Black Friday and the Aesthetics of Fascism

Window-mounted cat beds, Amazon review: "It's been nine months and Tucker still loves this bed ten times more than anything else I've bought him." Image Source: Buzzfeed.

In North America, Thanksgiving weekend is the cornerstone of consumption-based capitalism. Thanksgiving is celebrated in the United States on the fourth Thursday in November, this year on November 22nd, followed by Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which have become pre-Christmas discounted shopping bonanzas. Stores are selling everything you could imagine, down to the window-mounted cat bed. This weekend is lucrative enough to tempt merchants in other countries to use the same gimmick to boost their fourth quarter sales.

Kohler Pedestal Sink. These sinks retail at Home Depot in the USA for USD $600-$800. Image Source: Miley Photos.

Essex Metal 24" Console Bathroom Sink with Overflow by Cheviot. Regular priced at Wayfair for CAD $830.25, on sale on Black Friday for CAD $584.99. Image Source: Cheviot.

Waldorf Ceramic 24" Wall Mount Bathroom Sink with Overflow by WS Bath Collections. Regular priced at Wayfair for CAD $1109.99, on sale on Black Friday for CAD $849.99. Image Source: homeclick.

This week, I saw some Black Friday examples which reminded me of an earlier commentary, Fascism at a Hairpin Turn. In a series of posts on this blog, I am considering how 1940s' fascism became a part of modern global culture in ways which are poorly understood. Above, are sinks by Kohler, Cheviot and WS Bath Collections. Kohler Co. was founded in Wisconsin in 1873 by Austrian Americans; it employs a sharp German aesthetic in its high end lavatory designs.

I was struck by the aesthetic similarity between today's sinks and 1940s' institutional sinks. Below, are sinks in an autopsy room and in another room from the French concentration camp near Strasbourg, Natzweiler-Struthof, where human experiments were conducted.

Sinks at Natzweiler-Struthof. Images Source: La Vie est Bonne.

Of course, sinks made outside fascist Europe in the 1940s would also resemble today's designs and their modernist style could be pre-World War II, derived from interwar Bauhaus. When I mentioned this similarity between past and present, my friend, C., said,

"The fascist aesthetic ... merged what ... [the fascists] wanted of [the] modern aesthetic (some aspects of architecture and NO aspect of the fine arts) and aspects of the neoclassic as well as empire styles, both of which were adopted as official styles by Napoleon's ... régime. ... Makes one think that everything that happened[,] including sinks, New York skyscrapers, and concentration camps were all a part of leaving the feudal system."

The Nazis definitely took that white porcelain neoclassical look and made it theirs. Going forward from 1945, there is no way a designer could be ignorant of that aesthetic reference when creating a consumer product in that style. This is why it was startling to see Nazi-esque sinks on sale on this Black Friday at Home Depot. I can't say that the example of the sinks proves anything in terms of demonstrable historical aesthetic lineage because I have not researched that. But it made me ask why and how that aesthetic has been absorbed into mainstream North American culture and values.

Anniversaries: End of the Great War

"A soldier of Company K, 110th Regt. Infantry (formerly 3rd and 10th Inf., Pennsylvania National Guard), just wounded, receiving first-aid treatment from a comrade. Varennes-en-Argonne, France, on September 26, 1918. (U.S. Army/U.S. National Archives)" Image Source: The Atlantic.

The hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I just passed on 11 November 2018. Normally, I watch the coverage of remembrance ceremonies, but this year, I was working on a writing project at a microbrewery, where everyone observed a minute of silence to remember the fallen soldiers, while the town's church bell tolled outside.

As memory fades of the 20th century world wars, I appreciate more and more the need to remember these conflicts, in order to avoid another century of bloodshed and particularly a third world war. The two world wars were both terrible and unprecedented in their own ways. If the Great War brought about the death of innocence, World War II led to the death of humanity, the death of the modern conscience.

My 2014 post on the anniversary of the start of the Great War is here. All my related posts on World War I are here.

A Day in Pompeii

A Day in Pompeii - Full-length animation (19 December 2013). Video Source: Youtube.

Image Source: Wiki.

For today, see A Day in Pompeii, an animated recreation of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius on 24-25 August 79 CE. The animation was created by Zero One, and initially shown at the Melbourne Museum from 26 June to 25 October 2009. Over 1,300 negative impressions of bodies and bodily remains have been found by archaeologists, in an area where up to 20,000 people lived at that time.

Mount Vesuvius is one of sixteen volcanoes in the world designated as 'Decade Volcanoes'; they are especially destructive and are subject to special study because they help us to understand our planet's core.

Eruption Of Mt Vesuvius 1944 (14 April 2010). Video Source: Youtube.

In 472 CE, the volcano erupted so violently that its ashfalls reached Constantinople. Mount Vesuvius has had periods of quiet and periods of greater activity. We are currently in the latter. The last major eruption was in 1944. At present, 3 million people live near the volcano. The Italian government has a plan to evacuate 600,000 people in one week in the case of the worst possible future eruption.

Naples with Mount Vesuvius in the background on 29 November 2009. Click to enlarge. Image Source: Antonsusi/Wiki.

Death in Panama

Image Source: The Daily Beast.

There is an Internet sub-genre devoted to investigating what has happened to missing people. One of the most disturbing recent cases of this kind captured the attention of bloggers, Redditors, Youtubers, and forum members.

"Lisanne Froon, aged 22. Picture taken on April 1, [2014] the day of her disappearance. Cellphone data, found in their backpack, revealed that attempts to dial 911 were made some 2 hours after this photo was taken. There was no reception. The last attempt to dial 911 was 10 days after their disappearance." Image Source: imgur.

This was the case of Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon, two Dutch college graduates, aged 21 and 22. In March 2014, they traveled to Boquete, Panama for six weeks to learn Spanish and do volunteer work with local children. Then they disappeared during a day hike in the forest near the town.

At the time of writing this post, the debate on this case at the German forum, Allmystery, was nearly 600 pages long. One of the related Reddit threads is here. The police investigation focused on the girls' disappearance its effect on the local tourist industry. This post and a subsequent post will ask about the much larger context of this case, including the Panama Papers.

Image Source: Kris Kremers/Facebook/imgur.

Going Off Script

The Buddhist Karma wheel. Image Source: Notefolio.

This year, I am participating in National Novel Writing Month, not to write a novel, but to clear out several projects in a thirty-day writing marathon. I will be reflecting on this process in November at my writer's blog, The Dragonfly, where I have a new post up today on how going off script and breaking your social conditioning helps heal karma.

BEST KARMA CLEANSING FOR BAD KARMA EFFECTS : KARMA SHANTI MANTRA : VERY VERY POWERFUL ! (4 November 2015). Video Source: Youtube.

Hallowe'en Countdown 2018: Happy Hallowe'en!

Happy Hallowe'en! For today, see some old-fashioned ghost stories in the playlist below.

Note to readers: October was unexpectedly busy; I will follow up on some ideas which I did not get to cover this month in November.

Video Source: Youtube.

Image Source: pinterest.

See all my posts on the Occult, Horror, and Ghosts.
See all my Countdowns.

Click here to see other blogs counting down to Hallowe'en!

Hallowe'en Countdown 2018: The CERN Tarot Deck and The Cybernetic Seance

The Knight of Swords in the CERN tarot deck connects early computers and the founding of IBM (originally established in Poland) to the Holocaust. Image Source: Hexen 2.0. Click to enlarge all images.

Even if you only follow the mainstream, you don't have to go very far before you come across horrors which are worse than anything found in the ancient stories. Not even Salome could ask for what passes for statecraft these days.

There are misattributed photos now circulating online of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who disappeared into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October 2018 and came out in chopped-up pieces. The photos, posted on disreputable sites, include a skinned head, with the face spread on the floor in front of the meaty skull. Warning: the linked material is gory and linking does not imply my endorsement of values expressed in linked material.

These scenes immediately reminded me of Clive Barker's Hellraiser; Barker's horror fiction describes demons walking the earth and entering it by way of certain portals. His  famous Books of Blood from the mid-1980s opened as follows:

"The dead have highways.

They run, unerring lines of ghost-trains, of dream-carriages, across the wasteland behind our lives, bearing an endless traffic of departed souls. Their thrum and throb can be heard in the broken places in the world, through cracks made by acts of cruelty, violence and depravity. Their freight, the wandering dead, can be glimpsed when the heart is close to bursting, and sights that should be hidden come plainly into view.

They have sign-posts, these highways, and bridges and lay-bys. They have turnpikes and intersections.

It is at these intersections, where the crowds of dead mingle and cross, that this forbidden highway is most likely to spill through into our world. The traffic is heavy at the cross-roads, and the voices of the dead are at their most shrill. Here the barriers that separate one reality from the next are worn thin with the passage of innumerable feet." ("The Book of Blood" in Clive Barker's Books of Blood, vol. 1 (London: Sphere Books, 1985), p. 1.)

It is almost as though the Khashoggi case created one of those broken places in the world, a rent in the fabric of reality between the worlds of the living and the dead, created by an act of cruelty. France 24 denied the authenticity of the Khashoggi photos; its reporters found that the photos hailed from Mexico and Egypt in 2017:

"The two photos that show the arms and the legs date back to August 2017, and were taken in Giza, Egypt. These body parts belonged to a man described as 'elderly' in the Egyptian press, who report that his body parts were found scattered between two different parts of town.

The photo showing the skull, the scalped face, the pair of eyes and the penis had already been published online back in July 2017. According to a blog specialised in Mexican drug trafficking-related crime, these body parts belonged to a police commander in Tecoman, Mexico, who was killed by a cartel."

Nevertheless, the photos are real, even if they are not part of the Khashoggi story, and the latter is bad enough without misattributed photo evidence. All of it confirms that something has gone wrong behind the façade of normal authority and current affairs.

[Press Update] Art residencies for Swiss artists at science research centres@CERN @ESO https://t.co/tjNQoUFVy5 pic.twitter.com/msy1fykaCL

— CERNpress (@CERNpress) October 24, 2018

[Press Update] Exhibition showcasing results of three years of arts and science collaborations @FACT_Liverpool https://t.co/DWVSlnfQnU pic.twitter.com/Vq3GV3cuxB

— CERNpress (@CERNpress) October 16, 2018

Dark Matter Day has returned! This October 31, celebrate the hunt for the elusive substance that, along with dark energy, makes up 95 percent of the mass and energy in our universe! https://t.co/LtByP8HnBT pic.twitter.com/pH4XTEXaIE

— Interactions.org (@particlenews) October 9, 2018

📸 The winning photographs of the 2018 Global Physics Photowalk competition have been selected. Congratulations to the winners! https://t.co/OX2SRyj4z1 #PhysPic18 pic.twitter.com/f0Zyc7RKDh

— CERN (@CERN) October 2, 2018

[Press Release] First particle tracks seen in prototype for international neutrino experiment https://t.co/AodsgtCScM @Fermilab @DUNEScience pic.twitter.com/mOzsZcGJrw

— CERNpress (@CERNpress) September 18, 2018

These three photos are the winners of CERN's ‘#Photowalk2018: Behind the Scenes’ competition.
Learn more and vote for your favourite photographs during the global #PhysPics18 contest before 16 September: https://t.co/PESqNoGD3D pic.twitter.com/bBBKJQWPbr

— CERN (@CERN) August 27, 2018

Dive into the subatomic world of @ATLASexperiment at @ArtBasel from 13 to 17 June. https://t.co/x92WxDzqtU @ArtsAtCERN pic.twitter.com/4EJNbERFPE

— CERN (@CERN) June 13, 2018

Art Basel installation turns particle physics into art https://t.co/8DAIbxYwvY via @financialtimes pic.twitter.com/eCoOXBfh3Q

— Arnaud Marsollier (@amarsollier) June 9, 2018

Want to know what's behind-the-scenes at CERN #antimatter factory? Join us tomorrow at 4pm CEST on Facebook for a unique live! https://t.co/riYTsOwcz1 #FacebookLive pic.twitter.com/XOQmoYfese

— CERN (@CERN) April 25, 2018

More clues of the state of affairs come from CERN, the autonomous quantum physics research organization. It turns out that CERN has an artist's residency. This year, the artist in residence, Suzanne Treister, created a CERN tarot deck. Out of all the things Treister could have developed to describe CERN's attempt to crack the building blocks of matter, she chose magic (Hat tip: Dark Journalist; see his dedicated video on this tarot deck, here). All tarot images are © S. Treister and found here.

Hallowe'en Countdown 2018: The Skeleton Key

Olga Neuwirth, Lost Highway opera stills (2003), based on the 1997 film by David Lynch.

In this year's Hallowe'en countdown, I have been describing a malaise that unnerves us. There is a collective sense that things have gone wrong and somewhere, there is an answer why. Somewhere, there is a skeleton key. If you had it, you could unlock all the problems, find their solutions, and blink yourself awake into a better world.