two-d or shrinky dinks

Collectors’ Weekly has a nifty little show-and-tell feature on the Mid-Century Modern phenomenon of Colorforms.

It was interesting to learn about the imaginative couple, Patricia and Harry Kislevitz, who created the die-cut vinyl shapes that can be stuck to a smooth surface with many offshoots but what struck me most was the candid tone of the article that was bookended by trying to demystify the myth of the infinite imaginations of children. It was funny but I’m not sure where that came from, and there’s surely no stint implied for cultivating creativity with simple toys like these.

beaker culture

Looking at this glass without knowing its context and provenance, one might think it’s a beautifully crafted piece of Nordic school Art Déco.

This vessel, one of fourteen known extant pieces, however, is called the Beaker of Saint Hedwig, a Polish duchess from Bavaria with a great reputation for her charitable works, like her niece Elizabeth. It was these glasses, however, commissioned by her husband, Henry Long Beard, Duke of Poland, hundred years ago which really cemented Hedwig’s fame and beatification. After the royal couple had reared twelve children (forming connections to a vast swath of European history) and the Duke had led a life of political intrigue and had some dealings with profiteering during the Crusades (where these fine glasses were almost definitely created, as such craftsmanship was not to be found in medieval Europe), the two turned to a more pious way of existence. Henry accepted most of Hedwig’s quirks and flagellations, but the Duke found it beyond to be too much when his wife gave up wine and only drank water.

Whether it was in fact the bath-water of the nunnery, as some say, the fact remained that the water supply of the day was potentially sickening to drink and wines and spirits were generally much safer and cleaner and so the Duke grew concerned about her health. Presenting her a collection of fine goblets—though the beakers are more vase-shaped and look awkward for actually drinking out of, maybe better suited as a communion cup—the Duke hoped his wife would change her habits but was disappointed when she still poured plain old water into them. Later, however, the Duke saw that when Hedwig raised the glass to her lips to drink, the water was changed miraculously into wine. The pictured glass is from the British Museum but the beakers have been held in the treasuries of abbeys and cathedrals as holy relics for centuries. In fact, I am pretty certain that I passed one more from the set from the same workshop in the very fine museum collection of the Coburg Fortress without realising it. There are quite a few of the Hedwig glasses in Germany, including one in the Cathedral of Minden—and H and I will have to be on the look-out during our travels.

life on mars or gulp and gulf

Researchers are intrigued by little belches in highly localised areas of the Martian crater that the Curiosity Rover is exploring. This venting may be due to some unknown geological arrangement or could be an indication of the methanogenesis of ancient or existing microbial life just under the planet’s surface. Scientists are cautiously optimistic and indeed this is exciting news, but I wonder how an alien researcher might observe our own gassy world.

djennistan or the witch of endor

Happily, I never had any exposure to the fringe belief that Islam worships a false god, a lunar deity, and when such ideas were in circulation, they were apparently limited to the audience of televangelists in America—though still potentially a dangerous thing as the former president of the US also was so inspired and many will believe the same without any academic background. Such pointed statements are obviously meant for scandal and slander but really do a disservice to all faiths when it comes to the question of incongruities that are common to every religion and put ahead of scholarship and understanding notions that Islam is inherently violent or just other—as if any group has a monopoly on bad behaviour and intolerance.

Some suggested, seemingly with an agenda, that the creator god of the Muslims was not a true god but rather an idol that was previously worshiped in Mecca as a Moon god, the long-established place of pilgrimage having aboriginal cults of gods for every day of the year. There was one Hubal, housed in the Ka’aba, that  had a special reverence—being an idol hewn from possibly meteoritic stone that fell to Earth and later studies conflate this with the Hadj and Allah. The Quran (also being in the imaginations of many as something written in secret, untranslatable and inaccessible to outsiders) mentions that the grandfather of Mohammed was expected to sacrifice his son, the father of Mohammed, to this god—which is avoided in an intervention a little less gruesome than the Slaughter of the Innocents. Christianity has not only many borrowings but also a lot of concessions to pagan traditions and customs to what came before.  One of the more theologically fascinating beings that Islam incorporates from earlier mythology—and there’s no shame in that, is the supernatural creature known as the genie.

Belief in such familiars is not universal and not a tenet of faith necessarily, but some lore holds that jinn are ætherial beings, distinct from angels in that they have free-will like humans and as such can be good or evil. Genies inhabit a parallel universe known as Djinnestan and manifest themselves on Earth as something like shoulder angels and devils, competing moral advocates. Usually just the wicked are predisposed to taking bad advice but sometimes a good genie can help someone reform, and not just grant wishes in an ironic fashion. The particularly troublesome ones fell in with a character named Iblīs, who refused to bow to God’s latest creation—Man. This is a recurring theme but Iblīs and his followers refused to be impressed with Adam and Eve out of arrogance rather than not kneeling before any others but God. For this act of pridefulness, God condemned Iblīs and his followers to Hell for all eternity. God, however, commuted the sentence, at Iblīs’ request, to Judgment Day, so the dissembler could try to prove his case and demonstrate that humans were the inferior ones after all.

storyboard or loving vincent

Conceived over a year ago, the visually stirring first feature length painted film about the troubled, intense life and tragic early death of Vincent van Gogh called “Loving Vincent” is about to be completed and have its premiere. Dozens of highly skilled painters are acting as draftsmen, with scenes taking months to commit to the canvas. The brilliant artwork is certainly evocative of van Gogh’s style and the animators hope to recreate the artist’s world and encounters as he would have seen them.

bivouac oder boofen

One of my favourite blogs, Nag on the Lake, directs our attention to a website devoted to treading lightly and minimizing our footprint and range called Living in a Shoe Box. It looks like there are quite a few interesting ideas here but the one that caught our attention—though Lady faces no completion—featured this bicycle mounted trailer called the Wide-Path Camper. Conceived by designer Mads Johansen, this folding, modular unit—no bigger than one of those bicycle-hitch strollers—boasts quite a bit space and comfort and would be perfect for exploring the her native Denmark and much further a-field.

perfidy

Patterned after the Monday Demonstrations that brought down the regime of East Germany, the PEGIDA (Patriotsche Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes—Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident, the West) marches are growing in numbers and frequency but are still rivaled by counter demonstrations. The German government, rightly, condemns the movement as racist and xenophobic. Trying to lend a legitimising air to thuggish and insular attitudes that were first championed by football hooligans (at least in costume, one has a better idea of what one is up against), these marches are hardly proving to be a civil way to channel frustrations or fears, what with public opinion splintered, calls that immigrants refrain from conversing in their native language at home and arson-attacks on refugee housing. I believe there are two very different things occurring here and bigots always capitalize on this confusion: immigration politics are not threatening to displace one’s culture and the level of interaction that all of these marchers have had with any form of Islam is limited to seeing families out in public and making assumptions, which does not exactly equate to an agenda of systematically imposing one’s way of life and values. Petitioning one’s government over real concerns for reform is one thing and resorting to violence and fear-mongering is quite another. Ideology and identity are not the same thing—but both run both ways.

iconography or graven images

A very interesting set of quite different factors and historical influences came together, I recently learnt, in the fourth century to establish rich artistic traditions that allowed the Buddha, the Christ and the panoply of the Hindu gods to be portrayed in human forms for the first time and in a manner that was cultural diffuse and immediately recognisable. Though these movements took place around the same time, the religions were at different stages of development and acceptance at this point—what with the Brahmin’s gods already enjoying milennia of devotion, Siddhārtha Gautama having achieved enlightenment some eight hundred years prior and the latest incarnation of the Abrahamic faith in its fourth century.  Despite these difference, they all started adopting pictorial representations around the same time.
A maturing network of international trade is of course a contributing factor, as being able to mediate on a shared image of how Jesus and company ought to look rather than relying on more abstract translated texts and interpreted teachings would spread these big religions and ensure their survival, but it is not the whole story. Before we got to the images of the serene Buddha and Jesus Christ in his characteristic poses, the story of these two was communicated through symbolism, teaching aides that represented the bodhi tree, the footprint of Buddha or the Cross, the sign of the fisher of men. And while it does seem natural and an effective step that the adherents of Buddhism would create figures of a limited and iconic variety for the benefit of foreigners being introduced to the philosophy, for Christianity it was a break with ancient traditions and taboos of not depicting God or His manifestations.  The decision to show Jesus as a man may have happened in part because Constantine around this time declared that faith the official one of the empire, and Romans and Greeks, used to having statues of Dionysus, Hercules or Nike decorating their villas with triumphant flair, thought it was acceptable to have even more glorious statues of Jesus on display. As with Buddhism, the move was probably also good for the edification of foreign-speakers. Some three hundred years later, during the first few decades of the faith, Islam restored the proscription again representing the divine by human-hands by issuing currency for the Caliphate that only bore the word of God, instead of coins bearing the image of the head-of-state or other trappings.

Places of worship were becoming somewhat uniform in their delivery but the coin of the land was really the only mass-produced and reliable product of the Middle Ages in the West by any reckoning. Insisting on the rubic of a shared language was a powerful tool, and it is remarkable that this level of organisation developed in just as many decades as centuries it took for other religions—and without pictures. The Hindu gods and their different aspects were almost too innumerable to catalogue, but with the rise of the Gupta dynasty to power on the sub-continent at this same time, there was an ambitious and successful effort to standardise how each avatar looked and deported his- or herself. Because of this promotion and propaganda, one could communicate a certain devotion with a few accepted conceits. The personal nature of the gods and their care and custody would be instantly understood and copied.  A sketch on a napkin being equally holy as any statue in a temple, and the image is understood to be the deity itself, to be treated as a honoured guest.