didn’t carry as severe penalties and his sentence was commuted to a year in prison. Opinion polls conducted in 1947 after van Meegeren’s release placed him among the most popular war-time heroes of the Netherlands, one cunning enough to fool the entire art world establishment plus the commander of the Nazi armed forces, Göring—who on learning that he had bought a counterfeit acted as if he realised for the first time that there was evil and dishonesty in the world.

berchtesgadener land oder alpine redoubt

We learned that the name of the town Berchtesgaden means “hayloft-hayloft,” once in Latin and again in old German—the denizens having forgot what the original toponym meant, the settlement still known for the same feature and utility, and though that was an apt introduction for our weekend tour through the beautiful but haunted Alpine landscape on the Austrian border.
We encamped near the shores of the serene Königsee and once through the souvenir-stalls, enjoyed the amazing views of the towering mountains protecting this body of water—which awkwardly bore the redundant designation “Lake Königsee” for the tourists—not quite yet hoarding and given it was so vast, there was never a high density of holiday-goers. On the peak of the Kehlstein, visible from the lake and later, illuminated from the campsite—it was eerie to think about being looked down on even though Hitler visited the mountain-top retreat built on the occasion of the Fuhrer’s fiftieth birthday only a couple of times, stood the Kehlsteinhaus, known in most contexts as the “Eagle’s Nest” (conflated with the Adlerhorst near Bad Nauheim).
The structure has been given over to a charitable trust that runs a restaurant and not much mention is made about the place’s past in order that these places not be made pilgrimage destinations—an effort that does not seem quite so effective, given the throngs of visitors and the infrastructure in place to manage them all. Thanks to a rather ingenious bus pass whose network had a stop nearby, there was no need to decamp and find further parking and were chauffeured around quite at ease. A second bus took us more than a mile up the mountain on quite a harrowing journey, alighting before a long tunnel that led to a bronze elevator—the original, that hoisted us up the final hundred meters.
The views were breath-taking and we were treated to absolutely perfect weather. Descending below, we went to the Documentation Centre—a museum that is dedicated to the story of this area during the Third Reich, built on the razed ruins of the Obersalzburg half-way down the mountain side. This compound housed the elite of the Nazi party, and constructed over an ancient salt-mining operation, sits atop a system of cavernous bunkers, which had all the life-support and connectivity capacities to allow the regime to retreat underground—an Alpine Redoubt (Alpenfestung)—and continue persecuting the war.
Only a retaining wall of Hitler’s favoured residence, the Berghof, remains. It wasn’t that the outstanding beauty of this place was besmirched by its past but we did need something to cleanse the palette with so much to think about, and so went back to Königsee and took a little cruise down the lake.
Our guide played the flugelhorn in front of one flat rock face to have his tune echo and resound through the valley and told us more about the natural history. The trip took us to the very picturesque church of Sankt Bartholomä, named for the Apostle Bartholomew, patron saint of dairymen and Alpine farmers—and having miraculously, the ability to make things either very heavy or light as a feather, depending on what the situation called for.

pneumatic danube

The much vaunted hyper-loop looks like it have its ground-breaking ceremony soon, but not shuttling passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco, in California as originally envisioned, but on a circuit along the Danube (Donau) from Košice to Bratislava, Slovakia, to Vienna (Wien) and on to Budapest, Hungary. Driving, the journey would take around eight hours, but passengers aboard the hyper-loop trains would complete this route in just under an hour. That would be a pretty keen way to explore the region and be home again in the evening.

royal-flush or en suite

After rioting and much public discontent of Fuad I of Egypt’s particular penchant for exercising his royal prerogative and dissolving parliament when it was seen encroaching on his power finally convinced the king to restore the previous constitution that brought Egypt and the Suez back under the control of British influence, reportedly he lamented that soon there will only be five royal houses in the near future, “Britain—and diamonds, aces, hearts and spades.” If not for an interesting and informative article from Mental Floss, I would never have suspected that King Fuad’s vote of no confidence might be referencing a contemporary craze in the 1930s that was promoted by an Austrian psychiatrist called Walter Marseille who thought the additional cards—comprising a deck of sixty-five—would make games—bridge specifically, more challenging and engaging. The fifth suit of the English tarot nouveau was the Crowns or the Royals (Eagles in American decks). Though Marseille’s theory of skill-building through gaming didn’t quite catch on, his other works (let’s play global thermal war) involving higher stakes had lasting influence in weapons disarmament and peace-keeping.

tatort oder der kommissar’s in town

Though truthfully I cannot say I consider myself a dedicated fan of the series—though I usually have it on in the background and make it a point to gyrate to the funky opening soundtrack—I think that I must give it another go after reading Dangerous Minds’ appreciation of Tatort, a crime-scene investigatory franchise that has regular parallel plot-lines in a dozen different cities within the German Sprachraum. The series has aired for four decades presently and its thousandth instalment is coming up soon. The tribute highlights some of the best episodes and offers a lucid explanation to the nonpareil format to outside audiences—however much we might already fancy ourselves forensics experts thanks to CSI and Law & Order. I have caught glimpses of familiar sights in the show’s extensive venues, especially Leipzig, beforehand—and although a recent chapter was filmed between Frankfurt and Wiesbaden, I was a little let down that Wiesbaden’s screen-presence was severely limited and confined to an underground carpark—though I could be reasonably certain I recognised it.

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onionoise: the Viennese Vegetable Orchestra performs Radioaktivität from Kraftwerk

placebo button: expecting more underneath the casing of a fire alarm

one teaspoon of unicorn tears: excerpts from absurdly challenging gourmet recipes

maltese falcon: interesting abstract of ancient forgeries

free-range: a look at different fruits, vegetables and nuts growing in the wild, via Presurfer

washington, this is kallstadt calling: Spiegel International visits candidate Trump’s ancestral family home in a village near Mannheim—the same place whence the Heinz dynasty hails