the firemen’s ball

To celebrate the long career of the recently departed Czech screenwriter, director and professor Miloš Forman Coudal Partners refers us to a gallery of international movie posters promoting his earliest works.
Though perhaps better known for his later contributions of the award-winning One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Hair, Amadeus, The People vs Larry Flint and Man on the Moon (the Andy Kaufman biopic), Forman’s final 1967 film in his native Czechoslovakia before self-imposed exile portrays a series of disasters that befalls a small town with endemic corruption and the inadvertent outcomes of the best-intentioned plans. Recognised as a cutting satire of Eastern European politics, the film was banned in perpetuity after the Warsaw Pact invasion of the country (a countermeasure to the Prague Spring of reformist Alexander Dubček) in the night of 20 August 1968.

snowbirds

The always brilliant Nag on the Lake directs our attention to a rather fascinating annual ritual through the photo-essay by Alice Gregory and Dina Litovsky that documents the end of vacation season, running from after October’s harvest to spring planting in April when the fields are fallow, for the “Plain People”—that is communities of the Amish, Anabaptists and Mennonites from rural Pennsylvania and Ohio—who are bussed down to a neighbourhood in Sarasota, Florida to enjoy an extended vacation away from the farm and harsh winters and to spend time with other members of their groups that are outside of their immediate communities, in fact any outsiders. Being on holiday, some of the strictures that determine their code of conduct are relaxed a little and for people that consider hard-labour and self-sufficiency sacred virtues, momentary leisure is to be savoured.

1. outside

The ever excellent Everlasting Blört introduces us to the painting, portraiture and storyboard work of David Bowie through a curated gallery that captures the artist’s soulful legacy, highlighting the influence of contemporaries (many of whom whose works he patronised and collected as well) and the German Expressionism movement that Bowie and Iggy Pop immersed themselves in when they moved to Berlin in 1976. Artwork includes sketches that are studies in cosmetic and costume development, album covers, stage directions for performances and a few panels for an unmade film adaptation of a story called “Hunger City.”

8x8

everything zen: images from this weekend’s European Stone Stacking and Balancing Competition in Scotland are tranquil (rather than precarious) and oddly fulfilling, via Super Punch

soiree: ahead of the fete for Macron’s state visit, the Atlantic reviews White House state dinners of the past decades

boilerplate: discontent over handling of user data may signal the end of perpetuating meaningless fine-print and illusory choice in contracts

bird’s eye view: cameras carried aloft by trained pigeons deliver turn of the century aerial photography (previously)

convolutional neural network: using deep learning and augmented reality, programmes can aid physicians in detecting cancer and other diseases in real-time, via Slashdot

crassus became the richest man in rome by owning the fire department: privatising emergency services will insulate the wealthy from the worst consequences of climate change while making the poor pay

2008 tc3: meteorite found in Nubian desert is one of the last remains of an ancient, doomed proto-planet

rest in grease: a fast-food chain’s release of a mixtape prompts us to question the boundary between music and marketing and what constitutes a brand versus a band

zwischenstopp: willmars

We’ve previously wrote a little bit about the village of Willmars when we went exploring some ruins and contemplated hunting for mushrooms but the side of town one spies from the road is also pretty picturesque and compact—everything that makes a proper village all right together. The bakery/general store is co-located now with the fire department removed a bit from the main street but everything else is right there.
The settlement was originally in the hands of a cadet-branch of the Franconian dukes of Henneberg, controlling the lands with imperial immediacy from the forests of Thüringen to the banks of the Main, from the early thirteenth century onwards.
Once the line died out with no legitimate heirs in 1583, Willmars and its neighbours reverted ownership to the Duchy of Saxony.
With the major re-distri-bution of sovereignty within the Holy Roman Empire of 1803 (der Reichsdeputationshauptschluss), the villages once again traded hands and came into possession of the Free and Imperial Knights von Stein zu Nord- and Ostheim—more or less for keeps and more on this venerable family to come.