yolo

H and I thought it bad enough when a portion of the remaining Berlin Wall fell victim to gentrification or the travesty of the massive compound called the Colossus of Prora commissioned as part of the Kraft dürch Freude (Strength through Joy) programme as a seaside retreat and then existed East German secret military base being turned into luxury apartments, and that they were among examples of the worse ways to pave over the past—that is, until learning of this quite tone-deaf property development firm in Hanseatic Hamburg.
The mixed use residency and deluxe shopping experience refurbishes the Stadthof which once hosted the Gestapos’ regional headquarters and interrogation cells. Originally the layout was to accommodate a museum and memorial to those questioned and disappeared there but the plans were decimated and the monument was reduced to the form of a section in a book shop about Nazi secret police with the possibility of a few plaques. The worse transgression was this wrought iron entry way (next to a table giving the history of the compound) that evokes the look of the lettering dismissive, dehumanising gates of concentration camps and juxtaposed with such a twee and trite message of welcome seems not only wilfully ignorant but an insult to what happened here.

friday matinee massacre

For those of you playing along at home, just to re-cap the individual, Devin Nunes—who drafted and dropped a think-piece that reinforces the narrative of the government agencies being infiltrated by ideologues of the Deep-State and are conspiring against the Trump administration not only wrote the memorandum himself, ordered de-classified and released to the public by Trump (propelled by the momentum of a twitter storm) against the wishes of the Federal Bureau of Investigations since it could not be expected to rebut this characterisation without disclosing classified and privileged information—was the same individual who in April of 2017 was temporarily removed from the investigation into ties with the Russian oligarchs and possible meddling over disclosure of classified documents to the White House he had obtained from the White House.
Trump was convinced that Obama was spying on him via his microwave oven and Nunes later rejoined the Committee. This was our Friday Matinee Massacre—paralleling the way Watergate pivoted after Nixon’s series of firings. To see what could come next, one need only look to the beleaguered Turkish people under their despot Erdoğan whose purges have not stopped and have intensified recently after medical professionals and academics (already under assault) are being ostracised and alienated for the smallest perceived infractions and anything that does not please the ruling party. Those found afoul in the public sector are not only summarily dismissed from the jobs, they are also not allowed to seek any government-sponsored assistance, and blacklisted—atomised as it were from contacts and social support—are either impoverished or imprisoned and have to resort to selling off their possessions and property to survive. These changes tend to creep up on you and we tend to miss the gradations until they’ve become so ensconced that it’s difficult to regain liberties and trust we’ve sacrificed.  We have to try and stay a few plays ahead.

red rover

Kottke directs our attention to a small but truly breath-taking gallery of photographs that the semi- autonomous Martian rover Curiosity (previously) has amassed in the first two-thousand sols (the measure for the time it takes for the fourth planet to orbit the Sun, slightly longer than our mundane equivalent). It does given one pause to appreciate how sharp and clear these images (approaching half a million) beamed back are and that we can explore an alien world with such a degree of awe and intimacy that we might expect for remote yet very terrestrial terrains.

southern exposure or defaced blue ensign

Via Futility Closet we learn that from 1889 to 1968, the flag of the British overseas territory of the Turks and Caicos islands displayed a stevedore working between two piles of salt (representing the chief trade good of the time when the Admiralty decided that the Caribbean islands needed a distinctive banner) with a sailing vessel in the background.
Upon review, a helpful bureaucrat—perhaps ignorant of the geographical location and the main export of the island group—shaded the leftmost pile as to suggest the door of an igloo. The correction endured until a royal visit prompted an update, changing the coat of arms to feature the islands’ symbols—a conch shell, a spiny, indigenous lobster and a native sort of melon cactus whose flower resembles a fez and bestowed the Turkish name on the smaller landmass, with the native Taíno words for a chain of islands, caya hico, making up the remainder.

choux de créteil

Completed in 1974, Messy Nessy Chic acquaints us with the Brutalist concrete ensemble of apartment towers dubbed Les Choux (the Cauliflowers) due to the distinctive balconies, which residents were encouraged to grow gardens on in hopes that the community would become a self-sufficient utopia.
Indeed the neighbour that architect Gérard Granval created for the south-eastern suburb of Créteil had everything that its dwellers could want for—a cinema and a shopping centre—and was designed to uphold principles of minimising one’s ecological footprint and discouraged gentrification by admixing a population of students with people of various income levels and social support reliance. In 2008, the Ministry of Culture recognised the group of ten cylindrical buildings as piece of architectural heritage. See a vintage promotional video of the grounds and a few other structures created by Granval at the link above.