Guardian obituary.

Back in the late 1970s, Mekas did a showing of “Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania” (1972) at Film Forum in New York.

Back in Soviet times, Americans had seen a lot more of Tibet than they ever had of any of the occupied Baltic States, so (being of Lithuanian descent and being a hard-core cinéaste) I was there with bells on.

You’d have expected the audience to be made up of the usual hip New York Experimental Film crowd, but actually that night it was full of Lithuanian Americans desperate to catch a look at their Fatherland.

The film (I’m remembering back over 40 years) was not very experimental, or arty, at all. It was really much more like a home movie. And Lithuania was startlingly poor and primitive. I remember that Mekas received accommodation at his relatives’ collective farm being given a pile of straw to sleep on.

Mekas clearly had bent over backward to avoid politics. If he had not, the Soviet authorities were holding lots of relatives of his hostage, and he would certainly never be visiting Lithuania again, if he’d expressed negative opinions of the system.

The audience, however, of hot-blooded, anti-Soviet Lithuanians was not happy with Mekas’s restraint. He got no cinematic questions, but he was deluged with demands that he openly condemn Communism and the Soviet Occupation.

The poor film-maker was nonplussed. He wanted to talk film. His audience wanted to fight Communism.

I met him, and found out that he was a Lutheran from Northern Lithuania.

HT: Vanderleun.

SNL predicted her rise back in 2013!

Franz Sedlacek, Industrielandschaft.

Franz Sedlacek (1891–1945) was an Austrian painter who belonged to the tradition known as “New Objectivity” (“neue Sachlichkeit”), an artistic movement similar to Magical Realism. He served as an officer in the German Army during the Second World War, fighting at Stalingrad and in Norway. He disappeared somewhere in Poland in January of 1945.

“[D]o not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; — though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.”

— “Self Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson.

There was a time when every school child in the United States read Emerson’s essay on Self Reliance.

Wg Cdr Ken Gatward.

In 1942 an RAF pilot flew to occupied Paris, dropped a huge French flag over the Arc de Triomphe, then shot up the Gestapo HQ. It was done to cheer up the French and annoy the Germans.

Telegraph story.

Josep Pascó Casa Casas-Carrbó, Barcelona 1902.

The former private home is now a luxury store. link

The Oldest College Daily reported last week on Yale’s latest accommodation to the Zeitgeist.

Students can now change their registered gender in the University Student Information System, University Registrar Emily Shandley announced in an email to the Yale community Wednesday.

The policy change arrived two months after the Trans Rights Coalition at Yale — a newly formed group of Yale-affiliated organizations — launched a petition calling on University President Peter Salovey to uphold, protect and reinforce trans rights at Yale. According to the email, students may change their gender online at any time, and it may differ from their legal sex. If students wish to update their personal data on Yale’s Student Information System, they will have three gender options: M for male, F for female and N for nonbinary. Students have the option to fill in any additional information regarding their gender in a text box.

This change in the university system comes just months after The New York Times reported a leaked memo from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that defined gender as an immutable biological trait under Title IX law.

“Recognizing the importance for students to be able to identify their gender beyond the standard binary options for legal sex in University records, the Office of the University Secretary, the Office of Provost, Information Technology Services, and the University Registrar’s Office, worked together to draft a policy for gender identity at Yale and to build the technology infrastructure to support a self-service option for student to change their gender, on their own, at any time,” Shandler wrote in an email to the News.

Dean of Yale College Marvin Chun said that this addition helps University technology “catch up with current understanding and practice of gender.”

RTWT

If there were a current constituency of madmen thinking they were each Napoleon, and they self-identified as victims, Yale would probably be offering the choice of the title of Mister, Ms., or Your Imperial Highness.