by Andrea Scrima
Sequel to the essay “Musings on Exile, Immigrants, Pre-Unification Berlin, Trauma, Naturalization, and a Native Tongue.”
It’s disorienting when cities lose their gray zones—the undefined plots of fallow land that used to line the banks on the Brooklyn side of the East River, for instance, the nineteenth-century warehouses, docks, and quietly deteriorating, decommissioned refineries. Crumbling cement made porous by weather and weeds, the whole of it replaced now by faceless, blue-hued high-rise towers of glass and steel that sprang up like mutant mushrooms over the past decade and a half to block the path of the evening sun along the waterfront, erase the sharp glint of silvery light that once illuminated defunct railroad tracks at sundown, their perfectly parallel lines momentarily ablaze with the recollection of past importance. In Berlin, wasteland terrains could be found nearly everywhere before the Wall came down: the long stretch of a discontinued S-Bahn line that led from Monumentenstrasse and over the bridges at Yorckstrasse up to the former railway terminus Anhalter Bahnhof, now a ruin consisting of no more than a fragment of the once-massive building’s façade, where a semicircular set of overgrown train tracks opened onto the remains of a round loading dock. A decade and a half after Allied bombs had obliterated much of Germany, its division into two countries produced a haphazard border that sliced through the massive reconstruction project underway, blocking streets and cutting through buildings and canals and occasionally giving rise to little pockets of land connected to West Berlin by long roads flanked on either side by the Wall. Read more »
When I heard that Chicago will host the 2024 Democratic National Convention next August, (August 19-22,) it brought back a flood of memories. Memories, not only of the convention itself, but of the 60’s. “The 60’s” did not exactly span the decade but began in 1963 , when John F Kennedy was shot, and ended in 1975, when the war in Vietnam ended. During this relatively short period, our country went through a large number of societal changes, including political changes, changes in gender stereotypes, in racial interactions, in acceptable speech, in sexual mores. This was the time when we Baby Boomers came of age, when the 76 million Americans born between 1946 and 1954, began to flex their muscles and recognize how much they could accomplish, and what a loud voice they had when acting as a group. For example, they influenced clothing styles and music. They had tremendous purchasing power, as most of the clothing for sale after the 60’s was more appropriate for a-19–year-old than for a 40 or 50- year old American!
Nanni Moretti has always been a melancholic in denial. Perhaps more than any other film-director raised on the French New Wave – born in 1953, shooting his first short in 1973 – Moretti has been turning around the question that François Truffaut posed as a key to the seventh art: is cinema more important than life? But where for Truffaut, or Rossellini, as for many amongst their long and glorious lineage (from Spielberg to Tran Anh Hung) the dilemma has been between a painful reality full of obstacles on one side and a ‘harmonious’ path where ‘there are no traffic jams’ (to speak like Truffaut in his 1973 Day for Night), on the other – in other words, where cinema is the path of escape towards a world where dreams (or nightmares) come true – for Moretti, it is the dilemma itself which is the essence of cinema.
I never heard Henry Bull, my father-in-law, claim he invented the Whee-Lo, but his proud sons have on occasion. He manufactured and distributed the toy, and made it into a nationwide sensation in 1953, just before the hula hoop and Frisbee. A curved double metal track that held a spinning plastic wheel, the gyroscopic magnetic Whee-Lo is still available for purchase, most frequently at airport gift shops. By flicking your wrist, you propel the wheel and its spinning progress down the track and back. Mesmerizing, it’s a sort of fifties’ analog Game Boy. First called the Magnetic Walking Wheel, it came packaged with six colorful cardboard discs known as “Whee-lets” that created optical illusions as the wheel spun. According to Fortune, Henry’s company, Maggie Magnetics, sold two million units its first year.
