This summer we were treated to a tour of Castle Tarasp, one of the last remaining fortifications of its type saved by an enterprising entrepreneur who introduced the German mouthwash Odol to the world and made dental hygiene something of a social necessity (like the vacuum-cleaner made hoovering a duty), and our guide was quite accommodating, telling the history of each chamber three times over for the sake of his audience—once in Schwyzerdรผtsch for the locals, then in Italian for a couple visiting and then in Hochdeutsch for our benefit.
The show was pretty impressive, but I understand that entertaining such a diglossa is becoming quite a rarity in the Confederation. Rather than learning on the four national languages, young students are tutored in English rather than standard forms of German, Italian, French—or the minority Rumantsch, a language descending from Roman occupiers displacing the original Celtic settlers' influence. Neglecting national and standardised forms, Swiss people are regressing further into regional and urban dialects, which while being very important cultural aspects to preserve, like the Bรคrndรผtsch of Bern or Baseldytsch, are essentially incomprehensible to others and defy being written down in any agreed-upon way, just like Italian and French versions, from outside. I wonder what it means to adopt a lingua franca that's not a national language and to revert further towards something that affirms pockets of patriotism. What do you think? Are national standards only an illusion and an artificial construct of the fretful or do they signal an important loss of identity?
Sunday 8 December 2013
turmbau zu babel
homeland and high-ground
I suppose there's no accounting for taste, and the mission-planners behind the selection of code-names, patches and mascots and free to choose whatever they see fit—surely within there own obscure rules for naming conventions, but there also seems no limits for hubris and insensitivity.
catagories: ๐บ๐ธ, ๐ญ, ๐ฅธ, foreign policy
trim up the tree with christmas stuff or persistence of memory
If such could be demonstrated about successive displays, I wonder if the vintage and the spirit of the season contribute to tracking the whereabouts of a festive moose out of place. It's more of oh—I remember this guy rather than there's too much or where did we put all this before, probably the effects of the above experiment magnified. Trim up the tree with Christmas stuff, like bingle balls and whofu fluff. Season's greetings with more to follow!
catagories: holidays and observances
Friday 6 December 2013
window dressing
Collectors' Weekly has a pretty keen feature on the long and faceted history of the mannequin and how they reflect our sense of style. The figures advanced from a tailor or dress-maker's form, going back to ancient times, to basic racks to display garments to a growing, mechanized middle-class, to their present form—converging with dress-up dolls that came before and becoming the afternoon-idols of window-shopping they are today.
The story of their development is spiced with some interesting vignettes, like the dressing-dummies found in the tombs of pharaohs, that in an earlier career, L. Frank Baum (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) worked in the advertizing business and was a key advocate of using life-like mannequins to sell the “romance of Merchandise and Merchandizing,” the genre of horror films that came out as they became more sophisticated and idealized, and lighter cases of agalmatophilia that teased and vexed returning war veterans. The history is augmented by a few individual collectors who are curators of these objects of fashion and make-believe.
native address system or context-clues
I had heard the term native advertising and its appeal by integrating itself—maybe a reinvention of the guerrilla-technique of piggy-backing, but I don't suppose I could articulated what it was. Mashables presented this handy infographic—framed in more traditional banner advertisements, of course—which presents the analytics fairly well.
catagories: ๐ง , networking and blogging
and they're all made out of ticky-tack and they all look just the same
Spiegel International reporters interview the former neighbour of the Fugitive at her home and from her perspective in suburban Maryland.
zungenbrecher
The constructed compounds of the German language can form quite lengthy and specific epithets that sometimes come across as jargon—especially among the longest examples.
Thursday 5 December 2013
three-d or camera obscura
While I was expecting some sort of explanation like the latter rediscovery of the forgotten lensing technique of camera obscura—a pinhole projection of an image onto a screen, tabula rasa fit for tracing that ushered in, speculatively, a revolution in painting, portrait-studio quality representation. The article goes on to account how in medieval Europe general misery with the human-condition led to a shunning of the classic artistic techniques of accuracy with their minds on the here-after, and surviving simplicity was a revolt and expressive way to remind viewers that worldly existence was something flat.
I wonder if it was the case, like in the relatively concurrent Muslim world there was a proscription against the rendering of natural things, which led to the elaboration of calligraphy and abstraction, that led to abandonment and subsequent reconditioning contemporary with the Western Renaissance.