Monday 14 August 2017

david bowie, david bowie

The photographer Gerald Fearnley who took the cover-image for the artist’s eponymous first studio album (“Sell Me a Coat,” “Maids of Bond Street” and many others titles) in 1967 is sharing some of the unused outtakes. One can see the germ of some of his other personalities that would be developed fully later in Bowie’s career present and exposed already on this one roll of film.

orpheus und euridike

Forty years after its first publication and three decades since it was translated into English the research and culminating work Male Fantasies (Mรคnnerphantasien) of ethnographer Klaus Theweleit are tragically enjoying particular relevance and probably should have never been allowed to recede into relative, academic obscurity.
Fascist movements and the undercurrents thereof defy the narrative of explanation that we look toward at such fraught and pivotal moments because fascism by its nature is a mockery of reason and rises by viciously attacking the framework of education and emendation that normally protects society from the worst manifestations of despotism from getting a toe-hold. In efforts to come to terms with the horrors his country committed when he was an infant, Theweleit looked first to the usual bellwethers of economic pressures and charismatics and discovered that such explanations fell short before turning to the disaffected paramilitary pulp fiction that circulated in the last days of the Weimar Republic. A critical reading of this previously ignored corpus of literature and ephemera that reflected the Zeitgeist of fear informed Theweleit’s brutal, psycho-political, fantasy-driven collage and collective unconscious. The sprawling study exposes the pre-ล’dipal male psyche that cowers behind the tough personรฆ of foot-soldiers and deputised goons that lives in abject fear of the feminine other—couched in terms that are not too different than what passes as dialogue these days, a morass that’s an enticing and perilous deep, a swamp to be drained, something visceral, fluid and fount of all sorrow. The body politic is inseparable, it seems, from our fragile psychology, and is ironically financed by a further appeal to vanities through our equally reason-defying obsession with appearance, stopping the dissolution of our physical bodies and in turn our virtual avatars. This social imprinting comes from within and until society can confront this, our worst tendencies are not calmed but primed to erupt at any moment.

sunday drive: die siebenschlรคfer

For a few weeks now there’s been a detour due to major roads construction on the way from home to my work-week apartment that necessitates that one drive straight up a mountain range to get to the Autobahn, and there’s been some new vistas to enjoy despite the dodgy weather. I made it a point to visit a little wayside, hilltop chapel near Ebersburg dedicated to the Seven Sleepers.
Click on the images to enlarge them.  Both Islamic and Christian traditions share the story of seven young men who flee persecution in Ephesus around the year 250 AD by hiding in a cave to emerge from a long slumber three centuries later, at a point in history when the Roman Empire had a more favourable view of Abrahamic religions.
Indeed under Emperor Decius, such religious practises were outlawed as antisocial and subversive but the Empire turned to adopting Christianity as a state religion.  One story names the youths as Achilledes, Diomedes, Stephanus, Eugenius, Probatius, Sabbatius and Quiriacus plus their loyal dog who stands watch the whole time.  According to other accounts, the seven are still sleeping and there is also a bit of conflation and cross-over with stories of Joseph of Arimathea as the keeper of the Holy Grail, identifying the Chalice Well in Glastonbury as the cave of the Seven Sleepers. 

Sunday 13 August 2017

form follows function

After having my interest piqued regarding different legislative bodies around the world, I tried my hand at surveying parliaments by their emblems but this uniform and minimalist approach, via Nag of the Lake, which an Amsterdam-based design firm has taken is immediate, imagining how spaces of assembly and debate are influenced, restricted or otherwise facilitated by comparing and contrasting the seating layout of various national and supranational constituencies. Most parliaments adhere to five typologies (architecturally-speaking, the layout, the accommodation)—opposed aisles, classroom, semi-circle, horseshoe and tending towards full circular. These theatres in the round are typical for newly constituted legislatures and are most democratic, according to the authors’ research—while a semi-circular typology is most conducive of consensus-building, but I also suppose that the number of parties would factor in as well.  Other, arguably outmoded set-ups seem to hinder governance.

la terre est habitรฉe

As a little kid, I remember distinctly seeing this short animated that posited extra-terrestrials observing Earth might be forgiven for assuming that automobiles were the dominant life forms of the planet with human beings just some parasitic infestation (though parasites, despite their reputation aren’t lower life forms) and being quite alarmed at the idea that we might be overlooked while the scouting-party compile an ethnographic account based on what they can extrapolate about car culture and society and make informed guesses on cars’ grooming, feeding, mating and funerary rites. Our appreciation to Fancy Notions for showcasing this feature and letting us experience it again. What on Earth! (ou La Terre est habitรฉe!) is a creation of the Canadian Film Board by Les Drew and Kaj Pindal and was first released in 1966 to critical acclaim. I wonder what visiting aliens might make of Earthlings if they came today to throngs of screen-gazers, communicative and engaged by not necessary in outward appearance or with those in closest physical proximity. Maybe such customs would be too inscrutable for outsiders to interpret.

Saturday 12 August 2017

mouse potato

Quartz makes an interesting study on how the maturing fears and foibles of a society are reflected in their neologisms through a dictionary tool that records the year when new terms began to be appearing in print, making a fairly direct correlation between what people were experiencing by what they hadn’t quite the words for and needed redefinition and nuance.  Like with other examples, it’s surprising to learn that what one might regard as a contemporary nonce word is actually somewhat older and just returning to common-parlance: cisgender (1994), humblebrag (2002), carbon-footprint and meh (1992) to date a few. The term mouse potato describes someone who couldn’t get enough screen time was coined in 1993 (the same year as metrosexual, unfriend and binge-watch) but never caught on. Maybe its time has come around again.  Visit Quartz at the link up top for more words and to conduct your own year-by-year lexical survey.

canopy or mind the gap

Kottke introduces us to a growth pattern that some types of trees display called crown shyness that will have us looking up. Why and how the trees stop short of touching each other is somewhat a mystery and it can happen in stands of trees that are the same and different species, but botanists suggest it might be a defence mechanism to prevent the spread of pests, wind-abrasion or perhaps just out of respect for personal space.

call and response

Frighteningly, the president of the United States of America can unilaterally order the launch of nuclear missiles in roughly the time it takes to compose a tweet and while the world can only hope and pray that the bluster and provocation of the present regime will be shown to be just that, it seems unwise to signal a belligerent posture on a social media platform that’s made subject to influence by mob-rule—especially once household atomics are brought into the picture. The sabre-rattling from North Korea isn’t new and the people of South Korea and Guam seem relatively unfazed by the latest threat, and the North has long had the ability to launch a devastating first-strike on the peninsula and Japan with traditional weapons.
It is the reaction of America that is more vexing.  In a stand-off, such as the one Dear Leader has provoked with fairly vague pledges of retaliation to which North Korea responded with a specific plan to demonstrate their capability by firing a volley of missiles into the ocean around thirty kilometres off the coast of the US territory of Guam. There is a grave potential for a miscalculation and collateral damage—not precluding that the US might attack North Korea for the provocation pre-launch. Meanwhile, China has stated that it will do nothing should North Korea be the aggressor and America presumably responds in kind. The strategic presumption being that North Korea will strike first because there is no option of a second since it has a limited arsenal. Thing’s tend to escalate quickly. Of course, it’s devilishly difficult to define what it means to strike first from all points of view, and China reserves the right to intervene should the US be the first to act. I’d like to think that Dear Leader wouldn’t even consider actions that would endanger the people of the region—especially the families of US service-members stationed in South Korea and other American assets. No military option seems tenable and all would result in death and destruction and signal a dangerous willingness to use nuclear weapons that could embolden other armed powers, like Pakistan and India or Israel against the rest of the Middle East, to play out their bellicose fantasies. The fact that evacuations are not yet underway and China’s assessment was put out there makes me think that the ratcheted-up rhetoric and the beating of war drums on social media will be unable propel the regime towards making a grave miscarriage of might. Maybe this is all a ploy on the part of China—allied perhaps with Russia—to rid themselves of two problematic autocrats in a single blow.