wunderkammer or department of antiquities

Though I had been hearing the series cited and praised by several sources, I have only just now begun to indulge BBC Radio 4 and the British Museum’s co-production of A History of the World in One Hundred Objects—which is brilliantly and joyously highbrow and erudite listening, though has since expanded to other media and ambitiously invites the audience to tell their own stories through the collected artefacts of affiliated treasuries. The series is really well constructed and does not presume to present an authoritative lesson but rather thoughtfully present a series of items that represent the various aspects that have contributed to our understanding of the human condition: not all curators or visitors would pick the same assortment or think of them in the same ways, necessarily, but all narratives coming out of the galleries eventually cross have story arcs in common.
There are quite a lot of these homages to humility—important when it comes to such an undertaking, for instance in dispelling the idea that museums, either by turns musty old places or serene repositories, are anything but static—artefacts forever revising the stories that they can share, thanks to our enhanced understanding about different historical contexts and thanks to advancing methods for researching and unlocking those secrets. Certainly some lovely old bones or pottery shards were intriguing enough finds at first, but under a new light (of cultural understanding or more precise dating) give up even more and the yield is yet unexhausted. Listen to a few episodes and I am sure you’ll be engaged as well.

over the seven jeweled hills, beyond the seventh fall

Once upon a time, H and I did get a chance to visit the village of Lohr am Main in Lower Franconia after going to a flea market.
We had a rather nice stroll around the little town but passed a small palace, presently housing a forestry museum, not realising that it was in fact the family home of the genuine Snow White (Schneewittchen), Maria Sophia Margaretha Catherina von Erthal. We will certainly make it a point to go back and investigate.  This daughter of the Prince-Elector of Bamberg and Würzburg was born into a wealthy family, whose holdings included a mirror manufacturing workshop. The remains of the factory that folded in the 1850s can still be seen in Lohr today. Tragically, as the Brothers Grimm adapted to fable, Snow White’s birth mother passed away and the bishop and industry magnate remarried to a vain and cruel woman, having no end of mirrors at her disposal, and treated her step-child in a truly awful fashion.
The account that the Brothers Grimm retell is oddly not an archetypal fairy-tale but rather a story based on actual personalities and embellished with elements typical to such folk-stories. The story itself is a much older, with variations on the same themes in many cultures, and it strikes me that this real-life Schneewittchen Schloß remains relatively unknown while Neuschwanstein, further south in the alpine foothills, itself an idyll of a king, is celebrated as the inspiration for Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, though no historical candidate has been forth-coming. Back in Lohr, it would not be hard to imagine a traumatised young woman fleeing into the dense woods (whose history and ecology are now curated in her home) surrounding the town and sheltered by family of dwarves, later finding her happily-ever-afters.

bon mot

Although we have only last left our intrepid Language at the mercy of the Viking raiders and have not yet gotten to the Norman Invasion and that cliff-hanger for the Anglo-Saxons, which lent English fully one-third of its vocabulary and influenced grammar and orthography to a great deal, the Mental Floss list of French phrases that ought to be brought back into common-parlance was to good to wait on until the narrative catches up. There were quite a few priceless expressions that could easily be incorporated into everyday speech and it is pretty lamentable that lingual affinities are not as wide-spread as they once were. I especially like le roi fainéant, a do-nothing king and a term that could describe our friends the Merovingians or Charlemagne’s ineffectual issue, mise en abyme which describes something akin to the Droste effect, an image within its own image, and honi soit qui mal y pense—shame on him who thinks ill of it—do not jump to conclusions or talk something down prematurely, which was a quip by Edward III, the English courtly language being French in his day, which has a pretty interesting provenance.
Mad Princess Joan of Kent curried, unfairly, such a name because of eccentricities that were deemed unbecoming of the royal family, including eloping with a a young lover, a commoner, and subsequently also marrying the baron that her parents had arranged for her to and apparently unconcerned about bigamy or secret weddings. Although not the most conventional creatures of the court, the later mother to the unstable Richard II was still welcome at official functions. During a ball, Joan experienced a wardrobe malfunction while dancing with the king—who, suffering the snickers of some of his nobles and Joan’s withering humiliation, retrieved her fallen garter and adjusted her stocking. Presumably reserving this new honour for those who had not laughed at this act of chivalry, Edward III went on to establish the Most Noble Order of the Garter, the motto of the knights being the above phrase.

social committee

I had seen this playful casting-call, cat-walk circulating featured in Vanichi Magazine bz photographer and artist Viktorija Pashuta on the internet for several days but figured it was something swanky enough to go viral and then dank all on its own. In fact, the male line up dressed as social networking sites struck me as an extension of the so-called Gamergate controversy about misogyny in video games until BoingBoing revealed the full pageant with women posing as internet browsers.
I wholeheartedly agree that Firefox and Instagram ought to be dapper and dressed to the nines, but I think the other looks and personalities are spot-on as well. What do you think? Are these human mascots posh enough to capture what is characteristic about your favourite media tools?

hunting high and low

I had forgotten that the brilliant and quintessentially eighties band A-ha hail from Norway. Next summer, the performers will celebrate their thirty years as a group with a concert in Brazil, the Rock in Rio festival having been founded the same year as the band.

coolhunting or memetic

Via Kottke, Business Week magazine celebrates its eighty-fifth birthday with an articulated list of the eighty-five most troublesome concepts in the market-place.

The city-state of Singapore, mortgages, the interwebs, a coffee magnate, infant formula, out-sourcing, open-source, and global positioning among many others are included with detailed articles and charts that explain how each of these ideas changed the economy and society. For example, #75 is Jane Fonda’s Workout, which propelled both the VCR and the self-help industry, #84 is the Polaroid instant camera, which was a harbinger of social media and #25 is the decoding of the human genome that launched a mad-dash for Big Pharma and fostered an era of not scientific ignorance but rather scientific apathy as if anything that could be captive and quantified warranted no further curiosity. You ought to check out the entire listing of big ideas and maybe you’ll be the next innovative insurgent yourself.

peep-hole or desk-set

Not long after the invention of photography, thanks to the genius of the Earl of Stanhope in crafting a simple, tiny magnifying lens (which bears his name)—the public also developed quite a penchant for the novelty of microscopic pictures.

Collectors’ Weekly once again presents readers with a curious and curated trove that illustrates the development of this rage. Virtually invisible images could be embedded discretely in any number of everyday objects and people could steal a glance at a loved one, picture-postcard holiday scene, the royal family or a holy icon without worrying about people gawking over their shoulders. Quite a lot of that kind of memorabilia was produced and I remember having these neat little cone-shaped souvenirs from Carlsbad Caverns as a little kid and was amazing by how much depth these pictures of caves seemed to have, disorienting like looking up and over through a periscope—or looking up from a screen after staring at it for too long. It’s funny how those themselves screens are migrating from telephones to less conspicous watch-faces. The majority of miniscule pictures printed, however, were of an arguably less wholesome variety: Victorian ladies and gentlemen kept a stash of more intimate and erotic photos secreted away from prying-eyes in plain sight.  

herostratic fame

Naturally there is a big difference between street art and graffiti and senseless vandalism, and certain landmarks are particularly attractive targets for both rage and expression.

It’s bad enough that Hans Christen Anderson’s Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen is routinely decapitated, I learnt that contrary to the popular account, the nose of the Sphinx was not accidentally damaged by stray canon fire from Napoleon’s advance on Egypt but was rather defaced by a religious zealot who wanted to put a stop to the idolatry (real or perceived) of the farmers along the flood plains of the Nile, who prayed to the colossus for a good harvest. Horrified, the farmers lynched the extremist for this act. These willfully destructive acts strike me as very sophomoric, something that ought be intolerable even among rival college sports teams. Herostratus (auf Deutsche, Herostrat is a criminal hunger for glory) is the name of the arsonist who infamously burned down the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus and proudly owed up to the act, hoping for immortal notoriety. Herostratus was immediately put to death for this heinous deed and decreed that his infamy never be mentioned again, but that did not quite work out according to plan as his example has not exactly gone unfollowed. One can hope, though, that tearing down is ultimately up-building.