silhouette of saxon

We're taking a long weekend to visit the phoenix of Dresden. I am sure it will be a nice refrain to sustain the feeling of last weeks' travels, and there will be a lot to see and do. I am hoping also to have the chance to explore the surrounding countryside known as the Sächsische Schweiz with its gorges and colossal rock-formations. No bureaucracy or committee ever diminished or contributed to the aesthetic value of anything, however, with Dresden's Elbe Valley being only one of two UNESCO World Heritage Sites (Weltkulturerbe und Weltnaturerbe) to be defrocked because of the muncipality's decision to build an Autobahn bridge to close to the Altstadt, it seems obligatory to celebrate what's original and authentic about a place--any place. Though it was a committee which too made that choice that's turned more and more unpopular, that move also ensured that the entire area tries to make amends in terms of preservation and conservation. Character and charm can be restored while they are not something easily displaced with either awesome enmity or mundane zoning.

sisyphus or the united states of austerity

The American economy, industry and stability has ventured into very uncertain territory. After the enduring the battle of the wills that nearly resulting in a suspension of government services and furlough, I kind of lost interest in the posturing and mime that pushes the crisis but affect no real positive good. Some have described the atmosphere in Washington as bellicose, and though the work of exercizing democracy is not meant to be neat and courtly and hard decisions face America, it seems that the will and welfare of the people is not what's being won by all these histrionics and summoned rage.

No long-term solution has been found, and while debt and spending are unsustainably high, erosion of employment opportunities and physical and social infrastructure impose a bigger threat. The notion of American identity is challenged by the loss of that fleeting American dream, American exceptionalism and also the loss of military supremacy. Public health is not being championed, but rather only the rolling, regimented faith and confidence of the broader markets, not allowing the fear and frustration other outlets of expression. Debt is fleet-foot, threatening to obligate everyone futures with the toil of money already spent. Rather than fostering ways for the country to grow itself out this tangle together, secretive panels have been deputized with the task of chipping away at a mountain of outlays. People won't so be able to look beyond the childish antics that staved off any real debate and transparency and won't ignore what's been eschewed, and the cycle has only been primed to continue. Insular or expansive, this drama will be carried out over a succession in a long run of bank holidays, beginning when America faces up to the task of drafting a budget for the next fiscal year, and then when austerity panels fail to meet the quotas, and the build up to the 2012 presidential elections, and then when the credit rating agencies--to maintain any semblance of credibility--downgrade the US, and so on.

bücherbox

The English daily, thelocal, reports on a urban, ad hoc library project in Berlin that revitalizes two not-obsolete but lower-tech institutions. The Institute for Sustainability in Education, Employment and Culture (INBAK) is installing bookshelves in disused telephone booths and filling them with donated literature. Some villages in the UK apparently are doing the same thing with their iconic red telephone booths. Even with whole annals and archives and borderless communication totable, it is welcoming to see the chance to take time out with real books and real totems to language.

trist dag

Possibly not so much attention should be directed to the fact that this duo of lifesavers is a married lesbian couple (I suppose headlines focus on such quirks of heroism--like grandmother saves football player from burning building), but the rescue efforts of this pair, who saved forty youth from drowning during the shooting rampage on Utøya, are commendable and touching. The Massacre in Norway is too raw, frightening and disturbed to properly address, and maybe the only way one can approach such a situation is by recognizing help and heroics, neither because nor despite of who people are. Their story and the accounts of survivors strike me too now because of conservative factions in the Germany government refusing to entertain, at the same time these incidents occurred, debate on married equality. Proponents demurred, conceding that change cannot be forced, but in light of this rescue and heroines and in light of the xenophobia and stereotypes that propagated these attacks in the first place, one should take away the lesson that respect and tolerance are the stuff of civility and prosperity.

huckleberry hound or pantone 222

Slate magazine (via Neatorama), after reflecting on the big-screen revivals of the Smurfs and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, who are rather uniform, monotone visually--made up this brilliant colour-wheel of other endearing cartoon-characters. On the website, one can scroll over the swatches and learn about each character. There is not an over-abundance of the classics, and most are squarely recognizable to audiences of the 1990s with the Snorks, Tiny Toons, Cat-Dog, Thundercats, but maybe the hue and cry of Hanna-Barbera and Tex Avery alone could not cover the entire spectrum.

truth or consequences, new mexico

The label on the Uruguayan wine bottle with dinner informed me that the country’s name “means ‘River of Painted Birds’ in the native language.” I stumbled upon a clever world map that gives an etymology of the names of nations—although I am not entirely sure how accurate some of these are and it is kind of a shame that the map does not explain who Amerigo Vespucci was or how he managed to have two continents named after him (though I suppose the terminally interested could easily look that up in their Funk & Wagnalls’). Incidentally, driving home through France, I wondered why the central region, containing Paris, was called Île-de-France (Island of France), and it turns out that this was probably because of an ancient Gaulish misunderstanding of an Germanic Old Franconian designation for the place--Liddle Franke, little land of the Franks. I think it would be a neat project to make a more local map of derivations and translations, streets and suburbs and towns--sort of like how Bad Karma got its name.

crawlspace or urban spelunking

Via the superlative BLDGBLOG, Der Spiegel (auf englisch) reports on a persistent mystery that’s been buried and forgotten in locations all over Bavaria. There are hundreds of discovered ancient stone passageways tunneled into the earth, mostly impossibly narrow and tight, in farmers’ fields, under churchyards and in towns, that have been described with such creative names as Schrazelloch ("goblin hole") and Alraunenhöhle ("mandrake cave"), because locals believed that they were the mines of dwarves and oubliettes of elves—since no one can really say what the purpose of these articifical caves were.

Though known of for a long time, with similar phenomena occurring in other parts of Europe, curators are only now taking interest in studying them, speculating on their functions from emergency food storage, like a fall-out shelter, refuge from marauders, like a panic-room but being impracticably small, others have interpreted them to have had spiritual significance. These Erdstall catacombs are never documented as being built prior and throughout the Medieval period—only their slow, accidental discovery, and maybe were the meditation chambers of a mystery-cult. No one knows, but perhaps the attention will lead to more finds, and maybe there’s something to be found down in the underground of Bad Karma.

aqua-velva

Having just returned from a fantastic, educational and relaxing vacation in the Aquitaine and Medoc regions of southern France's Atlantic Coast, I wanted to take the opportunity to round-up a few photographs that did not make the travel blog and a few pensées (after Blaise Pascal's random collected thoughts and enigmas, like, the parrot wipes his beak even though it is clean). 

The area was just incredible--the port of La Rochelle along with this other hidden cove of Meschers-sur-Gironde with troglodyte dwellings pounded by the surf into the cliff was like a pirate theme-park. The caves there actually saw some piratery and were once host to French protestants who had to practice their religion in secret.

A sort of regional mascot too was a donkey in pajama bottoms, and later I learned that these pants were worn to protect them from mosquitos while working in the salt-flats that brought these cities great prominience.

The city of Bordeaux has a crest that resembles a bio-hazard or toxic-spill clean-up symbol, though I am sure there is no relation.  The coast was also dotted with these colossal and exemplary (really just like the perfect dreamscape of what one would imagine a fort or a castle to be with winding causeways, endless stairs, turrets, towers, loopholes and murder-holes) bastions from the handiwork of the Marquis de Vauban to protect trade and the rich harbours from foreign navies, but there was one inland garrison town that fell victim to the environment that created this wealth.

The mud-flats that are part of the oyster culture and the salt-flats which gave Aquitaine a monopoly are nourished by sediment washing in from the mouth of the Gironde colliding with the silt of the ocean.  Eventually, and probably rather sooner than anyone expected, the sediment choked this fortress off from the port by a good ten kilometers. 

Not useful for fending off invading ships, the town--which was also the birthplace of promogenitor Canadien Samuel de Champlain, the fort and billeting has been well-preserved.  There was a lot of neat stuff going on here and I have a lot of homework to do.