the phantom toll-booth or intersecting rings

In response to horrible traffic snarls that converged on the town of Swindon between Bristol and Reading, civil engineers installed this intimidating-looking but ingeniously effective array of roundabouts in the early 1970s.

Probably without the aerial view of this anti-clockwise clockwork, called the Magic Roundabout, I’m sure the layout directs drivers quite naturally and would result in no hesitation or panic. It was a challenge for me at first and I’m still content to circle a few extra times until I get my bearings, but I have learned to embrace the Continent’s shared fondness for the traffic circle to regulate cross-roads. I won’t forget, however, our shock and uncertainty upon the first time we came to Ireland together and leaving the airport in a rental car were confronted with a roundabout a few lanes deep. Maybe that first hurdle was intentional to remind visitors of the rules of the road.

zeichenträger

Designed by Gerald Herbert Holtom a few months prior, the first public appearance of the Peace Sign occurred fifty-five years ago today, at a rally against the proliferation of atomic weapons in the UK. The simple sign was quickly adopted as a banner by activist groups around the world. Although some point to much old and mixed origins of the symbol, including signs of Christian persecution and intolerance, anarchy, the Petrine office, and even as a unit badge by a Panzer division during World War II that led the advance into Russia and Hungary—which surely experienced distress to see the sign paraded and celebrated. The artist may or may have not known and been influences by these past associations but the popular legend has it that the Peace Sign is a overlapping of the semaphore signals for N and D—for Nuclear Disarmament. Whatever the true history, the icon is now universally recognised as a sign of outreach, engagement and reconciliation.

numbingness

Tom Stafford, psychological writer for the BBC and expanded gorgeously on his own blog Mindhacks, reflects on the newly named state of mind called Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) which is a sort of euphoria brought about by indulging mundane, boring things registered with a measurable galvanic response. I don’t think this phenomena, not fully limned nor described and entered into the annals of common experience, is merely an expression of the over-stimulation of the internet but perhaps rather identified and shared through it. There are blind-spots, naturally, in any trade but we like to think that psychology has been fairly thorough and that remaining discoveries are either ornamental or intolerably idiosyncratic. What do you think? Synestheia, the melding of perceptions, used to be dismissed as nothing communicable but now if Thursdays have an assigned colour or certain scent, that’s valid though not universal as well. Is it possible for a new sense to arise by motley consensus or is the new confessional attitude contagious?

tremolo heroism or darlings of oblivion

Here is a compact and gorgeously executed reflection on the ephemeral hardships, annoyances great and small with a significant license and latitude whose resolution and denouement does not rate, it seems, as the stuff of literary treatment. Film abounds with lucky breaks, some of which could be classified as what Vladimir Nabokov called his “darlings of oblivion,” but they are seldom acknowledged as something plot-forwarding. Minor annoyances make up the surplus of our days, unfortunately, and while those irritations overcome are not really the defining matters. Sometimes what rules the day is nothing savoury or bidden to repeat, despite the fading but all-consuming importance it once demanded. Is there more of a demand to merely relate or commiserate with a book? I don’t know—it seems like what’s ephemeral and overcome, a laundry-list with its associated dirty laundry is something never summarily done away with and still exists as nagging distractions for a faithfully limned character and a species of simplification for the reader. Are such trifles really eliminated and what does it mean if they are?

sunday drive or nutbush city limit

On the way back to my workweek apartment, after some nice dwell-time at home, I stopped along the way to explore the Frankfurt am Main suburb of Eschborn. I was surprised by the corporate skyline, heavy with headquarters that I would have thought the immediate proximity of Germany’s financial capital would have simply absorbed.
It turns out this town, displaying quietly all past influences as an agricultural area with ample spacing of field and farm among the skyscrapers, as a military garrison town for different powers (Camp Phönix is a commercial park, which hosted no decent flea-market as advertised, converted from a former US Army base that existed in the area until 1992), and most recently as a business annex of sorts for multi-national concerns, who’ve taken up residence here in order to be close to Frankfurt but avoiding the city’s corporate and property tax rates.
 I’m as likely to find anything by chance but I did stop here to seek out the Sculpture Axis, an exhibition of public modern art, which I was looking to find in some sculpture garden but the display continues in sort of a scavenger-hunt, I saw later, along certain lines of latitude and longitude and I suppose that I’d need to do some geo-caching to find Travel-a-Head, giant chair and the rest of the collection—or maybe just keep on in a straight line but the weather was being a bit dramatic.

flea-market finds or johnny apple-seed

People at flea-markets are universally keen on selling souvenirs—which is something I could never understand, unless maybe they inherited a collection of memories that they had no relationship with nor access to or bought them themselves at other sales and later decided that their accumulations ought to be culled. The cogent fact is, however, I suppose that people bringing plastic bins of old records, catalogues of old photos, travel mementos for display never have a guarantee that they be made to part with any of it and are probably caught off guard when someone does offer to buy some keepsake or another.

I have found a lot of cool stuff, sentimental to someone or otherwise, and though there are things I would not part with, having become some of the household artefacts, I’d be willing to entertain offers—especially in a situation where an uncaring relative cast off some keepsake and came into my collection. H was not very impressed by I enjoyed these couple of items found at a flea market just across the former border separating East from West Germany—die neue Bundesländer, so called literally because the government of the GDR was not a federal authority and the traditional state structure (restored with the reunion) did not exist, but rather districts (Bezirke) but also used figuratively, I suppose, as parts and places still held with a certain otherness.
I found this pretty neat little brass plate with the enameled flag of the DDR flying in solidarity with the Soviet banner, the USSR, the UdSSR or the CCCP, and this hinged plastic box, which contained a bunch of unsent post-cards from the Soviet Union’s far eastern autonomous republic of Kazakhstan with several undated scenes from Almaty (Алматы or Alma-Ata as the former capital was known back then, a construction of two Turkic terms for apple and father, owning to all the different apple cultivars found in the area and probably the origin of the first orchards). There are a lot of places yet to learn about and to see and to re-visit, and I am grateful that I found a bit of another destination for inspiration.

vetternwirtschaftsgaffe oder -gate

The last contemporary scandal of German politics to shake tigers into the streets was over plagiarism and ill-gotten academic accolades, be they vanity diplomas even so.
The behaviour was less than inspirational and invited in quite a witch-hunt among the rank and file. Politicians, by nature I think, are not ones to relinquish due-credit in any form and scholastic dishonestly is probably a gateway fib.

Now, though with less fanfare since the guilt is most likely highly prevalent and the racketeers do not want to attract too much scrutiny (though surely not exclusive to Germany) , another scandal, equally hallmarked with the failure to learn a fundamental civics lesson, is ranging through the class of hopefuls for next year’s general elections: nepotism (Nepotismus oder Vetternwirtschaft, cousin-business) and cronyism is a widespread practice, and apparently many office-holders with the ability to bestow grace and favour do so without stint or caution on family members. This is about as shrewd and intriguing as tepid philandering or other sins of irony and omission.

leute heute

This day, coinciding the late night capitulation of Nazi Germany of 1945 to the Soviet army, after midnight according to Moscow time (executed in Reims, France) but observed on the day prior by Western European countries, is universally recognised as Europe Day for the Schuman Declaration of 1950 that founded what would become the European Union.
The fatefulness of the coincidences are muted (but not mooted) by the spirit of the day, reserved for lessons in civics, integration and harmony, but it is a little off-putting to have such a significant collusion of anniversaries that the political overtones cannot (and should not) be fully ignored or forgotten. Much could hinge on any given date on the calendar and maybe there is a certain hopefully affinity to be found in infamy but the designation of does seem a bit of a bombast, considering the certain friggatriskaidekaphobia to be overcome. The day also falls on the eve of the invasion of France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg in 1940 in addition to Victory Day, and curiously is precisely offset by a half-year with the German declared Schicktsalstag (Day of Destiny). 9 November, from a German point of view and the perspective of Weltsanschuung, is marked by the execution of cooler-heads in 1848 in Vienna that led to later crises of state, the overthrow of the monarchy and formation of the Weimar Republic, Hitler’s coup (Putsch) in Munich, the horrors of Kristallnacht (Reichspogromnacht) a few years later, the founding of the SS, an unruly and disenfranchised bunch of malcontents despite the lent prestige, and the razing of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Maybe that date will never be fully reformed but did redeem itself, and it was originally celebrated as the German Day of Reunification, though later shifted to October of the following year when all formalities were complete in order to not dither on a day already associated with atrocity. The culling of time and dates is certainly not limited just to the past and perhaps Europe Day is really an avenue towards redemption and unhinging.