Lübeck — Part Two

The Holy Ghost Hospital (Heiligen-Geist-Hospital) in Lübeck was built in 1286 and looks today much as it did then. It housed a monastic foundation that rendered charity to the sick and needy.

Eventually the Hospital was converted into an old age home. These wooden cubicles were built in 1820 and inhabited by older persons living on charity up till 1970. Note the fine medieval roof.

Inside the nearby St Jakobi-Kirche, whose war-battered tower is seen as it was around 1980, are found two of Germany's most interesting organs.

In these badly faded pictures you can see first the Friedrich Stellwagen transept organ from 1636-37. It incorporates Gothic pipes from the 15th century, making it one of the oldest instruments in Germany.

An excellent sound sample of the Stellwagen organ can be heard here.

The Great Organ in the Jakobi-Kirche appeared in different versions between 1466 and 1740.

+

Lübeck — Part One

An hour's train ride from Hamburg, the Baltic seaport town of Lübeck was the most important city in the Hanseatic League. The city was largely destroyed in the bombings of World War Two. This Merian map of 1641 shows it in its glory days.

I took dozens of photos from my visits there, mostly inside the ancient redbrick Gothic churches which have been well-restored.

The Holsten Tor, gate to the city.

The Marienkirche, built between 1250 and 1350.

Plaque commemorating Bach's apprenticeship with Buxtehude here.

Eternal Gothic

Front door handles

+

San Francisco discovered in Game of Thrones

This cgi from Game of Thrones shows the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts in the background, and a second shot of the same dome enlarged behind it. The buildings in front were photographed in Malta. Ned Stark is about to be decapitated: Joffrey and retinue are on the platform to the left, waiting for the Lord of Winterfell who will enter through the portal at the right.

The Palace of Fine Arts was built for the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915. Obviously its creator Bernard Maybeck, shown below at home with his family around 1910, would have been completely cool with its appearance in Game of Thrones.

+    Clicking embiggens as always.

You be the judge

Good fun is to be had at http://ybtj.justice.gov.uk/, where you can compete with British judges in determining the proper judgement for miscreants who have been convicted and are now up for sentencing.

As a proper medievalist, my habitual sentence for most of them would be something along the lines of toss-'em -in-the-dungeon-and-throw-away-the key, but a couple of the cases proved me a real softy, bestowing justice more leniently than the actual judges.

What surprised me that if the evil-doer says I'm sowwy, the sentence is apparently automatically mitigated--fat chance that would have in this country.

It helps to know that misdemeanors are tried in magistrates' court, and more serious matters in Crown Court, which is robed. The modern judge's costume looks ridiculously unattractive compared with the scarlet robes, white ermine cuffs, buckle shoes and long wigs which His Lordship wore in times gone by. If you're going to make a theater out of the trial system, why not really go for it.

+

Pellworm

The little North Frisian island of Pellworm on the North Sea coast of Schleswig-Holstein is a convenient escape from Hamburg on hot summer days. It is encircled by a dyke upon which grazing sheep circulate in a somewhat diffident manner.

Over the edge is a thin strip of beach populated by day-vacationers, probably Hamburgers. Note the pounding surf, an object of derision for any visitor from California.

German beach behavior should be and probably is already a worthy subject of sociological analysis. First, there signs are posted which divide the beach like grids on a sheet of graph paper indicating what it is permitted and where: let your dog run free, take your clothes off, build a sand castle, etc. Second, the visitor stakes claim to a small parcel of beach sand over which s/he becomes the temporary proprietor. This may be accomplished by renting a Strandkorb or "beach basket" in which you can sit and activate your nature experience by staring out at the ocean.

Or if for some reason you feel encouraged to resist entropy you might rent a bicycle and examine the island's rather minimal architectural heritage, which includes an attractive ancient parish church.

North Germans are proud of their patch of sea coast on the North Sea and on the Baltic. To hear the touristic and media hype, you'd think Germany was one of the great sea-faring nations of the world. This is distinctly not the case, but there are many pleasant moments to be found along the German coast.

And also some odd ones. I can't remember where I took this photo of a monument to an ocean mine, (probably Cuxhaven), or rather to those who were killed by such. I couldn't figure out from the inscription whether enemy personnel who were blown up by the German mines were being memorialized, or rather those who were laying the mines, in which case they must have been awfully clumsy.

+

Jugglers I have known—3/3

Francis the Juggler anticipating the momentary arrival of a set of dumbbells being hurled to him by his partner at the Renaissance Faire in Novato, 1977.

+

Jugglers I have known—2/3

Cuthbert, Renaissance Pleasure Faire in Novato, 1978

+

Jugglers I have known—1/3

Francis, Renaissance Pleasure Faire in Novato, 1978

+

Scenes from academic life—Just say no.

 More academic funnies at whatshouldwecallme.

+

Stade

Continuing our thrilling series about day trips you could have made in the early 1980's if you were in Hamburg and it was Sunday when everything was shut down and you wanted to go somewhere, one option might have been to visit Stade, a small town half-way up the Elbe to Cuxhaven.

My main motivation in this case was to gratify my interest in North German baroque pipe organs, many of which are equal to their Dutch counterparts, the world's biggest and best. My primary destination therefore was the church of St. Cosmae et Damiani. (German saints often seem more foreign-sounding than those found in England. Cosmas and Damian were twin brothers martyred somewhere in Turkey 303BC resisting Diocletian's persecutions.)

Cosmas and Damian would have certainly enjoyed the Arp Schnitger organ built before 1688, which looked like it was about to bust through its containing wall. You can hear it yourself on YouTube, for example right here.

Stade itself is afflicted with a severe case of Puppenhaus-Romantik (Dollhouse romanticism). You get this in many places in Germany, and it is seriously annoying.

It's all done up for the tourists of course, since house-paint didn't exist before the 20th-century.

North Germany was largely atomized during the bombing raids of  WWII, but apparently this water tower in Cuxhaven escaped Allied attention, and there are some interesting constructions dating from the turn of the 20th century. But why would a water tower have windows?

And from the same period a couple nice houses either renovated or built in quasi-Jugendstil, although I think it would be more fun to live in the water tower. I can't remember if these houses were in Stade or Cuxhaven.

+

International Day against DRM

Today, May 4, is the International Day Against DRM, the day in which the Free Software Foundation's "Defective By Design" campaign urges you to celebrate DRM-free media and boycott DRM.

+

Slavoj Žižek and Buddhism

Dharma-protector Manjusri

Slavoj Žižek criticizes Buddhism in two ways: by ridiculing the Dalai Lama's dictum that Buddhism makes you happy—My God, hasn't this man heard about Freud?—and by referencing the support afforded to nationalist militarism in WW II by the Japanese zen sects, citing in particular laudatory remarks expressed by D.T. Suzuki.

The second argument is more easily dispensed with: the political ideologies associated formerly with the zen establishment in Japan have as much relation to the teachings of the Buddha as the Spanish Inquisition does with the teachings of Christ. The abuse and perversion of religious ideals by institutional authority is a sad and ancient story, but there is nothing especially Buddhist about it. Indeed in all the Asian countries where Buddhism flourished, there are remarkably few instances.

The Dalai Lama however can be criticized for advertising the view that Buddhism makes you happy, giving critics the chance to speak of it as "fast-food religion," or see it as simplistic New Age-ism. It's not that Buddhism doesn't make you happy—why would so many people practice it for 2.5 millennia if it didn't?—the question is rather whether the Buddha actually taught that and that the answer is clearly no.

The original teachings of the Buddha—as closely as we can discover them through philological analysis of the earliest layers of the Pali Canon sutras— are contained in the Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Path. These teachings say that suffering exists, that the unreflected pursuit of desires is responsible, and by committing to certain ethical precepts and to the practice of meditation, such suffering can be overcome. This is anything but some "Don't worry, be happy" species of spiritual dumbdown. In truth the practice of Buddhism is really quite challenging.

Slavoj Žižek would be better advised to view the Buddha as a kindred spirit, since he was in fact an early philosopher working at the dawn of human literacy, addressing themes common to the Greek Pre-Socratics, and, as evidenced by the early Pali Canon narratives which show him in dialectical exchange with all kinds of contemporary philosophers, ready and eager to respond to any kind of criticism.

+