From "Tornado-shaped museum invites political storm with art of migration/As Geert Wilders’ government clamps down on immigration, the Fenix museum in Rotterdam aims to show that the movement of people ‘has always been there’" (London Times).
You can see some pictures of the architecture here (at Archipanic). It's ugly from some angles, kind of cool from others, but doesn't seem to relate to the desperation of mass migration. It's coldly abstract and design-y. You may like it if you're the sort of person who wishes Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum had been built out of stainless steel.
It's kind of funny to see Johnny Weissmuller extolled alongside Albert Einstein and Willem de Kooning, but I am not the arbiter of icons, and I wandered off into the Wikipedia article on Weissmuller:
When asked to play Tarzan, Weissmuller was already under contract to model BVD underwear. MGM agreed to have actresses such as Greta Garbo and Marie Dressler featured in BVD ads so that he could be released from his BVD contract. The author of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs, was pleased with Weissmuller, although he so hated the studio's depiction of Tarzan as an individual who barely spoke English that he created his own concurrent Tarzan series starring Herman Brix as a suitably articulate version of the character (as is true to the original books). Weissmuller is considered the definitive Tarzan. He originated the famous Tarzan yell, which was created by sound recordist Douglas Shearer. Shearer recorded Weissmuller's normal yell, but manipulated it and played it in reverse.
Are there existing images of Garbo in those BVD ads? I think not, but though Weissmuller had agreed to do ads in underwear, the swapped in services of Garbo did not involve underwear, but swimsuits.
ADDED: There is this photo of Garbo in a swimsuit. She does not look like a woman who wants to be in a swimsuit. She looks more like a woman who is ready to kill you for making her wear a swimsuit.
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The vibrant, multicultural city that used to be safe. But safety and security aren't Vibrant.
So, again we're going to conflate legal, sanctioned, limited immigration with illegal, unsanctioned, uncontrolled "migration." It reminds me of all the efforts to conflate advanced age with mental unfitness that we just suffered through. And tolerance with full-throated celebration that's been ramping up for decades. And scientism with science. And violence with speech, and speech with violence -
Although it does seem to me that Huxley was more nearly correct about how our age is developing than Orwell, Orwell sure was spot-on about control of language.
”…that used to be safe.”
and Dutch.
Yes, all the harping about compassion misses the point entirely. Fairness and risk of ruin are never part of the equation. When the system they’re championing falls apart and blame starts getting assigned they’ll scatter like the exposed roaches they are…
I don't know if this monstrosity has anything to do with immigration, but it's definitely modern, so maybe they can take this on loan? Maybe forever?
My husband kindly produces the Tarzan yell whenever I win a game of Very Hard Solitaire.
Anne Kremers is evidently one of those people who cannot learn in abstraction. She ought to be nailed to a board and force-fed like a foie gras goose.
Eventus stultorum magister.
Garbo is pretty flat by the standards of modern swimsuit models.
Nobody wants to migrate (illegally or otherwise) to sh*t-hole countries. Ever notice that?
where millions of European migrants left Europe for America in the 19th and 20th centuries....to enter the country legally.
the movement of people ‘has always been there'... like Case Yellow for example. Perhaps the museum celebrates that as well.
A Dutch museum called "Fenix" is just waiting for the Top Gear guys to visit and use gaffer tape to change the name to "Penis."
JSM
The Dutch were shipping slaves from Africa to America.
I happen to be an immigrant. A legal one, brought here by my parents when I was 7 years old, and now a proud and productive U.S. citizen. When my parents immigrated here, they were required to have an identified "sponsor," who would agree to provide housing and financial assistance until they were able to do so themselves. They were also required to take classes on speaking English and American history. And they had to pass a test and pledge loyalty to the United States after a certain period of time before becoming U.S. citizens.
THAT is how you do and celebrate "migration" properly. And if you want to fix your "immigration problem" permanently, let people like us (legal immigrants) instead of Congress design the legislation and manage its enforcement for you.
Peachy said, "Nobody wants to migrate (illegally or otherwise) to sh*t-hole countries. Ever notice that?"
That's not technically true. The Dominican Republic isn't what I would consider a 'nice place to visit' and actually had to place a moratorium on Haitian immigration and tightly controls it to this day. Same with Chadian refugees in Libya or Sudanese in Egypt and Ethiopia. There's always someplace worse, but people forget to ask why they're worse. It isn't acts of god...even billets for spots at McMurdo in Antarctica are competitive.
They're worse because the people there made it that way.
"The futuristic, organic and sinuous design dialogues with Rotterdam’s rough and heavy industrial skyline..."
The architectural descriptions at the link read like an AI blurb prompted by pretentious twaddle.
Although my twelve-year-old self would've loved to take my 1970s-era skateboard down that winding ramp...
I am Laslo.
Laslo's Back! Shit just got real...
Another random blast from my past: i remember my mom and dad's generation referring to underwear as "your BVDs."
There isn't a single truthful and complete explanation of the Tarzan yell that first appears in the 1932 MGM Tarzan the Ape Man. There are several others from films and radio unrelated to the MGM series. These others are human voices, whereas the Metro yell sounds like an amalgam of human, animal, and mechanical sounds. Wikipedia has an entire article on the yell alone, and it's a chaotic mess. Wiki claims the MGM version is a "palindrome", which seem like a a misapplication of the term. For example, radar is a famous palindrome, as in tobor radar robot, but not phonetically. The As are distinctly different phonemes. Pronounced backwards it's something like RAH-DARE. Radar is an acronym from radio direction finding and ranging, so the first syllable is identical to the first syllable of radio. That first A is long. The second vowel in radar derives from the short A in and.
I've isolated the 1932 yell as an m4a clip. I intend to work with it in Audition and investigate that palindrome claim.
"There isn't a single truthful and complete explanation of the Tarzan yell that first appears in the 1932 MGM Tarzan the Ape Man..."
Much easier to investigate the Wilhelm Scream.
I am Laslo.
"These docks witness the departures of millions...and welcomed just as many arrivals"
Filed under "facts that are simply too useful (to some) to check."
Migration exhibits of Johnny Weissmuller, Albert Einstein and Willem de Kooning, can't justify more than exhibition wall space in an airport terminal.
The Dutch realized that, so made the building interesting. The wandering walkway suggests a river of people taking different paths to reach something better. Maybe there is a snack bar on top.
What happens when it rains?
That Greta Garbo story somehow seems like a prescient metaphor for what comes next...
A travelling museum would be a more realistic representation of migration. That half pipe structure was designed by and for skaters.
Garbo is a master. Her lower half is in the water, obscured. Her shoulders are hunched so that her chest and abdomen are obscured. Mostly we see her back and that priceless face.
And it wouldn't be Garbo if she didn't look a little stabby.
Colonialism?
Peachy said, "Nobody wants to migrate (illegally or otherwise) to sh*t-hole countries."
I remember when Kamala announced she would be researching the Root Causes of illegal migration. LOL, it's because the migrants live in shitholes and the USA is nice!
n.n said...
"Colonialism?"
One of the few things that might make a shithole country better.
Kate: "And it wouldn't be Garbo if she didn't look a little stabby."
I vant to svim alone!
JSM
In 1924 Johnny Weissmuller was the first swimmer to break one minute for 100 meters freestyle, taking the record all the way down to 58.6. 100 years later the record is down to 46.40.
In 1934 he was in the movies filmed swimming underwater in his trademark Tarzan loincloth with a nude Maureen O’Sullivan. That brought down the Hayes Code, and Hollywood had to hint at things sexual for a bunch of decades.
My Father used to sing the following in the shower to the tune of Ja-Da (as in Ja Da, Ja Da, Jing, Jing, Jing!)
She's got 'em
She's got 'em
She's got a pair of BVDs
She wears 'em
She wears 'em
She wears 'em down around her knees.
She wears them in the springtime,
She wears them in the fall,
But when she's out with me she doesn't wear them at all.
She's got 'em
She's got 'em
She's got a pair of BVDs
I wonder if this will be like that structure at Hudson Yards. They had to restrict access. It attracted a lot of suicides.
...TCM showed some early silent films made by Garbo in Sweden. She wore diaphanous gowns and no bra. One doesn't ordinarily think of Garbo as sexy, but that's because she doesn't wear diaphanous gowns and no bra in most of her Hollywood films.......I think her best role was Ninotchka. I wonder how that film would have held up if she had played a totally committed Nazi instead of Communist ideologue.
Why did Chief Mogumba always look down?
The porters' chant that featured in the Tarzan movies went
Way-o way-o na-na,
Na-na way-o ju-ju.
It's the unofficial slogan of archivists.
Weissmuller's background is a reminder of just how complicated parts of Europe were before the great simplifiers arrived.
planetgeo reminds me of Helga, a young German girl that my Oma and her daughter sponsored to come to this country in the mid-60s.
She lived with them for a while (a year?) before getting a decent job and meeting a nice American guy to marry. I think she became a nurse, and he was a lawyer (or doctor?).
They did very well for themselves.
Modern definitions.
Migration: When any group of non-European people at any moment in history move en masse into another area.
Invasion: When any group of European people move en
masse into another area.
Migration, colonization, invasion, squatting, human rites, slavery, rape, pillage, redistributive change, abortion, etc.
I've completed my analysis of the 1932 MGM Tarzan yell. I am quite certain it is a human voice edited and mated to itself in reverse. If that is a phonetic palindrome, the Tarzan yell is a paradigm case. Whether it's Johnny Weissmuller's voice, I can't say. The yell as it appears in the 1932 Tarzan the Ape Man and its sequels is 6 seconds long. Loaded into Audition and viewed as a spectral frequency display reveals an obvious edit at precisely the 3 second mark. I trimmed the clip back to the edit point, saved it as a WAV, reversed it, and saved the reverse as another WAV clip. Then I mated the clip to the reversed clip and got a virtual copy of the yell I extracted from the movie in the first place.
The unreversed 3-second clip is just a single note with a bit of Alpine-style yodel at the 1-second mark. Stretching the clip 600% reveals the unsteadiness of the voice, a characteristic of an untrained natural voice. This works against theories that an opera singer performed the yell. The yodeling part oscillates down-up-down-up, which is consistent to other Swiss yodels I’ve listened to. Naturally, reversed the yodel goes up-down-up-down, which may not be easy to do or even exceedingly difficult to impossible for the human voice to produce. I think this is why MGM used the same Tarzan yell recording again and again and nobody can accurately replicate the yell in a live situation.
Was the building inspired by the gold toilet seat that Donald Trump has or does not have?
There are plenty of museums of immigration in the world, if not exactly museums of modern art devoted to the topic of migration. I wonder about the thinking behind the museum. Surely most of that migration on the docks was of people leaving Europe, not of people coming to Europe to shape today's "vibrant, multicultural" Rotterdam. Surely more of those recent arrivals flew in, rather than land at the docks.
For a country with such an illustrious artistic tradition, Holland isn't necessarily too kind to its artworks.
A Dutch town hall has admitted it "most likely" threw away dozens of pieces of art, including a print by Andy Warhol.
Maashorst municipality said it believes the missing works of art were "accidentally disposed of with bulky waste".
"It is not expected that the works of art will be found again," the Dutch authority admitted.
It added: "The board of mayor and aldermen regrets this very much."
The artworks included a 1980s silkscreen print of the former Dutch monarch, Queen Beatrix, by Warhol.
Dutch media reported that 46 pieces of art were lost in total, and some of these had been stored in wheelie bins in the basement of the town hall.
Sheesh. That street's corner liquor store or barber shop will get more visitors than that place, unless of course the local educrats start sending bus loads of kids by for mandatory educational reason$. FTP.
"... the desperation of mass migration."
Is that 100% desperation? None or it greed, at a level below desperation? None a political/religious movement? None an undermining of the western values?
Sure I know a lot of it is desperation. But just like food stamps, not EVERY recipient is a poor waif holding out an empty bowl.
Although that is the portrait by those opposed to stopping the carve offs of the system.
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