feuilleton

Quartz presents a really fascinating and under-appreciated glimpse on the strange, strained affair that the Chinese government has with Western social-networking heralds and mavens.

The dominant sites are banned from public-consumption, although it is not as if the average Chinese citizens were unaware of their existence and most businesses and state organs maintain their own internet presence on the same blocked sites. Possibly in order to curb curiosity and assuage rebellion, the state news agency Xinhua is featuring a segment of selected tweeted and shared items to give its audience a glimpse of how China is portrayed around. The articles seem pretty anodyne and cherry-picked to cast the country in the best light, but then again most regimes have highly propagandised mouth-pieces. Learning of this and of the sobering, unfamiliar mirror universe of applications that the Chinese make do with reminded me of the living tradition of the “lectores”—that is, news-readers, of the Cuban cigar factories, which is a really rich and fascinating story in its own right. The scope is of course very different and attestedly, the individual whose job it was to read to the workers as they rolled cigars usually elevated by popular consent, there for the emendation of the others. The juxtaposition of someone first anchoring the national, official newspaper, however, and the moving on to literature in the afternoon—whether subversive, unvetted or otherwise, makes me wish that this broadcast feuilleton might prove just as entertaining and broadening.

5x5

put the needle on the record: hard-won footage of a stylus on vinyl on a microscopic-scale

your moment of zen: cat serenely balances anything placed on her foot

spoiler-alert: Interstellar’s four-dimensional finale was filmed on an actual set, not just a computer-generated green-screen

atomic gardening: lethal doses of radiation have been used since the 1950s to create heartier, mutated food-crops

moai: neglected colossal US presidential busts in search of a home

pulp fiction or the sackfull of news

Advances in printing and enterprising publishers of Europe’s early modern period led to an explosion of literacy and voracious appetite for reading material. Long before penny dreadfuls, comic books and social-mediums, itinerate salesmen touted a compact and cheap format called chapbooks (known as Volksbucher in German), a single sheet of paper folded to accommodate as many as twenty four pages and was stitched together rather than bound. Publishers, with low overhead and minimal exposure to the frailties of public taste, would sell supplies to sometimes hapless, wandering booksellers on credit, who went from door to door or had a booth at the market.
The seller’s prospects and the success or failure of given titles to sell provided invaluable feedback and helped determined what would be reprinted and the character of the genre. These pamphlets covered all sorts of topic, most literate adults also trying their hands at writing—history, education, health, politics, travelogues, often through anecdotal and superficially consulted sources with a repetition and formulaic approach, and often bore the viral, most popular woodcuts of the day—whether that illustration had anything to do with the content or not. Though much criticised as pap for the masses, the surviving bulk of these booklets are cultural artefacts that reveal aspects of life during the Renaissance that would not have been preserved elsewhere.

5x5

flight-path: merry prankster living near an airport welcomes fretful passengers to the wrong city

i want to believe: nature reserve in Vancouver had the most screen time of any of the X-Files stars

prefab: Chinese engineers and architects construct flat-pack skyscrapers in record time

the place of shining light: holographic projector used to recreate the Bamiyan Buddha

identity politics: 1967 Mike Wallace documentary on the homosexuals

forbidden colours or darkly adapted eye

I am not positive that the so-called chimerical colours aren’t an explanation of that dress and the phenomena doesn’t truly strike me as an optical illusion and something more akin to a more intense exercise than one subjects his or her eyes to, but nonetheless catching a fleeting glimpse of the stygian colours—that is something both dark and super-saturated, is something to behold. There are other flavours of colours outside the visual gamut, what can be displayed, reproduced, or seen due to the structure of our eyes or even imagined in the conventional sense, but these contrasting hues and resultant impossible blue are suggestive of the mythological river Styx that separated the world of the living from the underworld.

To achieve the effect, one ought to stare at the target within the yellow circle for a full minute, then glance over the black square. Staring at the bright spot fatigues certain colour and light receptors (not like an after-image burnt into a television screen) and then those receptors that are used primarily to boost night-vision are excited, and one should briefly see the contradictory spectre. Maybe some have the ability to see such things everywhere—although the concept of colours can be communicated to an extent, I suppose we never know what another person perceives, and there was probably also a time not too long ago when unnatural colours like hot-pink or the florescent- and neon-tinged ones were unheard of and novel. Other descriptors include luminous and hyperbolic, and I think it would be fun to give names to that whole spectrum of overlapping colours and challenge our brains and eyes to see the impossible. Are these chimera colours—like the hot, bitter, baby and shocking, once seen unable to be unseen or must they be conjured up every time?

everyone knows hoverboards don’t work on water

I used to pass this charity hospital chapel (Spitäle Kirche) that’s been converted into a gallery space for local artists in Würzburg almost on a daily basis while I was discovering the city.

This museum at the head of the Old Bridge over the Main below the Marienberg Fortress, once dedicated to the Fourteen Holy Helpers, always made me think of the courthouse that gets struck by lightning in Back to the Future. The first instalment of the movie trilogy was released for US Independence Day weekend exactly three decades ago and the sequel travels forward from the 1985 of the characters’ past-present thirty years to our future now of 2015 (21 October). Where are the flying cars I was promised? Maybe it really is like Alex P. Keaton said upon ordering his father to ask his mother out to the prom, “My name is Darth Vader; I am an extra-terrestrial from the planet Vulcan.”

justice served or shamers gonna shame

Writing for the Daily Beast, columnist Ben Collins, together with humourist and author Jon Ronson, confronts the grave and impending travesty of social-justice that social-media is courting to the detriment and inattention of most of the other potentially positive aspects of these different venues.
I suppose, like the general drift of the article, that memorialising faults and faux pas is a way to claim political power over others, whether or not disguised behind one or more masks or exposed, known and recognised, for otherwise pleasant and civil people who’ve no truck with politics—nor in indignities neither. Members of that good company would also not like to be confronted with past blunders, embarrassments or regrets—and one’s known by the company one keeps, but perhaps with the tremolo-courage of anonymity and expediency that has no time for manners (or reflection) they hope to bully others before they’re victims of the same treatment. What do you think? Not everyone has lost his or her shoulder angels, sense of self-censorship, and genuine yearning to learn something or have a conversation (an intellectual rather than visceral response) but in distancing ourselves from those users don’t we risk fuelling this phenomena all the same in abandoning certain forums as the domain of trolls?

sunday drive: gemünden am main

Driving back for the work-week—the weekends are always too short but the intervening time does not drag on too awfully—I decided to take the scenic route which we’d just traced the day before, exploring Lohr and that narrow projection of Bavaria that extends into Hessian territory all the way to Aschaffenburg.
 It certainly was a more pleasant experience than rumbling along the Autobahn and I took the chance to stop in the town of Gemünden am Main—so named because it is where the tributaries of the Sinn and Frankish Saale empty (the streams’ mouths) into the River Main. Naturally this confluence was a strategically important spot and sometime in the early thirteenth century the Count of Rieneck erected this castle and keep as a toll-station to control traffic and trade along the waterways.
Only ruins of Schloβ Schreneburg remain but the view is an impressive one and is now a venue for open-air concerts and a home for bats. Competing claims on the land by the dioceses of Würzburg and Fulda, especially after the line of the family Rieneck went extinct, even saw the construction of successively higher castles on the rolling hills above Scherenburg, since levelled, to dominate the Main below. The waterways are still important components of the transportation infrastructure for the region, and the rail-links that run parallel supplement the connections. I think I’ll start taking this route more often in fair weather and get a better taste of what’s here for us to discover.