Books: Some New Views of the US Constitution; German Media

Several very interesting-sounding new books on the US Constitution.

• The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era
• Jonathan Gienapp, Stanford
• Amazon here.  Kindle $23, Hardcover $24.
• Our constitution had no precedent and was, in many ways, a maddeningly vague document.  We still see its gaps today (if the House impeaches, the Senate holds a trial; if the President nominates, the Senate must give "advice and consent" -- but neither has any timeline.  "How about never? Is never good for you?"
• In the decades following its creation, innumerable gaps, holes, and ambiguities in the Constitution had to be filled by conflict, judgement, or creation of precedent.
• The Cult of the Constitution.
• Mary Anne Franks,Professor of Law, University of Miami.
• Amazon here.  Kindle $18, Hardcover $19.
• The absolutism of the Constitution - absolute gun rights, free speech, freedom of religiion, framed with text like "Congress shall make no law..." - obviously conflicts with common sense.   (Your religion doesn't get you out of taxes).   Franks sees the Right making a fetish of guns, but, the Left making a fetish of speech.  
• Amazon: " The Cult of the Constitution lays bare the dark, antidemocratic consequences of constitutional fundamentalism and urges readers to take the Constitution seriously, not selectively."  
• "In this controversial and provocative book, Mary Anne Franks examines the thin line between constitutional fidelity and constitutional fundamentalism."

On other topics:

• News From Germany: Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945.
• Heidi J.S. Tworek. Asst Prof. History, UBC
• Harvard Historical Studies.
• Amazon here.  Kindle $16, Hardcover $12.
• Amazon:  "Heidi Tworek’s innovative history reveals how, across two devastating wars, Germany attempted to build a powerful communication empire—and how the Nazis manipulated the news to rise to dominance in Europe and further their global agenda. When the news became a form of international power, it changed the course of history."
• Contrast to:
• Medien im Natioinalsozialmus [German only]
• Amazon.de here.  Harcover only, 42 Euros.
• Bernd Heidenreich and Sonke Neitzel
• Amazon:   "An introduction to the media history of National Socialism. The role of the media in the Third Reich has still received too little attention, although their importance for the establishment and stabilization of the Nazi dictatorship can hardly be overestimated. Within a few years, the National Socialists fundamentally restructured the media and made it one of their central instruments of governance."
• ...I've read elsewhere recently that the Weimar government invested much control over the media in the government, to avoid growth of Communists and Nazis.  However, once the Nazis took over, they wielded the same laws controlling the media that Weimar predecessors had.
• ...On a trip to Berlin in June 2019, there was an exhibit about democracy and threats to democracy at the German Historical Museum (DHM).   One poster said:  "Democracy protects free speech.  We protect democracy."  It was a poster for the civil police.

Noticed also:

• Rule and Ruin: Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party.
• Geoffrey Kabaservice.  Oxford Press, 2012.
• Amazon here.  Kindle $9, Audio $35, Harcover $2, Paperback $3.
• See also last year's book, The Polarizers, by Sam Rosenfeld.  Here.  Kindle $10, Hardcover $21.

Weimar and Bauhaus: 100 Years Each.

 

It's easy to find a lot of material this year about Weimar, Bauhaus, or both, just a few listed here.

BauHaus Opens New Museum - In Weimar.

There's a new Bauhaus museum in Weimar itself.  Don't get confused - there's also a Bauhaus institute/center right in Berlin (a half-mile west of the Philharmonic), there's the original Bauhaus School in Dessau, and in Fall 2019 Dessau opens an even newer Bauhaus museum of its own.*

Dessau is about 80 miles south of Berlin, Weimar about 180. Trains for Weimar change in Erfurt, which is on a major rail line.  Dessau and Weimar are respectively north and south of Leipzig (120 miles south of Berlin).

Bauhaus at Getty Center

In Los Angeles, Getty Center runs a big exhibit looking back at Bauhaus, June to October 2019.  Here.

Not directly Bauhaus, but see 1920s landmark Schindler House in Los Angeles also.  Near Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood.   Website here.  Also, a Neutra house in Silver Lake can be visited on Saturdays, here.

Six Brit Videos About Weimar

London Philharmonic is having a series of concerts and lectures related to Weimar, here, under the banner, Bittersweet Metropolis.   Here.  Something you can access from a distance, six ten to fifteen minute videos about the Weimar era, free at Youtube, here.  This link should get you into the set of six videos, Youtube.

Weimar History - At Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin

The DHM in Berlin, part of Museum Island, is in some ways equivalent to the Smithsonian.  In the last few years I've seen some amazing exhibits of cultural history there - on immigration to Germany; on Germany colonies in Africa in the 1890s.  See a big exhibit this year on Weimar politics and history at DHM.  Titled, Weimar: Essence and Value of Democracy.  Here,  here.  It runs to September 2019.  PDF here (mixed German/English).  It looks like there is also a broader exhibit titled, Democracy 2019, running on the same calendar.

DHM benefits enormously from a large multi-story exhibit behind the historical building on Unter der Linden [aka Zeughaus].  The new wing was completed by IM Pei in 2003.


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Berlin reminder: Zeughaus is the large DHM building.  A tiny one-story historical building next to it is Neue Wache,  which is a war memorial with a Kollwitz statue.

Brecht and 3 Penny Opera are inseparable from the collapse of Weimar.  There was a terrific 2018 German movie about making 3PO into a film around 1930, but sadly it never played in the US and the DVD has no English subtitles.  Here.

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That's Bauhaus Berlin, Bauhaus Weimar (new museum), Bauhaus Dessau (classic buildings), Bauhaus Dessau 2.0 (upcoming new museum), and there's also a Bauhaus Museum in Tel Aviv.

Several Recent PBS Documentaries (April/May 2019)

Several surprisingly memorable PBS documentaries in the last several weeks.

The most prominent was RECONSTRUCTION: America After the Civil War, by Harvard's Henry Louis Gates.  Two parts, totaling four hours.   Here, here.   Gates has a companion book.   See also the short standard history of Reconstruction, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, by Eric Foner, who is interviewed in the documentary.   Unlike Foner's book, the documentary tracers the  after-effects of Reconstruction and its collapse into the 1920s and 1930s.

By biggest take-home lesson was that this decade 1865-1875 is the centerpiece of many examples that American history has mostly been seriously crazy.  The first decade was crazy (to start with, nobody knew how the Constitution worked; see Jonathan Giepnap's new book The Second Creation).   The War of 1812 was crazy; so was the subsequent Jackson era.  The 1840s, 1850s were crazy (there were about six initiatives for presidential impeachment prior to Andrew Johnson; see Giepnap).  There were many crazy years of lead-up to the Civil War.  (Even the months before the war were crazy.   We forget that a number of Southern states seceded immediately after Lincoln's November election, under President Buchanan, and long before Ft. Sumter; and that in part, the South thought it would be a very economically successful country due to the world demand for cotton - more like the secession of Quebec or Catalonia if they were half of Canada or Spain.)

The Civil War was horrible and then each several-year period from 1865 to 1880 were rich in a some new kind of crazy.  By the great depression of the early 1890s we were into the labor/capital period of crazy.  No need to mention the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, or 60s.  (For refreshers on 60s-crazy, see the trifecta of HBO's Path to War with Michael Gambon as LBJ, Fog of War about McNamara, and MLK, King In the Wilderness from HBO last year.)

KOREA: The Never Ending War, here, was one I tivo'd but wasn't sure I would ever watch.  It was gripping.   Korea was invaded by Japan in 1910, and treated very badly, becoming much worse during the WW2.  When WW2 was over and Japan defeated, there was no turnkey government to restore, so the Allies divided Korea at the 38th parallel, US and Russian.  By the late 40s, tensions were very high and US under MacCarthur invaded North(ern) Korea almost to the China border.  However, they were stopped by a horrific winter and by the early 50s a stalemate returned at the 38th parallel.  However, both sides bombed the other into oblivion by the time a truce was declared in 1953.   In the meantime, Truman had fired MacArthur - who received a hero's welcome in the US while Truman had a record low 22% approval rating.   In the 50s, North Korea rebuilt faster than South Korea, but South Korea caught up and sped ahead.  Two hours.

TRUMP's TRADE WAR (here) is a misleadingly-titled episode of Frontline that I almost didn't watch.  I would have missed alot.  It's really about the last 20 years of political, business, and strategic relationships with China, how much is going on now (add cyberwar and DJT), and what may happen next.  This was about the most interesting single hour of television I've seen in a long time.

Two interesting documentaries about important women.

See IN THEIR OWN WORDS: Queen Elizabeth II, a new one hour documentary reviewing her entire life in a concise hour.  This is a small PBS series I haven't noticed before (another subject is Jim Henson, another Muhammed Ali.)    Here. 

American Experience has a one hour documentary on Emma Goldman, 1869-1940, a Russian immigrant in the 1880s with a prolific career as a New York-based socialist and activist until her expulsion from the US - and back to wartime Russian - in 1918.   Here.

I haven't checked which ones stream free; while PBS has gotten fussier about streaming free video, most of these are available for rental on Amazon for no more than a couple dollars.  Some might be available video-on-demand on your cable tv service.

Two Stories about Effective Problem Solving Thinking (Ahrens)

Anecdotes from page 28 and page 126 of Sönke Ahrens' book, "How to Take Smart Notes."  (Here).

NASA

NASA tried to figure out how to make a ballpoint pen that works in space.  If you have ever tried to use a ballpoint over your head, you have probably realized it is gravity that keeps the ink flowing.  After a series of protypes, several test runs, and tons of money invested, NASA developed a fully functioning, gravity-independent pen, which pushes the ink onto the paper by means of compressed nitrogen.  According to this study, Russians faced same problem.  So they used pencils.

WW2 Bombers

We can make it a habit to sense what is not in the picture, but could be relevant.  One of the most famous figures to illustrate this skill was was mathematician Abraham Wald.  During World War II, he was asked to help the Royal Air Force find the areas on their planes that were most often hit by bullets, so they could cover them with more armor.  But instead of counting the bullet holes on the returned planes, he recommending armoring the plans where none of the planes had taken any hits.  Royal Air Force/RAF had forgotten to take into account what was not there to see: All the planes that didn't make it back.





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NASA story attributed to De Bono, "Simplicity," 1998.  Staples now carries inexpensive Uniball "AIR" pressure pens.

Bomber story attributed to Mangel & Samaniego, 1984. Abraham Wald's Work; J Amer Statist Assoc.  Here.

A New Abbey Is Being Built in Orange County

A new Abbey (on an obviously medieval footprint) is being built in Orange County, after St Michael's Abbey raised $120M for new construction in 2018.

https://stmichaelsabbey.com/the-new-abbey/

In other news, north of Los Angeles, a very small "great books" college, Thomas Aquinas College, is doing well and has opened a Massachusetts campus.

https://thomasaquinas.edu/

Also north of Los Angeles, see the Benedictine monastery, St Andrew's Abbey.

https://www.saintandrewsabbey.com/

 

Documentaries about Very Old People, 2018-2019

In May 2019, we have two new documentaries about very elderly people:  Werner Herzog's Meeting Gorbachev, and a new documentary Ask Dr. Ruth  / Ruth Westheimer.

But if we roll back a year, there have been several more documentaries about the very elderly. 

The most prominent by far was RBG, about Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  But see also Pope Francis: A Man of His Word, but Wim Wenders, and Wait For Your Laugh, about the remarkable life of actress Rose Marie, performing from age 4 until her 90s.

Links

Meeting Gorbachev here.
Ask Dr Ruth here.

RBG here.
Pope Francis here.
Wait for Your Laugh here.

Lez Miz - The Parody

(mini review)  May 12, 2019

We saw an INCREDIBLY funny show yesterday and I am sorry we saw it only on the closing day.  

For a month or two, in the Santa Monica Blvd HWD theater row, there was a parody of Les Miz called LES MIZ AND FRIENDS.    We knew one of the leads.   It was in a 99 seat theater. 

Click here:

https://www.lesmizandfriends.com/

The motife was that lead characters were gradually replaced by muppet-like puppet versions, but the use of the original Les Miz music, plus very funny parody lyrics, plus breaking the fourth wall, improv, etc, was really funny.   

Example.  Toward the end a couple of the actors paused and one asked, "Does anybody in the audience know what happens next?"  Several call-outs, "Javert commits suicide!"  "Javert jumps off the bridge!"   The actor double-takes, waves his arms, yells, "IT WAS A YES OR NO QUESTION !!!"

During the second act battle scenes, Epinome takes a love letter from Marius to Cosette, and when she hands it to Jean Valjean it turns into a "who's on first" sketch ("Marius is in love with me?   No?  Cosette is in love with me?   No?"    "Just give the letter to Cosette!"   "(turns letter upside down)...Marius is in love with Fantime...?")  

Another digression was on the weak roles of women relative to the several male leads, and then a comparison to Hamilton which is much more recent but has the same problem.  The finale started, and then was paused to point out that the melody and rhythm were almost identical to Battle Hymn of the Republic.

It's a little hard to extract but there's another section where they point out that they have arrested someone thinking he is Valjean, but the lyrics also tell us elsewhere that Valjean's number 24601 is branded on his chest.  "They found another guy the same height, same age, and same prisoner number tattooed on this chest?"  "How did Victor Hugo explain this?"  "He didn't!  The branded number occurs only in the musical lyrics and in a different act.  It's the biggest unforced error in the history of musical theater!"    

Or, an outtake, "That's right, folks: Jean Valjean has become mayor of the one town in France where the Chief of Police is Javert, a man who has dedicated his life to finding Jean Valjean.  But we digress, because this next scene depends on the mayor and chief of police never having met each other once in the previous five years."

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The actors were very good as actors, as singers, and also as improve comedians which was a small but important part of the experience.  There were two sections where they bring audience members on stage as extras.

It's written and produced by two of the ensemble, Nathan Makaryk and Geneveive Flati.  Find some reviews through the links here.

Hear a 30 minute podcast with the creative team at LA Theater Bites online, here.