Mother Goose-Step

The goose-step (or goose step) did not end with the Second World War, but it did start with Germans (specifically, Prussian military training in the 1700s), as der Stechschritt / Paradeschritt. These soldiers are marching before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in East Berlin, Deutsche Demokratische Republik (East Germany), behind the Iron Curtain, in the last decade of the Cold War. Along with San Antonio Bill and other compadres from the University of North Chapel Hill, I saw them with my own eyes, as well as leftover ruins from the Anglo-American firebombings of Dresden's city center in 1945. This was a doubly eye-opening and strange experience, because we were behind what were currently labeled enemy lines during the Cold War, looking at the ruins of previously labeled enemy lines decimated from above, in what is now a reunited "friendly" Germany.

Todays Rune: Gateway.
  

   

All Hallows: First Day of the Dead, Reprised

To the departed and the fallen: Gone but not forgotten.

Last year at this time, I saw Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others / Das Leben der Anderen (2006), about life in the DDR (East Germany) in the mid-1980s, and ending in the 1990s, after reunification. I liked it.

In the 1980s, participating in an undergraduate history trip led by Jim Leutze (who is currently running for state office in North Carolina, as a Democrat), I ventured behind the Iron Curtain (around the time the movie begins) and checked out East Berlin and Dresden in person. Nothing quite like seeing things for yourself!  This allows you to cut through a great deal of media smoke and propaganda bullshit generated by all sides at all times.

Strange to think how much has happened regarding that area since then: Gorbachev, Chernobyl, Glasnost, Perestroika, the Soviet pullout of Afghanistan, fall of the Wall, Der Deutsche Einheit, and now German units participating in Afghanistan, fighting some of the same people the Soviets did. Who would've dreamt how things have turned out? Sometimes we forget how much things can change -- for good and for bad. We mustn't. Cultural amnesia is not healthy, but when I look around today, it explains a lot.

Today's Rune: Defense.

The Art of the Steal

Don Argott's The Art of the Steal, revolving around the world-class Barnes Foundation and its art collection, highlights powerful arguments about the place of art in society. Literally -- placement, preservation, ownership, access and original intent. Compelling and fascinating, this documentary evokes the conflicts and struggles over the Barnes Foundation's "assets" -- now "worth" approximately twenty-five billion U.S. dollars.

Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951), a sort of Great Gatsby-like figure but also a  Working Class Hero well ahead of his time, created the Barnes Foundation in 1922 as an educational institution more than as an art museum. Before a consensus was reached in the art world of the value of his collection (actually it was scoffed at in the 1920s), Barnes had snapped up dozens of key works by Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso,  "Le Douanier" Rousseau and Van Gogh -- just to name some of the big guns.

Barnes' will clearly specificied that his foundation remain in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, outside the "establishment" zone of the city itself. 

In the 1990s, a movement managed by "charitible trusts" and politicians took shape that would see the Foundation's relocation to along the Benjamin Parkway in Philly proper, on a tract sandwiched between the Rodin Museum and the Free Library, within walking distance of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Despite the ensuing power struggle (the movement has been contested by many counter-interests), the relocation plans stand. But this outcome is not anywhere near as tragic as, say, the firebombing of Dresden during WWII or the looting in Baghdad after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Why? Because the Barnes Foundation artworks, moving to a more accessible location (by 2012), will be displayed as arranged in their thematic cluster formations just as Barnes wanted them. And they will be preserved, not destroyed or split up and sold off piecemeal. 

Much more to discuss about all the things brought up by this pithy documentary, perhaps at a later juncture.

In the early 1990s, I had the great joy of walking the grounds and interior spaces of the Barnes Foundation, in its beautiful and original location. The experience left me stunned in amazement, but I remember specifically its intimacy of design and also, its wooden floors. I'd like to get back one more time next year before the relocation is completed.  What I don't know yet is what will happen to the original structures and grounds after the move.

Any thoughts about art and its presentation in public spaces?  

Today's Rune: Wholeness.

Guernica to the Nth Degree: Dresden, 65 Years Ago

Notice how the older one becomes, the more connected one feels to history? I don't believe anyone who says they're not interested in history -- that is, everything that's come before the ever-shifting present moment -- unless he or she lives only in a disembodied spirit. The present always has a deepening context, and that context is history.

I remember seeing the city of Dresden in East Germany with my own eyes in 1981 during the Cold War, the remaining ruins from the 1945 firebombings and the rebuilt parts, as well. The living people and the ruins of a church. If the 1937 bombing of Guernica was a harbinger (already transpiring in the Asia-Pacific War), Dresden provided more testimony to human cruelty and madness.

But beyond Picasso's Guernica of 1937, why not check out Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969)? Or Errol Morris' mesmerizing documenary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003), scored by Philip Glass? Or from yet another viewpoint, via the perspective of an Inuit guy who finds himself over Dresden 65 years ago: Vincent Ward's Map of the Human Heart (1993)? What I love about all of these artistic achievements is how they draw so many things together with such clarity.



This trailer for Map of the Human Heart makes the movie seem like Disney meets Hallmark, but the film is anything but. The Dresden scenes are indelibly wrought.

Today's Rune: Gateway.  The older I become, the closer I feel to the big events of the past. How about you?

All Hallows: First Day of the Dead

To the departed and the fallen: Gone but not forgotten.

Also got to see Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others / Das Leben der Anderen (2006), about life in the DDR (East Germany) in the mid-80s, and ending in the 90s, after reunification. I liked it. Got to venture behind the Iron Curtain around the time the movie begins, see East Berlin and Dresden. Strange to think how fast everything has changed since then: Gorbachev, Chernobyl, Glasnost, Perestroika, Soviet pullout of Afghanistan, fall of the Wall, Der Deutsche Einheit, and now German units participating in Afghanistan, fighting some of the same people the Soviets did. Who would've dreamed how things have turned out? Sometimes we forget that. We mustn't.

Today's Rune: Strength.

Map of the Human Heart

Vincent Ward's Map of the Human Heart (1993) has as much texture and complexity as a novel. It deals with so many things, there's almost too much to absorb in one sitting.

It may be partly due to his New Zealand background, but Ward's vision is far-flung and interesting and often comes off like a vivid and riveting dream. He works with time, space, race and cultural clash in a way that includes Inuit, French, First Nation and English Canada, mapping, the Second World War in Europe, the British Empire, balloons and zeppelins, airplanes, mirrors, the absence of parents, and the firebombing of Dresden from the perspectives of both bombers and bombed. And it's all held nicely together through the exploration of the relationships between Avik (half Inuit, half Euro), his Inuit grandmother, Walter Russell (surveyor and airman, archetypal representative of the Empire), and Albertine, (Métis, or half Euro and half First Nation or Indian).*

In brief: Walter arrives in Nunatuk (Nunavut), Avik is dazzled; Walter takes Avik to a Catholic Québécois TB sanitarium in Montréal for treatment, where he meets Albertine, also being treated; Albertine is sent to Ottawa and Avik back to his grandmother's people. Avik is seen as tainted for having spent too much time among the Euros. Walter returns. WWII has broken out, and there are U-boats in the area. Avik eventually joins the Royal Candian Air Force. He goes to Europe, where further complications arise when he meets up with Albertine as an adult. Culminates with the 1945 bombing of Dredsen, a final return to Canada, and ends in the 1960s, with a pretty beat-up looking Avik in the foreground and pumpjacks sucking oil through the Canadian tundra in the background. Plus another scene after that . . .

I'd heard for years that Map of the Human Heart was worth seeing, and now I, too, can say -- it is. If you're a real depressed type, though, you may want to kill yourself by the time it's over. As of this posting, I am still not of that type.

Today's Rune: Signals.

*Note: Probably a nod to Marcel Proust's classic seven volume novel, À la recherche du temps perdu / In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), given that Marcel, the narrator in Proust's novel, has a similarly haunting relationship with another Albertine and the whole movie has the same kind of feel.

Being There

Photographer: Margaret Bourke-White. Every picture tells a story, don't it? Even in hard and segregated times, Americans used to dress up for their public appearances.


Photographer: Margaret Bourke-White. Not that dressing well really matters when your city lies in dust. This one happens to be Dresden. Most of that city was eventually rebuilt, but some ruins were left as a testament to the ravages of war and time.

Today's Rune: The Warrior.

Birthdays: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Robert La Follette, Sr., Aloysius Alzheimer, May Allison, Yasunari Kawabata, Margaret Bourke-White, Burl Icle Ivanhoe Ives, Che Guevara (Ernesto Guevara de la Serna), Junior Walker (b. Autry DeWalt, Jr.), Jerzy Kosinski (b. Josek Lewinkopf), Renaldo Obie Benson (b. Detroit), Donald Trump, Boy George (b. George Alan O'Dowd), Sam Perkins (UNC), Steffi Graf.

Guernica/Gernika in Memory

Guernica/Gernika represents all violent attacks on primarily civilian targets -- that is why it's so important and lasting as a symbol. It was also a real incident (April 26, 1937) in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), a conflict that helped spark the Second World War. But it was not the first such incident. The German Condor Legion bombed the Basque town of Durango on March 31, April 2 and April 4, 1937, killing some three hundred people -- including at least fourteen nuns and a priest giving communion.

At Guernica, perhaps another two hundred civilians were killed. Most of the townspeople were able to run for their lives after the first bombs fell, though Guernica itself burned. In 2007, some 200 survivors of that attack still live and remember.

After Durango and Guernica, air forces on all sides ramped up the scale and scope of such attacks, so that by 1945, the world experienced hundreds of such mass atrocities ranging from the London Blitz to attacks on Warsaw and Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Civilians killed en masse. It's happening today in Mogadishu and around the world, and it is perpetuated by suicide bombers and Stealth bombers alike.


"Guernica was not bombed by my air force . . . it was destroyed with fire and gasoline by the Basques themselves." Generalissimo Francisco Franco, May 5, 1937.

"Guernica can offer nothing of interest to anyone concerned with its past, nor is ther any value in discussing what happened then with anyone here." Gervasio Guezurago, mayor of Guernica under fascist dictatorship, 1974.

Sources:

Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts, Guernica: The Crucible of World War II (1975).

Paul Haven, "70 Years Later, Guernica Holds Secrets" (Associated Press, April 22, 2007).

Fight the Good Fight

Pearl Harbor must seem like yesterday to those who lived through it. The Japanese precision surprise military attack will always excite people's imagination. By contrast, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Tokyo, Hamburg, or the 9/11/2001 attacks are too horrible to absorb or comprehend. When civilians are tageted en masse from the air, a line has been crossed. Or has it? The Japanese confined their December 7 Pearl Harbor attacks to the naval forces; of 2,403 Americans killed, 63 were civilians, and most of them, from what I've read, were accidentally killed by American counter-fire against Japanese warplanes. All the other named air attacks intentionally sought to kill men, women and children outright. And they succeeded. Way to go, human race! We can do better -- or can we?

December 7 is also Tom Waits' birthday (1949). He rivals Marianne Faithfull in the gravelly voice department. A crafty English instructor in Chapel Hill played an early Tom Waits record in the one composition class I ever took at UNC. "Now that's poetry, man," he said. I liked it. We had to write a response after a few songs. He also made us look up the roots of words in the massive Oxford English Dictionary (OED), another clever "activity" designed to torment static thinking and apathy. Fomenting cognitive dissonance, as it were. Now I teach composition and history using the same kinds of tactics. Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards, Tom's new 3-CD anthology, was released in November 2006.

Other birthdays today include:

Willa Cather (1873-1947): "There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before."

Eli Wallach (b. 1915): "One bastard goes in and another bastard comes out." (as Tuco)

Noam Chomsky (b.1928): "If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged."

Ellen Burstyn (b. Detroit, 1932, as Edna Rae Gillooly): "Just remember, beautiful, everything gets old if you do it often enough. So if you wanna find out about monotony real quick, marry Duane." (as Lois Farrow)

Today's Rune: Separation (Reversed).

Hasta La Vista!

Kurt Vonnegut: A Man Without a Country

Kurt Vonnegut's A Man Without a Country (2005), edited by Daniel Simon, is a fun little book, 146 pages of art work, observations, quips and musings. Like Jim Jones, Vonnegut (b. 11/11/1922) hails from Indiana, but his form of suicide comes in cigarettes, "a classy way to commit" it.

Vonnegut's view of human progress is not rosy, but it is compassionate.

The book reflects his eclectic approach to art and life. Including this one, he's created a number of memorable works, but two of my favorites are his novels Mother Night (1961) and Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade (1969). The latter inspired me to walk around the ground zero area of the World War Two Dresden aerial bombings. One can still see piles of rubble and debris in the downtown area of the German city, which also housed American POWS (Vonnegut was one of seven who made it out alive).

It's nice to see a writer still working well into his eighties. Something to aim for, especially if the planet hasn't been reduced to ashes by then. Last I heard, he lives primarily in New York City.

Today's Rune: Initiation.

Auf Wiedershehen!

The Power of Place

I'm always astonished to see places in person, especially ones with names I've heard or read about since childhood. War sites are particularly good reminders of our collective past and the human condition.

I've seen so many, yet there are always more to see.

The most mind-blowing in scale have been the First and Second World War sites, places like Verdun, The Somme, Dieppe, Normandy, Belleau Wood, Bastogne and the Ardennes, Arnhem, Berlin, Dresden. And from the Napoleonic Era, a smaller area but just as epic in its nature: Waterloo. In Scotland, Culloden.

In the US, I've ranged far and wide, for instance walking the grounds at Guilford Courthouse, King's Mountain, Yorktown, Brandywine, Germantown, Charleston, Bentonville, Fort Fisher, Fort Sumter, Fort Donelson, Fort McHenry, The Alamo, the Little Big Horn, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Cold Harbor, Chattanooga, Savannah, New Orleans, and Shiloh.

At Shiloh, I walked around the patches of fields and woods where Samuel France, infantryman in the 31st Indiana Regiment, fought on April 6 and 7, 1862, was wounded but survived to fight out the rest of the war before being mustered out in Victoria, Texas. I recently came across a searchable archival database and found Sam listed, sometimes with a "J." as middle name.

Place names are branded in conciousness by association, memory, and imagination. Which is probably why, one day, I'd like to see Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City.

Today's Rune: The Blank Rune.

Bon voyage!