True blue, v. 3

Blue_Obertauern, in color-corrected version by hannsotte.blogspot.com

wemo has announced his retreat to a Zen monastery, but made sure there would be wireless internet around and renewed his Apple Care support lease.

The rest of the blog team will stay in lieu and meditate on the color blue.

Soundtrack: Fine Young Cannibals Blue

Chorus:
Good god, all my tears
There’s no denying life
Would be better if I never ever had to live with you,
Blue - it’s a colour so cruel

From Lyrics.Time

True blue, the crisis, or DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE

This is the blog administration speaking; wemo's been taken to a protected shooting range by the back office crew, to confine him to a safe place in order to get to grips with his anger at a supposedly unlawful intrusion from an otherwise friendly blog.

Now he has uncovered under his long desert-colored coat: 1 Winchester rifle, 1 AK47, 2 .45 Colts, 1 Glock, and a few knives, and is firing at various distances at: Swastikas, portraits of late actor John Wayne, printouts of the unlicensed 'color-corrected' version of his Blue_Obertauern photograph. We know, this will calm him.

Meanwhile a third version of the photograph has been submitted, that is in serious discussion by the rest of the blog-team. There could be a way to even interest stubborn wemo in a re-thinking of his views on photography. Let's see.

Signed Mister Mister, a.k.a. blogwart

True blue?

The blogwart would have said, hey, you gotta take some of that blue out of this picture. Well, Photoshop Elements are somewhere ready to be used. But: this is snow under a blue sky just before sunrise on the shady slopes of the valley. It is so blue, only what our brain does when we're there, is to correct the snow into what we think should be white. Does a photographer need to do so? I don't think so.

Photoshop Elements still unused.

Season's greetings

Once again, it was not a white Christmas in Salzburg city, but it was not as bad as this: heavy rain on New Year's Eve 2007. Today it's slightly freezing, and sunshine to be expected during daytime.

Off season

Maybe there's something wrong with that photograph selector? Outside I hear people shoveling snow, it's the shortest day of the year – and what comes up here? An August sunset, shot at 19:42:47, just for the record.

Fog and freezing

The fog at Intercont Berchtesgaden was in June, now it's freezing cold down here, -8.3° C, and probably -15° up there (1,000m or 3,000ft. above sea level), around one foot of snow, and a bright blue sky to be expected once sun comes up.

Beautiful place to have a hotel built, yet if it were not for the dark past, see below, this is just in the middle of nowhere. Just mountains around and great views, plus the documentation centre at Obersalzberg, and – from May through October – the bus departure to the Eagle's Nest on top of Kehlstein mountain.

Obersalzberg documentation (reportedly the largest permanent exhibition on the Nazi period, and a very good one), in the background Untersberg.

In 1928, when Hitler first rented a chalet not far from here, one of his reasons was the view of Untersberg, a myth-laden mountain. Legend has it that in one of the huge caves of this limestone mountain there is eather emperor Charlemagne or Frederick I, Hohenstaufen emperor in the 12th century, sitting at a stone table in a death-like sleep. Only when the ravens quit circling the mountain and his beard has grown seven times around the stone table the emperor will awake, gather his army and in a huge battle at Walserfeld (a plain in the area around Salzburg airport) will erect a realm of Christ on earth.

A myth that goes back to the late middle ages when Christians were still awaiting a return of Christ and a 1000 year empire on earth before doomsday. It was not a dangerous one before the Nazis grabbed hold of it to legitimate their own "Thousand year empire".

In the neighborhood

In hiding

Intercontinental Resort Berchtesgaden, the hotel built on a location that was called "Göring Hill" in dark ages: Göring had his chalet there, not far from Hitler's Obersalzberg house; the whole structure grew over the years with additions to the houses of Nazi greats, SS-barracks, a parade ground, and a tunnel system inside the rock, used as bomb shelters and as dungeons for convicts.

Hiding in the clouds above the building: The "Eagle's Nest", high outpost of this mountain retreat for the Nazis. Not far behind the location where the mountain escape of the Trapp family was filmed. Not a good way into Switzerland, then.

Leaping back

in time to when it was still 'old' Residence fountain, the marble a dark yellow + all the gray & black from withering – and a strange fall sunset sky.

Telling a secret

Hallstatt, Unesco World Heritage Site for its nature as well as its cultural history.

There is a good chance that getting there you see quite a few buildings wrapped for renovation.

Well, nowhere in those tourism hot spots you will find terms of trade that would guarantee a right to see all the buildings uncovered and in a state of best repair – so a flight through the covered gate in a delivery van might be appropriate.

This is in memory of Jeanne-Claude, partner in life and arts of Christo.

Jeanne-Claude died aged 74 on November 18, 2009. May she be sketching and planning to wrap clouds or stars in heaven with friendly support by St. Peter by now.

Soundtrack: Schubert, String quintet c-major, D 956, currently on Radio Ö1 with Acies Quartet and David Geringas.

Why?

"Woher kommen wir? Wohin gehen wir? Und wo geht's hier zum Bahnhof?"

Schubert could not have answered the last of those three basic questions; there were no train stations around in his lifetime. And he did not answer a lot of questions in words anyway, it is his music that is about life and death, creation and destruction, about dancing when things seem to be petrified. So it seems there is a direction home somewhere.

Hello to Hanns Otte and his current blog series "Man soll den Tag nicht vor dem Abend loben......" from Vienna and Teheran; and hello to all good-willing people who think that tolerance and constitutional rights are a higher value than "clipping other people's minarets, because we don't like to have those dark-skinned muslims in our tidy country" – as the Swiss just did; and a lot of my fellow Austrians found this a great and respectable decision.

A second soundtrack is to be credited: a blackbird "singing in the dead of night"; hello there!

Saint-Julien-Straße gen Westen