colossus and curio

After reading about Iowa County Wisconsin’s House on the Rock, a sprawling labyrinthine campus of connected wings built in the late 1940s by an eccentric collector to house an expansive and random collection of artefacts (whose provenance and authenticity could not always be vouched for, so there are no more labels or signs)—which includes the world’s largest indoor merry-go-round, an “infinity room” that juts off the edge of the cliff it’s perched on, a mock Victorian street, wax-figures, elaborate Glockenspiel and other musical automatons, besides displays of historic dresses, chandeliers and Santa Claus figurines, I was reminded of the time we visited the Colossus of Prora on Germany’s Baltic coast and spent a day in its museum.

The four and a half kilometer long compound hugging the beach was to be a monumental retreat for Nazi party members and service-members on shore-leave, a resort with accommodations for twenty thousand and available to all at nominal prices—but was never completed and abandoned.

The East Germany army had used a small portion of the building up until Reunification, when it was wholly deserted. When we visited, one could wander the neglected and graffiti-spattered but sturdy corridors freely, and there was only one central column that was put to any use at all, hosting a youth hostel and a museum, curated by a local family.
Being that Seebad Prora has been refurbished and sold off as luxury condominiums, I doubt the museum with its random exhibits of taxidermy, mock-ups of East German Command and Control and the typical resort room plus the typical East German living-room, geology, motorcycles, grade-three’s artwork, some exhibits defying explanation, a lot of Ostalgie and a Viennese café are there any longer.

It does make me sad to think that there was no room for someone as passionate about history (and wanted to make sure that that place and those times did not fall into total obscurity) as the individual who commissioned the House on the Rock above—and despite the chaos, I do remember that every item was well researched and documented—but maybe all these artefacts got to stay together, somewhere.  That rugged and quiet beach is probably again off-limits to the all-comers as well.

Here are all the images of Prora that I could find from our visit and exploration back in the summer of 2010.  One ought to really visit such places when one has the chance, since one can never say if it will always be accessible to the curious public.

kitsch and clowder

Thanks to Poseidon’s Underworld, a blog dedicated to unearthing forgotten cinematic kitsch, we learn about an obscure but star-studded production of a movie called “The Phynx” by Warner Brothers and the Seven Arts, released to only a few venues in 1970.
It sounds wonderfully dreadful and has an equally byzantine storyline (that’s sort of derivative, hoping to maybe capture some the success that operatic productions like the Beatles’ “Help” found with audiences a few years earlier) that seems to be a light-hearted indictment against Communist Albania, who seems to be systematically kidnapping America’s national treasures in order to lower morale in the West and claim them as part of their own culture. Colonel Sanders is abducted and forced to cook for the Albanian First Lady—Marla Gibbs, Butterfly McQueen and countless other personalities are being disappeared as well and pressed into service as celebrities behind the Iron Curtain.
America’s intelligence agencies meet but are unable to agree jurisdictionally how to proceed, previous efforts to infiltrate the country having failed, and so turn to a “super-computer” called MOTHA (Mechanical Oracle That Helps Americans) for advice. MOTHA suggests quite sensibly that they form a boy-band—the eponymous Phynx—whose members are also trained in the arts of espionage, to take Albania and the whole of the Communist Bloc by storm and liberate their captured compatriots. This looks wacky and deranged but I think just for the sheer number of cameo appearances (the actors and/or their roles of the Lone Ranger, Tarzan, singer James Brown, Charo!, choreographer Busby Berkley and Charlie McCarthy—not the leader of the Communist witch-hunt but rather the ventriloquist dummy), the animated interstitials and musical interludes, it might be worthwhile viewing.

love counts for zero on the court

Via the always marvelous Nag on the Lake, we are treated to a fantastic tournament of tennis matches, as imagined by Medicine Hat sportscaster Felix Harr, godson of author Paul Auster. There are a lot of clever ones, and I especially liked Felix Frankfurter versus Warren Burger, being as they were both US supreme court justices.

catchascatchcan

We had heard beforehand of the unique Russian republic between the Black and Caspian seas called Kalmykia—the only place in Europe where a plurality of the population is practising Buddhists, which is pretty remarkable to learn in itself, but we had never known about the first and still (nominally so, at least) Jewish state (autonomous oblast) called Birobidzhan until listening a really engrossing discussion about it on NPR’s Fresh Air.
Established in 1931 in the Soviet far east, on the border with China, almost two decades before the founding of Israel, the territory partially planned and to a large part championed by Swiss-German Bauhaus architect Hannes Meyer. After the Bolshevik Revolution which suppressed religious practises and outlawed private property and put enterprise under the mantle of the USSR, Jewish people, who already faced discrimination and were excluded from many public pursuits and now lost their livelihoods as owners of small businesses. Birobidzhan was advertised as a homeland where they could express their Yiddish heritage (and speak the language, whereas Hebrew predominated in Israel) without fear of reprisal—but as the discussion reveals, it was far from ideal—with cultural labels imposed and thrust upon individuals rather than allowing people to self-identify (which is usually the case in such situations) and the migration seemed more of an expulsion to a harsh and remote land, hardly arable and with no infrastructure. After initially being encouraged to build a community, those members of the “elite” who promoted it and tried to make a success out of the experiment were themselves victims of subsequent Stalinist purges. Be sure to check out the whole fascinating and tragic interview in the link up top.

6x6

ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp: the three decade mystery of the Toynbee tiles that urge mankind to aim for the impossible in order to survive

muchołapka: unfinished and abandoned Nazi construction project in Poland that may be the landing platform for die Glocke or the skeleton of a cooling tower for a reactor

tobacconistas: interesting back to back postings on cigarettes with the taste and aroma of marijuana (but not the high) and lettuce smokes for those wanting to quit

defying the laws of gravity: for what would have been his seventieth birthday, Freddie Mercury has an asteroid named after him

if IKEA made SUVs: a flat-pack all-terrain vehicle

slate and shingle: omnibus of clever chalk board art that drew in more and more patrons

even old new york was once new amsterdam

Our faithful chronicler Doctor Caligari informs among many other things that occurred on this day, the Dutch surrendered the settlement of Nieuw Amsterdam (formerly Nouvelle-Angoulême, claimed for the French crown by a Florentine explorer) to the British in 1664 after the Duke of York (the future James II) invaded by sending a fleet of warships to the harbor, under the auspices of his brother, Charles II.
 Somewhat ironically residents were unhappy with the puritanical strictures of their current governor Peter Stuyvesant and welcomed English rule and the territory was handed-over without a fight. A decade later, however, New York was re-christened New Orange for a brief period of time when it was re-taken by the Netherlands during the Second Anglo-Dutch War.

clairvoyance

The gang at Hyperallergic take another field trip to a museum exhibition—this time to see the ink and watercolour abstract paintings of Georgiana Houghton in London. These swirling scrolls strike me as very modern and surreal—almost like the visions of electric sheep in Deep Dreaming but less nightmarish—but were produced in Victorian times, with Houghton’s brush acting as a medium for the missives of angles and saints or sometimes channeling old masters.
Far ahead of her time, the reception of the public was confused at best as the works went against all the accepted artistic conventions of the time—despite the strong interest in spiritualism and séances in England at the time. Although largely forgotten and overshadowed, awareness of Houghton’s contributions and insight is again gathering notice. Clairvoyance in the context of the paranormal or extra-sensory perception simply means “clarity of vision” but there are terms for all the senses plus intuition (claircognisance): clairsentience—psychic through feel and touch to include knowing an object’s provenance and future just by holding it, clairofactus—psychic through smell, clairaudience—psychic through hearing noises or voices, and clairgustance—psychic through taste. I wonder if there were psychic chefs back in Victorian times, as well.

7x7

etaoin shrdlu: a documentary of the final edition of the New York Times printed with hot metal typesetting

miner ‘49er: Street View of Old San Francisco recreated with thousands of archival photographs

quick response: generate animated QR codes that are fully machine readable

parts of speech: we unconsciously follow a certain order of precedence when using adjectives

true colours: friends describe colours to a girl who was temporarily blind and really touch all the senses, from Nag on the Lake


dynamation: the evolution of stop-motion special effects, via the Everlasting Blört

shotgun wedding: the story of the tiny Scottish border village that was the destination for eloping couples of the nineteenth century