I'm out of meadow

Alpine toe story

I enjoyed very much hiking in the Alps with CC and the occasional Ibex (or Chamois) (pictured)
despite dropping CC's laptop on my toe the night before we left for the hike. The toe (pictured), as Tom put it, saved the laptop "from certain smashtastrophe." Happily it turned out that the toe didn't hurt much once I soaked it in a bidé and strapped it into a hiking boot.

Nice to Teriso

Above: The beach in Nice two nights ago (rocks instead of sand!) and the view in Teriso, Italy this morning.

CC tells me that this summer is the hottest in recorded history, according to U.S. NOAA. We are leaving for our hike in the Maritime Alps tomorrow morning.

'Fiche rides off into the sunset

It was pointed out to me by CC that the raging international debate to settle once-and-for-all the question of microfiche versus microfilm is not whipped into "raging" just yet because some people do not have an opinion. Because they do not know what the 'fiche is.

Microfiche is these plastic cards, a little bigger than index cards. On them are tiny photographs of documents.


To read them, you go into a little windowless back room and put them into a giant machine (circa 1990 if you're lucky; 1970 if you're not) that makes a lot of noise and heat and projects the tiny pictures onto a screen.

Can you see why this is much better than microfilm?









Microfilm is the same kinds of tiny pictures of documents on plastic, but on a reel instead of on cards. These reels are very long, maybe 50 feet long. They have many more tiny pictures on them than do the microfiche cards. You put them into usually the same machine that reads the 'fiche.

(In a recent moment of personal victory, when faced with a biatchy archivist, I taught myself to convert the reader machine from microfilm to microfiche reading.)

But the main reason that the 'fiche is the best is that it's so, so much easier to find the document you're looking for on the 'fiche. You don't have to scroll through 500 pages of documents to find your doc. On the 'fiche, it's right there, waiting patiently for you.

That is why I heart the 'fiche.

The sadness is that I think around 1980, someone decided that the films are better. Because they are more durable? (I think the reason they filmed these files anyway was to preserve them, also to save space.) Who knows. Anyway, there are a lot more films out there riding the range than 'fiches. That is why everybody has to get behind the 'fiche!

The Hills are Alive

Walking tour: post-Nazi Munich

The Nazi party was founded in Munich, grew into a mass party there, and kept its headquarters there after it took over the German government in 1933. Architecture and aesthetics were deeply important to the fascists--fascism consisted in them--and the dictatorship had big plans to re-make Munich, but never broke ground on the most ambitious of them. They did, however, build a number of buildings in Munich, many of which survived the war and are still in use today.

What's fascist architecture all about? Are these buildings evil? How do people negotiate the past as they use these buildings?

I went on a walking tour to check it out, with the help of this website along with this book.

First stop: The former House of German Art (Haus der Kunst). Convinced of the need to revitalize German art, by which he meant to get rid of Jewish artists, modern art, and expressionism, Hitler commissioned this museum with much fan fare. Across the street, a temporary exhibition of what the Nazis labeled "degenerate art" (including works by the greats of German expressionism) drew far more spectators than the Nazi-approved art in the Haus der Kunst. Today, it's still a museum, but it purports to display the art that the Nazis tried to suppress.

Above: the doors on the side of the Haus der Kunst. Creepy, huh? The building isn't in great shape right now. When it opened, the stone (granite?) was bright white, and its facade dominated the view from the street (they've let the trees grow up in front of the main facade.)
Above: The Führerbau or Führer building, a major Nazi Party administrative building containing an office and living quarters for Hitler. An integral part of its design was the giant eagle and swastika above its portico, which, like similar garnishes on other buildings, was removed, likely by the U.S. army that occupied Munich. Can you see the spot where the eagle used to be?

Another party administrative building across the street from the Führer building. Although they were built well before the war, a tunnel and air raid shelter connected them. A lot of the building materials for Nazi construction were quarried by concentration camp prisoners in brutal and often fatal work conditions.

These two Party administrative buildings above face a central square that saw the most extensive fascist architectural makeover of any spot in Munich. Here they built two "honor temples" to house the coffins of the Party members killed in the Beer Hall Putsch. The "honor temples" saw an annual pageant commemorating the putsch and expressing fascist aesthetics. Here's a link to see the whole plaza (the gate in the foreground pre-existed the fascist construction.) The U.S. army tore down the "honor temples" and re-buried the putschers.


Above: a party office building, now a Bavarian government office building. Here they just took down the swastika and left up the eagle (the swastika was inside the wreath that the eagle is holding in its talons.)


Above: a fountain that's pretty much the same today as when built. German fascist sculpture can be tough to spot because it's so banal, but you can often spot it because it tends to depict the beautiful, naked male body instead of the female body. The statues I find slightly silly, unlike the buildings. There are a bunch lying around in overgrown Berlin parks, half-forgotten. (Or maybe not forgotten. There's one I used to pass a lot that someone spray painted a message on. The message was, 'this is a Nazi statue.' I wouldn't have known otherwise because it is a statue of a fat baby and a basket of flowers.)

So what's it all about?

One thing that interests me about these buildings is that they're not over the top or campy, at all. Moreover, they seem to have succeeded, in that they express a unique and fascist aesthetic that's about monumentality, a lot of stone and right angles, and a kind of modernist spin on greco-roman tropes (like the square columns).

I feel like they have a dwarfing affect on the viewer. You feel unimportant, and the building doesn't compensate for its monumentality by offering charming ornamentation or beauty. But is that me reading into it? Fascism was all about subverting the individual to the state/nation.

Also, they creep the heck out of me! I sort of can't believe that people go to work in them every day.

What do you think?

Surf Munich!

My heart belongs to microfiche

Microfiche is so much better than microfilm. Only losers would choose microfilm!

Toronto police shoot aparently peaceful protestors with rubber bullets

Even though I know they do this kind of stuff--I have seen the NYC police cart people away in the midst of a peaceful march--this video shocked me. It's long, but try to catch the last two minutes.

It's just such a small march!

Still against it

I still support boycotting the facebook, but I joined it.

I joined it because I said to myself, 'Self: if there were a new technology that let you see a picture of like, everyone you ever knew, including the 60% of those people with whom you are no longer in touch, and maybe learn a little about them--would you struggle to be the only person in the world not using that technology?' And then I said back to myself: 'Self, I would struggle to do that but probably give in at some point.'

Also, I have to spend the weekend alone in southern Germany and I feel lonely. (This may be a better reason.)

Anyway, there you go. I defiantly pledge myself to the blog medium!