boom! bonk, bonk on the head

Vis-à-vis the mounting refugee situation as hundreds of thousands families and individuals fleeing war-torn Syria and other regions transit through Asia Minor and the Balkans or risk a harrowing trip across the Mediterranean—trafficked or through their own determination—for Germany and to eventually be resettled, the ever brilliant BLDGBLOG presents a sort of alternate and modern historical study with the manner in which the US dealt with its own possibly bidden (Germany’s is considered inviting too) crisis for the care and housing of migrants, especially of unaccompanied minors that surged on the Mexican border from points further South, quickly overwhelmed accommodating institutions.
Cynical as it sounds, finding storage solutions for surplus is pretty dehumanizing and the notion of a generation brought up by ghost-malls and derelict warehouses makes me think of that Star Trek episode where the “onlies,” the children are the only one left in a dilapidated, crumbing world—without the “grups” to take care of them. While searching for a pharmaceutical answer to immortal youth, a plague was inadvertently unleashed that attacked any grown-up, past puberty, and caused them to succumb to the disease within seven days. As childhood spans several centuries, with the pre-teens protecting the younger ones and the whole planet having fallen to wrack and ruin, until Doctor McCoy isolates a cure and Starfleet dispatches teachers and counselors to the planet to help rebuild it. Temporary shelters—hopefully without the potential of becoming a more permanent limbo—are not much better in Germany with up to ten thousand refugees daily entering Germany and corralled in empty sports halls and other locations, quickly over-crowded and with inadequate facilities. No amount of shuffling and hide-and-seek will address the underlying geo-political causes but may result in more dignified housing for both new-comers and established residents, already struggling with exorbitant rents and gentrification.

vulgate or hashtag hastings

It strikes me as a little paradoxical that the claim to the Divine Right of Kings comes of the newer, reformed protestant tradition with monarchs dual-hatted as heads of state churches, the Church of England, the Church of Norway, et alia rather than from something more seeped in history. This political and religious creed, holds that the kings rules by God’s grace alone is not subject to any earthly estate or institution, including the will of the papacy. In other words, the monarchy was invested with both civic and spiritual powers, bucking ancient divisions of authority, which were nonetheless prone to overlap and currying favour or displeasure and later developments, revolts and the spread of democratic-thinking cut short the tenure of a monarch, but this doctrine. Prior to the Reformation—however, alliances were built and strengthened through military campaigns, persecuted under the papal banner, that continued nearly without interruption up until that schism for Western Christianity in the form of the Crusades, launched against whomever was deemed to be a heretic. The first instance of this type of campaigning on a grand scale had a different character than the retaking of the Holy Land but there are definitely parallels with the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 and the First Crusade that coalesced just three decades later.

As way of asserting figurative and more literal legitimacy for inheriting his father’s Norman duchy, the ambitious invasion carried out Gullaume le Bâtard that made him known to history as William the Conqueror—and made crusading a popular method of securing power, turned on the caprice of the wind. To secure his dignity as heir-apparent, though born out-of-wedlock and thus against the marriage of aristocratic families that was sanctioned by the Church, William convinced the Pope that he could bring order to an otherwise recalcitrant England—after all, in the most remote reaches there were monastic, self-governing communities, archbishops had been appointed without papal consultation and they were even conducting mass in the native vernacular. With the backing of the support of the Church, William readied his armies to cross the Channel. English forces also braced themselves for the invasion, and both waited and waited as the prime season to wage war came and nearly passed, waiting for a favourable gust to send the Norman sailing ships across. At cross-purposes to this undertaking, William’s distant cousins, the Norse raiders were poised for an assault from the North. While the distraction would have been surely a welcome one—though the question of claim and settlement is an interesting alternative reality to ponder, the Vikings were praying for winds in the opposite direction. At the last moment before harvest time pulled away the conscripts, the Norse invaders fell on Wales. English forces watching the Norman coast were immediately deployed to the other front—and rather miraculously were able to defeat the Vikings definitely and discourage any future forays. The very next day after the Norsemen had retreated, the winds shifted and propelled the Norman fleet to Hastings. Though drained and shattered from taken on the Vikings, the English forces put up a noble fight in resisting the onslaught from the South, and might have even managed to rebuff William’s troops, had the English held the high-ground and not been lured to fight the Normans on the beaches—where the flat terrain negated England’s advanced manœuverability on uneven ground. It’s a little baffling to think how one event that nearly didn’t happen could create the precedence for such later rifts and clefts. Changing a ruler’s appointment to something akin to God’s lieutenant—and later manifestations, just seem rather to be deferring the argument, until it declines into ochlocracy, mob rule, mobile vulgus.

bamberger freiheit

It’s become a little tradition for us to visit the big gathering of antiques vendors spread throughout the Altstadt of Bamberg held annual on the Day of German Reunification (Tag der Deutsche Einheit). Though we sadly did not find any treasures to bring home this time, it’s always fun to look and find some of the same relics and artefacts from last year still up for offer and to explore a bit of the historic city.

Of the Old Rathaus—which today houses on of the largest porcelain collections in Europe, a fine place for window-shopping too, there’s a simplified legend that it was built on the artificial island that straddles the Regnitz, the tributary that divides the city in order to isolate a particularly tyrannical mayor. The citizens of Bamberg never had such an intolerable civil leader, but rather, like Nuremberg, aspired for Imperial Immediacy and (Reichstadt, only answerable to the emperor) but the episcopal and secular division of the city—the Lord Bishop’s borders were statutorily defined by the Regnitz—and civil authorities hoped that a little engineered encroachment might consolidate powers. Though the domains remained under separate governance, forcing the bishop and his retinue to pass through the civic hall did go far in keeping the Church in check.

5x5

pork rembrants: Liartown, U.S.A. now offering an Apple Cabin calendar, chronological accuracy guaranteed

everyday-carry: illustrated evolution of common objects by decade

victory garden: hobbyists were encouraged to irradiate fruit, vegetable and flower seeds in the 1950s and 1960s and see what mutations thrived

fire dance with me: arcade game dance-off to celebrate the weird genius of Twin Peaks

citizen science: the Pocketlab is an affordable Tricorder to conduct ad hoc experiments

attica or cultural studies

Though best remembered international for stellar performances of roles that were not able to contain her energy and talent, stock-characters in good but less acclaimed films like the happy hooker in Never on a Sunday, the good-time girl-type, naughty nun, or gal Friday in Topkapı, Greek singer and actress of the stage and screen, Melina Mercouri, had another equally impassioned calling as a politician. Finding herself exiled, stateless—her passport having been revoked for outspoken socialist sentiments against the junta government of a cadre of conservative colonels who overthrew the liberal government in 1967, while away on performing on Broadway, Mercouri—along with other prominent members of the Greek diaspora focused attention and shame on the military coup d’état.
Despite tepid support in Greece and an overall laughable platform that no one took seriously, the junta lingered on and on for seven unbearable years—not ousted until their adventures with a one-Greece-policy by invading the Cyprus that was so poorly executed and resulted in the partition of the island nation rather than its annexation. Once Mercouri could return to Athens, this “last Greek goddess,” as she was nicknamed, decided to focus her energies on rebuilding her homeland—which had suffered considerably in the intervening years with dismantling of cultural capital and censorship. When questioned on her credentials for entering politics as an actress, Mercouri retorted by questioning what qualified lawyers to represent the people. Mercouri went on to become the Minister of Culture, and lamenting that it was always just the chiefs of finance that met and that money was not certainly everything—a pretty bold truth to speak, especially in the present atmosphere where Greek financial ministers are characters people might actually recognise by name—and called together, for the first time, all the European ministers of culture and the arts. The legacy of this summit survives today in the rotating European Cultural Capital and the open dialogue it invites with a less rarefied form of diplomacy that everyone can appreciate. Mercouri was also the first voice in a growing choir of protests and calls of vandalism to have the so-called Elgin marbles returned to the Acropolis and for the protection, stopping trafficking and the repatriation of other national treasures.

badenov, godunov

Though for some the names Mel Blanc and Tex Avery are more instantly recognisible among the luminaries of animation, there was another Man of a Thousand Voices that gave life to as many memorable characters during his long and varied free-lance career.

The name Paul Frees with mention of his collaborator Natasha Fatale and their mission to capture moose and squirrel for Fearless Leader probable starts to materialise right away, but there is an endless succession of equally jarring, cameo performances: Frees was also voiced Morocco Mole in Secret Squirrel (never realising those two phrases were associated with same actor), the Pillsbury Dough-boy, the Ghost Host of Disney’s Haunted Mansion, Toucan Sam, Burgermeister Meisterburger, the Tree, Rook and the Cat of The Last Unicorn, styled John Lennon and George Harrison in the Beatles cartoon series, various villains for the Superman, Aquaman, Banana Splits Adventure Hours, the Knight Rider’s nemesis K.A.R.R, plus countless other narrations and re-dubbing to clean up the garbled lines of other actors.

half a league, half a league, half a league onward

Though there are of course many historical pitched-battles and sieges that are received through careful scholarship that dissect the propaganda of the victors and the element of psychological warfare that’s always been upheld on the home-front, the first truly modern war in the way that we think of it, with embedded correspondence and mediated public sentiment was the international quagmire—from which we’ve never managed to extricate ourselves—that spanned from 1853 to 1856 called the Crimean War. For a war with so many modern elements, including explosives, rail-transportation and the concepts of triage and sanitation through hospital adminstratrix Florence Nightingale, it was very much rooted in religious contentions with the Russian Empire’s desire for crusade and recapturing the Holy Land from the Ottomans. Previous conflict, with collaboration among later belligerents, had established British protectorates for Christian enclaves, with the collateral control of the Suez shipping-lanes also under British mandate. Banking on continued support from the French and British (who had previously allied with them against French hegemony during the height of the Napoleonic Wars), Russia moved to attack the Ottoman territories and claim the Holy Land for the Orthodox Church, enraging Napoleon III, who felt he owed his legitimacy to papal allegiance—but the various controlling churches were pretty much pleased with the arrangements as they stood and had expressed no ambition to be liberated.
Despite confessional differences, France sided with Britain and the Ottoman Empire to rebuff the Russian advance. It strikes me as strange quirk of the march of history that Fredric Auguste Bartholdi’s work that would eventually become known as the Statue of Liberty was originally conceived to commemorate the to be dynamited Suez Canal, but due to the conflict she was sent to America instead. I wonder how that conversation went. As much as religious intrigues were brought down onto the mundane level and invoked as a casus belli and the home-front exposed to developments in real-time—something that the rear-detachment in England could really rally around, far greater than unmaterialised consequences and grand engineering projects. The immortal prosody by Lord Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” was interned in the public imagination nearly as quickly as the latest news dispatches and was an invocation, “Like Remember the Alamo,” that victory might be snatched from the hands of defeat—though the Franco-British powers had the upper-hand and were just ensuring that this advantage be retained. It is dangerous to second-guess the purity of one’s intent, but Russia—with access blocked to the Black Sea because of Ottoman control, had historically lacked routes for trade until the foundation of Saint Petersburg on the navigable Volga some one hundred and fifty years prior, the port built to better supply the British with raw materials, lumber, to build up their naval prowess. Having their export limited to this one centre of exchange, Imperial Russia embarked on a series of desperate but dogged overtures for the taking and keeping of the strategic stronghold of Sevastopol and thus access to the sea. The terms of surrender were rather humiliating for Russia in the end with all gains capitulated and Russia cut-off from international markets—at least to a large extent as only the inland routes of Saint Petersburg and the northern Baltic outpost of Archangelsk in the White Sea was not reachable in the Winter months and had been somewhat decomissioned in favour of promoting the city of spires and masts on the Volga—created to counter-balance the mercantile impositions. The Russian Empire was not allowed to keep a fleet in the Black Sea until the defeat of the Ottomans in War World I and the subsequent Bolshevik revolution that saw that Imperium reconstituted under new auspices. The immediate effects of this crushing commercial defeat further brokered the sale of Alaskan territory to the US—fearing that the lands would just be taken away as retribution by British-Canada, but if they sold, however unwillingly, at least Russia would get something out of the transaction.

hive-mind, motorcade

Hearing reports of the big trends at the Frankfurt International motor show (the IAA, die Internationale Automobil-Ausstellung) were finally broaching the potential of driverless-carriages and that markets may be losing interest in gilding lilies (though coverage was somewhat tarnished by other events in the industry).

Thinking along similar lines as this interesting analysis and projection from Vox magazine, while I would not necessarily embrace having the one remaining risky and frenetic activity that’s allowed to us anymore despite the potentially deadly consequences of letting a human pilot a massively over-engineered craft taken away from us—shedding yet another experience for something overly-safe and sanitised, I would nonetheless being treated to a special valet service, where I did to fret about my particular parking handicap and be dropped off curb-side and trust that my vehicle will find itself an orderly place to keep itself until summoned. Transporters could negotiate among themselves the logistics of double- and triple-parking. Civil engineering would need to reserve far less space for idle vehicles. There are always trade-offs, I suppose, and it does seem particularly worrying for teamsters, lorry-drivers, whose role in supply and shipping would be as quickly made redundant and the demographic shift for the labour market would be as monumental as change that results any more intelligent (but not reduced, I think, but rather the opposite) traffic. What do you think? Is it time to take off the training-wheels?