back-lot or quadratura

Berlin’s film museum, the Deutsche Kinemathek, is celebrating the work of set-builder and stage-crafter Sir Ken Adam, who conceived some of the most memorable, iconic and colossal cinematic backdrops of the past fifty years.  Adam’s vision of the White House War Room for the Stanley Kubrick classic Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb even had the newly-elected real-life, Hollywood president convinced that was the command-and-control centre he’d inherit when he took office. Adam created the atmosphere of epics like Ben-Hur, several James Bond films and other cult movies.  Quadratura is an Italian term used to describe the technique that applied perspective and foreshadowing to flat surfaces to create the illusion of depth and space. 

domesticated ungulate or nectar of the gods

Though already rejected and ridiculed as coming straight from the teat of Frankenstein’s monster, a major soda conglomeration has decided to venture unabashed into one relatively untapped niche of the dairy market with a new and improved milk-like tonic. As if the non-browning apple was not bad enough, this new beverage is supposedly more healthy and nutritious than plain, old no-name milk. Despite initial public revulsion, I am certain that this concoction will be snuck into the food-supply surreptitious through the soda’s flagship distributors, fast-food franchises that pump out brand identification and loyalty. What an unholy alliance to scratch out a bit of profit from an industry that while not unsullied universally with growth-hormones and battery-farming remains wholesome in some places.
Interestingly, and mostly without notice, one of America’s (as the chief producer of these enhanced foodstuffs) geographically closest trading partners, which produces its own classic version of the above-mentioned soda incidentally, Mexico, has quietly repelled any overtures from US agri-business to sell crops or plant seeds on its soil. Though certainly not alone in worrying about the future impact of such experiments, this uncertainty is not the primary reason for Mexico’s distaste and it is rather out of a sense of reverence that such imports are blockaded. Like India’s sacred cow—who’s resisting advances but sadly under great pressure to assimilate, Mexico has an ingrained tradition of worshipful respect for their sustaining staple, maize, and consider it sacrilege to presume to improve upon Mother Nature.

small arms

A tragic break with tradition happened last year when for the first and only time in living-memory, possibly for the first time ever, police in Reykjavik were forced to shoot and kill a criminal after being fired upon themselves. Though the act of self-defense on the part of the officers was justifiable, an apology was subsequently issued to the family of the fugitive shooter. In a nation where weapons-ownership is relatively high so is mutual respect for human life, and I pray that is not just an aberration and that the same sense of peace can be fostered elsewhere. I think in general, though, that their guns ought to be taken away since we’re mostly capable of only treating them as play-things.

chronotype

Graphic artist Vahram Muratyan exposes the tyranny of our sense of time and timing through the media of creative illustrations. A lot of the pressures and abstractions are artificial constructs and symptomatic of other ills, but it is—as the interview with the author suggests, also emblematic of the blessing and curse of being human with the capacity to imagine how invisible forces are manifested. These visualisations are delightful and I think make good likenesses of our patterns that are anything other than circadian.

glücksbringer oder ganz happy

It always used to strike me as strange that one word in German, Glück, signified both luck and happiness—but somehow satisfying, comforting since the association with fortune, an unexpected windfall, is coloured as positively as they effort to create good cheer—until realising that English had a similar construction and derivation.

The state of being happy also harks back to a chance occurrence in the parent terms happenstance and mayhap, though these words are usually reduced to just something happening in the neutral sense, and English has borrowed a lot of different ways to convey fate, luck or fortune, as well as the more facetious sense of wishing lotsa luck. It turns out the French way of expressing the same feeling, heureux, covering both the portentous having derived from the Latin word for art of augury and the exalted, forms this zeugma. The ultimate source of this divining and the lucky omens themselves, however, are both unknown.  I wonder if in other languages the same connections hold.

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.