cat-burglar or level-boss

Though often subtly alluded to and perhaps the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty, nineteenth century gentleman burglar turned international criminal syndicate mastermind, Adam Worth, is virtually unknown. Celebrated in his day—albeit no one knew his true identity as he hob-knobbed with Europe’s elite and discreetly ran a network of underlings who committed the actual robberies, and always without violence—the cardinal code of his organisation being never to use firearms, Worth managed to elude capture by Scotland Yard and other national police forces, as well as the sleuths of Pinkerton’s Detective Agency.  Some one ought to make a movie about this original gangster.
Worth operated at a time when associates referred to “baby-face,” gums, sister, lumpy—or by some other physical attribute in case of any eavesdroppers, and though while based in Paris, Worth was faced with none of those stakes that fostered a criminal underworld in America with Prohibition, Worth did open and run the first Bar Americain in the city, which held on its upper-storey an illicit gambling hall that could be transformed in an instant into a sedate salon peopled by figures lounging and reading newspapers through some ingenious pneumatic works that hid the gaming tables when trouble approached. There was also a sense of respect above this honour among thieves displayed by Worth’s own arch-nemesis in the personage of Allen Pinkerton, who had spearheaded the hunt for Worth for decades in the US (where he regularly chanced to visit his parents, who knew nothing about his exploits), London, Paris, Greece and Constantinople, who was relentless like Inspector Javert’s relentless chase for fugitive Jean Valjean but ultimately held the outlaw in high esteem.

johnny-scoff-law oder mannheim steam-roller

Over the holiday weekend, we flagrantly violated the prohibition on dancing during Easter when H and I went to the Time Warp event held in the massive May Market Halls (Maimarktgelande) of the industrial zone of Mannheim. I think that transgression is forgivable; H captured far superior foottage of the DJs, music and dazzling light shows. I was somewhat familiar with the city, though during this visit, we weren’t really afforded the chance to explore—just possibly to eliminate anything we’d might regret having not seen, had we partied until dawn.

I also knew a smattering about the city’s mechanised and innovative heritage as well, what with Mannheim being intimately connected with automotive pioneers Karl and Bertha Benz, but I discovered that that association is really barely scratching the surface. Besides the car, Mannheim was also instrumental in the development of the zeppelin airships and the jet engine for civilian applications, but the forerunner of all of these inventions too came about in Mannheim, I learned over the name of a campus adjacent to our venue, Drais—for Grand Duke Karl Drais, whose acumen and engineering skills produced the first so called Laufmaschine, Running-Machine, dubbed the dandy-horse, before becoming known as the modern Velocipide, the bicycle. Supposedly bizarre weather in the year 1816, just before Drais’ inaugural bike ride from Mannheim to Schwetzingen and then from Gernsbach to Baden-Baden, famous routes we were partially retracing that late evening from the Autobahn, had resulted in a poor harvest and prompted the population to resort to slaughtering all the horses for sustenance—or at least unable to share any of their grain with livestock however useful, and in turn inspired the professor of agriculture and physics to find a substitute for individual transportation.

As an after-though, Drais developed the keyboard as an input-device for the typewriter, as well. I will have to look into that further, since something known as well as the back of one’s hand as cliqued as never forgetting how to ride a bike is hardly something to just pass up.  The bit about Citizen Drais being elevated with a dukedom was so that he might be able to profit from his genius and enjoy a bit of a monopoly on his bicycle, being that this German state did not recognise patent-law at this time, but personal intrigues and war made Drais renounce his title and the idea fell into public domain and was championed by many others as a bridge for later discoveries, like the above automobile and the airplane, Benz and the Wright Brothers both first in bicycle manufacture. Not only was the introducing of the bicycle a touchstone of democratising and liberation, pedal-power also indispensably shaped the world as we know it.

happy Easter, fröhe Ostern!

wampum or echo base

Some are criticising the 2008 decision by the Norwegian Ministry of Defense with the approval of NATO to mothball and sell its secret arctic seaport at Olavsvern, three-decades in the making at a cost of over half a billion dollars, at less than one percent of the construction price as one of the biggest blunders of recent military history. 

These apparent pangs of remorse of not having any ready presence near the North Pole are much compounded by the fact that the bargain-hunting holding group have sublet the property—now off-bounds from any government oversight—to a fleet of Russian research vessels, ostensibly prospecting for untapped sources of petroleum in the contested reigon, that wintered in cavernous compound. Given, however, that the privatisation took place under the auspices of a government whose then leader now heads the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation as a whole, I wonder if there is not something else going on here. Despite the complete lack of economic necessity to divest itself from any of its holdings, whether or not of dubious strategic value five years ago, the transaction seemed to belong to a buyers’ market and no vanity environmentalist, troll-cordonnier, film-crew, patient investor or even a mad-scientists seeking a hidden lair materialised at the time—for the first public auction of such an installation was advertised online. I wonder if there is not some sort of game of entrapment going on here.

five-by-five

huldufólk: elf-conservationists are stalling construction projects all over Iceland

pink punk: fun renditions of the theme from Blake Edwards’s Pink Panther

upstairs, downstairs: amazing and intricate stairwell concept models

the ballad of max headroom: rewritten by machine on new technology 

pick-ups, perfume and pasta: fifteen commercial ventures directed by David Lynch

salonnière or narrative structure

The ever intriguing BLDGBlog has a marvelously curated preview of an upcoming series of seminars chaired by the Flea Folly Architects of London on narrative architecture, inviting one to imagine a cityscape made with the vision and distinct styles of story-tellers in all media. The group’s own venture to create a serpentine plot “disguised” as an incredible, geometric urban-setting—as illustrated through Grimm City, wherein a fairy-tale Gotham sprawls as projections of the eponymous folklorist’s own enchantments, and rather the opposite of being inspired by the some of the places associated with their research and story-gathering, I think gives prospective acolytes a taste of what the workshop might offer.

columbian exchange

A pairing of thoughtful articles from Vox and Æon magazines present some really interesting insights and unresolved questions about ushering in the Anthropocene epoch.
There are many contenders for when the handiwork of man might have outstripped, outpaced geological change, from the nebulous reaches of time when early humans first hunted giant mammals to extinction—although the Holocene Age (Greek for wholly new) seems to me to include the rise of man, the landing of the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria that introduced global trade and New World transplants to the Old, a point in 1610 when green-house gases began an uptick due to land-management practice, the Industrial Revolution, the atomic bomb, to the nuclear winter of 1964. While it is an arbitrary distinction to some extent and many researchers will continue to champion their favourites in terms of delineation once—if a consensus is reached, what’s nearly as significant as the change that man is imparting on the environment is that we’re adverse, maybe unable to recognise or reconcile is when and how man became estranged from Nature—fancied as no longer of Nature but rather Nature was made man’s ward, with us as not very fit caretakers. What do you think? For all the eons that have gone before, is this debate a reasonable one?  It can nonetheless become a helpful one, I believe.

five-by-five

chizukigou: check out these lovely Japanese map legend symbols

système vidéo domestique: French artist repackages contemporary series and films in VHS wrapping

SMPTE bars: a look behind the scenes at the calibration tools of our seemingly seamless electronic world

maki-maki: sushi roll bath-towel concept

mirror, mirror: a look at Star Trek’s departures into an alternate reality