two left feet but oh so sweet

H and I will be detouring in America very soon and are very excited to visit my family in Georgia. It’s been far too long, and it is going to be a real treat and surely some culture-shock for the both of us too. PfRC will be on hiatus but please visit our friends over at the Smörgåsblog and stay-tuned to our little travel blog for further adventures. Georgia named her, Georgia claimed her.

société de pétrochimie

As the giants of the petroleum industry—and there be only giants these days, are set to devour one another—this internecine struggle couched in the usual regional conflicts but probably more owing to plummeting oil prices and potential for profit, I wondered where this industry’s and culture’s roots lie.  As recently as the 1970s, I found, before the series of mergers that created Big Oil—too big to fail and top of the food-chain, there was still a remnant of the world’s first petrochemical concern.
Though oil has become inextricably associated with the Middle East, with a spate of other contenders for seconds and for most of the modern history that this commodity has fuelled and lubricated, European deposits were acknowledged to be primarily in the Carpathian planes that spreads from present-day Poland in the west and Ukraine in the east, the discovery as it were and recognition as a valuable commodity can be more or less credited to the Alsatian enterprise, Antar, originally incorporated in 1745. The French interpreter to their ambassadorial mission to Switzerland, a man called Louis Pierre Ancillon de la Sablonnière, was exposed to a small pitch-mining operation near Neuchâtel and learnt of a similar natural bitumen spring on the French-German border, near his homeland. Sablonnière bought the estate with its dirty brown streams. Early uses for this substance included pavement, water-proofing ships’ hulls and sewer-systems—later in the development of photography and synthetic dyes but evidence of its use and understanding reaches far back to the practise of mummification in Ancient Egypt and the mysterious formula for Greek fire.  Centuries passed before the refining process was advanced enough to harness the energy latent in petroleum, but progress marches onwards and the belief that enthralled certain individuals for the tar-pits never faltered. Sablonnière began prospecting around his new far and sold stocks to support his venture.  The name Antar was a much later addition to the original charter, coming in the aftermath of World War I and the rise of the automobile, with the company specialising in petroleum and motor oils, opting to drop its old identity named after the commune where the first mine was located.
Antar may get its name from the pre-Islamic Arab hero and chanticleer Antarah ibn Shaddad (The sons of the prophet were valiant and bold, and quite unaccustomed to fear, but of all the most reckless, or so I am told, was Abdul Abulbul Amir) whose memory was popularised at the time with a symphony by Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov.  I would have guess the super-giant star Antares (meaning equal-to-Mars due to its relative brightness and reddish hue) but the celestial body is named for the poet too.  It is also interesting to note how the logo evolved from something generically heraldic that could represent anything but in fact is not a device associated with anything at all to a little mascot who is either supposed to be a Gaulish warrior or one of our old friends, the long-haired, blond Merovingians.  Moreover, the family that traditionally keeps the keys to the Church of the Nativity since centuries are held to be of the extraction of the clan of Antarah himself.  These connections, however rarefied, are much finer things I think than some leviathan of Exxon-Mobil-Esso-Shell-Fina-Total-Total-BP.

five-by-five

cock-and-bull: Wall Street’s iconic charging bronze began as a guerilla art installation

within the lines: colouring books for adults

pet-sounds: anti-nurturing games impart lessons on mortality and fortitude

body-politic: vintage caricature maps of Europe

subject to your approval: niche blogs for your perusal

jamboree or sieg heil, my coney island baby

Dangerous Minds curated an engrossing gallery of letters home from Summer Camp Siegfried on Long Island, New York that’s plenty to pique the curiosity about such a dark and unwholesome milieu.

The campgrounds were opened in 1936, like several other sites in America during the 1930s, under the auspices of groups sympathetic to Nazi ideologies—going by different names and not always successor organisations, called things like the Free Society of Teutonia, Gau-USA, Friends of New Germany (FONG) and finally the German-American Federation (Amerikadeutscher Volksbund). Their banner looks like something out of a Flash Gordon comic but still sinister and embarrassing enough. These camps and the sentiment that they promoted were not just in areas with a high proportion of German immigrants but also attracted membership from the disaffected and those unhappy with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal Policies that grew out of the global economic Depression that followed WWI; Germany was in a shambles and the group’s aim was to convince people that certain elements would led America down the same path.

The federation, however, was rather one-sided, as the Nazi government did not endorse the American organisation and especially disdained its leadership, one disenfranchised reactionary named Fritz Julius Kuhn. The Nazi Chancellery did not give the Bundesführer a very welcoming reception when a delegation visited during the 1936 München Olympiad, and eventually forbade any German national from holding membership in the Federation. Nonetheless, Kuhn still attracted followers, culminating in a huge and frightening rally of some thirty-thousand supporters in Madison Square. The group and cadet associations were eventually dissolved in 1941 as the US was compelled to formally enter the fray, and in addition to facing charges of tax-evasion and embezzling from the Bund, Kuhn and his partners got in trouble for counselling young people on how to avoid conscription and dodge the draft, but there is always a surplus of demagogues and charismatics.  

much coin, much care

Though I would not describe myself as a dedicated and studied numismatist—albeit perhaps somewhat more reasoned the collectors of com- memorative coin sets, which is exactly for whom they’re issued but I do admit to having a cigar box heavy with a small fortune, at face-value at least, of the special national series of the euro-zone members, the Bundesländer, and various defunct currencies. I was never before given in change a Cypriot coin, however, and it did take a moment to register, remembering that only Greece had formerly been accorded with using something aside from Latin script but that was before Cyprus joined the Union, the name of the island displayed in Greek and Turkish. The totem depicted on the obverse, nearly worn away since 2008, the idol of Pomos, is a prehistoric talisman of fertility and the seven thousand year old figure is wearing a charm of herself around her neck—the portable versions being popular in the day. Given the events of that year, I hope Cyprus picked an auspicious time to adopt the euro.

five-by-five

inside voice: dogs in Japan taught to soft-bark

staring-contest: crystal lattice whose patterns appear when one blinks

relocation: an interesting podcast on chaotic Moving Day in New York City, the annual event when all tenants’ leases expired simultaneously

PET-project: plastic bottles beautifully repurposed as artificial plants

playland: restaurant in Italy has an amusement park that’s powered by the momentum of thrill-seekers

depalletised oder unverpackt

The roving reporters of Quartz Magazine send word that a new market has opened in Berlin called Unverpackt that’s been designed to showcase how we can manage our grocery shopping without sleek and resource intensive packaging.
It’s not exactly as if we shopped in some old timey general store when I was little, but I do remember that the concept of buying in bulk, which seems now only retained for candies and nuts, was more common—at least for generic brands and maybe that’s why it went away. I hope that this movement takes hold elsewhere, since even if for the sake of vanity and brand-loyalty and in an ideal world where nothing goes to waste and is properly recycled, a lot of thoughtless cost goes into something just tossed away. Besides I think it would be fun to come up with creative storage solutions or revive quality tins worth saving.