household heraldry

I spied this interesting frieze on a corner of an apartment building while on a walk—a really singular motif, I thought, under the eaves of constructionist, cubist embellishments bracketing pilasters and edges. I was not able to determine, just yet, what such a decoration is properly called, but I adore how each functional and formative element has its own name and style. To have a home dripping with the projections of a very specific period is something pretty outstanding, almost as keen as harbouring a saint’s alcove or some other legacy in one’s living-space.

austatten

There is a certain range of predictably and com- mercially classic, which one could expect to find decorating the walls of hotel rooms and dormitories the world around. Nothing against the gaffers’ and grips’ taste and sense of style, as I am sure everyone can recall his or her first exposure to The Kiss, La Chat Noir, an unseasonable string of Christmas lights, beaded-curtain, or at least the touch of disen- chantment, because maybe you wanted to do the same, that these worthy works (testified by their infinite reproduction) displayed are not very original. I am grateful that my dear landlords equipped my work-week apartment with less conventional art work. It’s funny though, because if I look at the photo-safari souvenir of the elephants a bit askew, my eyes are drawn into a mirage of Gustav Klimt—something with the patination of the baby elephant’s ear.

habemus papem

Benedikt XVI has announced his retirement, a transition to a post in a local monastery of quiet mediation and prayer, fearing that the infirmities of old age are making him an ineffective leader. The office of Pope is an odd one for precedence, with all possible permutations discoverable—bad popes, short-lived papacies and even a lady pope, supposedly. It has been more than seven hundred years since the last Pope removed himself. Like Britain’s reigning queen, however, experience and living-memory are prevailing and formative factors, never mind that most of England’s heads-of-state were male and most occupants of the throne of Saint Peter were Italian. Familiarity, I think, does not out-strip all institutions.

There are some guardedly mysterious whispers about health and higher-level intrigues, whose speculation probably plague all such decision, but I do wonder if the seemingly responsible decision ought to be besmirched with conspiracy. Nearly eight years of services were ringing with speculation that the Pope was a place-holder, a concession to crown later a Latin pope again. If that were the case, I think Benedikt surprised detractors by hanging around this long and not just on balance being a bridge, and if anything, this controlled though unexpected stepping-down engages the Church all the more and makes people scrutinize the candidates in such a way as to make any larger agenda untenable.

gale force

Der Spiegel’s English mirror presents an interesting compilation of interviews and analysis regarding just what exactly is stealing the wind of the sails of the renewable energy revolution, die Energiewende: namely subsidies (Subventionen).

Governmental support programmes (in Germany and elsewhere) for alternative power are being curtailed due to budget priorities, sometimes as a sort of inside-out Trojan Horse promising consumers that the policy redirection will help stifle rising home utilities prices. Such changes are enough to make investors, who would champion the building of new infrastructure and fund research skittish—though a really winning idea would succeed with or without government imposed controls, and probably in spite of bureaucratic support. The handicapping for wind turbines, however, is compounded by government subsidies geared in the opposite direction, meant to help wind-down the conventional powerhouses: support for coal and nuclear energy. The emergent and experimental technologies cannot compete and the markets react unkindly to these cross-currents.