telefunken

Although they are minor worries not to be agonized over, I am as yet undecided how to complete my work-week tenement. For a temporary arrangement, first I wonder if I ought to go to the trouble of a television set. TV certainly seems like something I could easily forego, though we do enjoy watching the news and documentaries from time to time, but, despite arguments that radio, broadcast television and print is outmoded and alien to the younger generation, no one really (especially, it seems, the most adamant disinters) do without staring off at rectangles in one way or another.

 I suppose I am preoccupied with this choice and alternatives because the room came fully and rather lovingly furnished, excluding the television and phone/internet, so those are in my house- keeping domain. Of course, I’ll be bringing a few familiar objects to keep me company (and it is nice and practical not to have to outfit and equip a second apartment and then end up with duplicate items, like we have before) and I’ll get to come home every weekend. Limiting one’s decorating palette to the impersonal glow of entertainment is not depressing or an unfavourable arrangement, but rather, I think, makes returning home and planning a new one all the more dear and exciting.

native mark-up language or cadence and marshalling

I have mused before on the exacting, formal language and grammar of heraldry (Heraldik), wonderfully medieval words and painstakingly florid descriptions in a tradition frozen and not liable to relaxing in rules and terminology due to the fact that such detailed and consistent instructions were necessary since there was no other way of transmitting an image, a coat-of-arms, short of recreating in full, with at least a sketch if not wholly with expensive tinctures and gilt. It is strange to think of pictures and impressions exclusively conjured up by the imagination and not communicated directly and I suppose it would be strange for our ancestors to experience anything otherwise. The economy of heraldry reminds me of a passage from A Canticle for Leibowitz when a monk depletes the cloister’s supply of blue tint faithfully reproducing a blue-print (Grundriss) and regrets later the waste, not realizing what was the cogent matter being conveyed with the floor-plan. All elements and attributes in blazons, on the other hand, have symbolic meanings. In adding a caption, however, even when not confined to a limited amount of characters, it’s always a choice about what details, style, emotion, likeness to focus on. I wonder if input and interface will progress to the point where one can summon up a picture with the imperfections of memory or the faulty conception of a non-artist. How many images have that same fimbriation in the dark clouds being pushed aside, and when inarticulate demands are materialized, how many chances for finding something new, different or tangential would be missed? Focusing on certain criteria, would we then miss the bigger picture and how style, likeness, nostalgia and influence hang together?

time in a bottle or pluperfect and future-tense

Bottles of wine are a bit like little secondary time-capsules, necessarily so as part of the manufacturing process, hermetically sealed and stored up, sometimes for years and years—although it’s a misconception that all wines improve with age and many times will sour or become corked. This unintentional archive, however, does resemble some of the criticisms of time-capsules in general, those walled into cornerstones or buried under pyramids and parking lots, of being unreliable narrators (unzuverlässiges Erzähler).

Those who act as curators of the past and assemble artefacts of the present for inclusion generally are not futurists and professional thinkers condemn them for not stocking their treasure chests with items that would give archeologists a useful and complete picture of their lives, etc. The critics strike me as a little bit unfair and matriculating kindergarteners should not be discouraged from hiding away something as a class and as individuals. Picking up the gravel drive way, I hesitate a bit over tossing an old screw, bit of glass, cigarette butt in the kip to eventual become the strata of a landfill and usually just knock it aside into the tall grass—for the benefit of future explorers. I wonder if any more historical elements are accidentally transmitted with the bottle under seal, other than the craft of wine-making and the quality of the growing season, the chemical signature of the terroir. While those characteristics are certainly sufficient, I do wonder if there’s not some other wayfarer (Anhalter) that’s been overlooked with the vintage, some snap-shot of a quality or quantity that isn’t recognized until later, like the growth rings of trees or ancient insects captured in amber (Bernstein).

stranger danger

Not that a day passes in the office without some sort of productivity disruption, which are mostly generated from within, conflicts and incom- patibilities among systems and safeguards, like some great, counter-adaptive lupus, but I’ve never prodded around enough to see this message and illustration before. The empty park bench symbol conveys something shady and sinister, like the perch for an electronic eavesdropper or a meeting point for something off-the-record. I wouldn’t necessarily think that the platform felt that way about public internet, but I do think that it fits to the attitude in the IT department that would go into conniptions over the idea of anything unregulated or anonymous—otherwise unsecure but not optimal for functionality either.

a series of tubes or recursive doodle

Via Colossal, photographer Connie Zhou brilliantly documents her privileged and exclusive visit to one of Google’s data centres. The organization and complexity of this wondrous information factory seems unreal, like a bonus level from Super Mario world manifest in reality. Getting this glimpse of where the internet lives reminded me of another fantastic piece of plumbing, one of the buildings of the National Library system in Paris (Bibliothéque nationale de France), which also has hot and cold running knowledge.

überdimensionales

It becomes strange what one doesn’t give a second glance after a bit of indoctrination. There is not exactly an aggressive giant chair advertising offensive making this too commonplace to notice, but one does find such structures fairly regularly in the parking lots of bigger cities—at least in southern Germany—sort of, I suppose, like Bob’s Big Boy but these examples are I think much more arresting, eye-catching landmarks, even if they’re just for marketing too.

Perusing the phenomenal adventure guide for curious destinations, Atlas Obscura, for something neat to see not too far away that we might have overlooked a few weeks ago, I learnt that the largest office chair in America is located not far from where my sister lives. From the vignette, I couldn’t really tell if it was in fact something to write home about, which she never did, or if it was something too that one stopped seeing with time and familiarity—driving with a newcomer down main street and when they ask ‘oh, what’s that?’ just replying without glancing away that’s just the largest office chair in America, sort of like Guy de Maupassant who took lunch daily directly underneath the Eifel Tower, which he thought an eye-sore, since from that vantage point, he was guaranteed not to have to look at it.  There is our regular again, Monsieur de Maupssant—he hates it here. It sounds like a distinction, nonetheless, and I will have to ask my sister to investigate.

lend-lease

I feel somewhat like a pariah, having been bounced around from one closing American military installation in Germany to another, like some foster child and it seems that I have been bad luck in terms of longevity. And as this place is winding down operations and the tempo of deployments is letting up, we’re witnessing the same mad rush to close out contracts and accounts with a flurry of new construction, both cosmetic and structural improvements.

The properties and housing units can be re-purposed for civilian use easily enough and brought up to code, streets straightened and the American ghettoes Deutsche-formed (like terraforming), but there seems to have been a lot of procrastination, denial and uncertainty about how to proceed, abandon that lets commitments and de-logistics go forward with controls or a plan. This closure cycle is different, and not just for the break of a decades’ old tradition and a cultural institution that was an integral part of the post-war era, but also because the military presence is too rarified and no parent organization is thereto assume command. All the activity, I think, overshadows chaos and the fact that no one really has designs on this substantial block of property, and is carried out to the end, since the government is honour-bound to host-nation contracts and it is cheaper to return buildings up to standards rather than raze them. Of course there is the historic character of the buildings to preserve, as well, and it would have been a loss to plaster over history and this place’s former incarnations, like one sees sometimes with faux half-timbering and friezes dappled with painted shadows, though I don’t think they’d replace this after-image. It just struck me as a little ridiculous (but typical, emblematic) that work was being carefully done around that architectural element. It’s a frustrating feeling to be always coming into things as they are changing and in transition, but I suppose that experience is neither uncommon nor unlucky.