humbug or the great pumpkin

Although the annual, apparent retrograde motion of seasonal marketing campaigns (though by now I suppose that we have entered that time-frame for which it might be appropriate to begin thinking about one’s costume—at least in those places where Halloween emerged organically—if these items hadn’t been on display and promoted since weeks now) might be off-putting and fatiguing enough any traditionalist who enjoyed the anticipation, no matter what transpired in the end. I always had a spare bag of chocolates in case we ever got a visitor. Sußes oder Saueres! I want keep the spirit of the season, however exported and commercialised (that’s a tortured old saw), always.

5x5

mind the gap: month rental prices for a one-room flat in London superimposed on the Underground map

divining-stick: successful dowsing in drought-struck California causes people to challenge their inner-skeptics

night gallery: curation of paintings by producer Thomas J. Wright for the macabre anthology

diorama: a dedicated California artist recreates faithful miniatures of New York’s disappearing store-fronts

treuhand: EU high court rules that social media giants may not freely repatriate international user-data as the integrity of it cannot be guaranteed 

boom! bonk, bonk on the head

Vis-à-vis the mounting refugee situation as hundreds of thousands families and individuals fleeing war-torn Syria and other regions transit through Asia Minor and the Balkans or risk a harrowing trip across the Mediterranean—trafficked or through their own determination—for Germany and to eventually be resettled, the ever brilliant BLDGBLOG presents a sort of alternate and modern historical study with the manner in which the US dealt with its own possibly bidden (Germany’s is considered inviting too) crisis for the care and housing of migrants, especially of unaccompanied minors that surged on the Mexican border from points further South, quickly overwhelmed accommodating institutions.
Cynical as it sounds, finding storage solutions for surplus is pretty dehumanizing and the notion of a generation brought up by ghost-malls and derelict warehouses makes me think of that Star Trek episode where the “onlies,” the children are the only one left in a dilapidated, crumbing world—without the “grups” to take care of them. While searching for a pharmaceutical answer to immortal youth, a plague was inadvertently unleashed that attacked any grown-up, past puberty, and caused them to succumb to the disease within seven days. As childhood spans several centuries, with the pre-teens protecting the younger ones and the whole planet having fallen to wrack and ruin, until Doctor McCoy isolates a cure and Starfleet dispatches teachers and counselors to the planet to help rebuild it. Temporary shelters—hopefully without the potential of becoming a more permanent limbo—are not much better in Germany with up to ten thousand refugees daily entering Germany and corralled in empty sports halls and other locations, quickly over-crowded and with inadequate facilities. No amount of shuffling and hide-and-seek will address the underlying geo-political causes but may result in more dignified housing for both new-comers and established residents, already struggling with exorbitant rents and gentrification.

vulgate or hashtag hastings

It strikes me as a little paradoxical that the claim to the Divine Right of Kings comes of the newer, reformed protestant tradition with monarchs dual-hatted as heads of state churches, the Church of England, the Church of Norway, et alia rather than from something more seeped in history. This political and religious creed, holds that the kings rules by God’s grace alone is not subject to any earthly estate or institution, including the will of the papacy. In other words, the monarchy was invested with both civic and spiritual powers, bucking ancient divisions of authority, which were nonetheless prone to overlap and currying favour or displeasure and later developments, revolts and the spread of democratic-thinking cut short the tenure of a monarch, but this doctrine. Prior to the Reformation—however, alliances were built and strengthened through military campaigns, persecuted under the papal banner, that continued nearly without interruption up until that schism for Western Christianity in the form of the Crusades, launched against whomever was deemed to be a heretic. The first instance of this type of campaigning on a grand scale had a different character than the retaking of the Holy Land but there are definitely parallels with the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 and the First Crusade that coalesced just three decades later.

As way of asserting figurative and more literal legitimacy for inheriting his father’s Norman duchy, the ambitious invasion carried out Gullaume le Bâtard that made him known to history as William the Conqueror—and made crusading a popular method of securing power, turned on the caprice of the wind. To secure his dignity as heir-apparent, though born out-of-wedlock and thus against the marriage of aristocratic families that was sanctioned by the Church, William convinced the Pope that he could bring order to an otherwise recalcitrant England—after all, in the most remote reaches there were monastic, self-governing communities, archbishops had been appointed without papal consultation and they were even conducting mass in the native vernacular. With the backing of the support of the Church, William readied his armies to cross the Channel. English forces also braced themselves for the invasion, and both waited and waited as the prime season to wage war came and nearly passed, waiting for a favourable gust to send the Norman sailing ships across. At cross-purposes to this undertaking, William’s distant cousins, the Norse raiders were poised for an assault from the North. While the distraction would have been surely a welcome one—though the question of claim and settlement is an interesting alternative reality to ponder, the Vikings were praying for winds in the opposite direction. At the last moment before harvest time pulled away the conscripts, the Norse invaders fell on Wales. English forces watching the Norman coast were immediately deployed to the other front—and rather miraculously were able to defeat the Vikings definitely and discourage any future forays. The very next day after the Norsemen had retreated, the winds shifted and propelled the Norman fleet to Hastings. Though drained and shattered from taken on the Vikings, the English forces put up a noble fight in resisting the onslaught from the South, and might have even managed to rebuff William’s troops, had the English held the high-ground and not been lured to fight the Normans on the beaches—where the flat terrain negated England’s advanced manœuverability on uneven ground. It’s a little baffling to think how one event that nearly didn’t happen could create the precedence for such later rifts and clefts. Changing a ruler’s appointment to something akin to God’s lieutenant—and later manifestations, just seem rather to be deferring the argument, until it declines into ochlocracy, mob rule, mobile vulgus.