sunday drive: idstein

On the way to Köln for New Year's celebrations, we noticed a Turistic-Tafel, one of those brown and white illustrated signs that offer what historic or cultural attractions one can find at the next exit, and since it was just at the start of our journey and it was another fair and sunny afternoon, I decided to investigate.
The town hosted a palatial Renaissance residence for the counts of Nassau, which is now used as a boarding school—including for one in the line, Adolf, King of Germany, who was once on the short-list to become the Holy and Roman Emperor of the Germans but was unceremoniously displaced by the Hapsburg family. Looking at this finely preserved city-centre, one wonders how history would be changed by the detail of that time-line.
This view is from the steps of Hexenturm, whose turret appears behind the ensemble of the old Rathaus below, which means witches' tower, though no witches ever endured an unfortunate incarceration there, the town did have quite a few victims of a series of witch-hunts in the seventeenth century and a plaque at the base of the tower is dedicated to their memories.
Behind the collection of signature Fachwerk (half-timbered) buildings, one can make out the steeple of the now consecrated Unionskirche, originally a Gothic edifice built on the ruins of an earlier Romanesque—the town lying directly on the Limes with quite a bit of revival and other remnants of the far-reaches of the Roman Empire in Germany. The building does seem a bit plain from the outside, but the interior is very ornate, replete with a ceiling of panels from the Gospels. It was a very nice place for a windshield-tour but certainly worthy of more and I am excited to go back someday soon.

what's the word? thunderbird! what's the price? a dollar twice!

I have recently discovered a new fascinating fount of nostalgic marketing in the web presence of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Here is one exemplary curation of the evolution of US airline advertising logos that's really well composed—and is just one out of a sizable archive of posts on various ephemera. The site is also a great resource for vintage advertising artwork, particularly Americana, and features time-capsules that capture pop-culture superlatives from decades ago. Triangulated with the preservation of disposables and style-movements reflected in packaging and touts that were not meant to be saved and living memories, one gets a really comprehensive glimpse into the past.

weltgeist

Newsweek has a clever and alluring review of the new work by Timothy Morton, entitled Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, which sounds like a very interesting, if not important and disabusing read. Invoking the apocalypse itself, by hook or crook, is a tautologism, because it is very human-centred and is a good invitation to consider the author's school of metaphysics, called object oriented ontology—which is a way of thinking about the universe that unseats the reigning ideas of an anthropomorphic universe and that things, even the named-nightmares that can be expressed in awful statistics, like traffic-deaths and the loss of rain-forests, have real consequences and existence independent of human perception and opinion.

We can name such things as climate-change and dystopian cults but nomenclature or Ivory Tower philosophizing does not change the impact that what can be abstracted through raw numbers and kept at arms' length have on the well-being of individual conceivers and the continuation of the world as they know it. That's one view, at least—and promises to be a very sobering and interesting exploration into the realm of these hyperobjects, things of doom and gloom—like H.P. Lovecraft's Elder Gods that are unknowable despite be very ripe for opinion and shifting, malleable attitudes. But there's surely still the classic counter-balance, which far from solely justifying our chauvinistic deportment, rather is the capacity to also recognize opportunities in those misunderstood monsters and is most likely the only camp able to remedy our problems of ego and oversight—having contributed to it to a high degree. Though man's beliefs and position are not privileged and are not a divine-right to impinge on others, resigning ones selves to the perspective of chemical valence and accident is not a hopeful nor up-building way approach—by itself—either.

peanut gallery

French artists and pro- fessional food photographers Pierre Javelle and Akiko Ida have an exhibit of macroscopic images of tiny people carrying on against landscapes of food, capturing in funny and inspired ways. Colossal features a series of their work, also to be found on their website MINIMIAM, a play on the French word miam, meaning delicious, and in person later next month at the Paris Agricultural Expo. I especially like the golfers putting the sugar binkies that top doughnuts and the cyclists waiting for a brood of chickens to cross their path over a terrain formed from a clutch of eggs, so be sure to check out more at the links and compose your own dioramas.

bucket list

As we go on together to explore some of the world's wonders this year, the brilliant and intrepid explorers at Atlas Obscura present a thoughtful gallery of some of the world's strange and unique places lost to progress in 2013. The tribute includes the Mid-Century Modern marvel of the Pan Am Worldport terminal at JFK Airport in New York, which was sadly razed this past autumn to make way for an airplane parking-lot.  I bet that there were time-travelers present to witness this unfortunate loss.

This list is by no means exhaustive and a lot of architectural and cultural treasures the world-round are endangered or have been already been paved over without wide-spread outcry—like the East Side Gallery remnants of the Berlin Wall, but it is worthy of note that all these particular monuments were located in America or China. Is there something slated for demolition in your community that you believe is worth preserving? What can you do to fight for it?

vapid or cig-a-like

In the European Union, there is a hat-full of regulations regarding the legal status of electronic-cigarettes, regarding sales, taxation, possession and whether such devices and activity is to be classed with restrictions on tobacco-products or bans on smoking. The activity itself has been dubbed by word-smiths in the United States as vaping—from the vaporising chamber that the cig-a-like devices use to heat up a liquid mixture to deliver the nicotine and produce a little puff of odourless smoke for effect.
There is, I understand, a new e-cigarette lounge at Heathrow Airport, and though I have seen such devices for sale in Germany, I have not yet seen them yet being embraced by bars and clubs, which have seen a down-turn in patronage, supposed, over smoking restrictions. What do you think? Vaping surely is it a wholesome or value-added habit but certainly seems better and safer than other natural methods for satisfying a craving, be it physiological or psychological. I wonder if there will be two-tiered culture of addiction in the future, with vapeurs and synthahol-drinkers unable to abide the company of their traditionalist counterparts.

anachronism

Via Boing Boing, a physics professor and a graduate student have embarked to scour the Internet in such of evidence for visits from time-travelers.

They employed parameters that would point to prescience, either direct or indirect that suggest a fore- knowledge, inquiries whose parameters seem to defy causality and too I suppose people claiming to be from the future were investigated. The study found no conclusive evidence, with the admission that this does not prove or disprove anything. Some thinkers postulate that it would be impossible to travel backwards in time to a point before said conveyance, the time-machine, had been invented.  The thesis too has a limited scope, aside from trawling the Internet for clues, in that it only looked for tourists to the past—not individuals native to it and traveling to their future.
I wonder if there might be some similar paradox at work that makes those living in the present somehow blind to things anachronistic—or to view them as a genre, like retro, steam-punk or Gothic, or that time-travelers from the future have returned to the past but to a parallel reality that we cannot experience directly, only as said trends from an alternate dimension.  Widely publicized time-traveler conventions have been held by academic institutions since the 1980s but have apparently failed to attract any genuine venturers. There is also the possibility that stealth and caution have made such journeys impossible to detect—at least through tried means, and maybe time-travelers only need the projects and papers of a professor and his companion like this to tip them off and allow them to cover their tracks.
 

what do you want on your tombstone? pepperoni and chease

I know that selecting a heavily processed frozen pizza makes could call ones judgment into question to begin with, but usual foregoing the American shopping experience—at the company-store, and opting to mostly buy groceries on the so-called “economy,” I was a little aghast and amused with the detailed, cradle-to-grave instructions on the packaging. One has to wonder what sort of horrendous lawsuits prompted such directions. Every once and awhile, it's worth it to have the reminder that there are far superior alternatives, readily available and even with the premium of far fewer special ingredients, unless one insists on a taste of home. Naïvely, I used to believe that such fortification with preservatives was a result of some rigourously honest admission and was required to maintain freshness for a long journey overseas, but now I think otherwise—especially considering the re-imported items on the shelves. I refused to believe that German beer, brewed hereabouts, was actually sent to the States, only to be sent back and sold at a discount, denominated in American dollars and with no visible taxes, to someone.
Just before the holidays, I noticed an expanded assortment of champagne, prosecco and Sekt, and I thought it was to supplement demand at first—that is, until I noticed this label (with mandatory warnings) on a effervescent beverage produced and bottled quite literally just around the corner. Lured by a bargain, I am now finding this more than a bit unconscionable. Though I am glad that there's an export-market for goods that seem very local, this indirect route to pass the savings along to you seems rather wasteful—whether or not specially outfitted for the journey.