neunundneunzig

The Berlinale film festival happening now is also a showcase for new mini-series for the small-screen. Among the new premiers is a spy drama set in a divided Germany (EN/DE) called “Deutschland 83,” which will be simulcast for American audiences on the Sundance cable network as one of the first German television shows to be distributed in this manner. The series takes place in the year 1983, when Cold War tensions were at their height over the Strategic Defense Initiative and the same year that performer Nena sang her cross-over protest hit, 99 Red Balloons. It might be fun to follow this trans-Atlantic thriller together. 

platitudnal

Via the inestimably great wonder-source Boing Boing comes this collection of motivational posters inspired from unflinching world-view of film director Werner Herzog Stipetić. Check out the link for more unabashed truisms snatched from bleak but resounding dialogue.

worth one-thousand

The Daily Beast has a very interesting profile of awarding-winning photographer Alec Soth and his team who are taking an epic road-trips and documenting Americana, sharing his dispatches with all and sundry that really draws in the reader, as the artist’s eye does.

Soth’s latest show is a collection of evocative, black-and-white images, all purposefully untitled and without a caption. The pictures are at first jarring and jumbled, and in trying to interpret what the subjects are doing and to make sense of the setting, one’s focus shifts to find little details that become extremely telling. Never staged and strangers appreciative of the attention, Soth’s work does invite the viewer to construct a narrative—but nothing more, as Soth know the story behind these images either, not wanting to impose his message or meaning. The artist’s publisher and agent also sponsors workshops and retreats to help other to hone their talents for visual story-telling.

desk-job

Via the nonpareil Neat-o-Rama, comes the next phase of office furniture engineered to make one jump out of his or her chair, a surfboard like foot rest that requires one to constantly readjust one’s weight and make small shifts in one’s posture to remain upright.
It’s a clever idea and I bet it would be much more fun to rock and keep one’s balance rather than just standing still or going through a litany of sitting, standing and kneeling like one’s at Mass—but sometimes this idea of healthy ergonomics makes me want to jump out of my skin sometimes. I would imagine that the goal of all of these subtle and not so subtle changes to the work environment is to eventually allow us to redeem the virtues of being able to rest one’s feet and work in a setting not buffeted by distraction and walking the high-wire. The office is a venue for combating our general laziness and inactivity because we’re rather captives for what someone has deemed our own good, never mind that being seated—or even lying in bed is probably more conducive to creativity and productivity and fitness ought not to start or end at work. Besides, I think the layout of the office, even as a sandbox for collaboration, is changing too quickly for any of these sedentary iniquities to really take root.

link roundup: five-by-five

major arcana: weird numerical connection, coincidence between the calendar and playing-cards

tyranny of the bells: can you match these electronic beeps to their gadgets?

the telescreens have no off switch: new TVs caution viewers to watch their mouths in its presence

pulp fiction: satisfying vintage SF artwork of Frank R. Paul

suitable for framing: sleek infographic on the chemical structure of vitamins

larp oder knutepunkt

Though this event reported in Spiegel (DE) is not the first instance of live-action role play—in some ways Renaissance Fairs, Civil War re-enactments and Comic Conventions can be considered games in the same genre and a few epically sophisticated ones are cited in the article, but this four day challenge that was held on board a battleship turned into a marine museum, transformed into an elaborate gaming environment in Wilhelmshaven probably really surprised its creators for its depth and wrenching emotion. Project Exodus, loosely based around the arc-of-story of Battlestar Galactica—with humans on the run from cyborgs intent on wiping them out, was immersive and elicited a lot of bathos, well-up from unexpected places, due to the game’s “play-to-lose” nature. The scripted plot had leadership killed off at crucial moments and the crew had to manage to carry on. The organisers of the game hope to eventually bring this experience to the classroom—to schools and universities, since it might prove more effective in teaching lessons about conflict and what it means to be a refugee better than a lecture.

velvet mafia

Though the truth is a very difficult matter to reconstruct, small bridges to the real story virtually pulverised by redaction and secrets yet to expire, the testimony of those he worked with and his compatriots of the so called Cambridge Five, a spy ring recruited from impressionable or impassioned students from the University by the Soviet Union in the interbellum period and for the course of the war, that operative Guy Burgess was the most ruthless and diplomat with the less tact was probably no hyperbole.

Committed to the belief that there were only two alternative world-views for a world that was dangerously close to slipping back into grave conflict, communism or fascism, and fearful that England would side for fascism ultimately and continue with appeasement of Nazi Germany, Burgess worked covertly to forward the agenda of the Bolshevik government. Despite or possibly because of his nature as a double-agent, Burgess not only ingratiated himself to the media, directing several programmes that covered parliament and foreign policy matters, he also came to earn the trust and confidence of powerful members of the Foreign Office and diplomatic mission to the United States. With essentially unchecked access to thousands of documents, Burgess was able to provide his controllers with incredulous amounts of information—and even they began to be skeptical of his sources and how long this relationship might go on before all were caught. That Burgess was flagrantly homosexual—but seemingly not blackmailed into treason like some of the other spies at the time, and was just as uncensored in that aspect of his personality as in all others, might have elevated him above suspicion in a way. That’s just Burgie, queer duck. Maybe that affectation kept others at a safe distance—or maybe no one dared risk having their own dirty laundry aired. Or maybe the British Intelligence services were devising a triple bluff, with voluminous but harmless information to distribute with hopes of catching bigger offenders. I don’t suppose that that truth will ever out.
Throughout the war and in the aftermath, Burgess funneled the Soviet Union details of treaty negotiations, the alliance between Britain and America and how the Marshall Plan would take shape. An aside: it is worth noting that the small-minded laws that criminalised homosexual-pratises in the UK never seemed to adversely affect a traitor but destroyed a genius and hero, Alan Turing, whom were incidentally both recently portrayed by the same actor—the former on stage and the later in film. Around 1951, feeling that his activities were about to be discovered, Burgess fled to Moscow. Burgess settled in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, but was reportedly never very happy there because he couldn’t carry on like he was accustomed to, despite being permitted to openly reside with a male-lover. Burgess never returned from exile, fearing he would stand for high treason if he tried to enter the UK. The courts were not forthcoming about the fact that the charges would most likely be inadmissible since it mostly came from fellow-defectors.

don’t gobblefunk around with words

Roald Dahl, the great Welsh author of Norwegian extraction, may be best known for his timeless and imaginative children’s tales but he was also a story-teller for all audiences, writing for Playboy magazine, was a compatriot of Ian Fleming and wrote the screenplay for one James Bond movie, featured on Alfred Hitchcock Presents and later hosting his own television series in the same genre.  

Dahl came into the profession somewhat by mishap, having in his earlier career as a dogfighting ace in North Africa during World War II and sustained a traumatic bump on his head that left him temporarily blind and apparently rewired his temperaments towards writing.  Dahl was compelled to resign his commission afterwards, but that accident—and subsequent manuscript of the event he wrote—Dahl’s plane had strayed too far off course and there was not enough fuel to get him back to base, and with the sun setting, Dahl choose to try to bring the plane down while he could still see obstacles on the ground and how he survived, but the article’s publishers tweaked the title to make the circumstances sound more harrowing, stating explicitly Dahl was shot down—led to a diplomatic posting as a sort of military attaché to the ambassador in Washington, DC in the office of propaganda, meant to align American commitment to the war in Europe.  Supposedly, after all that, which is barely even the introduction, Dahl had originally hoped to be a doctor.  The talent for story-telling that was violently thrust upon Dahl was surely regarded as a blessing but not a curse, but a lot of his personal life is tinged with sadness and loss, which influenced his plot twists and sometimes rather frightful ordeals and was surely an outlet besides. 

In his family, several of his children suffered tragedies and his wife, actress Patricia Neal fell victim to a massive stroke.  Dahl helped rehabilitate her with constant physical therapy and practice—which was unconventional for the 1960s when it was thought that no one could recover from such a bad and debilitating blow, but he refused to give up on her and and his wife learnt to speak and walk—and act again.  As Neal was figuring out to put words together again, her bittersweet malapropisms became the basis of the way the Giant speaks to the curious little girl (patterned after his own daughter, who sadly died from an avoidable case of measles, prompting Dahl’s campaign for getting children vaccinated) in his whimsical story, The BFG—Big Friendly Giant.