Dresden I - A Wave of Capitalism

Yes, I finally bought myself a new camera, a Nikon D3100 with a 18-55 VR lens, which was recommended by several people. I got it just in time before I continued my tour across Europe. After finishing my work at CERN, Geneva and visiting Brussels, I went to Dresden and Bratislava, and wanted to do Berlin. Tour ended rather chaotic though:

• checking into a Hotel in Bratislava, I realized I left my passport in Aarhus. I've been crossing 4 countries with no passport. (I will not refer to the concurrent Danish-German border issues here.)
• going back from Bratislava to Dresden: Slovakian train conductor checks my ticket, says it's no good. I need a new one. I protest, but have to pay. A bit later new Czech train conductor arrives, says again ticket is no good. Ticket from Slovak colleague is also no good, even after heavy protests, I have to pay again.
• In Dresden I also lost my fairly new mobile phone. It was a HTC Desire, and what really bugs me is all the data which is gone with it. Of course, I did not encrypt it. Wish it was my laptop which got lost, which is fully encrypted. (Tracing it from phone company not allowed. Weird: after all those apps which main purpose is to trace where you are and what you do. But if I want to access my own data...!? Wtf!)
• Last day in Bratislava I got a bad flu, which still persists. This made me cancel the Berlin part and a course I wanted to follow in Mainz.
• One credit card was recently lost in Brussels, another forgotten in Aarhus, my last one hit the VISA 30 day limit the last day of my travels. So, suddenly I was in Dresden with no credit cards and almost no cash! Never felt so free...

Anyway, what I wanted to tell about was how the face of Dresden radically changed since 1989. Former chancellor Helmut Kohl was speaking of "Blühende Landschaften", which characterize this transformation process, but note the subtle double meaning of it, as it also can refer to nature taking over deindustrialized and depopulated areas. :-D

Dresden was more or less obliterated at the end of the second world war, and much of the voidness was filled with socialistic type architecture. Just north of the main railway station there is the Prager Straße, which more or less looked like this in 1986:

Prager Straße, 1986, with the "Inter Hotel" and the "Restaurant International".
Taken from http://flic.kr/p/4A6gVS

More or less the same buildings are there, however massively renovated and now full of "standard shops" you find in any city in Germany.

Prager Straße, 2011.

A few more impressions:

Prager Straße 1991. From: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eastgermanpics/2197012589/in/photostream/

Same street 2011, guess the fountain was turned and moved a bit further to the north.

Prager Strasse 1991: Aluminum padded building which served as a central store.

Panels were partially reused for a new building.

Over the socialistic soviet-style reminiscences, a wave of capitalism crushed, cladding the dilapidated buildings with its usual representatives: Karstadt, Douglas, Jack Wolfskin, McDonalds, Deutsche Bank, Esprit... they are all there, effectively removing any uniqueness, rendering the shopping street identical with that in Frankfurt, Stuttgart or any other medium sized town.

I searched for a few remanences which still prevail from socialistic times. Some are easy to find, but they get less:

A crystal tree at Pirnaisches Tor.

Robotron was the chip and computer manufacturing company of the former GDR.

Blühende Landschaften, in its other meaning. (Note the GDR typic lanterns.)

I was somewhat surprised how difficult it actually is to find some industrial wastelands. Way over 90 % of the entire city is renovated in some way, I spent an entire day on bike going through clean streets without finding what I was looking for. Even asking the locals did not really help much.

Almost all of Dresden is fully renovated, and streets look like this.

But then, after roaming the city for an entire day, I finally found somenthing:

Dresden 2011, somewhere near Zwickauer Str.

Garages with characteristic "droplet" shaped lamp.

Those lanterns are mostly mounted on poles made of concrete.

Black graffiti says: "Here a MURDER happened! A piece of art was destroyed."

Dresdner Frauenkirche, 1991.

... and again, as in 2011. That part seen in the former picture is the darker left of the church.

Another thing I really enjoyed about Dresden was how easy it was to get in contact with people. Nomatter where I were, people came to chat, and they openly discussed anything about their lives, the former GDR etc.

I had a very long chat with this guy at a flea market. Note the cylinder of mono-crystalline silicon at the lower edge in the middle of the picture. (He wanted 10 € for that.)

Reminiscences from second world war can of course also be found, this one I found interesting:

"Museum, do not bomb"

I could not understand what it said, my very limited knowledge of the Russian language only identified "Museum, do not...?", so I decided to wait next to the inscriptions until I found some Russian tourists to help me out. I only had to wait one minute, a group of young Russians gave me the answer  (I even asked in Russian, and they understood what I wanted, feel very proud :-).

Anyway, this concludes more or less the first part of my Dresden visit. Thanks to Alina for hosting, being my tour guide and holding my cup of coffee while taking the picture below.

Impressions, Brussels

This post is a bit difficult for me, since I am not really sure what I want to say here. Guess it purports to write down a few recent impressions I had.

So, after I finished this years antiproton run at CERN, and a short visit at GSI, I had an opportunity to visit a friend who stayed in Brussels for a few weeks.

Brussels. Right.

What came to my mind is

1. the European Union, 
2. Frensh, sorry, Belgian fries 
3. and Hercule Poirot.
   
   Oh, yes, and 
4. the Atomium.

It turned out to be a visit which connected a lot of mental loose ends I had in my head.

What really impressed me was the extensive use of Art Deco like architecture throughout the city. In terms of style, one may think of a Hercule Poirot BBC TV-series featuring David Suchet, which is full of Art Deco like scenograpghy. Housing seems to be arranged in "Residences" where apartments can be rented out furnished or unfurnished, and those residences would be given fancy names.

Now, I still have only a poor mobile phone camera with me, nonetheless: here are a few random examples from the southern part of the city:

"Palais de la Folle Chanson" (Palace of the silly song)

Entrance of the same building.

Another random building near the ULB university.

However, some buildings were extensively decorated with organic cast ion forms:

From http://brusselsphotos.blogspot.com/

Clearly different than Art Deco. It reminded me of the Metro station entrances in Paris:

A Metro station entrance in Paris

and indeed, this architectural style is known as Art Nouveau, or "Jugendstil". It is a predecessor to Art Deco.

The influence still prevails, take a look a the Kusmi Tea label design, and I think I sometimes see elements hereof in the steam punk genre. Computer games too, most noteworthy BioShock where the entire utopian underwater city "Rapture" was kept in Art Deco style mixed with plenty of steam punk.

In an earlier post, where I mentioned Bucarest, lots of Art Deco architecture should be found (such as the "Cinema Scala" building, shown in the same post, with its characteristic curved surface.)

So, I started to reflect, why do I find this architecture fascinating?
A part of the answer might be that this style of the inter-war period conveys some sort of jovial limitless belief in development of technology. Protagonists of industrial tychoons naively extrapolated this idea into megalomaniac dimensions, and it surely had its downfall, the sinking of the Titanic probably one of the first evidence hereof.

Visiting a comic book shop, a colleague recommended me the book "Brüsel" by the famous Belgian comic artists François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters.

(Now I got another reason to improve my French.) This book generally portraits the same idea. Inspired by the actual destruction of a real world part of Brussels to give room for new buildings , "Brüsel" describe a very similar scenery.  Corporate oligarchs push new ideas beyond limits, leaving a wasteland behind as they fail since the human aspect was ignored.

Hm, this post has now become an eclectic mix of thoughts. Anyway, this way too short, yet overwhelming, visit in Brussels more or less puts the city into my top 5 list of cities I would like to live in.

Thanks Linda and Nico :-)

And I am now going to buy a decent camera.

Warriors

Recently, Ratko Mladić (aka "The Butcher of Bosnia") was captured, 16 years after the Srebrenica massacre. I got interested in the details of the Bosnian civil war after watching the very depressing BBC TV-series "Warriors" many years ago, which deals with events a few years before Srebrenica.

The TV-series illustrate the impotence of the UNPROFOR peacekeeping force during the ethnic cleaning of civil Bosniaks in the Lašva Valley by Croatian nationalists near Vitez in 1992/93. The movie and its characters are fictional, however based on interviews with British UNPROFOR soldiers who served there. The forced passiveness of the soldiers as the crimes took place and the resulting trauma is one of the key themes in this movie.

The TV-series was aired in 1999 and is in two episodes. It can be found on YouTube, divided into 10 minute bits. The start may be a bit slow, but don't let that stop you:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9T_VBa9krlk


(use link above if embedding below fails)





In 1995 after the second Markale massacre, the Croatian Operation Storm along with massive airstrikes by NATO (Operation Deliberate Force) led to the Dayton agreement which ended the war.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

In an earlier post I mentioned how the movie by Andrei Tarkovsky utilized the urban exploration concept in his "Stalker" movie long before wasteland tourism became in vogue.

The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. computer game series by Ukranian GSC are based on Tarkovskys movie. The Games are centered around the Chernobyl area, naturally enough, which bears several similarities to the "zone" concept of the orginal movie, even if the nuclear accident happend several years after the movie was released.

In fact, this games series was my main reason to get a new computer with a decent graphics card, I simply had to experience it! And I was truly spellbound by them. Ok, indeed the first two games, Shadow of Chernobyl and the prequel Clear Sky, had plenty of bad bugs. Call of Pripyat however improved a lot on the technical side. Also, as all first person shooters, they carry a solid amount of violence, but that is not really the point here. The atmosphere of the games along with the wonderful graphics is simply staggering.

The developers put a lot of care and detail in the graphics development, it took me some time to realize that most buildings and sites in the game actually exist in reality.

For this post I made a ton of screen shots, and compared some of them with real pictures I could find via google maps and panoramio.
(Click on images for a full scale version, most of them are very dark, but improve when viewed in full size.)

A model of yanov railway station at noon and dusk.

Yanov railway station is located south of Pripyat.
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/20352657

Yanov station in reality. 

In the western part of Pripyat there is the "Jupiter" factory, as seen with google maps:

View Larger Map

Below is a screen shot taken while inside the factory. The amount of details in the shadows rendered by the sun really demonstrates how computer technology has accelerated in the last 10 years. When I still was a little kid, a super computer might take days to render such an image via raytracing. Now they are generated faster than 50 times a second, and the CPU still has time to do the physics engine, artificial intelligence of non-player characters etc... Whee, I feel very old now!

The "Jupiter" factory in real life.

See http://www.panoramio.com/photo/21305364

I was astonished how close the game developers stuck to the real layout of Pripyat city. The hospital, kindergarten, shops, movie theater, landmarks and building blocks are located at the correct places.

"Univermag", Soviet time supermarket.

Same place in reality.

http://www.panoramio.com/photo/27682851

What really adds a lot of quallity to the game is the fantastic lighting engine. The movement of the sun with all the resulting shadows are rendered on the fly. Different weather conditions and positions of the sun, dims or increases contrast of the shadows.

Awesome lighting engine! And walls half painted in blue-green colors, very Soviet Russia style.

And all runs fluently with plenty of frames per second, of course. This makes me speculate what would happen if computer game programmers would develop applications for medical physics.

In the nortern part of Pripyat there is the "Prometei" cinema.

Movie theater "Prometei"

And a shop for consumer goods:

http://www.panoramio.com/photo/29016229


Housing:

http://www.panoramio.com/photo/29016249

The Duga-3 antenna complex (Nato codename "Steelyard"), is a long abandoned over the horizon radar. See e.g.:
http://englishrussia.com/index.php/2010/09/15/chernobyl-2-a-pearl-of-the-past/

Nearby the Duga steel giant they were also carrying out some ionospheric experiments, which probably inspired this part:

Note how the antenna ceramic isolators were carefully modelled.

Close to the "Duga-3" antenna complex.

And a few random screen shots from the game:

I guess those are figures from a Russian children cartoon.

"Chernobyl"

The machine to the left is a very typical soviet time water dispenser.

Inside a building in Pripyat.

The "Gastronom" welcomes you. I am afraid that pelminis are out, though.

Most Soviet housing architecture was standardized, and that way may cities tend to resemble each other a lot. I had the chance to visit Russia a few times, and always got a mild deja-vu feeling when seeing those buildings again in the game:

"Books"

Pripyat seen from below. Game is not entirely bug free...

 

Sunset at a small train depot.

Video below gives a quick tour through Pripyat city model, at varying time/weather conditions. (Never mind the split screen.)



This is the eastern part of Pripyat, it fits pretty well with google maps. (Try to enable photos, to compare some of the locations).

View Larger Map

Last but not least: a very nice trailer for the "Clear Sky" prequel (in my opinions that game still had the best atmosphere.) Video shows how to model Soviet nostalgika:



Large post, but I wanted to post this for a long time, and finally I had a Weekend off! :-)

Ripping Online Radio Streams

At work and at home I listen to online radio streams a lot (headphone of course, in order not to annoy my fellow office mates). Countless of tools exist which can save the audio stream to disk (i.e. ripping). This is perfectly legal in most countries as long as it is for private use, according to wikipedia.

A very good tool I can recommend is streamripper which can be used from command line in Linux (there are multiple windows front ends, though).
Streamripper is really "set and forget" and comes without a bloated GUI. Once you have the URL of the station you want to rip, the command line is simply:

streamripper http://www.di.fm/mp3/chillout.pls -s

The "-s" option should always be at the end. Streamripper will properly split and save the "DI Chillout" stream in individual mp3 encoded tracks. The mp3 filenames are fomatted as "Artist - Title.mp3" and to some extend the ID tags are set. The very first track will logically be stored in a folder named "incomplete" and the subsequent files will be saved at the location where you invoked the command. Very nice.

There are thousands of internet radio stations out there, these are currently my favourite ones:

http://streamer-mtc-aa04.somafm.com:80/stream/1032 - Drone Zone (Ambient)
http://www.di.fm/mp3/chillout.pls - DI Chillout
http://www.di.fm/mp3/trance.pls - DI Trance (it's crap, yet very good if office gets too noisy + coffee substitute)
http://www.di.fm/mp3/spacemusic.pls - DI SpaceMusic
http://www.dradio.de/streaming/dlf_hq_ogg.m3u - DeutschlandFunk
http://c13010-ls.i.core.cdn.streamfarm.net/dwworldlive-live/13010dwrde64.mp3 - Deutsche Welle
http://edge.live.mp3.mdn.newmedia.nacamar.net/klassikradio128/livestream.mp3 - KlassikRadio (only good in small doses)
http://www.tv-radio.com/station/france_musique_mp3/france_musique_mp3-128k.m3u - France Musique

and last, but not least:

mms://mms.online.ru/c12_1_128 - Music from 50-70ies Soviet Russia

A note about the last link: streamripper did not like the encoding or protocol of the stream - it just idles. (Right. In Soviet Russia, you don't rip stream - stream rips you.)
What works is to use (hungarian, eh?) mplayer instead:

mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile stream.wmv mms://mms.online.ru/c12_1_128

which will save the stream into stream.wmv. But mplayer does not split the stream into individual songs, this must be done manually. I use audacity, but audacity is not always happy with the .wmv format. Mplayer can convert the wmv file to something more convenient, here I do .wav because I want to do some post-processing:

mplayer -ao pcm:file=filename.wav stream.wmv

and after importing and editing in audacity you can export the final file to mp3.

Here is an except [foo.mp3] from the very same station, which was also my motivation for going through all this. I heard this piece at a concert in the deepest Russia some years ago, and I had trouble to stop giggling while listening. Later I was told it's a very sad song about a dying swan and I was certainly not supposed to giggle, probably offending my neighbors. (I've still not identified what it is, but that should be easy to find out.)
Anyway, plenty of patriotic songs, balalaika stuff and ballades are to be found here, much of it resembles the french chanson genre. It is something refreshingly different which is to be enjoyed silently, late at night.


--- Update ---
it's Лебединая верность
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgcxtyC6Qng

lyrics here:
http://www.karaoke.ru/song/6100.htm

Спасибо, Oksana. :-)