arbeiter nr. 11811

Debuting on this day in 1927 at the Ufa-Palast-Zoo cinema in Berlin, the silent, expressionist dystopian drama Metropolis was director Fritz Lang’s vision of the eponymous science-fiction novel by Thea von Harbou. Filmed during the optimistic days of the Weimar Republik and informed by the philosophy of such attendant movements as Bauhaus, the ground-breaking piece forecasts, presciently, a bleak and oppressive future technocracy with a huge chasm separating the classes. With a legacy of immeasurable influence and launching numerous homages, it was inscribed on the UNESCO register of Memory of the World—the first film to receive this honour. The message of the movie, whose allegory is of course not meant as an instruction manual, is summed up in the final intertitle: „Mittler zwischen Hirn und Händen muss das Herz sein“—that is, “The mediator between the Head and Hands must be the Heart.”

project diana

Namesake of the Roman lunar goddess (twin sister of Apollo, establishing the naming convention for missions eventually taken up by civilian agencies) carried out by the US Army Signal Corps at a specially built laboratory with a power surplus transmitter array at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey achieved on this day in 1946 one of its initial aims, concomitantly establishing the discipline of radio astronomy, by demonstrating that a radar wave could be bounced off the surface of the satellite, sent and received by a terrestrial source. Previously no one knew for certain whether transmissions through the vacuum of space were possible. This monumentally large step not only accurately furnished the distance from the Earth to the Moon and hinted at mapping the terrain of other worlds, Project Diana in a sense began the Space Age.

refectory

Via friends TYWKIWDBI and Nag on the Lake, we find ourselves transported to the monastic complex of the town of Alcobaça, a Cistercian community famed for its gastronomical and vinicultural excellence and founded by Portugal’s first king Alfonso Henriques, which features among its Gothic elements a dining hall whose entrance is preceded with the rather abstruse admonishment: Respicte quia peccata Populi comdeitis—that is, Remember you eat the sins of the people. 

Otherwise perfectly proportion, the communal area has direct egress to the kitchen, which according to popular legend and rather practically, had a door to discourage gluttony, either measured for self-catering or as a monthly check on one’s girth with the passage two metres high but only thirty-two centimetres wide, a model pants-size for many though the cloth and cowl could be quite concealing in any circumstance. Perhaps we are misinterpreting the whole intent of this narrow doorway and it was rather meant to shame those who were not committed devoradores de pecados.  According to current lore, those who could not pass needed to diet until they could sidle and squeeze through. 

heaviside layer

On this day in 2006, with its seven-thousand-four-hundred-eighty-sixth performance Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera over took the composer and impresario’s other long-running stage piece Cats with the most iterations on Broadway in the latter’s eight-year run, twice-revived in the West End for twenty-one mostly parallel years in London. The establishing megamusical phenomenon, the piece has proved polarising and defining for the entertainment industry and arguably introduces quite a bar to entry.

schneebedeckt

Just a few local impressions from my walks yesterday and the day before.  We’ve gotten quite a bit of snow.

 

7x7

zip-tie guy: as bad as this act of terrorism was, the Ku Klux Coup (see previously) could have turned out much worse  

election, objection, ambition, sedition: another pitch-perfect Randy Rainbow political parody 

regrets only: Trump’s final missive confirming he would not be attending Joe Biden’s inauguration—cornerstone to a peaceful transition of power—is interpreted as another way of casting aspersions on a legitimate election and gets his account suspended from Twitter—permanently  

privilege check: race and the cos-play veneer of the invasion combined with remorse over more heavy-handed tactics over the summer allowed them to organise and launch their raid unchecked—see previously  

us capitol police: encomnia for officer killed protecting senators and congress members from the Blue Lives Matter crowd  

jericho march: more Cos-Play with Evangelical Christians (previously) rallying in D.C. blowing shofars

no pension, no secret security detail, no travel allowance, no chance to hold high office again: a second impeachment has consequences even a few days out and Congress is moving swiftly to make it happen, nearly as fast as Mr Rainbow above or Lego

monogrammed

The comprehensive rebranding—new uniforms, colour scheme, packaging, signage plus digital assets and merchandising (see also here and here) returning to the fast food franchise’s corporate branding circulated and experimented with from 1969 through 1999. Especially brilliant is the letterform, a double-struck B and K in a bun for Burger King by Jones Knowles Ritchey.  The mascot and monarch are not featured in this new roll-out but we are assured that he has not abdicated or been otherwise dethroned.

context collapse

Disturbing we learn, via the Morning News, that whilst perhaps less immediately dangerous and radicalising than some other conspiracy theories, with may possibly started as a tasteless joke, there are some who doubt the existence of Helen Keller—an individual who was able to overcome significant obstacles and go on to author a dozen books including one on socialism that was put on the Nazi biblioclasm and campaigned for civil rights, perhaps desperate for the incredulity of a biography having accomplished more than their able-bodied selves. While it might be tempting to fault this latest theory on the naïvety of digital natives, it is endemic to older generations of course as well—found in the sensibilities of those who ascribe the ingenuity of Antiquity to Ancient Aliens, those triggered by climate activism and those who make the ‘Mandela Effect’ not the statesman’s accomplishments and social reforms but rather misremembered childhood memories of the shared delusion of a cohort and not wanting to admit that it is dismissively, demeaningly racist to not accept Shaquille O’Neal as a genie in a movie rather than the comedian Sinbad and some paranormal phenomenon must be invoked.