gdańsk

Arriving in the historic city late at night, we took in a quick view of the iconic row of Hanseatic buildings lit up over the Motława where the Vistula empties into the Baltic before getting an early start the next morning to take in the sites and learn as much as we complex and storied trade and ship-building port, principal entry point of commerce for Pomerania and greater Poland.

Walking the length and breadth of the main city and old town behind the riverfront promenade of granaries, ancient cranes and accounting bureaus and toured among other places the fifteenth century Saint Mary’s Basilica, the one of the largest brick churches in the world and containing priceless works of art (The Last Judgment by Hans Memling) as well as an astrological clock from the early fourteen hundreds by Hans Düringer along the Royal Route (Ulica Długa) between the Golden and Green Gates—the latter originally housing the Gdańsk residence of the kings, then presidential office suite of Poland outside the capital.

With mazes of canals and waterways criss-crossing the port and a preponderance of warehouses and retrofitted store fronts, the place reminded us to an extent a combination of Hamburg and Amsterdam. The mannerist Green Gate was designed in the style of Antwerp City Hall.  The chief meeting house for the merchants of the Hanseatic League was in Arthur’s Court (Dwór Artusa)  positioned directly behind Neptune’s Fountain, a mastepiece by sculptor Abraham van den Blocke. 

The final image speaks again to the city’s complex history, strategically located on the Polish Baltic Corridor, it was controlled over the centuries by Polish, Prussian and German powers, lately mandated under the League of Nations as the autonomous Free City of Danzig (incorporating Gdynia and Sopot) according to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Poland was to retain access to the sea but as ethnic Germans comprised the majority of the populace at the time, they were able to lobby for this state of quasi-neutrality though largely aligned to Poland for trade and external affairs, reserving the right to maintain a garrison in Westerplattle, use of the seaport and establishing a postal union, the Polish Post Office in the background with the monument to its defenders in front. Through the 1920s and 1930s, efforts were made to keep the city as German as possible, with refusing to teach Polish language in schools and making employment by Poles difficult and by late summer 1939 (see above) had finalised a false-flag operation to legitimise invasion and annexation. The outnumbered garrison holding out against a battleship entering the harbour, the post office (considered extraterritorial and sovereign under Poland) staff resisted for fifteen hours and refused to surrender.

  In August of 1980, the Gdańsk shipyard became the birthplace of the Solidarity trade union movement, whose opposition to the Communist regime under leader (and future president) Lech Wałȩsa sparked and sustained a series of protest movements that eventually destablised the Warsaw Bloc.

the rainbow taboo

Being disabused of believing that one’s own superstitious inheritance is not universal—like the particularly narrow-held thought that opening up an umbrella indoors causes bad luck, is a rare privilege and can prove particularly exciting if it causes one to completely shift one’s perspective and so especially  liked learning of one Westerner’s singular, impressing experience that turned into a project to document the over one hundred cultural traditions that have a proscription of some sort against rainbows—particularly pointing at them. I think we’re well over the idea it symbolises God’s covenant not to destroy the Earth with a flood ever again but the meteorological phenomenon is strangely ellusive and liminal, present and bold in the sky but something that one cannot reach or get closer to, and is regarded with awe and respect and pointing would be a bit rude or familiar. Some dread malady who be visited on the offending finger, though that curse could be placated by sticking one’s finger in one’s navel. We wonder how with its adoption as a symbol of hope during periods of lockdown, rainbows in windows were received by communities who were raised with these prohibitions.

narthex and nave

On this day in 1626, on the thirteen-hundredth anniversary of the consecration of old St Peter’s by Pope Sylvester I, the new papal basilica (Basilica Santci Petri Vaticano) planned by Popes Nicholas V and Julius II with construction starting more than a century earlier was heralded as complete. Financed chiefly through the selling of indulgences, with the Archbishop of Mainz and Magdeburg being a major advocate for this fund-raising method, sparking the objections of a certain Augustinian monk.

colour reference card

Effectively calibrated to recognise and register lighter complexions as standard, 99% Invisible—through

the artefacts called “Shirley Cards” that were distributed to film developers (see previously) to adjust their laboratories and perpetuate the built-in bias—explores how technology, deliberately, natively, naively or not, privileges whiteness by making it de facto more photogenic. The defaults of cameras, film and flash—and still the case to an extent with digital photography but we’re slowly growing wiser to our own shortcomings and their consequences (though the problem is a big one that goes far beyond pictures and is reflected in body of medical literature that is derived from too few female or minority subjects) makes it more challenging to capture compelling images of darker complected individuals and effects how people are seen and limits expression. Much more at the links above.

7x7

wordle: a daily acrostic-variant challenge—via Waxy  

double-dog dare: the original overture to what’s become a real snowclone for about to do something foolhardy  

parasitus: a fixture—or at least a trope of Greek and Roman society—was the individual whom could thrive off of the hospitality of others and suffer a little humiliation—via Super Punch 

i prefer the sequel—also sprach zarathrustra: an extensive look at 2001: A Space Odyssey and how some of the most indelible elements were left up to chance—see previously 

you would give everyone salmonella, ella, ella, eh, eh: Weird Al narrates Thanksgiving  

natural habitat: an interactive map lets one explore the range and change of living organisms at their margins  

uncountable case: the partitive declension and a lively debate on less versus fewer

i will kill you!

At the risk of over-explaining the gag, the seventh episode of the second season of Mystery Science Theater 3000, airing for the first time on this day in 1990, is one of the first incidents of the above often repeated threat or pledge throughout the show’s run which is itself a reference to Sting’s portrayal of Baron Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in Dune (1984) delivered to Paul Atrides and they both try to usurp power from the Padishah Emperor, during their treatment of the 1967 William Grefe film Wild Rebels in which a retired stock car racer is engage by the police to infiltrate a biker gang called Satan’s Angels, who are terrorising southern Florida with a crime spree, undertaken not for financial gain but rather “kicks.” Below is a short preview of the lampoon as the full episode wasn’t yet available for watching.

the gospel according to matthew

Venerated in the Eastern Church on this day according to the Julian calendar (21 September in Western Christianity), the tax collector (among his patronage—including also accountants, bankers and broadly civil servants) turned evangelist would have been universally despised as a collaborator with the Roman occupation and garnered criticism for Jesus for associating with such a person. Although the Biblical accounts are anonymous and only attributed to the titular superscription, Saint Matthew is attested to collecting oracles—that is, sayings—of Christ, with some crediting the Apostle with the authorship of the Q Source—from the German Quell or Source Source, a hypothetical canonical rubric of quotations, ghost-written by an angel, that would account for similarities among the first books of the New Testament.

nec temere, nec timide

With the above motto meaning “Neither rather nor timidly,” the Free City of Danzig / Wolne Miasto Gdańsk was established on this day in 1920 under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles following the peace of World War I. Created as separate from the post-war German republic (populated with the overwhelming number of residence and sandwiched in between Königsburg, Kaliningrad) and the Republic of Poland as a League of Nations protectorate—with limited self-autonomy and bound with Polish customs, the city council was infiltrated by 1936 with representatives pushing to rejoin Germany, having been granted independence once under Napoleon Bonaparte and recaptured by Prussia after the Battle of Leipzig in 1814—the most recent declaration of self-determination being a compromise between territory was annexed as Reichsgau Danzig-Westpreußen, mirroring status quo ante bellum, to exist as a contested land until the end of conflict.