georgeland: the blog

testing, testing, 1.2.3. How the hell do i get my old blog into this bastard?

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

Robert Moses joins forces with Le Corbusier in Boozy: The Life, Death, and Subsequent Vilification of Le Corbusier and, More Importantly, Robert Moses. How they find the time to fight crime, I’ll never know.

Sleep well, little monkeys.

temporary anesthetic, a production of cartoonist Don Herzfeld. “My spoon is too big,” indeed.

buttercup festival. Absurdism at its finest.

Extract DNA with simple tools around the home!. I’m just excited that they’re using Fred Meyer brand peas.

Gay German penguins this time.

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.

one woman, 5000 books

This just cracks me up for some reason.

sexy cake

sexy phone

Catherine Mackinnon has a Spartacus moment

Bad Valentine’s Day? It could have been worse. Much, much worse.

Ex-boyfriend poems. Sample:
I wouldn’t know whether or not it happens to everyone,
Since I wasted my youth on only you.

Dating guidelines. 66) 66) Of all the reasons for using a condom with someone, their recurring heroin habit is the least preferred.

Fuzzy memories.
There comes a point in every relationship when you have to ask yourself, “Am I willing to stick a bottle of A1 sauce up this person’s butt?” And in that relationship the answer was, “Just once and now I never want to see you again.”

Let alone trying to find somebody, period.
1. “Oh, you’re Asian. Sorry, not interested.”
2. “Oh, I’m attracted to Asians, but you’re too fat. Sorry, not interested.”
3. “I’M REALLY INTO ASIANS THEY ARE SO SMOOTH CAN YOU PLEASE COME OVER MY WIFE WILL BE BACK IN 2 HRS!!!!!”

High resolution trailer

See also, Bootleg of “exclusive” Amazon trailer

The Dalles, Oregon, to be precise.

But what about Googles noted links to Satan? Won’t somebody think of the children?

Screw the hydrogen economy. In POW camps back in WW II, they had the cigarette economy.

Even when cigarettes were not scarce, there was usually some unlucky person willing to perform services for them. Laundrymen advertised at two cigarettes a garment. Battle-dress was scrubbed and pressed and a pair of trousers went for the interim period for twelve.
I read this back in college; even if you’re not into economics or anthropology, its a fun little read, and quick.

How to eat sushi. It’s a little dogmatic at times, but for the fugu section alone, it’s good reading

Penguin sweaters, duh.. Almost surely apocryphal, but sooooooo cute.

Online font creator.

fontleech.com. An ongoing blog of free fonts. Huzzah! No more searching for fonts like a sucker.

Staged or photoshopped? Still not sure. Reminds me of some Charlie White’s pieces.