chemin de fer

Messy Nessy Chic captivates our attention with her latest scouting expedition returning with this incredible, extant railway hotel constructed in the 1920s called the Belvédère du Rayon Vert of the French town Cerbère close to the border with Spain.
The art deco gem that once boasted a breath-taking cinema, dining halls and a roof-top tennis court closed down in 1983 but can happily still be engaged on a weekly-basis for those willing to rough it self-catering or toured for an afternoon. Check out the source link above to peruse a gallery of photographs and for more details, including the telephone number to arrange a visit since—in the spirit of being a time-capsule, there’s no website to deliberate over.

cross-roads

Though I can’t say for certain that many hikers will cross our path, we discovered that our new home, remote and rather secluded as it is, lies just behind the intersection of two of the European Long Distance Routes (the nearest point of reference shared by both trails is the City of Coburg), marked and maintained hiking paths that follows ancient trade and pilgrimage routes. From north to south, one stretches from Lapland through Finland and Sweden through Germany and Austria to the Adriatic coast, and from west to east, the other spans from Spain following el Camino de Santiago (der Jakobsweg) through France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany, the Czech Republic onto the shores of the Black Sea in Bulgaria. What an amazing journey to embark on and to think we are at if not the centre-point at least a nexus of sorts.

the rock or europa point

Residents of British territory of Gibraltar have doubtless seen more contentious times under the regime of Francisco Franco when the border was blockaded and trade suspended by a series of embargoes and transit was not normalised until 1985 and of course when it was captured as a naval base during the War of Spanish Succession in the early sixteenth century.
Having asserted their continued link to Great Britain on multiple occasions and no desire to rejoin Spain, the majority of Gibraltarians voted to remain part of the European Union. Though Madrid has given no indication of a change in policy or posture towards the exclave it claims as its own, the formal triggering of Article 50 is inspiring some rather baffling, hostile remarks from the metropolitan care-taker government, including the foreign minister arguing that Gibraltar is not for sale or subject to bargaining and comparisons to the conflict in the Falklands

operation rügen

Inviting listeners to draw their own parallels, Fresh Air host Terry Gross reprises her excellent and engaged interview with author Adam Hochschild from last year on the Spanish Civil War, which fraught with all other associations and its native horrors certainly was an evident that stands alone but also could be characterised as the opening volleys of World War II.
One aspect that was new to me was the realisation that the fields of Spain were the training grounds for Hitler’s machines of war, giving the Nazi armies time to perfect their juggernauts before deployment in their own adventures. Though Francisco Franco was grateful for assistance of Hitler and Mussolini, Spain was never fully accepted as part of the Axis powers—possibly because Franco was demanding too many concession and territory in France and England. Contravening the US policy of neutrality and statutes on exports, the CEO of one petroleum company in particular, Texaco, fuelled the fighting, throwing its support to the fascists and cutting off supplies to the Spanish Republicans. Not only was this corporate partisanship dangerous and without precedent, Texaco’s global network of installations acted as spies and provocateurs to ensure that the blockade on the rebellion remained unbroken. As further insult, the decisions and intent that enabled these opening salvos to be fired cast long, long shadows and is illustrative of what happens when Big Oil meddles in the affairs of statecraft.

chariots of the gods?

I enjoyed reading this brief travelogue from Atlas Obscura about the Gothic “new” cathedral of Salamanca, the old city declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with its rather anachronistic astronaut adorning its façade, which was added during a 1992 renovation that will surely present a puzzle for visitors of the distant future but is by no means a hoax—rather a contemporary signature of the masons doing the restoration work. This detail to discover and wonder about made me think of the Darth Vader grotesque that’s lurking high in the eaves of the National Cathedral in Washington, DC.

7x7

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

6x6

shadow-casting: projecting the shade created by New York City’s skyscrapers

buzz-kill: cosmic radiation may inhibit cannabinoid reception for astronauts

panopticon: Lithuanian studio produces a tapered mirror to be seen from all angles

ball-peen: a quick tour of the Hammer Museum of Haines, Alaska—conserving humanity’s oldest tool

geocentric: confound your geographic prejudices by looking at maps oriented differently

azotea ajardinada: Spain to put mobile gardens on the tops of buses and bus-shelters 

forty-winks o siestario

Demonstrated health benefits aside (provided that one’s work and life framework can support it), the Spanish government is considering labour-reforms that may curtail the tradition of the siesta. Interestingly, as ingrained as it seems in Spanish lifestyle and it is common-place across the Mediterranean as a way to avoid working through the hottest part of the day, the connotation of the prolonged afternoon nap with that country probably has more to do with advertised or perceived business-hours than cultural prevalence, the extended lunch and workday being formally instituted in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, when it was necessary for everyone to hold multiple jobs to make ends meet.
As there was little in the way of public transport, workers were granted a two or three hour break to make it to their second job and to work a full-shift, hours extended until late in the evening. The situation was exacerbated when Spain’s time zone was aligned with Berlin—out of solidarity with Nazi Germany though geographically much closer to London. As economic conditions gradually improved, this work-schedule took on the reputation of labourers being able to sneak home for a nice long and refreshing nap and worked until later in the night. The reality, however, sociologists believe is that the siesta-ideal is far from practical and is exacting too high a toll on workers and their families. The Spanish word for the concept of a power nap is siesta poderosa. In reality, few live close enough to their workplaces to consistently get away and take advantage of siesta-time and it causes havoc for your children and parents—rarely being able to settle down and turn in until after midnight. What do you think? Compared to counterparts in other European countries, Spaniards are just returning from lunch as others are getting ready to go home for the day, and for more and more something to be envious of. Alternatively, we could all institute a culture of napping and be a bit more flexible with what we think of as an honest day.

6x6

gaslight: those prim rows of street lamps originally were pilot-lights for burning off excess methane and prevent sewer explosions

glitter ball: surreal street artist transforms a construction site in Lyons into a disco floor

quartz revolution: the role of Soviet Russia in the spread of the wrist-watch

capcom: imagined movie and classic arcade tie-ins that look fun to play

fire-break: network of alarms scattered in Spanish forests hope to combat seasonal blazes

trongs: Japanese inventor designs utensils to make eating insects easier to handle

first we take manhattan, then we take berlin

The Local’s Spanish edition has a nice tribute for Leonard Cohen that explores the extent to which Spanish poetry and music influenced his own.
Radical futurist poet and playwright (Salvador Dalí was his set designer) Federico García Lorca who was executed for sedition at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War lends Cohen’s daughter her given name and made a strong, lasting impression on the artist. Seminal so too was Cohen’s fated encounter with a flamenco guitarist in Montreal who taught him a few chords and awakened something inside. Be sure to visit the link above for more of the story and see Cohen honoured with the prestigious Prince Asturias Award for literature in 2011.

chirality

Some weeks ago BBC Radio 4 featured the story of a lovelorn snail called Jeremy who because of a rare, one-in-a-million genetic mutation is coiled anti-clockwise and could never find a mate, being that the general population is right-handed.
The question of compatibility, however, does not come down to a matter of handedness and dominance we see in human dexterity—though this match-making is a tool for studying aspects of it, and is more akin (if parallels are appropriate) to the exceeding rare but viable mutation where some people have their hearts on their right sides: Jeremy’s sexual organs have the wrong orientation and would only work with another like him. This rare state however does not require extensive anatomical examination and is easily recognised by an attentive eye by the way the spiral of the shell radiates, clockwise or counter. The radio appeal, despite the odds, netted two potential suitors or sires for Jeremy (all snails being hermaphroditic and beyond gendered labels) one found by a snail-fancier (a conchologist) not far from the Nottingham labs where Jeremy was kept called Lefty, who’ve had their initial date. Jeremy’s other potential partner—yet unnamed and seemingly held in reserve, was rescued from the frying pan by a keen-eyed sous-chef in Mallorca and given that your garden variety snail is rather polyamorous, and they are scheduled to meet up at a later date.

popular imagination

A small specialist publishing house in Burgos with a penchant for the palindrome, the Local’s Spanish edition reports, has been granted permission to recreate exact replicas of the enigmatic and mysterious Voynich manuscript, named after the Polish antiquarian who acquired the fifteenth century document from Italian Jesuits just before the start of WWI. Scholars, collectors and cryptographers have been bewitched by this inscrutable tome ever since it came to light—having baffled all and successfully thwarted every attempt to decipher it or deduce it’s authorship—or even its purpose.
The text consists of a score of unique glyphs that has all the hallmarks of an alphabet and natural language but cannot be decoded, adorned by bizarre and beautiful illustrations that provide little in the way of context clues—naked women and plants that don’t exist, leading some to suggest it is a book of magic spells or a treatise on alchemy, rendered so, covertly by one of the respected and orthodox luminaries of the age—or even the artefact of a visiting extra-terrestrial or temporal tourist. What is your theory? Images of the entire book has been available online for some time (the original is kept safe in a vault at Yale University), but the publishers home that exact copies that capture the weight of the parchment, every tear and stain might just embolden the wit of academics in the near future to take that leap and be able to intuit its meaning.

a brief history of injunctions

Though such examples of true and unabashed stalking are no laughing matter and to be alive at the same time as great thinkers is an enormous privilege, it did make me giggle to read Bob Canada’s sobering indictment and predictions of recidivism for the American woman resident in Norway recently sentenced and served a restraining order for her harassing but contradictory claims of being enamoured and concurrently wanting to kill Professor Stephen Hawking—plus her characterisation as the world’s laziest psychopath. Apprehended whilst shadowing the physicist during a conference in Tenerife, the woman alternately professed her love (perhaps a honey-trap) for Hawking and her grave displeasure with him for disproving God. Regarding the later, I can’t recall Hawking proving or even attempting to demonstrate that he was capable of such a thing.

cat’s cradle

Via Dark Roasted Blend comes a fascinating overview of an assortment of demonstration projects of applied robotics in construction running in various universities from Stuttgart to Barcelona. From self-building bridges and spray-on façades architectural to drones that stack and weave students are exploring what sort of recursive programming could be used to automate and innovate the building process.
Not only could these novel methods, with feedback from the robot-builders about what works and what doesn’t, provide emergency shelters and repairs to existing infrastructure, such techniques could also be applied to space exploration and offworld colonies.

entrada

Though it might be safe to assume that the Aztec Empire of Mesoamerica was already doomed by the arrival of Europeans bringing Old World diseases with them without the ambitions of Conquistador Hernándo Cortés, it is hard to say what fortunes hinged on the ingenuity of one of expedition’s (entrada) artillery units, named Francisco Montoya.
While most of the slaughter and abject destruction was perpetrated by the Spanish with what would have been traditional weapons at the time (swords and arrows and missionaries that the natives knew and could repulse) and was indeed somewhat facilitated by client states of the Aztecs (a modern fiction to simplify a rather politically complex and strained alliance that referred to a mythological region called Aztlan somewhere in the north where the people had migrated from—sort of like metaphorically calling England Avalon), willing to throw off the yoke of Tenochtitlan, who’d just consolidated power only six decades before the arrival of Columbus, and sided with the Spanish.

Possibly too was an unfortunate series of coincidences and the way their calendar was constructed to stir superstition and resignation, which certainly could not compete with Spanish manifest destiny and prospecting for treasure. Although equipped with plenty of munitions, canons and muskets, the primitive gunpowder that had recently been communicated to western Europe from the Chinese was in short supply. The prepared mixture was unstable and unsuitable for sea-voyages, and though most of the constituent ingredients were available in situ, sulfur was a rare commodity. Our clever Francisco Montoya (prepare to die), determined not to have brought all these weapons for nothing, led a daring mission into the caldera of an active volcano, Popocatepeti (probably sacred to the Aztecs and a place of worship and sacrifice), to collect sulfur and produce enough gunpowder to compel the Aztecs with shock and awe to capitulate in less than two years (heady with the recent and parallel achievement of the Spanish crown called the Reconquista, recapturing lands on the Iberian peninsula that had been under Muslim control for seven centuries) after the expedition arrived in 1519.

alhambra

Antoni Gaudí, perhaps best known for his exquisite though not slated to be finished until 2026 basilica Sagrada Família in his native Barcelona, also designed a colossal hotel to dominate the skyline of New York City.
Called Hotel Attraction, the renowned architect submitted the blueprints in 1908 but was deemed structurally unsound for construction methods of the time. Originally proposed for a location somewhere in Lower Manhattan when it was known as Little Syria but before the establishment of Radio Row and later, to reverse urban-blight, the World Trade Center, Gaudí’s sketches were among the contenders for rebuilding at Ground Zero—and arguably a far better and purer memorial and testament (since the architect’s ego was not involved in the project) than the ghostly pillars that carried the day.

guerre civil

Indulging the counter-factual (supposing an alternate history) risks belittling suffering as it happened and building up for oneself a grasping sort of fantasy world, but in that split one also calls to account the calculated omissions and permissions of other powers. The Spanish Civil War that simmered to its critical point in 1936 is something incomprehensible, with long chains of causation reaching back generations and projected forward four decades and more with only drives attributed to make sense of the terrible and theatrical violence. I cannot claim to understand what each faction represented, but to the victor goes the spoils, like Qaddafi, who only reigned a slightly shorter period of time.
The unlearnt lessons of this war that was not contained to a domestic dispute are cemented with Picasso’s mural Guernica that distil the horrors of war that appears at the entrance to the United Nations’ Security Council chambers—at least, that is, from 1985 to 2009 with a notable veiling in 2003 during the Iraq War (when the American defence minister Colin Powell did not want to speak with backdrop of a mutilated horse’s ass) and afterwards the tapestry was sent on tour pending renovations. One is invited to imagine viscerally what befell the victims of this one arbitrary episode among many, but I think too that one is remembered as to how this conflict was also what we’d now call a proxy-war (though certainly not the first, nor the last). The struggle to take region, town by town, did not remain an internal affair for long, with Hitler and Mussolini almost immediately siding with the Nationalists, sending materiel that included the planes that bombed the quiet village of Guernica. British Gibraltar, through the UN’s predecessor that was supposed to prevent such escalations among members, placed an embargo, but with anti-Communist sentiments, did little to quell hostilities. Mexico and the USSR supported the Republicans but garnered a paucity of outside support. Whether the members of the future Axis Powers acted only out of ideology or wanted to destabilise the UK and France is unclear, but it seems as if other stances were assumed, with less entanglement and partisanship, the future might have played out very differently.

inter gravissimas

Due to the calendar reform of 1582, most of Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland and Lithuania did not have these past few days in that year—the date jumping from the fourth to the fifteenth of October.
Pope Gregory XIII issued his papal bull, Inter gravissimas, in order to correct for the drift in the Julian calendar but certainly did not considered it a name sake or legacy item, and it was only later historians that sought to reconcile earlier dates on civil calendars, prolepsis, applying the new conventions backwards (which also marked the beginning of the new year with different dates, city by city), that came up with the designation. Confusingly, France implemented this change around two months later, leaping from the ninth to the twentieth of December. Great Britain, Tuscany and the Protestant Kingdoms of the Holy Roman Empire waited until the 1700s to make the change. I think all these people had the good sense to stay in bed and wait for tomorrow.

cowboys and indians: sacerdotal or the fifth crusade

I spoke ridiculously too soon when I claimed that the horrors of the misrouted Fourth Crusade which sacked Constantinople, ravaging the beautiful city, depleting its treasures and resulting in the very brief reign of a resented Latin emperor called Romania but failed to reunite the lands or the Church, had put Europe—or at least the guilty Church—off of crusading permanently. Far from it—in fact before the same Pope Innocent III rallied the European noble houses to again descend on the Holy Land—in keeping with his original vision of the campaign with a thrust through Egypt, there was a coordinated massacre of the Cathar gnostics at home, inspired in part by the papacy’s equivocal attitude when the Crusaders were attacking fellow Christians in Byzantium. Mainstream Christians had regarded this dualistic sect that believed in the transmigration of the soul and equality of the sexes with suspicion for some time and called them devil-worshippers and pagans for the tenet that God had a good and an evil aspect and were glad to have the excuse to be rid of them and take their lands in southern France.  The Reconquista heated up to drive the Moors from Spain and Portugal.

Separately, two charismatic shepherd boys in Seine-Saint-Denis and Köln gathered thousands of children, the poor and disposed to march on the Holy Land and convert the Muslims—both promising that the Mediterranean at Marseilles or over the Alps and in Brindisi would part before them, like Moses crossing the Red Sea. Once the horde made its way to the shore, the Mediterranean did not comply and those who did not try to start their young lives anew at these endpoints or try their fortune at going home were caught by Saracen pirates and sold into slavery. It’s hard to say if the adult population of Europe felt obliged to complete the mission their children were willing to undertake unquestioningly or not (some question the accounts or if such travesties even happened at all), but in any case, Pope Innocent was able to marshal the support of armies that might be able to fulfill the task of recapturing the Holy Land without too much variance. This time, however, the leaders of the Crusader States would rather that Europe didn’t try to help out again. The past few years had ushered in a time of relative peace and great prosperity and Christian and Muslims coexisted due to a constellation of conditions, including the death of Saladin and crises of succession among his heirs, lack of Crusader aggression and very lucrative and mutually beneficial trading arrangements.
The last thing that the County of Acre, then the dominant Crusader State, wanted was to have a bunch of uncouth holy warriors despoiling the calm but they were not in a situation to disinvite the coming armada of ships. A sizable Crusader fighting force landed at Acre and King John of the realm tried his best to occupy the restless men, who were additionally an onerous task to quarter, and as more forces from Hungary, Germany, France and Flanders arrived, King John was helpless to prevent the march on Egypt. The Crusaders sought control of the city of Damietta (Dumyāt) at the mouth of the Nile, which protected the waterway to the capital of Cairo, some two hundred kilometers downstream. Maneuvers were indecisive and guarded, the force strong enough to besiege the fortification but not strong enough to take the city outright and the months before the Crusaders decamped, they found that they had starved the population into submission. Once Damietta had fallen, the way-forward remained unclear as they were awaiting the arrival of relief-forces from the armies of Holy Roman Emperor Fredrick II that would give them an unstoppable numerical advantage and could thus safely proceed. The armies of Sultan al-Adil, Saladin’s brother, were watching events unfold in a similarly vacillating manner, as internal strife prevented them from a certain counter-attack.
While at this impasse, the sultan ordered the destruction of the defensive fortifications that protected the city of Jerusalem, preemptively entertaining the idea that the Holy City might become an important bargaining token in the near future and if it was to fall to the Crusaders, the Muslims wanted them to have a city not easily defended, just as Saladin had directed for the town of Ascalon to be demolished to stop the earlier Crusaders’ advance from Jaffa to the Holy City, then resolved to negotiate with the Crusaders in order to end this stalemate and attend to its own affairs. The offer that the sultan’s ambassadors brought to the table was unbelievably favourable—concession of Jerusalem and return of the True Cross in exchange for leaving Egypt in peace, but what was even more unbelievable was how the Crusaders rejected the terms. Maybe they were sly to the dismantling of Jerusalem and did not want to take it just to see it lost again, but I think the only plausible logic behind their stance—which was not universal among the ranks, was that they were sure that they were going to triumph, with the wealthy and powerful Egypt and not just out of the way Jerusalem as the prize.
The papal legate, nominally in charge of military operations, was flattered with a prophesy that he fancied to be a sure sign that he’d personally led the Crusaders to victory—and besides, Egypt was apparently being attacked on its eastern border by the long awaited cavalry from the land of Prester John and so there was no way that absolute triumph could be denied them. Except that the papal legate had misinterpreted the augurs and having waited so long in Damietta, the Nile had again flooded and was no longer navigable and the fighting-force was bogged down once again. Frustrated, the separate divisions splintered and sailed back to Acre and then back home to Europe. One last exception was that Egypt was not under siege from a magnanimous Oriental Christian Magi, but rather these skirmishes with an unknown and fierce tribe marked the first encounter that the Western world had with Genghis Khan and the Mongol Hoard, but all that is for another story-line.

boilerplate or ultramar

Abrecht Dürer’s famous and celebrated woodcut of an India rhinoceros—which the artist never saw in person, has much more than æsthetic value, approaching the crossroads of modernity from all possible angles. The trading magnates of Europe were cut off from Asia via the overland route, the Silk Road severed by the Ottoman Empire, and so they sought other ways to reach China and India. Spain opted to reach the East by sailing West and Portuguese explorers scaled the African coast on a southerly trip to round the Cape of Good Hope and onward across the Indian ocean. Seamanship and navigation had reached a level of sophistication that made such long voyages possible and profitable. There was, however, the problem of competing colonial claims to lands and exclusive trading outposts. The kings of Spain and Portugal eventually turned to Pope Leo X to settle matters and both sides tried to woo a blessing from the Pontiff. In 1494, the Treaty of Tordesilhas settled the dispute to a degree by dividing the world outside of Europe, Africa and Asia, between the two maritime empires. Keeping up patronage, however, was important and Portuguese King Manuel I had merchants in Goa fetch a rhinoceros and bring it to Lisbon, via Saint Helena.

People were absolutely astonished to see such a beast, which was unknown in Europe since Roman times—the animal described by the classic naturalist Pliny but generally regarded the rhino as some legendary creature. Vilified and curious, Europeans at this time were also rediscovering elements of their heritage that had gone missing during the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages weren’t all that grim and backwards but it is interesting to think how we know more of the Romans than people half a millennium nearer to them, and ruins were being excavated and art uncovered that no one suspected. Manuel was keen on getting this exotic specimen, however, to present to the Pope—thinking it would complement his pet white elephant Hanno, which the Pope rode around the streets of Rome on. Sadly, after being admired in Lisbon and communicated to draughtsman Dürer, the rhinoceros went down in a shipwreck off the coast of La Spezia and never made it to Rome—doubly sad because the rhinoceros is an able swimmer and probably would have survived had he not been chained to the deck. Of course, this print became as famous as it did and still remains in circulation because of emerging printing-technology in Dürer’s home-haunt of Nürnberg, another aspect of the modern age.