Yeah okay, those edits were made by her dad, a cishet person – and also her dad, a Holocaust survivor, who would have been brutally aware that when the diary was first published in freakin’ 1947, had he included anything which people could use to demonize his daughter or tar her as some kind of “pervert”, it would prevent the message he was trying to send about the horrors of the Holocaust and the heroism of his daughter from being properly understood and accepted the way he hoped.
That isn’t fair. It isn’t just. But it is reality. If Otto Frank had let this be included in the published version, there’s a large chance the homophobic backlash would have prevented the book from reaching the audience it did and spreading the message it needed to. It was NINETEEN. FORTY. SEVEN. The Holocaust had ended TWO YEARS AGO. The acceptance of LGBT identities was basically nonexistent. Otto Frank made a decision based on the time and place he was living in, about what the world at that time was and wasn’t ready to accept.
Let me say this as bluntly as I can – I am a bisexual Jewish girl and I would have made the same decision Otto Frank did. Making sure Anne Frank was unambiguously seen as sympathic and heroic was more important. Making sure people weren’t sidetracked from the main issue of the Holocaust was more important. He shouldn’t have had to make that decision, without doubt. Anne Frank’s sexuality (however she would have identified in modern terms) shouldn’t be considered relevant to her status as a hero or a sympathetic victim. But in 1947, it undoubtedly would have been.
Otto Frank survived Auschwitz and lost his entire family (a wife and two teenage daughters) to the horrors of the Holocaust. He hoped that publishing his daughter’s diary would spread awareness and sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust. If he had to make sacrifices to do that – well frankly, so fucking be it. I don’t know who alive today has the right to judge him.
PLEASE do not forget that the gay men who survived being put into concentration camps by the Nazis WERE NOT FREED BY THE ALLIED FORCES. They were deemed rightfully convicted criminals and moved to prisons. This was not the battle Otto Frank was fighting and judging him as if he should have been fighting all the battles at once is not fair or realistic.
Snowball fight 124 years ago. Lyon, France, 1896. Colorized and speed adjusted. Original in black and white by Louis Lumiere.
Oh wow! Another portal back in time!
Reblogging to add excerpts from Sam Anderson’s wonderful commentary about this newly colorized/upscaled* short film in The New York Times:
“This is my favorite film of 2020 — a tiny masterpiece that perfectly distills not only our current mayhem but also, more profoundly, our baffling displacement in time.
“The footage was captured in Lyon, in 1897, by the Lumière brothers…. It was originally black and white, of course, and herky-jerky because of the low frame rate. But this snowball fight has recently been colorized and smoothed, and the result is shockingly modern. [….]
“Down in the bottom-left corner [of the gif** below], a thick man with a strong black mustache fires a cheap shot: a wild fastball, from point-blank range, that barely misses its intended target, a slim man who is busy looking the other way. The slim man turns, cocks his left arm and wallops the big man on his thigh. [….]
“My favorite character, and the closest the film has to a protagonist, is a man in a bowler hat and a coat so long it flaps around his legs like the cloak of a levitating wizard. He looks as if he has just stepped out of a bank meeting, and yet he abandons himself to this childish street warfare with eager glee.
[….]
“And then there is the bicycle. This is the peak moment of brutality, when the whole group loses its collective goddamn mind. Right from the start, you can see the cyclist coming: a small figure, growing larger every second, gliding smoothly on an angle toward the fray. Before he even reaches the crowd, he starts to take distant fire. And yet he is determined to ride on. When he arrives, all the warring factions turn to unite against him, unleashing a wickedly targeted cyclone. The cyclist takes hard shots to the arm, the face, the back, the neck. Still he pedals forward, hunching his back, spinning his long legs — a stoic hero, intent on gliding through the violence, determined to reach the safety of the other side.
“But he can’t. The cyclist absorbs one blow too many. He collapses like a broken toy. [….]
“On an intellectual level, we all understand that historical people were basically just like us. All those stiff figures frozen in blurred photos and smoke-stained oil paintings — the endless parade of side-whiskers, small dogs, billowing dresses, baggy trousers….They lived, as we do, in the throbbing nerve-pocket of the now. They were anxious and unsure, bored and silly. Nothing that would happen in their lifetimes had happened yet. The ocean of time was crashing fresh waves, nonstop, against the rocks of their days. And like us they stood there, gasping in the cold spray, wondering what people of the past were like.
“And yet it’s hard, across such wide gulfs of time, to really feel this connection. So to watch this snowball fight, to see these people so alive, is a precious gift of perspective. We are them. They are us. We, too, will disappear. We will become abstractions to be puzzled over by future people. That certainty, in the flux of 2020, feels anchoring. We are not unique. We move in the historical flow. [….]
“In Lyon, this street from the snowball fight is still there. It still looks basically identical: the trees, the buildings. I am staring at it now on my computer screen, and in my mind I am already planning a trip, imagining a pilgrimage, in some unrecorded future.”
I posted these photos of the infamous Millennium Dome back in June, but since then I’ve found more photographs of the place! Turns out my family visited it twice… I kinda suspect it was because the first visit turned out to be disappointing and my parents thought the second time would be better.
I….can’t remember if it was or not.
Here’s me being part of the “net generation.”
This pic here, where I look incredibly sulky and pissed off, gives a good idea of the scale of the Dome. (Absolutely no reblogging this photo please.)
Now I’m curious as to what that wall of screens was.
Turns out it was the Self-Portrait Zone:
Self-Portrait also featured several sculptures by political cartoonist Gerald Scarfe. With titles such as The Racist, The Couch Potato, The Thug, and Traditional Cool Britannia (caricaturing Tony Blair), these pieces were a FAR CRY from the nebulously optimistic mood of the dome. pic.twitter.com/96NSFkaW8Y
— 〽️ax krieger's big moves (@MaxKriegerVG) August 3, 2018
And I actually remember those sculptures! My 12-year-old self found them VERY unsettling (especially The Couch Potato, which was a guy melting into his sofa) but sadly I guess we didn’t take any pics of them.
This globe and spaceship marked the entrance to Home Planet, a sort of educational dark ride.
Y’know what? The Dome sold Dome-branded merchandise! And while going through old boxes I found what I myself purchased from the gift shop!
That’s it! Just a notebook with a holographic sticker on it! I wonder how much it cost to produce.
This brochure I found is quite interesting. It says “For one year only” so… Was that always the plan, to only have it open for one year? Or had things deteriorated so quickly by October they’d already decided to close it? Either way, how incredibly wasteful.
I DO remember the Blackadder film! I think it was the first Blackadder I ever saw.
CUl8tr, Dome! Though before I sign off – I ran across this photo from the same era in my boxes and boxes of photos. It’s a little LEGO dome at Legoland in 2001!
Absolutely living for the fact that in ancient Greece, it was said that when Apollo was drunk he created people with the “wrong” genitalia,, which, first of all, means that 1. trans people are not a new thing, we’ve always been here and we’ve always found ways to justify and explain our existence, and 2. the way that we chose to explain ourselves at one point was, “Yeah, the sun was wasted as hell when he made me, but it’s cool.” and that is fucking awesome
christians: god makes no mistakes
ancient greeks: actually sometimes god os just really fucking wasted
man, there’s something about material culture that really just…gets to me sometimes, y’know? especially the small stuff. not that i don’t think the statues and buildings and whatnot aren’t great, but something about the everyday objects fills me with a fondness i can’t describe. like i’ll look at a bracelet and think, this might’ve been someone’s favorite piece of jewelry. maybe this little animal figurine was a child’s beloved toy. someone devoted this votive statuette to a god in thanks for curing their spouse’s illness.
they’re objects that, in the eyes of the people that made them, might not have been all that special. but they’re also some of the most human objects, and that makes them all the more valuable.
A question that is frequently asked is, ‘are any of Dido Elizabeth Belle’s descendants still alive?’ The answer in short is no. Today, I thought it worth providing a somewhat lengthy, but nevertheless potted genealogy, to explain how her family line died out. Be prepared, it’s not always an easy read in parts. At the […]
The above article is a work of satire, but it got me thinking about the Blitz. I’m lucky enough to have relatives still alive who were in it. Over the years I’ve learned a few stories about what it was like… and it was awful. It was extremely likely that you would wake up one morning and find your neighbours the next street over were all gone, bombed in the night. I believe my grandmother’s place of work at the time (I think it was a shoe shop?) ended up a pile of rubble and there was obviously nothing anyone could do.
One story my grandmother told me which stuck in my mind – she said a girl she knew just got sick and tired of going to the shelter every time there was an air raid alert. This kid just flat-out refused to leave her bed, so her mother dragged her out of there, I imagine with considerable frustration, and forced her into the shelter. When the family got out of it the next morning, the bed that the girl had been adamant to remain in was ripped to shreds by bombs.
……..And now these days I feel like, that story may be a good illustration of why you should keep wearing a mask.
Recently I stumbled across some photos from when my family went to the Millennium Dome in 2000! OMG!
If you’re not British (or are British but very young) you might not know the history of the Millenium Dome. I didn’t until quite recently. This twitter thread sums it all up perfectly:
In 1999, a great white dome rose in the heart of London, at the place where time begins.
What did it hold?
An artificial wonderland of dreams for a new millennium. A monumental public expenditure. A national boondoggle. "One amazing day".
— 〽️ax krieger's big moves (pt 2) (@MaxKriegerVG) August 2, 2018
Essentially the Millennium Dome was an expensive, extravagant, incredibly entertaining disaster right from the get-go and there’s a part of me that kinda wishes it was still there. Just me? Probably, yeah. Sadly I can’t really remember all the details of it very well either, because I was only about 12 I think and there was a lot to take in.
This picture, featuring as it does both an inexplicable sculpture of a squatting child and a McDonalds, pretty much sums up the essence of it.
This was Timekeepers of the Millennium, pretty much the only thing in the Dome that children would be remotely interested in. It was, if I remember rightly, basically a massive ball pit/play area where you could fire balls at each other with air cannons and generally cause chaos. It was of no educational merit whatsoever, which was probably for the best.
It at one point had a television show to go with it! It had the same name as the ride and aired on CITV. Most of it is lost apparently but I have some old VHS tapes to go through and I’m really hoping I might find some of it on one of them.
Here’s one of the Disney-like Timekeeper mascots. (If you’re viewing this post looking for pictures to illustrate something you’re writing about the Dome, please don’t use this one okay? You can use one or two of the others if you message me in the comments first.)
This here was a seaside-themed area. I think it was the first section completed on the Dome, I remember Newsround telling me so back in 1999. It had, IIRC… pretty much the same charm as your average British seaside.
Wonder if kids were allowed to play in the sand, like on a normal beach? I’m guessing probably not.
Now THIS! This is the Body Zone!
The weirdest and daftest section of the Dome. I clearly remember this beating heart (for it did indeed beat) hovering omniously above guests in this area.
Here’s a wall of brains! I’m told by the aforementioned Twitter thread that the one wearing a Fez did Tommy Cooper impressions. I also learned this:
Inside, guests were greeted by…….. uh….. flesh. Walls of flesh.
— 〽️ax krieger's big moves (pt 2) (@MaxKriegerVG) August 3, 2018
WHAT? The WHAT NOW?
Outside in the slightly more fresh air there were some pretty, rainbow-coloured tents which I believe formed a “rest zone.” Probably for the parents who’d left their kids with the ball cannons.
In the very middle of the dome there was a show on every so often! And I remember it was actually really good?
Or at least, it had music and fire and lights, and that was more than enough for my 12-year-old self.
While going through the photos I also found this leaflet:
There’s a little map in there which gives you some idea of the scale of the thing. Might be safe to say the crowds of people drawn on there aren’t completely accurate, though. In many of the pics I have there’s… Pretty much no people in the background at all.
These photos were taken in May 2000 and by December it had closed. During its brief time on Earth it racked up no end of controversy, ended or at least severely stunted a few political careers, and had a gang of diamond robbers crash in with a JCB digger. We will never see its like again. The Sunday Times, which was I think marginally less crap back in those days, predicted the downfall before it even opened:
At worst it is a millennial metaphor for the twentieth century. An age in which all things, like the Dome itself, became disposable. A century in which forest and cities, marriages, animal species, races, religions and even the Earth itself, became ephemeral. What more cynical monument can there be for this totalitarian cocksure fragile age than a vast temporary plastic bowl, erected from the aggregate contribution of the poor through the National Lottery. Despite the spin, it remains a massive pantheon to the human ego, the Ozymandias of its time.
Look On My Wall Of Giant Animatronic Pubic Lice, Ye Mighty, And Despair.
