meinungsfreiheit

While the first through the fifth estates in Germany are wrangling with the question of what it means to curtail freedom of opinion and expression—surely too a sacrosanct right but not without limitations, over whether to allow a public-viewing of that repulsive trailer smearing Islam the discussion keeps returning to America’s founding axioms and the sanctity of the First Amendment. It is a difficult matter to essay and presents dangerous and weighty precedents on either side—mostly, I believe touching on the fact that the role of the state is not perfectly defined and such guarantees, in any pluralist society, are neither a perfect system nor perfectly enforceable.

Does the state give tacit licence by suffering such demonstrations or is a free public necessarily a responsible one?  To exacerbate the situation, the message and controversy is being championed by some right-wing elements that have urged (or submitted) to the idea of having one hate and hellfire preacher come from Florida to officiate. This preacher formerly tried to dictate the US president’s foreign policy and priority by holding holy books ransom. The actual video clip is of course marginalized by the vitriol it represents and the genie is already out of the bottle, so it does not matter so much anymore if the trailer itself is spread or censored further for the public-good. Unlike the clip, which is intent without content, the permission or restriction—more broadly, is intention that reaches far beyond any one disputable statement. While these American standards are being enshrined in the German media and government, and difficult questions are being ricocheted, it seems an even bitterer irony that the steadfastness of the internet hosts, that communication æther that fills the voids left by bureaucracy, &c., &c. may not be choosing to defy the wishes of the US government and majority of public and let the clip remain on-air and in circulation out of noble ideals—the speech should be free even if repulsive, but rather because such a policing (even at the behest of another) might make the hosts liable for policing all contributions and enforcing everyone’s rules and not just their own. If the guarantors of liberty are now the mechanisms for avoiding for lawsuits, then we are all in trouble and the United States certainly seems like not example to follow.

music week: turning to the horoscope and looking for the funnies

Digital audio pioneers at the University of Erlangen and the laboratories of the Frauenhofer Institute helped early on to make music (and later video files with standardized formats like AVC) more manageable by figuring out how to compress inherently huge files by diluting the depth of the data without sacrificing the sound. A raw music file, a bit of time and vibrations digitized, would still be a huge thing and impossible to work with on most platforms—even given how personal computing has advanced, and sadly not predicting this kind of progress in storage capacity and the ever increasing detail of photography, I ruined few good pictures from the beginning of the decade, convinced I needed to apply a lossy space-saving routine to them if I ever hoped to keep them all.

 Engineers had one favourite test track, familiar and catchy so programmers would instantly hear how a changed parameter affected the recording—which was the 1984 release of Tom’s Diner (which in reality is Tom’s Restaurant on the corner of Broadway and 112th Street in Manhattan and portrayed in fiction as the diner in the television series Seinfeld) by Suzanne Vega. The same talent that produced the mp3 file format is also currently overseeing piecing together a monumental puzzle, which will have ramifications on how any archive or collection of sibylline leaves are organized in the future. From the partition into the East and West until the reunification of Germany, the German Democratic Republic’s secret police, Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, also the Stasis) swelled to a network of over a quarter of a million operatives and informants keeping watch over all citizens and amassing some fifty million pages of dossiers. As the dissolution of the DDR became imminent, there was a rush to dispose of these files—which was more volume than any mechanical shredder could handle, so many people in the office resorted to rending them by hand. These torn pages were relatively easy to recover, but this low-hanging fruit only accounted for a fraction (about two-hundredths of the total documentations) that could be reassembled by hand by a team of specialists over the past twenty years. Frauenhofer Institution is now aiding the reconstruction efforts by cataloguing each scrap of paper and the text on it (even the ones that made it through the shredder), producing a virtual jigsaw, mosaic that may eventually fall into place... When I'm feeling someone watching me and so I raise my head. There's a woman on the outside, looking inside—does she see me?

music week: soundtrack

As far as prequels go, especially those whose backstory involves time-travel that usually raises more paradoxes than can be explained and whose formula would probably rejected out-of-hand for division by zero and makes one wonder that studios don’t retain logicians since no movies would ever get made, the in the latest in the Men in Black (MiB III)  franchise was, I have to admit, pretty good. The theme music was pretty catchy as well, though it was the only title song in the series not performed by the Fresh Prince of Bel Aire, a rap that tries to reconcile nostalgia with said time-travel and samples the guitar riff from the 1956 Mickey and Sylvia hit Love is Strange. Although I guess the song was included on the soundtrack of Dirty Dancing—though only a snippet—I remember hearing it first played on the television show Designing Women, where Suzanne Sugarbaker was sidelined from the decorating firm’s talent show entry because she insisted on performing in black-face, so she and Anthony Bouvier had their own lip-syncing number.

bayreuth-beirut

Though overshadowed by the protests triggered by the ignorant and ridiculing portrayal of Islam, the Pope went ahead with a planned trip to Lebanon, originally and without taking sides for the seated regime or the rebellion to urge peaceful resolution to the civil war in Syria. Neighbouring Lebanon has taken in tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the violence, and there are fears that the conflict may spread.

As Benedict XVI reaffirmed to his audience, however, Lebanon has struggled to become a model nation, recapturing the harmony and hospitality that was thrown into turmoil with independence and its own civil war, pulled in different directions by other regional players. Much of the crowds that thronged to see the Pope, I am sure was comprised to a large extent by the forty-percent Christian population that the country hosts, but the government declared a public holiday over the weekend for the Pope’s visit so more people might have the chance to see him. Lebanon also hosts the spectrum of Islamic sects and traditions, who by turns, have also been targets of intolerance. The message of peace, understanding and empathy, I think, was not restricted to any one demographic of the audience and takes on a more urgent meaning in light of other, reviled and impugned embassies.