Cut through the ice among birds and seals

[sovay]

Today was full of snow. Very gentle snow, the kind that falls softly and steadily and spirals on the wind and makes a pile of garbage bags in a parking lot look like the hedgerows of a winter field; it started last night while spatch and I were at the 'Thon so that we walked through its cut-paper whirl a few times this morning, finally stopped around nightfall. I am hoping it does not all suddenly melt with a new seasonal spike tomorrow. I am enjoying the old-fashioned feel of New England in February.

It is my hope to write up the marathon tomorrow when I have had some sleep. Until then, links.

1. Maybe I'd feel differently if I had seen Downfall (2004) rather than doing my best to avoid the ranting Hitler meme, but it is a little strange to me to see Bruno Ganz remembered for that film rather than the role I always associate him with, the angel Damiel in Wings of Desire (1987). I imprinted more on Otto Sander's Cassiel, but that doesn't mean I couldn't appreciate his dark-haired, more wistful companion who quite literally runs away and joins the circus, falling for love, falling into love, trading the wings and armor and overcoat of his immortality for a terrible flannel jacket and a hat that doesn't match either, the ability to taste coffee and bleed, see in color, tell a lie. That was one of the first movies I loved and I loved all the actors in it who seemed inseparable from their characters, the ancient storyteller walking the vanished city, the trapeze artist in her stage feathers, Peter Falk. I saw Ganz in little else, but I don't think it would have mattered if I did. It was entirely believable that before he was an actor, he watched the world.

2. a_reasonable_man writes thoughtfully and beautifully about walls, Berlin included.

3. I had not known about the mummies of Cladh Hallan before tonight. It's another one of the ideas that would have terrified me when I was small: the icon of a body made from other bodies, bog-preserved and curated for centuries before their interment under new construction, strangers interlocked into family. "The results show that bones came from different people, none of whom even shared the same mother . . . The female is made from body parts that date to around the same time period. But isotopic dating showed that the male mummy is made from people who died a few hundred years apart." It feels ancestral, but I don't know. It was the Bronze Age. The rocks of South Uist are the oldest in the British Isles.

4. I have been listening repeatedly to Desperate Journalist's "Hollow." This was true even before I read the above-linked article, though I think they may have gotten a little mixed together since—frost in her hair and sand in her shoes, skirts the coastline, iron-black and blue.

5. I am deeply charmed by this picture of Samuel West embroidering a cabbage.

I slept very little on Saturday night, but I dreamed of tiny slugs carved into gingersnap cookies passing a candy cinnamon heart back and forth among one another. It was a kind of stop-motion animation. In real life I have no idea how it would be achieved, but in the dream it was adorable.

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

I hope you get more sleep. <3

That picture of Samuel West sewing a cabbage is very random and great, though.

[selenak]

Re: Bruno Ganz, I think which role he's chiefly remembered for certainly differs between the German and the English language world. Downfall was widely watched here, too, of course, but by then Ganz already was such a living legend that when it showed up in his obituaries the response I've seen was more "oh yeah, he was in that, too?" (Not least because as far as I know - never watched one - that meme depends on different subtitles, and well, if your language is German those are kind of pointless.) Personally, I first saw him in The Marquise of O by Eric Rohmer, with Edith Clever as the Marquise, and he was the only one who could pull off someone who is, shall we say, one of Kleist's more problematic characters. (That film is every German teacher's favourite literature based movie, or was in the 80s, so I guess most people of my generation encountered him there first, and then of course Wings of Desire came along.)

[shewhomust]

Thank you for the mummies - that's a new variation!

I would have appreciated the cabbage embroiderer more had I not formed the mental image of him embroidering an actual cabbage - which, yes, would have been - well, unexpected, except that apparently I expected it.

[tree_and_leaf]

Eh, I saw Downfall, and he was superb in it, but I still think of him more as Damiel. (I'm charmed, though, that Ganz's response to the Downfall memes was more or less "Oh, young people today are so clever and creative!")

[cmcmck]

I wondered about 'Downfall' myself but I did find it rather impressive once I'd worked up the courage to watch it.

SW & BG

[lauradi7dw]

I first learned of Ganz's death Saturday morning from Samuel West's tweet that was mostly a photo from "Wings of Desire" that just said "Bruno Ganz. With the angels." He then wrote other tweets, but that was sufficient in some ways.
https://twitter.com/exitthelemming/status/1096742158458064896

[selkie]

I wonder how many ghosts you get with a mummy in that style. I wonder what they were for.

*sends tea*

[https://openid-provider.appspot.com/mcdolemite]

First place I saw Ganz was in Wim Wenders THE AMERICAN FRIEND, the first film adaptation of Highsmith's RIPLEY'S GAME. Dennis Hopper's Tom Ripley is kind of a cartoonish psycho cowboy (complete with Stetson), but it's Ganz's movie and he's great, much better than Dougray Scott in the equivalent role in RIPLEY'S GAME (with Malkovich as a Ripley nobody would ever trust).

[brigdh]

Aren't the Cladh Hallan mummies so great? I came across them last year when I was researching a project on bog bodies. I love that they only realized that they were made up of multiple people because the man's teeth didn't line up – his lower jaw has a full set of normal teeth, but the upper jaw had no teeth left at all. It was while the archaeologists were trying to figure that out they decided to DNA test the bones and realized it was actually multiple skeletons. They didn't test the accompanying female skeleton until later, since she appeared to match. It does leave open the question of if there's many more similarly Frankenstein'd bodies out there, since how often would anyone bother to DNA test multiple parts of a skeleton?

The female skeleton is actually even weirder than that article describes – she had two incisors removed (after death) and was buried with one in each hand, and despite calling her the "female" skeleton, DNA suggests the skull belonged to a male (I mean, as much as DNA can identify lived experience, so take that for what it's worth).