who cares!

Apparently using White House letterhead deprived his preferred mode of communication (see previously here and here), Citizen Trump to no effect and with zero geopolitical consequence has written to the Screen Actors’ Guild, the US labour union for film, television and radio performers as well as journalists, to pre-emptively resign once word circulated that the Guild would eject him for notorious behaviour, ill-betting a member of the organisation. In his signature immodest way—also used with a host of UN agencies and NATO partners—he rubbishes the union as doing very little for him whereas Trump has greatly helped “the cable news television business (said to be a dying platform with no much time left until I got involved in politics), and created thousands of jobs at networks such as MSDNC and Fake News CNN, among many others.” Despite parallel efforts to digitally remove his cameo appearances, Trump goes on to cite his roles in Zoolander, Home Alone 2, and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps as well as reality television.

the birth of a nation

Highly controversial, contentious and irresponsible though a landmark moment in the entertainment industry and film technique, D.W. Griffith (previously) debuted his three hour long cinematic spectacle in Los Angeles to an auditorium of three-thousand guests (first shown on New Year’s Day to a much smaller crowd at an opera house in Riverside, California under its original title The Clansman) on this day (not coincidentally the date that the ceding states reunited as the Confederacy in 1861) in 1915. The most ambitious and complex film produced to date with a number of innovations with a full orchestral score, an intermission between the first and second parts and sophisticated use of the cameras, the romanticised history chronicles the Civil War and Reconstruction through the experience of two families, one Northern, the Stonemans, and one Southern, the Camerons. Divisive from the beginning, the film wrecklessly promoted the negationist Lost Cause ideology that portrays the break-away states as just and heroic with all of its attendant supporters and reinforced, writ-large the worst, contemptible slurs and stereotypes that white people harboured for Black people. Ahistorical depictions of the Ku Klux Klan as a paramilitary police force that preserved social order caused the hate group to reorganise within just a few months after the premiere, the group having disbanded in 1872.

one-way ticket

Via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links (much more to explore here), we receive a lightly macabre update to the former dedicated rail-line in London that transported the departed and mourners from the overcrowded city out to a cemetery in Woking with news that the purpose-built Waterloo Necropolis station built in 1854 (expanded in 1901) will be transformed into a suite of flats. The seal is that of the company granted the charter to construct the grounds and arrange the logistics and transportation. Though large portions of the building were destroyed in World War II during a 1941 air raid, what remains is witness to the automation of the funerary arts with halls designed for private service and hydraulic lifts to bring the briers on to the loading docks below, a shift towards hygienic awareness (a dread cholera epidemic decades earlier had overwhelmed London’s graveyards) and separate entrances that showed that even the dead were expected to be class conscious.

drahtfunk im amerikanischen sector

From the first broadcast on this day in 1946 from the switchboard exchange of the Reichspost on Winterfeldtstraße in West Berlin for the next several months until a medium wave transmitter could be procured and installed, news and political reporting from the US occupational authorities for the German people, counterprogramming to what was regarded as a propaganda put out by the Soviets, could only be distributed over telephone lines, hence the original DIAS call-sign before becoming RIAS—Rundfunk in the American Sector. Following the Berlin Blockade (previously), the terrestrial sender broadcasted each Sunday at noon the chimes of the Freiheitsglocke installed in the Schöneberg Rathaus, modelled off the Liberty Bell, followed by a short recitation from the “Declaration of Freedom.” Expanding into entertainment with the station’s own orchestra and choir, RIAS and related stations came to cover almost all of West and East Germany (see link up top), on the air until 1993, when facilities and frequency slots were handed over to Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international broadcaster.

happy martian new year

For a host of arbitrary and capricious reasons—the same that plague and beset our own terrestrial time-keeping buoyed by a compelling amount of research, observation and calculation to synchronise our calendars and fix our neighbouring planet to a chronological and epochal marker, today marks Year 36, falling on the Red Planet’s vernal equinox. MY 1 coincided with 11 April 1955 here on Earth when astronomers were first able monitor and to study the seasonal changes to the landscape in depth and could better articulate what was going on. Because a day on Mars (Sol) is a bit longer than our own and because of the planet’s superior orbit, it takes twice as long to circle the sun, hence only at MY 36. The probe Tianwen1 will join a number of other steadfast explorers to celebrate.

barbarians

Via JWZ which is so much more than an excellent resource for quiz nights once bars get to re-open, we learn that there’s of course equivalent phrases in other languages that convey the same sense as the scribal gloss and line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar for encountering something incomprehensible—dismissively or otherwise—completely with a directional graphic showing where each language might attribute the impenetrable sounds. When a Hebrew-speaker is pinned in a corner, for them “it sounds Chinese” and conversely for someone whose mother tongue is Korean, something that seems like gibberish smacks of Hebrew, reportedly. For Germans, it’s Kauderwelsch, a trade patois. Ich verstehen nur Bahnhof. Chinese itself defers to the celestial language of the gods.  What’s all Greek to you? Especially appealing is the etymology of the term Gringo coming from the similar expression “hablar en griego” and how in Esperanto, one sighs, “tio estas volapukaĵo”—that’s a Volapük thing, a contemporary rival constructed language invented by a priest in Baden.

classic of changes

Via friend of the blog par excellence Nag on the Lake, we are shown some snow oracles that artists and flâneuse Jan Baracz began noticing on the storm grates around New York City as the warmth and gas seeped through to form patterns. I’ve found myself also transfixed by the same uniformity or unevenness on display during these periods of respite and thaw between the flurries but had not made the leap from melting redaction to actual divinatory hexagrams like those encountered in the I Ching. I’ll need to consult the sidewalk for a reading next time I walk through town.  For instance, the one in the bottom right corner (though there's only five lines) would be 坤, kūn or Field, and signifies the receptive, acquiesing Earth.

the love of freedom brought us here

With the organisation and the planned settlement of the commonwealth of Liberia established four years prior, the Society for the Colonization of Free People of Colour of America constituted to encourage the migration, repatriation of African Americans to the continent sponsored its first voyage of eighty-eight individuals on this day in 1820, departing from New York harbour to the colony of Mississippi-in-Africa on the Pepper Coast, southwest of the Sierra Leone Province of Freedom (previously) established in 1786 by the London-based Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor.

Though some abolitionist and Quakers who supported the society thought that the emancipated and formerly enslaved individuals might fare better outside of the systemic prejudice of the United States, the society’s motives were pure racism, uncomfortable with the growth of non-white population since the conclusion of the Revolutionary War and mounting pressure from slave-holders to do something about the free population lest they stoke rebellion—hopeful that the concession could avoid a civil war, whose tensions were already primed.

Apparently under considerable duress (at gun point), Zolu Duma, the Gola ruler who also ostensibly was positioned to profit from Triangular Trade, was persuaded to sell the land that would become the capital Monrovia (named after the fifth US president and plantation-owner) and surrounding territory. Of the four thousand that immigrated there, unwelcome by the indigenous population that they were displacing and the harsh environment, less than half survived in the coming decades and were forced to grow cash-crops for export to repay their passage. Finding the situation untenable and suffering privations on par with what they had experienced on the other side of the Atlantic, Liberia revolted and declared its independence from the US in 1847, the first colonial-holding in Africa to do so. Its status as a republic was not recognised by reunited America until after the Civil War in 1862.