For a small break from Brussels and the economic crisis:
Nothing fades so quickly or so tackily as a Soviet resort.
One of the lighter observations (on p. 139) from The Spirit-Wrestlers by Philip Marsden, a journey across southern Russia and the Caucasus in search of various religious non-conformists who fell afoul of both Russian and Soviet states.
From Geert Mak’s visit to Sarajevo in 1999:
Batinic leans over and looks me straight in the eye. ‘Tell me, Geert, honestly: what kind of people are you sending us anyway? The ones at the top are usually fine. But otherwise, with only a few exceptions, the people I have to deal with are third-class adventurers who would probably have trouble finding a job in their own country.’ It makes him furious. ‘To them, we’re some kind of aboriginals. They think they have to explain what a toilet it, what a television is, and how we should organise a school. The arrogance! They say Bosnians are lazy people, but it takes them a week to do a day’s work. And you should hear them chattering away about it! At the same time, everyone sees how much money they spend on themselves and their position. They put three quarters of all their energy into that.’
Not a new complaint, but pungently put. The classic retort, of course, is that if the local people hadn’t made such a terrible mess of their own country, they wouldn’t need the international aid. Mak’s companion does not spare his fellow Bosnians either.
We order another drink, and Batinic starts complaining about the corruption in Bosnia, the rise of religious leaders in the city, the enthusiastic discussions at the university about ‘the Iranian model’. ‘Sarajevo isn’t Sarajevo any more. The city has filled with runaway farmers…’
Batinic’s pessimism has had the upper hand again for some time now.In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century by Geert Mak, p. 806
Over at English Russia, Sergei Larenkov has merged historic photos form the siege of Leningrad with contemporary pictures taken from the same vantage point. Flak balloons, protective scaffolding, ruins and dead bodies juxtaposed with SUVs, modern busses, restored facades. Fascinating work.
Don’t miss his links to other photo projects down at the bottom of the post. Russian North Truckers. Ain’t No Russian City. Another Abandoned Theater.
The world my children (one, three and five) remember will always be one in which a black person has been President of the United States of America.
Less than 10 percent of the way into the book (to be fair, my edition weighs in at just under 900 pages), I’m liking In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century by Geert Mak a great deal, and looking forward to the rest.
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Two productivity-enhancing additions to the internet that at least a couple of our readers may not have noticed in the last 24 hours.
Google is putting the image archive of the American magazine LIFE online. Over the next few months, this will mean access to some 10 million images, the vast majority of them never published. In the meantime, some of the best-known are already online. Add the text “source:life” to any search in Google Images to specify something from the archive. Browse pictures dating back to the 1750s, though searches max out at 200 results right now.
If you still haven’t whiled away the entire day, there’s an official Monty Python channel on YouTube. As if the site itself weren’t bad enough.
It’s Friday afternoon, and if you, gentle readers, should want to leave the gloomy reality of a world in economic crisis behind you for a night out in Europe, you may be interested in having a look at a new web service called Happenr for hopefully useful suggestions about what to do.
According to a techcrunch review by Erick Schonfeld, Happenr is a new search engine, operated by a Belgian company, that currently collects information about events in Germany, Ireland, Belgium and the continent’s most important cities by scouring tourism, town, and cultural websites. While the review author sceptically remarks that “event databases are a dime a dozen,” he also mentions that “Happenr thinks there is still room for a comprehensive events search engine in Europe, and it believes it has a better way of indexing events automatically.”
Well, see for yourself. I for one actually found something I might do later on.
I’m beginning to think that our neighborhood grocery store here in Tbilisi could be an interesting source of stories about the politics and economics in the Second World. The tastiest corn chips come from Turkey, the cooking oil brands are almost all Russian (though with relations being what they are, I don’t know if the products themselves come directly from the neighbor to the north), the peanut butter from China looks too suspect to buy, and a fair amount of the pasta is Italian Barilla. Stocks sometimes still seem a question of what the store can get, rather than what the customers want. There are a whole bunch of fancy-looking Dutch cheeses just now, but they seem to be going for about EUR 16 a kilo, which is an awful lot for here. Particularly as I think behind the nice packaging they’re probably pretty ordinary, rather than actual super-artisan stuff that might command the price. And some of the choices are just odd: of the main shelving (the display area in the middle of the store) fully one-twelfth is given over to nothing but ketchup. Ketchup is the perfect condiment, but still. Further, the 750-ml Heinz regular in a squeezable plastic bottle with a label in Dutch is about 7.50 lari, while the the 750-ml Heinz regular in a squeezable plastic bottle with a label in French is about 9.50 lari. This does not look like a rational market. Maybe someone in management speaks English and I can find out why.
The guns of Europe fell silent as the Armistice took hold.
Not everywhere, of course. Fighting continued in revolutionary Germany and Russia, in the remains of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, and in other places whose history I don’t know well enough to cite here.
Death and destruction were meted out on a scale that is still difficult to fathom. On the columns of the memorial at Thiepval are carved the names of more than 70,000 Allied soldiers who fell in the area between July and November 1916, and who have no known grave. I was pointed to the photo by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, whose excellent posts on successive Armistice Days are moving, full of informative links and followed by astute commentary.
Though the events themselves are passing from living memory, the world shaped by the war is still all around us.
London gets a visit from AFOE founder David Weman. Here’s a photo of him and fellow long-time fistfulist Matthew Turner, at the Prince of Wales, Highgate.
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