mutation?

I'm trying out another type of blogging software, wordpress. You can check it out over here; so far I haven't had much luck importing any old stuff into the little dickens, so I would definitely classify this stuff under the "work in progress" category.

he who made kittens put snakes in the grass

Ian Anderson, front man for prog-rockers Jethro Tull, really likes kittens. Definitely aging better than Jimmie Page, I must say.

cndnsd bks

Too busy to read? Check out the fine selection of condensed books at Book-A-Minute. Although my personal favorite is the abridgement of Goodnight Moon, you may also enjoy such classics as Jack London's To Build a Fire, or any of the fine works of Robert Jordan.

Animals

Well, since Jon already had this one nearly formatted already, I thought I'd post it for him. (Jon, just for the record, your 15 minutes of fame began at 20:11 PST)

So I was listening to Pink Floyd the other day, and I got to thinking about the bleak landscapes of the urban UK, and thought I'd find out what the cover of Animals, which I was listening to at the time, was.

Figure A

This building is actually in London, and is now part of one of the most ambitious real estate development schemes in the city. One developer already failed to pull it off as an entertainment center.

The new plan looks really nifty. It's ambitious but so was this and this.

Shanti returns!

marthaller.com has returned from the dead, with news of New Zealand.

Coming to theaters March 18

Kung Fu Hustle, the new film from Stephen Chow. Much like the trailers for Delicatessen or The Big Lebowski, you come away with a very general (probably incorrect) idea of what the movie is like, and an overwhelming need to see the rest of it, hoping for 90 full minutes of that fantastic mind-fuck.

Book Reviews 2004, part one: Fascism

Fascism

So, it all started when I read Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism. This book is freakin' awesome. Yes, I realize that I am officially boring now. I'm okay with that.

Seriously, though....The book is hard to describe, though, because it is such a curious beast. His central thesis, as near as I can garner, is that the problem most previous books on fascism have had is that there is no central thesis, no unifying traits really except in name. All pure and uncorrupted Fascist movements fail; the survivors are the ones which mutate to best fit their audience. Therefore, most of the book is less a definition than a comparison of various Fascist movements, mostly the Italian and Nazi movements.

The closest he comes to an actual definition was an anti-definition, an intentional narrowing of the definition of "Fascist." Rather than just letting "Fascist" be tossed around as a catch-all dismissal of any rightism, Paxton would have it be both radicalizing (unlike Franco's Spain or Pinochet's Chile, which were actually very, pedestrianly conservative) and genuinely popular. It is not enough, in short, to be anti-Communist and authoritarian; there has to be enough of a utopian goal to generate genuine popular interest. The true horror of a fascist regime is not the right-wing politics; it is that they are viral, self-propagating.

Anyway, I won't try to bore anybody with a full summary, but there were a couple of bits in particular that stuck with me. One, of course, is his terrifying description of American fascism:

The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the original European models. They would have to be as familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the original fascisms were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and Germans, as Orwell suggested. Hitler and Mussolini, after all, had not tried to seem exotic to their fellow citizens. No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy. (p202)

The other bit which stuck in my mind was how the racial discrimination and violence, which we now associate as being integral to fascism, grew in fact very slowly. The closest parallel apparent in the pre-war years was in the discriminatory policies in the African colonies.

This little tidbit brought me to Hans-Jurgen Massaquoi's Destined to Witness. His white mother was a nurse from Hamburg; his black father was the son of the Liberian ambassador to Germany; and he spent his entire childhood as a German citizen under the Nazis. Despite obviously being of mixed race, he made it through the end of WW II alive, in more danger from Allied bombs than his own government.

Through an odd twist of fate, official discriminatory policies basically saved his life. Since he was "racially inferior," he could not take college-tracked classes in school, and instead trained to be a machinist. When the war started, he was too "racially inferior" to join the good Aryan military. By the time they were desperate enough to draft any able-bodied German man, he was too important to the war effort as a machinist.

Although the Nazi years were probably the major selling point of the book, his story does continue on . He spent time after the war with his father's family in Liberia, and with his mother's family in America, never feeling quite at home anywhere for a long time. He ended up all right in the end, an editor for Ebony magazine, happily married, well-respected and all that, but I could easily understand feeling out-of-place, spending one's youth under those circumstances

While searching online to find the name of Massaquoi's book, I also ran across the rather grimmer story of the "Liliput Troupe," Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev's In Our Hearts We Were Giants. The Ovitzes, a Jewish family of dwarfs from Romania, became rich performing as musicians; their size, more than their talent, made them a huge draw throughout Yiddish-speaking Europe.

When the war came they, like so many others, did not think to leave until it was too late. Conveyed en masse to Auschwitz in 1944, they (and their taller relatives as well) were saved by Josef Mengele's interest in genetics. It says something about the true horror of the camps that the constant tests, physical examinations, and blood draws which Mengele subjected them to were seen by the other residents of the camp as soft duty. Nevertheless, the entire family escaped alive and intact; every one of them who left the village of Rozavlea that day in 1944 walked out of Auschwitz in 1945.

Maybe it was the translation, but this book just didn't seem to be that well written; part of it is that they only really had one primary source, Perla Ovitz, the youngest Ovitz daughter. The rest of the book draws from old interviews, old articles, old rumors and lies. So many things are misremembered, or remembered as they should have been, or lied about, or conflated with other events....eventually much of the narrative, especially after the Ovitzes move to Israel, develops a stale flavor, like a musty room.

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