founding-father or amazing wonder stories of the imagination

From now until the end of October, there is a special exhibition hosted by the Centre for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe on the work and lasting influence of author, tinkerer and entrepreneur Hugo Gernsback. The namesake of the Hugo literary prize for science-fiction was born in Luxembourg and received training in a German military signals unit in Bingen, establishing his enduring interest in ham radio and helping to grown the network of amateur and hobby radio operators world-wide, before immigrating to America. Settling there, Gernsback entered into the publishing industry, first distributing a catalog-magazine hybrid for wireless accessories and several other popular mechanics-type publications following his interests in emerging technologies and feeding his sense for speculation.

Soon afterwards, Gernsback ventured into specialising in hosting works of science-fiction, first with classic works and then new authors.  Though his stingy business-model tended to stiff his contributing writers—much like some modern day content-mills, gave Gernsback a certain reputation, his move, similar to fostering a social network among radio operators, to include the names and addresses of subscribers, however self-promoting, helped immeasurably to promote the genre and create a fan-base who could reach out to one another. Gernsback was directly responsible for several thoroughly modern and forward-looking novel aspects that are taken for granted, and I would like to visit this exhibit.

sunday drive: barbarossastadt gelnhausen

Fearful of the shadows cast over the beating rays of the sun which acted with this strange and
uncertain periodicity though I was, I did stop off at a place we had visited once a few years ago, lured by an antique market on the upper and lower market squares of the imperial city of Gelnhausen, which was accorded this status by Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa for its location at the intersection of important trade routes between Frankfurt and Leipzig and interestingly the geographic centre of the European Union by  more contemporary measures and vetting. Aside from the medieval city centre, Gelnhausen's chief draw is its imperial palace grounds, which although were rich with nice ruins of masonry work and well-curated history, was not quite the palatial scene H and I were expecting at the time, and it seemed afterwards we gravivated towards a series of Pfälzer that did not live up to out expectations. There was a lot to explore, I found in the old town, and I except it is well worth another visit. The market, incidentally though a bit top-heavy with porcelain and furniture (larges as opposed to smalls) was the genuine deal, but I did not find anything that might find a home at ours.

rain dance

While I am not certain if historic records were broken all over Germany this weekend as predicted, it was certainly more than hot enough.

The weather was absolutely oppressive during the past weeks and humid by turns (but probably not enough to illicit much sympathy from readers used to such temperatures), punctuated with brief spells of dramatic but taunting storms. Pink heat lightening was on the horizon many mornings and few drips of rain came down, not as if due to the migration of weather from elsewhere but rather as a consequence, it seemed, of some physical imbalance locally as if Sol Invictus had managed to ring and wither every last drop of moisture out of the land and was obliged to give back a little. Now there's signs that some relief is coming, and while I hope that summer is not called in the coming weeks due to rain, that sort of weather was becoming unbearable, especially for those not on holiday.

double-feature

Usually under the heading It Came from the Cineplex, blogger Bob Canada regularly features some really astute and comical movie reviews. It one of his latest installments about derivative blockbusters, since those who don't learn the history of cinematography are doomed to repeat it and some studios use this to their advantage in subjecting audiences to paired-films, many times within the same season. There's a pretty clever list of twins (plus some of my own), generally one more original and the other noisier and less thought-through:

• Whitehouse Down and Olympus has Fallen
• Armageddon and Deep Impact
• The Prestige and The Illusionist 
• The Abyss and Leviathan
• The Truman Show and EdTV
• The Descent and The Cave
• After Earth and Oblivion/WALL-E
• The Road and The Colony (or any number of post-apocalyptic movies) 
• United 93 and World Trade Center 

This is surely not a new phenomenon—including self-plagiarism, and such coattailing was probably even more widespread in the past. What other movies, classic and contemporary, would you add to this list? Be sure to check out Bob Canada's Blog World for some other funny observations about the entertainment industry and keen, original artwork.

the real macguffin

Writing for the superb Neat-o-rama, guest blogger, Eddie Deezen, explores the enduring 1994 Pulp Fiction film through one of its abiding and fan-generated mysteries, the contents of the suitcase with the super-natural orange glow. Though primary sources are readily available, not to dispel but rather promote the imagination of the audience, it was intended to be anything and nothing in particular, just a plot-device. The original screenplay called for diamonds but it was decided that it would be a let-down to actually show them and it ought to be left up to the viewer. Good critique and analysis have always managed to maintain an edge on artistic composition, especially once released and with a life and career of its own, enhancing connections and themes that any artist would gladly claim as part of his original purpose. What do you think was in that briefcase?

pandora or who done it

Though the only thing to have definitely been disappeared is a portion of the US administration's public resource and engagement web-site that made the pointed promise for continued protection for so-called Whistle-Blowers—defined aptly as important stewards to mitigate fraud, waste and abuse, it is a very unfortunate time for the page to go off-line. It's not entirely irretrievable, according to the site's web-masters—safely retained in the archives, cheerfully referred to as the Wayback, and not some Orwellian bottomless memory-hole where censored materials are shunted and people are told they never happened and everything has always been this way.

The timing is bad nonetheless, for the collusion of other tragic events—ones that cannot be undone or restored, and if anything—the Fugitive has rather vindicated those conspiracy-theorists who always had the feeling that they were being watched. The timeline is becoming pretty dreary, incidentally just ahead of the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights March on Washington, DC, which probably could never happen in today's environment: the promise went off line just a couple days after the Fugitive's initial announcement of the scope of America's and the UK's spying capabilities, and only a few more days ahead of the death of the journalist, critical of America's stance of late on press-freedoms and the harassment of reporters, who penned among other works that scathing and frank interview from the NATO commanding general in Afghanistan, highly disparaging of the way the war was being prosecuted and led to his immediate dismissal, in a mysterious single-car crash, and only a few weeks prior to the recent mysterious death of a hacker-become-IT security specialist, who had famously demonstrated, among other things, that one can easily commandeer, remotely, such things as automated teller machines, pace-makers and car engines, to reveal inherent and compromising flaws. The world is not a safe and harmonious place, in spite and despite our best efforts, and the upkeep of intelligence and secrets is a necessary thing, over-reach and perception included. Making the presumption that one sees the Big-Picture is a dangerous one and begs back every accusation made against the establishment in doing so. One unequivocal thing that came out of the Civil Rights Movement was that the apparatus was capable of character-assassination, and though I think focus is blurred by many separate pieces and causes in motion here, I do think a reasonable person could connect the dots, and without much imagination. I sympathize with the families of all the individuals involved and sincerely hope that all parties grow ever mindful of those actions that cannot be undone, retracted or disregarded.

teufelsbrücken or a bridge too far

The ever fascinating Atlas Obscura presents a collection of unholy spans, which medieval superstitions credited to master civic planner and engineer, the Devil himself, over the seemingly impossible feats of architecture that ancient crossings imparted to people seeing them for the first time.
Featuring amazing old stone bridges from all over Europe, the article talks about the folklore that grew up around them, with common stories of townspeople striking a deal with Satan to construct a much needed but beyond human-abilities and gravity-defying bridge over rivers and ravines. The Devil agreed to give the mortals their bridge but usually in exchange for the soul of the first to cross it. The Devil was inevitably denied his due because either an over-excited dog ran across first or the villagers sent over a stubborn goat. How they outwitted Satan is preserved in local legend and sometimes commemorated with sculpture and artwork. At one of the hair-pin curves going into a tunnel along the shores of Lugano in Switzerland, there was a relief of the Devil coming out of the cliff-face—I wonder if there was some similar tale about connecting the region overland as well as by sea.

zarathustra's roundelay

Via Nag on the Lake's other blog, there is some interesting background on writer Friedrich Nietzsche's typewriter of choice—at least for a time—the very steam-punk and boldly designed Malling-Hansen Writing Ball. The philosopher ordered this model for portability and quietness—sort of a tablet computer for the late Victorian Age, but lack of manuscripts finished on the Writing Ball, which resembles a brain-scanner with its spherical keyboard suspended over a curved parchment, suggest that Nietzsche had difficulty mastering the interface, which is a contemporary problem too. Be sure to check out Nag on the Lake for a wealth of daily curiosities.