This was mostly a full work week; we fine-tuned our plans as far as the LARP-related design and analysis work on the proposed accelerator is concerned & I discussed projects with several other groups. This weekend I am home alone; Sylvia is on a meditation retreat in Flüeli-Ranft, a village several hours by train and bus away from here in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. So I am getting some technical work done besides catching up on paperwork that somehow does not just stay in the US but is following us around. I also tried to watch some of the Olympics, but alas, so far without success: none of the French TV channels we get carry anything other than short summaries, and the only Internet stream I could finally manage to get access to was in a format that is decidedly Mac unfriendly. I guess they really want us to pay extra for this (bonne chance!). In lieu of the real thing I saw a piece about Vancouver on the German ZDF channel. Needless to say that most of what was presented was a bit cliche (probably unavoidable in 45 min), nevertheless it triggered a pang of sentimentality. More satisfying was the restored version of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”, a silent movie from the 1920s that I stumbled upon last night on Arte (a French-German-Austrian TV channel). This was a real treat. Clearly influenced by the industrial revolution and by Marxist ideas the movie was absolutely gripping. I was drawn in by the ambivalence about religious leadership (the heroine, embodying the message of salvation, gets cloned into a robot (by a mad scientist, no less!) and the robot goes on to lead the masses into peril); and how Lang employs the Revelation to demonstrate the decay of society I thought was quite masterful. While some of it maybe on the surface a bit romantic for modern taste, the message is still vivid, nuanced, and perfectly applicable to modern life (and ignored as well). How can someone create a work like this that lasts for close to 100 years??

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