jump back loreta or velvet underground

The golden city of Prague, for all its tangible history and its legend and lore, is an inexhaustible place, a story-telling at every pass, corresponding point for point. Here are just a few impressions that didn’t fit elsewhere. The Loreta church of the Immaculate Conception is a pilgrimage site, inspired by the Holy Hut where Maria lived that was salvaged from Saracen raiders and brought to Italy, with an altar and reliquaries dedicated to the Holy Family.

An Italianate arcade surrounds the chapel, Casa Sancta, and there is an impressive treasury and museum with a detailed history of the cult and patronage.

Prague is also a canvas for revolution, aside from the famous and ephemeral John Lennon Wall, a side of a building belonging to the Knights of Malta who allowed the graffiti artists to make their statements throughout the times of the Velvet Revolution until today, like this infinite loop, Möbius strip, of tanks and construction vehicles tearing across the city.

The city has done an extraordinary job in preserving the sacred and profane, acknowledging that invention and openness are sometimes the better curators.  Also on the palette of expression were these looming--close by the canals and water-wheel of the the Lennon Wall, giant and monstrous baby sculptures in the park on Kampa Island in the Vltava.

ahoj-hoj or bohemian rhapsody

PfRC is taking a few days of vacation in the Czech capital. Please be sure to follow our continuing adventures on our little travel blog. In the meantime, here is an interesting point to ponder: the ancient city’s host of kings and emperors are famous for their patronage of the occult arts and sciences, like alchemy, astrology and numerology, through a few highly visible landmarks, like the Astronomical Clock or the dormitories and workshops of the royal hermeticists on the Golden Row below Prague Castle, but there is also a more subtle homage to the esoterical. The pedestrian bridge spanning the Vltava (Moldau) was realized at 0531 in the morning on 9. July in the year 1357, when the bridge’s namesake (Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV) personally laid the first foundation stone. The precise time is known because this palindromic timestamp (the same forwards and backwards, 135797531) hewn into the bridge tower was picked by court astrologers as the most auspicious time to start building the bridge.  I wonder what other mystical symbols might be hiding in plain sight.

centennial

With the deadly cruise ship fiascos of the recent weeks, the somber commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic coming up in mid-April probably constitutes one of the most infamous events of the year 1912, but that year, on the cusps of revolution, exploration and war, was filled with a calendar of events. The year, framed by drug issues, begins with the International Opium Convention, ratified at Den Haag and ends with a Germany pharmaceutical concern developing and patenting the amphetamine that would become known as Ecstasy. In between, a biochemist identified and defined the concept vitamins, isolating essential nutrients, and another pharmacist developed an organoleptic scale to rate the relative spiciness of chili peppers. The studio system in Hollywood was formed at this time, man reaches the South Pole and the Balkan Powder Keg began to rumble. Monarchy was not the exception but rather the rule in Europe, with only the Swiss Confederation and twee San Marino as republics, and European colonial possessions formed a patchwork in Africa and Asia for later strife by proxy.

 There were firsts for aviators and aviatrixes, with national air defense forces formed in earnest—and the auto-pilot came into being. Bold experimentation in the arts took place, during the active periods of the likes of Picasso, Kandinsky and Duchamp, as well as the literature of Joseph Conrad, Willa Cather, DH Lawrence, Jack London and Thomas Mann--Bertrand Russell also philosophizing and Carl Jung probing the collective unconsciousness. Some of the art and personalities seem distant and unreachable—not dismissed and forgotten, but only just so, on the advancing edge of modernity. I wonder how people might remember about 2012 and how vital those far-off ripples from our time might heave or wash-out.

uncanny

Surely the mad scientists in the government that have seeded the clouds with drones and brought the public dragnet surveillance have always been churning out creepy and diabolical inventions but, I guess, were made to dip their flag to publicity and P-R (or just out of pride) and put their technological achievements on display. Dexterity and upright posture are only a question of degrees and will improve, I think (barring some unknown Pinocchio principle about balance), but as with aerial drones, a robot whose mobility can outstrip man's is unsettling.

Such a contraption could round up undesirables, be an expendable cat-burglar, but I suspect that it won't be primarily deployed in search-and-rescue missions, like a fire-fighter's companion. Nimbleness and agility are exclusively human domains, but even without a modicum more of artificial intelligence, the way that man interacts with machine will change significantly. Ethicists and sociologists are drafting laws, rules of conduct to try to anticipate this new cultural shift, which I am sure will touch on all areas of human life, labour and leisure. Broadly, I am sure a lot of highly intelligent visionaries are trying to equip philosophical quivers against all contingencies and changing norms, but those robot laws that I have heard proposed so far seem naïve and inadequate and very pro-business. It is as if one is getting a parody, like the sorry and pointed lampoon of Dr. Seuss' Lorax, instead of Asimov: 'no robot should be designed primarily to kill or harm a human being; no robot should exploit the empathy of humans, nor should they be indistinguishable from humans; one should always be able to determine who has legal responsibility for a robot…' That is all well and good but seems a little shallow. Machines have been making their human counterparts redundant for some time, but advances in robotics equates to the shock the first criminal who was caught by his finger-print had and the perfect crime entailed more than outwitting a detective.  Progress cannot be legislated but it can thrive within an ethical and sufficient framework—bureaucracy is still trying to catch up to the personal computer. This next revolution needs to have creative and thoughtful architects, and the rate of progress will be exciting and catapulting.

antidote

On certain slow news days, when the headlines are dominated by pageantry, corrections, retractions, revisitations and pro forma events, I wonder if there is not some sort of viral persuasion for disengagement and even repulsion in circulation among mainstream media outlets. This anti-news is a confirmed and competent school of journalism, it seems, and latches on to the day’s events with a subtle and ingenious mechanism to distract and dissuade. Such reporting is not of the opportunist variety, taking advantage of gladiatorial games or easy-chair terrorization to obscure substantive stories, but something else—something insidious and lulling enough to cause the public to take leave of that estate. Focus is not magnification, and as bad as the idleness that can be inspired through misinformation or omission is, the idolatry is even more dangerous.