Victory in spite of all terror

I got an email from my mother and she included these memories, all of which I'd heard in dribs and drabs, but this is the first time I've seen some of them written down.  She's referring to her experiences during the Blitz in Sutton (Surrey), and it always fascinates and moves me.  I'll press for details on that and try to get her to write a bit on her eventual evacuation to the Lake Country.  Apparently this was late in the Blitz, and her details confirm this as the V-1 (Doodlebug) bombing began in June '44.  Also note that she's referring to some postwar details as well, as her father was away for most of the War in North Africa and Italy.

I lived through a war and everything it entailed. The house I was raised in had no running hot water. No bathroom. Outside toilet complete with Jeremy the spider (if you saw him then it was ok to go in if you kept your eye on him. If he was not in sight then where was he?) No electricity for years only gas lights etc... No heating except a coal fire (if we had any coal). Then coke that we had to queue up for for hours that we carried in an old pram (baby carriage to Americans).

No TV of course only a radio that transmitted the news on the war efforts. We had an Anderson shelter [I think she's referring to a Morrison shelter] in the front room that when the sirens went off and the searchlights began we had to run for, not forgetting our gas masks. Listening to the doodlebugs was nerve-racking. Also the blackout curtains that had to be put up at the windows.

As we did not have a bath room we had a bath tub in the scullery (kitchen) that had a big board over it, which had to be removed before one could take a bath. We had that bath once a week and we all bathed in the same water. 5 of us. Before we were older we used a tin tub in front of the fireplace (the one that did not put out any heat). That fireplace was the sole heat we had in the house. The kitchen (family room) was so small only mum and dad had a small chair. The only other furniture was a table with six small hard chairs around it so if we children wanted to sit on a chair we had to climb over all the chairs to get to our seat. Or we sat on the floor. Which was stony cold as we had thin rugs not wall to wall carpet.

Everything was on ration. We kids would stand for hours in a queue waiting to buy with our coupon a loaf of bread (not sliced). We would buy a half-pound of broken biscuits. Us children would have hand me down clothes even underwear. Our socks were darned so much it was all darn and no socks. We wore cardboard in our shoes because of the holes in the shoes. This was in winter with snow and ice. I could go on and on. So you see life has not always been good for me and my sisters. But strangely enough we were happy but very cold.

I should write my memoirs.

Indeed!

Choco Strip 2

This new strip was was featured yesterday on Vapid Bucephalas: "Gallimaufry tin for vaporslave and knicker-bockins, widdershins, flip-flaps, chimney-knacks, swinedrivers and such."  A bit like LoS, although we generally avoid widdershins so as not to run afoul of the French legal system. 

Artist T. Wilson says: 

"Another Choco strip, one of many featuring the apparent murder of his enigmatic sidekick, DingDing — his visualization is a work in progress … "

But not to worry folks, as any Chocologist can tell you, DingDing can't really die, being as he either a hologram or a figment of Choco's imagination.

Coincidentally, the following images were posted on my facebook page an hour ago by old chum Dr. K Jensen, who wrote a post for us some time back (Sausages in suitcases: A visit to the Plum Island Animal Disease Center) and an avid collector of votive paintings from Honduran Choco Cults.

Hope you're enjoying the strip!

Choco votive painting, acrylic on canvas, Tegucigalpa, Honduras

Choco votive painting, detail

Le Mani Destre Recise Degli Ultimi Uomini

album cover courtesy of Wickedpoodia

Whenever I see an American band in Toulouse, I always try to buy a vinyl to help 'em get a tank of gas for the next gig.  Such was the case with Secret Chiefs 3, who I saw rock the house at Mix'art Myris Thurday night.  Great band, great show.  Their chops heavy, tightly structured and Arab-influenced psychedelia, not to mention their cowls and other face-hiding headgear, remind me of the Master Musicians of Bukkake.  I think I've read these guys have played together.  Wouldn't surprise me if they were pals or members had switched through various incarnations of one another's various projects.

SC3, for instance, has a number of "subgroups" and this vinyl is from one of them:  Traditionalists.

I got this one because it was the only one I could afford and liked the cover.  I know enough Italian to have guessed the title Le Mani Destre Recise Degli Ultimi Uomini had something to do with hands, but it wasn't until I looked at the cover again this morning, sober, that I saw the title translated as The Severed Right Hands of the Last Men.

Which means nothing to you, I'm guessing, but it's highly meaningful for me.  Some time ago the meme of the severed hand crawled all over this blog like Thing from the Addam's Family. 

Severed hands!  They just keep on finding me!

City of Light

Barrière du Trône. (LoS)

The radicals of the French Revolution were ambitious fellows.  They not only sought to overthrow a regime and its accomplices, but to export this revolution around the globe.  Most audacious perhaps was the goal of redefining consciousness itself via the cultivation of reason and a new way of perceiving reality.  If the senses were the gateway to the mind, how they processed that sensorial input, how they measured and categorized it, would need to be reworked.  For this reason the French revolutionaries adopted the metric system, changed the calendar and reorganized the administrative lay of the land, all towards a goal of establishing a radiant citadel of reason.  Paris, if not the geographical center, was nevertheless the center of this beacon.  La Ville-Lumière....The City of Light.

Every man and woman could be a star, but they needed a city to reflect this....and magnify it.  Thus Paris itself is a kind of temple to the principles the revolutionaries wanted to instil...not within its subjects, but its citizens.

Architecture and urban planning became a crucial weapon in this struggle.

The Triumph of the Republic.  Aimé-Jules Dalou, 1889. LoS

Paris's Place de la Nation features a massive bronze sculpture which represents the Republique and its virtues in allegorical form:  The Triumph of the Republic.  At the eastern entrance stands a pair of massive columns, surmounted by globes, marking the Barrière du Trône.  These colums were erected in 1787 and designed by architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux.  Ledoux is believed to have been part of a Rosicrucian order and a Freemason, attending the Loge Féminine de la Candeur.  Perhaps this influenced his design.  Two freestanding colums  have marked the entrance to sacred space since antiquity:  the Egyptians used two obelisks and the Phonecians used pillars, a design reproduced by Hiram of Tyre in Solomon’s Temple, the model for the use of pillars at the entrance of a Masonic Lodge (see previous stuff here and here).  In any event, Ledoux was considered a rigorous Neoclassicist and utopian whose designs reflected the ideas of architecture parlante (both Ledoux and "ap" previously on LoS).

The columns and two nearby pavilions were originally part of the Mur des Fermiers généraux, a series of towers, wall and barriers used to enforce the octroi.  This tax on goods entering the city has ancient roots, but it was certainly a gripe for many.  Tax farming was essentially privatized tax collection, a neat deal in which tax farmers at the head of private companies reaped colossal fortunes at public expense.  The Parisian wall was very unpopular, it was said, "Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant".  (Loosely: "The enclosing wall has Paris grumbling").

There was also an epigram:

Pour augmenter son numéraire (To increase its cash)
Et raccourcir notre horizon (And to shorten our horizon),
La Ferme a jugé nécessaire (The Farm judges it necessary)
De mettre Paris en prison (To put Paris in prison).

The architectural style of these buildings, "dens of the Tax Department metamorphosed into palaces with columns" according to Louis-Sebastien Mercier, highlighted the oppression which the wall represented for Parisians.

The toll on goods was removed on May 1st, 1791 in the early stages of the French Revolution, but was restored in 1798 by the Directory.  The tolls persisted under Napoleon, but the majority of the barriers were destroyed during the expansion of Paris in the 1860's and the octroi that had been collected at the wall was abolished.

Perhaps because this place was so emblematic of the abuses of the Ancien Régime, a guillotine was set up here.  A sculpture was created to honor the centennial of the Revolution : The Triumph of the Republic.  The central figure of liberty, herself mounted atop a globe, looks towards the hated place where the Bastille prison once stood, while four paths (in the four cardinal directions?) and then streets radiate outwards like rays of light.

Placing the columns in the east is also interestng, coincidence or otherwise,  for the east has alway been associated with light and the rising Sun, which as we have seen, was a Revolutionary symbol of both Wisdom (Illumination) and regeneration.  We have also seen this represented by columns themselves.

The columns are a perfect illustration of competing political agendas.  During the Restoration, the globes were fitted with a pair of rather severe statues of Philippe August (1165-1223) and Saint Louis (1214-1270), deftly celebrating both the monarchy and the church.  They separate the avenue de Trône from the Place de la Nation, whose previous names reflect the upheaval of  the Revolution :  place du Trône (Place of the Throne) became place du Trône-Renversé (the Throne Overturned) during the Revolution.  Its less aggressive moniker dates from the Bastille Day festivities (July 14th) of 1880.

from Wikipedia

Post-revolutionary Paris became a series of gateways into new spaces.  Napoleon created the Arc de Triomph on the Place de l'Étoile, so named for the symbolically-laden 12 streets radiating thenceforth like beams of light.  Napoleon's arch is echoed in the La Grande Arche de la Défense.  This arch in perfect alignment wih the Arc de Triomph along the "axe historique" which radiates westward from the Louvre and includes the obelisk of the Place de la Concorde.

La Défense

The Arche is almost a cube (width: 108m, height: 110m, depth: 112m).  It was inaugurated in July 1989 with military parades to mark the bicentennial of the French revolution...just as the The Triumph of the Republic was created to celebrate the centennial.  It is is turned at an angle of 6.33° on this axis. The most important reason for this turn was technical, but the turn emphasizes the depth of the monument, and is similar to the turn of the Louvre at the other end of the Axe historique.

Even as is drives the nation's motors of commerce and finance, Paris remains a kind of ceremonial space, both rational and mystical, organized along various significant axes, boulevards and plazas.  Washington D.C. is such a "ceremonial" city in an even stricter sense.  Unlike Paris, it has only one function:  to house the government and the monuments that glorify its values and accomplishements.  It is a hieratic city, a kind of city/temple and funerary monument.  It is not the home of a significant cultural, financial or commercial industry, aside of course from the very significant governmental or quasi-governmental organisms which partake in those sectors.  I've always thought it quite like Paris in its physical arrangement.  Perhaps this should come as no surprise when we consider the original design stems from the hand of a Frenchman.

Indeed, there is a book called Paris on the Potomac dedicated to exploring the influence of Paris on the US capitol.  Apparently in 1910 John Carrère, consulting architect for the US Capitol complex, said "learning from Paris made Washington outstanding among American cities" and that both plans should "underlie all city planning."  I've only glimpsed through its "Google booked" contents, but it seems clear Washinton was consciously modeled on Paris, a city which didn't become fully rationalized itself until the 1860's, and this at the expense of the medieval clutter which had been growing organically for centuries.

America provided the rationalists with a new and fresh start, not only in forms of government, but in the neat little grids they plopped down and which are characteristic of American cities and which one only finds rarely in Europe.

On the square, as it were.

He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)

Not what we normally do, but I just wanted to share a cool film, It Felt Like a Kiss by Adam Curtis. Okay, okay, so why share it here? Well, there's its attention to conspiracy, its sense of whimsy, it's suggestiveness. And there's the way the director plucks (or perhaps strings & manufacturers) a narrative thread from a pile of data/footage; his selective attention and creative interpretation, presented as if voicing the silenced ... And, well, shit, I dunno foax, hows 'bout you stop being so by god lazy and watch it for your own damn self and then you tell me what the hell you think for a change, huh? Huh!?! How's about that for change, yeah?!?

Sorry, sorry, got a little carried away there. Anyhow, this here's the by goddest documentary I seen in a awhile. Hope you dig it, too.