#1967 snowstorm

[dprs99]

The Great Snowstorm of 1967: The Snow-Lover's Dream

The Great Snowstorm of 1967: The Snow-Lover’s Dream

I hear people talk about the snowstorm of 1978. I’ve seen pictures and it was pretty bad. We missed the storm because we were working for a ministry in Fort Worth, Texas, where we had moved the year before. During our first winter in sunny Texas, we had seventeen inches of snow, more than the state had seen in many years. I think God did it to say, “Welcome to Texas, ya’ll!” Texans didn’t know…

[federer7]

Girl in bus and figures in street during snowstorm. New York City. 1967

Photo: Erich Hartmann

[pedestriansteppers]

The art of the darkroom. An aspect of teaching that I dearly miss. The Bolshoi Ballet School, Moscow, 1958. Cornell Capa. Feast of San Gennaro, New York City, 1984. Bruce Gilden. New York, USA, 1998 Chien-Chi Chang. Snowstorm, New York City, 1967. Erich Hartmann.

[colonellickburger]

Erich Hartmann. Annotated darkroom print of Snowstorm, New York City, 1967. Markings and notations by Pablo Inirio

[4eternal-life]

Erich Hartmann  /German-American, 1922 –1999

Girl in bus and figures in street during snowstorm. New York City. USA. 1967.

© Erich Hartmann | Magnum Photos

https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/winter-a-season-of-visual-contrasts/

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 4.10 (after 1920)

1925 – The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is first published in New York City, by Charles Scribner's Sons. 1938 – The 1938 German parliamentary election and referendum seeks approval for a single list of Nazi candidates and the recent annexation of Austria. 1939 – Alcoholics Anonymous, A.A.'s "Big Book", is first published. 1941 – World War II: The Axis powers establish the Independent State of Croatia. 1944 – Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler escape from Birkenau death camp. 1963 – One hundred twenty-nine American sailors die when the submarine USS Thresher sinks at sea. 1968 – The TEV Wahine, a New Zealand ferry sinks in Wellington harbour due to a fierce storm – the strongest winds ever in Wellington. Out of the 734 people on board, fifty-three died. 1970 – Paul McCartney announces that he is leaving The Beatles for personal and professional reasons. 1971 – Ping-pong diplomacy: In an attempt to thaw relations with the United States, China hosts the U.S. table tennis team for a week-long visit. 1972 – Tombs containing bamboo slips, among them Sun Tzu's Art of War and Sun Bin's lost military treatise, are discovered by construction workers in Shandong. 1972 – Vietnam War: For the first time since November 1967, American B-52 bombers reportedly begin bombing North Vietnam. 1973 – Invicta International Airlines Flight 435 crashes in a snowstorm on approach to Basel, Switzerland, killing 108 people. 1979 – Red River Valley tornado outbreak: A tornado lands in Wichita Falls, Texas killing 42 people. 1988 – The Ojhri Camp explosion kills or injures more than 1,000 people in Rawalpindi and Islamabad, Pakistan. 1991 – Italian ferry MS Moby Prince collides with an oil tanker in dense fog off Livorno, Italy, killing 140. 1991 – A rare tropical storm develops in the South Atlantic Ocean near Angola; the first to be documented by satellites. 1998 – The Good Friday Agreement is signed in Northern Ireland. 2009 – President of Fiji Ratu Josefa Iloilo announces the abrogation of the constitution and assumes all governance in the country, creating a constitutional crisis. 2010 – Polish Air Force Tu-154M crashes near Smolensk, Russia, killing 96 people, including Polish President Lech Kaczyński, his wife, and dozens of other senior officials and dignitaries. 2016 – The Paravur temple accident in which a devastating fire caused by the explosion of firecrackers stored for Vishu, kills more than one hundred people out of the thousands gathered for seventh day of Bhadrakali worship. 2016 – An earthquake of 6.6 magnitude strikes 39 km west-southwest of Ashkasham, impacting India, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Srinagar and Pakistan. 2019 – Scientists from the Event Horizon Telescope project announce the first ever image of a black hole, which was located in the centre of the M87 galaxy. 2023 – A mass shooting occurs at the Old National Bank in Louisville, Kentucky that leaves five victims dead and eight wounded.

[tilbageidanmark]

Movies I watched (and books I read) this Week # 143 (Year 3/Week 39):

Jules, E.T. for senior citizens. A simple (and simplistic) story about 79-year-old Ben Kingsley (with a head full of hair) and early onset dementia who discovers an alien ship in his back yard. More of a character study that sci-fi. It's nice to see a light movie about old people. 4/10.

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2 documentaries from a 'different' New Yorker list, Richard Brody's '62 Films That Shaped the Art of Documentary Filmmaking':

🍿 The Lenny Bruce Performance Film (1967), more of an interesting historic document, than a funny-ha-ha stand up of the iconic rabble-rouser. His next-to-last live performance, at a small San Francisco cabaret hall, consists mostly of readings from the legal transcripts of his prosecutions. Paranoiac ramblings, strung on drugs, intense. Born 30 years too early.

🍿 A Plate of Sardines, (1997) a short Syrian poem about Quneitra, a city at the Golan Heights that was razed to the ground by the Israeli army in 1974. Disturbing (but not a very good).

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The last film I saw in Israel, Tel Aviv on fire, only my 3rd Palestinian movie. It's an implausible story about a soap opera of a Palestinian spy who falls in lave with an Israeli general. Filmed in Ramallah, it is popular with Arabs and Jews alike. A low-level production assistant on the set becomes a writer, and is forced to use input for the plot from a soldier who mans the checkpoint he must drive through every day. An intriguing premise which predictably ends as a light soap opera itself.

I had a hard time with the more realistic parts of the movie, showing the oppressive humiliations that the Arabs have to go through every day, as they live "side by side" with the occupying soldiers. It's the first film I've seen that takes part on the eastern side of the border wall.

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(Completely unplanned) 2 With minor character actor Guy Boyd:

🍿I've seen all but one of Charlie Kaufman's eight features, but I can't say I'm a big fan. His 'mysterious', unexplainable I'm Thinking Of Ending Things didn't win me over. Creepy Jesse Plemons brings his new girlfriend to meet his bizarre parents at their secluded farmhouse, and "nothing is what it seems" there. I liked the enigmatic ballet and "revelations" at the end, but the 'snowstorm from hell' and intellectual, unsympathetic characters turned me off. 3/10.

(From a list of '96 Best Thrillers')

🍿Body double, one of the old Brian De Palma Hitchcock homages, felt like one of the worst movies I ever saw. I know it wasn't, but it felt like it. 80's gratuitous "voyeurism", trashy prurient porn-parody, with a young Bill Maher-clone who can't act as the protagonist. Just horrible. 1/10.

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2 X London gangsters action from the early 2000:

🍿Snatch, my first crime comedy by Guy Ritchie. All macho and bravado, bad accents and testosterone-fueled attitudes, wise cracks and brutal mayhem.

"In the quiet words of the Virgin Mary… come again?" 8/10.

🍿"Listen, I know it’s not your thing, but if you ever have to kill someone, never ever tell a living soul."

Layer cake, another highly-quotable story from the same source, with the same people and the same sensibilities. The film that helped Daniel Craig land the role of James Bond. Terrific entertainment all around with a shocking last scene. 8/10.

RIP, Michael Gambon!

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7 more shorts:

🍿 Shall we kiss? (On s��embresse?), one of my favourite French shorts. (Video Above).

🍿 How to count a wolf, a short conservation documentary, about the process of tracking wolves across many seasons in Washington state.

🍿 Encarnación, a New Yorker documentary: A Ninety-Five-Year-Old Shares Her Secret to Happiness.

🍿Also, 4 more of Wes Anderson shorts:

Now that Netflix spent £500 million for Roald Dahl's works, we'll see many more of them. The swan, The rat catcher and Poison are 3 adaptations from his short stories. I've seen nearly all of Wes Anderson's films, features, shorts and commercial, and he is indeed a real 'auteur', but (Like Kaufman above), his work, except of small brilliant moments here and there, leave me cold.

Castello Cavalcanti is actually my favourite of today’s bunch. Another stylish Prada advertisement, a Fellini product placement, rustic Italy for nostalgic tourists.

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Alice Kuypers’ Life on the Refrigerator Door, a British book about a 15-year-old and her single mother who discovers she has cancer. It features a unique 'hook'; The story unfolds 100% via a series of notes the two leave for each other in the kitchen. It’s a very light, 240 page / 40 minute read - 7/10.

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(My complete movie list is here)

[engineer-gunzelpunk]

Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus, lines 1083-1088

“Let then the blazing levin-flash be hurled;

With white-winged snowstorm and with earth-born thunders

Let him disturb and trouble all that is;

Nought of these things shall force me to declare

Whose hand shall drive him from his sovereignty.”

Prometheus, Napier Waller, 1967

[sleepydrummer]

Snowstorm, Finland George F. Mobley

crédit photo: National Geographic

[casadabiqueira]

Girl in bus and figures in street during snowstorm, New York City

Erich Hartmann, 1967

[dprs99]

Getting Ready for Christmas

A huge snowstorm! It’s a snowpocalypse! There hasn’t been a storm like this since the big one in 1978, or 1967, or 1919! The heavens may run completely out of moisture! Snow plows will be of no use! Snow blowers? Don’t make me laugh. Salt? Pllleease! We may not be able to get out until May! The kids will probably never go back to school. Not this year. I’m out of breath just typing this! I…

[oldguy56-world]

Apocalypse Now

One of my friends of over 50 years (I will give you a moment to wrap your head around that concept) every few days sends me a simple text containing 4 words. The text will have an attachment of something that has happened in the world. The four words: THE END IS NIGH! 

That’s right. He is monitoring what is going on in the world as an early warning system to anyone that will listen about where we are headed. I usually shrug this off as he is, how do you say this, not quite right in the head. (I know you already figured that out from the first line in this blog.) Snowstorms in Hawaii and rainstorms in Greenland are just seasonal flukes, right? But then, this morning, there were three stories on the news that got me thinking.

First story was about a dentist that went in to get vaccinated. Seems that he tried to get the injection put into his prosthetic arm so he could get the paper work without actually being vaccinated. Surprise surprise, he is an American. I would not blame the nurse if she pulled off the arm and beat him with it, although it is the U.S. and she would probably get in less trouble if she just shot him.

Second story. A U.S. politician posted his family’s Christmas greeting. It shows all of them (kids included) holding guns of various sorts. The caption says ‘Santa, please send us ammo’. Given recent events my only question is ‘Why’. Maybe Santa should deliver each a taser. Personally. That might shock some sense into them.

Third story. 2 hippos in a zoo have been diagnosed with Covid. My questions are ‘did they visit animals from South Africa recently?’ and ‘was the problem caused by not being able to find a mask to fit that giant face of theirs’. We don’t know because they are not talking.

So a lot of stuff happening but what would be the clear signs of the Apocalypse? I found a lost passage of the bible that tell us. it is in the book right after Revelations called Really Bad Revelations. Here are some excerpts.

- When politicians agree, the end is near. (Old version says nigh so my friend is on to something)

- Steven Segal wins an acting Oscar for his portrayal of Hamlet. He also directs.

- Rich people pay their fair share of taxes. We seem to have a lot of time before this happens.

- Donald Trump wins a spelling Bee. (Yes it actually names him) It also mentions George W. Bush in the passage. (Interesting side note: He started using W when he discovered how hard it was to spell his middle name of Walker. Those silent ‘L’ s are tricky.)

- Toronto Maple Leafs win another Stanley Cup. They were allowed a specific amount and used that up by 1967. They have been saving the world by holding off ever since. Good work guys.

- Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck get back together. (Uh-0h. We are one step closer)

THOUGHT OF THE WEEK: The world is as good or as bad as we choose to make it.

[mythicallore]

Dyatlov Pass Incident

On January 25, 1959, nine Russian students set out on a strenuous cross-country skiing trip across the Otorten Mountain range, in the northern Urals. Eight days after they were due to arrive at their end destination a search party set out to find the missing students. Fighting against the falling snow and sub-zero temperatures the search party finally came upon the flapping remains of a tent pitched on the uppermost slope of Kholat Syakhl, or “Mountain of the Dead” in the native language of northern Siberia. The tent, the search party discovered had been ripped apart, torn to shreds from the inside out.

This was to be the first riddle in an ever-expanding puzzle. The case became known as the “Dyatlov Pass Incident”, and the unfathomable deaths of nine young mountaineers whose cross-country skiing trip ended in a tragedy so horrifying and perplexing that it has mystified experts, and indeed the world ever since.

The group had initially set out for a cross-country skiing trip on January 25th by taking a train to Ivdel in the center of the northern province of Sverdlovsk. From there, they caught a truck to the last settlement of Vizhai and set out for Otorten Mountain on January 27th.

The team consisted of ski instructor Semyon Zolotariov, three engineers (Rustem Slobodin, Yuri Krivonischenko, and Nicolai Thibeaux-Brignolles) and five students from the Ural Polytechnic Institute (Yuri Doroshenko, Zinaida Kolmogorova, Lyudmila Dubinina, Alexander Kolevatov, and Yuri Yudin). The expedition was led by 23-year-old Igor Dyatlov, for whom the pass would eventually be named. Although Yudin stayed behind at the settlement due to illness, all members were experienced with long ski tours and mountain expeditions. They were more than prepared for the trip, but not the mysterious fate that awaited them in the snow.

After skiing across frozen lakes and uninhabited wilderness, the group began moving through the pass on February 1st. Although they had planned to make camp on the other side, a snowstorm with low visibility pushed them up the slope of a mountain called Kholat Syakhi or “Dead Mountain” in Mansi. Realizing their mistake, they decided to camp on the slope rather than a forested area downhill that would have provided better shelter. Yudin remarked after the fact that it was likely because Dyatlov didn’t want to lose the ground they’d gained.

The film rolls and journals that they left behind paint a picture of high-spirited adventurers exhilarated by a breath-taking landscape. With evidence that they set up camp at around 5 PM, investigators believe the group ate dinner around 7 PM before settling down for the night despite frigid temperatures of less than 5 degrees Fahrenheit and wind chills well below zero.

What happened next is unclear, but forensic pathologists estimate that the central event occurred between 9:30 and 11:30 PM. At that point, something terrified the skiers as they were sleeping, and they ripped their way out of the tent and into the freezing night without turning back for coats, shoes, or supplies. As experienced mountaineers, they would have known that they needed protection, so whatever awoke them must have seemed a mortal peril.

Their footprints in the snow show that they initially retreated down the slope to a large pine on the edge of a forest, beneath which they likely shared clothes before starting a fire. Based on wounds on their hands, Doroshenko and Krivonischenko climbed the tree to get a better view of the campsite, but both soon succumbed to exposure. At some point, Dyatlov and two others attempted to retreat back to the tent, but each died in the snow before they could reach their destination.

The remaining team members Zolotariov, Thibeaux-Brignolles, Kolevatov, and Dubinina stripped the clothing from their deceased friends and moved toward the forested area for shelter, before eventually descending into the ravine where they died. Zolotariov, the last surviving member of the expedition perished shortly after from internal trauma and hypothermia.

Before leaving for the trip, Dyatlov had scheduled the team to return and telegraph their arrival in Vizhai no later than February 12th. However, it was only when relatives demanded action that the Ural Polytechnic Institute began a search and rescue operation that soon expanded into military and civilian authorities. On February 25th, a helicopter pilot spotted the group’s campsite, and investigators found eight or nine sets of footprints circling the badly-damaged tent, which still contained the team’s belongings. They followed the group’s tracks to discover a naked Doroshenko and Krivonischenko by the long-dead fire. They then discovered the snow-covered bodies of Dyatlov, Slobodin, and Kolmogorov at a distance of 200, 400, and 680 meters from the tent, respectively.

After an exhaustive search, three months later, on May 4, the final four bodies were discovered beneath 12 feet of snow in a ravine 250 feet from the tent. They were fully clothed, with items taken from the other members.

Of the four, Dubinina and Zolotariov had crushed chests without any soft tissue damage, and Thibeaux-Brignolles had major skull damage. The doctor who inspected them at the time noted that the force would have been equivalent to a car crash. More disturbingly, Dubinina was missing her tongue, eyes, and other facial tissue. The team’s clothing also had high traces of radiation, and reports noted scrap metal in the area, as well. Although a legal inquest was filed, Soviet investigators were pressured to close the case quickly, and the files were soon archived and classified.

The inquest’s vague conclusion was that the nine deaths were caused by a “compelling unknown force”. At the same time, the very popular region where the bodies were found was closed for three years afterwards, feeding suspicious that something strange had happened there. As a result, the Dyatlov Pass Incident remains a controversial one, with many different interpretations of what happened. What compelled the group to race bear-foot and half-naked into a blisteringly cold night? Some of the most prominent theories include the following:

Paradoxical undressing could explain why 6 of the 9 skiers died from hypothermia, as one-fourth of hypothermia victims remove their clothes due to a false sense of heat.

Some proposed that they were attacked by Mansi tribesmen for unknown reasons and that the Russian government covered it up to benefit land negotiations.

The lead Soviet investigator argued that the group was the victim of aliens, as hikers in nearby areas reported orange spheres in the sky on that same night.

Yudin believes that his friends accidentally entered a covert military testing ground, whose weapon shocked and injured them in the middle of the night.

Many mountaineers have argued that the group’s death resulted from avalanche paranoia, such that they fled from a distant rumbling and became lost in the snow.

A more recent scholar has proposed that the winds around nearby mountains created an infrasound phenomenon called a vortex street that induces panic attacks.

The main difficulty with each of these explanations is the lack of signs of struggle, of animal or human presence, or any clear evidence of what caused the deaths of these nine individuals. Whether it was one of the above explanations or a Siberian Yeti looking for friends, the difficult truth is that we will never really know.

Still, several journalists and researchers have attempted the seemingly impossible work of untangling this mystery but have faced other kinds of difficulties. In particular, Yuri Yarovoi’s 1967 novel dramatized the events based on his experiences as an official photographer for the search party but was heavily censored by the Soviet government. Others have found that much of the files from the original investigation have since gone missing.

In response to the lack of action on this case, Yuri Kuntsevitch founded the Dyatlov Foundation to push for the case to be re-opened and for lost files to be recovered, based on his own experience attending the funerals for the skiers in 1959. At a conference held by the Dyatlov Foundation in 2008, Yuri Yudin, surviving searchers for the group, and technical experts came to the consensus that their deaths were the unintended consequence of a secret military weapons test. Yet despite this, and without conclusive proof, the extraordinary events that took place on that fateful night continues to make the “Dyatlov Pass Incident” one of the great mysteries of the 20th Century.

[figurationoftheinvisible]

Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern. The country is grey and brown and white in trees, snows and skies of laughter always diminishing, less funny not just darker, not just grey. It may be the coldest day of the year, what does he think of that? I mean, what do I? And if I do, perhaps I am myself again.

—Frank O’Hara

Image: Erich Hartmann, Girl Looking Out Of A Bus Window During A Snowstorm, New York, 1967

[attropin]

A  girl looks out a bus window during a snowstorm,  New York City, 1967. by Erich Hartmann

[aaliyahfairy-blog]

The blizzard of '67, Chicago, IL, January 26, 1967