#especially when she started showing certain characteristics that were reminiscent of her father

[gh0st-city]

Thinking about Azula again...

[expensiveplaces]

The Charles Hotel in Munich

While most of the Rocco Forte Hotels are situated in historical old buildings, The Charles Hotel in Munich is a completely newly built hotel. When planning the hotel together with the renowned Munich architect Christoph Sattler, Sir Rocco Forte had the guests of today and their wishes already in mind. The Charles Hotel, which was named after Lord Charles Forte, the father of Sir Rocco Forte, and which was built on the site of the former university library for natural sciences at the Old Botanical Garden, tells with its interior design three different stories: one of the Forte Family, one of the Old Botanical Garden and one of Munich and its art heritage. Our team visit the hotel and write a review of The Charles Hotel in Munich In The Charles Hotel one should feel the ambience and the discreet charm of travelling. The lobby, restaurant and terrace overlooking the Old Botanical Garden give a feeling of tranquillity and harmony in the middle of the busy city. Large windows and a glass dome in the middle as the heart of the hotel allow pleasant natural light in the floors, lobby and restaurant. Noble materials such as lime sandstone, stylish furnishings, cherry wood panelling, crystal chandeliers and selected home accessories convey elegant and simple comfort when entering the lobby.

Olga Polizzi, the sister of Sir Rocco Forte, together with her design team, the Agency Art Consult International from Mainz as well as the interior design studio Markus-Diedenhofen impress with soft decorations and friendly, muted colours. The lighting designer Mrs. von Kardorff from Berlin was responsible for the entire lighting project.

Themes from nature and especially botany are the leitmotifs throughout the hotel. Also the colour schemes of the rooms, with brown, violet and green are reminiscent of discrete earth colours. High quality natural products such as cotton and silk were preferably used.

A characteristic feature of all Rocco Forte Hotels is the fact that every hotel reflects its location. The Charles Hotel is no exception: Already the floors, which are unusually light-flooded due to the windows to an inner courtyard, shine white-sky blue, the typical Bavarian colour combination. The white room doors have been treated with clear varnish, normally not used in the hotel business.

The hotel was built in 2007 as part of a new Munich quarter Lenbachgärten. The Munich art museum Lenbachhaus, including the former villa of the Munich painter prince Franz von Lenbach, is only a few minutes walking distance from the hotel. It is therefore only natural that the Rocco Forte Hotels acquired original paintings of the 19th century painter, which can be found throughout the hotel. In the rooms, large art photographs of Hubertus von Hohenlohe are an eye-catcher. The pictures show the artist against a background of Munich scenery. A further connection to Munich is the wall decoration in each bathroom – the architect Sattler had this especially made for the hotel in the Nymphenburg Porcelain Manufactory. With Adam or Eve as theme, this also tells the story of creation – this time from a religious perspective. Olga Polizzi also led the design team in March 2016 on the redesigning of Sophia’s Restaurant & Bar, formerly Davvero. She has developed an ambience through the architecture which is generous and light, with a high ceiling that contributes to the bright and airy atmosphere. Two large fig trees in the centre of the restaurant, and other plants and herbs in rustic pots, mirror the lush restaurant terrace and the gardens beyond.

The bar area is connected to the light-filled restaurant, but boasts a subtler lighting, darker design, and more masculine fabrics. The space features a striking and contemporary eight-metre bar and the Moroccan-inspired interior décor of the lounge space creates a feeling of intimacy and privacy.

In The Charles Spa the natural theme is continued in its interior design: The walls of the pool area are decorated with extensive, elaborately made coral mosaics from Bisazza. The nature theme connects with that of Munich: The members of the royal family Wittelsbach were passionate coral collectors and even used them in their coats of arms.

SUITE LIFE AT THE CHARLES HOTEL MUNICH

The Rocco Forte Hotels is the only European 5 Star hotel chain which is family-managed since four generations. The comfort and the wellbeing of the guests are part of the family tradition. The programme especially developed for the suite guests, the Rocco Forte Suite Experience, gives the guests a maximum of comfort and time to enjoy their suite, the city and their life to the full. „Nowadays, for many people time is the biggest luxury. We give our guests the time by dealing with certain things or think along with them“, explains Frank Heller, Director of The Charles Hotel in Munich. „The Suite Experience Programme, for example, makes packing and unpacking of suitcases or ironing superfluous for our guests“, he adds.

Royal Monforte Suite – highest comfort and optimum security The Charles Hotel opened in 2007 at the Old Botanical Garden has, apart from 136 standard rooms which are with 40 square metres the largest in town, also 24 individually designed and differently sized suites.

The heart of the hotel is the Royal Suite Monforte on the 8th floor, named after the South Italian small town and place of birth of Lord Charles Forte, father of Sir Rocco Forte. The spacious roof top terrace has a magical attraction and places the Bavarian capital including the Alpine peaks on the horizon at the guests’ feet. The 200 square metre suite impresses with its open-plan concept combined with elegant interior design by Olga Polizzi.

Divided in a sleeping-, living-, dining- and working-area as well as a fully equipped kitchen with separate entrance, the suite offers a maximum of space and privacy. The stylish and nevertheless cosy furnishing is completed with modern art from Max Wiedemann as well as a Bechstein Grand Piano in the living area. An own steam bath, rain showers and a free-standing bathtub with a view over the historical Munich ensure a unique bathing experience. The Monforte Suite can be connected with two further suites. Guests who put special value on an undisturbed stay can also rent the entire floor with a total of four suites and more than 450 square metres.

The Royal Suite is also very convincing with regard to security: In defiance of the fact that the hotel is a detached building, the windows, ceilings and floors of the suite have been made of bullet-proof material. In the corridor, a total of five cameras have been installed which can be monitored from the next suite, the Junior Deluxe Suite. Thanks to the structural conditions, the hotel underground carpark is accessible via three separate underground routes. Guests can reach the suite floor directly from the underground carpark. The hotel lift can be programmed in such a way that only authorised people can reach the top floor. Furthermore, the Royal Suite has an autonomous telecommunication installation as well as an SOS alarm system. Moreover, one can prevent electromagnetism and switch off the entire power supply of the suite from the bed with one manual movement. A security representative of the hotel provides guests with help and support and is also responsible for the control of the sophisticated surveillance system of the hotel. The next police station is only 900 metres, the next hospital around one kilometre and the closest fire station is approximately two kilometres away.

The right suite for every occasion Whether for a romantic weekend as a couple or for a big family meeting – at The Charles Hotel, guests will find the right suite for every occasion. With a size between 48 to 146 square metres, all suites have separate living and sleeping areas with a comfortable king-size bed and a walking-in wardrobe. Floor-to-ceiling windows with French balconies or terraces ensure especially fantastic views at any time of the day.

Guests will find any comfort in spacious bathrooms with daylight, underfloor heating, rain shower and bathtub. For families the Two-Bedroom Suites are the perfect choice. Thanks to the unique location of the hotel in the centre of town and yet quiet at the Old Botanical Garden, the suites surprise particularly with their peaceful atmosphere and a popular garden view.

Olga Polizzi, Director of Design at Rocco Forte Hotels, used high-quality natural products and soft colours when designing the interior of the hotel. Skilfully and unobtrusively placed design highlights, such as paintings custom-made for The Charles Hotel suites, provide a warm and welcoming atmosphere. The Executive Suites located in the corner towers of the hotel are especially charming – due to the semi-circular windows there is a 180 degree panorama view over the city from the bed.

Rocco Forte Suite Experience Programme The Suite Experience Programme applies to every suite. The programme includes breakfast at the Sophia’s Restaurant & Bar or at the suite, wireless internet access as well as a selection of „Videos on demand“. Check-in takes place at the suite, while guests may mention any possible wishes such as restaurant reservation, transfer or concert tickets. The hotel staff takes care of time-consuming unpacking of suitcases and creased clothes are ironed the same evening. For a pleasurable start of the evening, guests may enjoy the daily In-Suite-Aperó-Bar, which contains an attractive selection of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks as well as sweet and salty snacks from the hotel kitchen.

https://justelite.com/stories/bistronomy-at-the-charles-hotel-in-munich/

The Concierge Team with its extensive network will fulfil even the most unusual wishes. On request, a personal butler can be organised for our guests.

At the urban Sophia’s Restaurant & Bar, Chef Michael Hüsken spoils guests with a modern and international cuisine, during the summer also on the terrace. The spacious The Charles Spa with Munich’s longest indoor hotel pool, sauna, steam bath and the latest generation of fitness equipment will be available for relaxing hours or an effective workout.

Contact:

ADDRESS: Sophienstrasse 28, 80333 Munich, Germany TELEPHONE: +49 89 544 555 0 FAX: +49 89 544 555 2000 EMAIL: info.charles@roccofortehotels.com WEBSITE: roccofortehotels.com OWNER: Sir Rocco Forte

[ghostonthenet2501]

Re: Lindsey Weedston’s essay:

It’s a mistake, I think, to assume that reception and fanbases of these shows are static and unchanging across such diverse periods in American history. Much of the phrases and metaphors of the alt-right derive from pop-culture big around the late 90s and early 2000s: the “red pill” from The Matrix, “snowflakes” from Fight Club, “working class hobbits” from The Lord of the Rings. But in terms of this time period itself, these references were more likely to signal left-leaning politics at the time when neoconservativism entrenched itself culturally.

The Matrix was an Afrofuturist cyberpunk narrative steeped in references to hacking, drug, and sex countercultures, along with postmodern philosophers, and inviting Cornel West to do the film commentary as a gesture to the profound degree he influenced the narrative. Created by two transwomen who hadn’t come out yet, the narrative anticipates the themes of the Black Lives Matter protest movement far more than the alt-right. Fight Club may have a certain homoerotic claim to return to violent aggression in a bare-knuckled boxing club reminiscent to a certain fin de siècle masculinity promoted by imperial powers prior to World War I. But it also tapped into the lingering frustrations about globalization after the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, and the anti-consumerist iconoclasm of Naomi Klein’s No Logo and Adbusters (the latter ultimately began the Occupy Wall Street protest movement). The Lord of the Rings films made a grand spectacle out of its battle scenes, but in terms of the core narrative of Frodo’s journey stuck to the pacifism and critique of power and corruption that so endeared Tolkein’s fantasy world to the hippies in the teeth of the post-9/11 era.

With the Cult of the Jerk Hero in the 90s and 2000s, and the correlated attacks on “censorship” and “political correctness”, in the scheme of things they speak to a certain young discontent with a perception that conservative and liberal politics in America tended toward mendacity. That is to say, toward the capacity to tell lies about ourselves, and to suppress alternative visions in words and in actions. The Jerk Hero harkens back to the Johnny Rotten persona of John Lydon, an iconoclastic punk rock sensibility attacking rhetoric surrounding paradigms of an allegedly harmonious society in the present like Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee. From Vivienne Westwood to The Slits to Riot Grrrl to the Matal v. Tam supreme court ruling surrounding the Asian American punk band The Slants, this has included offensive imagery and language designating the disgrace of how society is actually functioning. In the scheme of things, this kind of political strategy tends to favor leftists or rightists outside the bounds of who is generally invited to the table to form political policy. The more successful it proves, the more liberals and conservatives in the “traditional” sense a placed on the defensive.

In terms of South Park, perhaps antecedents like Oliver Stone’s Wall Street and shock jock radio might have a certain resonance. Oliver Stone’s films like Salvador do make use of a leftist Jerk Hero to attempt to tell the truth about U.S. sponsored neo-colonial brutality of death squads covered over by Reaganism. But probably the best approach would be comparative analysis of the genre of the family sitcom, televisual heir to the family melodrama. With much fame and infamy in the 1950s, daytime television in this Golden Age of Television was exemplified by family sitcoms like Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best presented suburban white patriarchy as idyllic and wholesome. Meanwhile, as gay horror historian and recurring critic of censorship and political correctness David J. Skal observes, young people reading E.C. horror comics and watching nighttime Shock Theater with horror hosts like Vampira got a much darker perspective on life and family after World War II. Such material was a point of fixation for angry young people (often male) who later became a generation of creatives, among them Tim Burton, Stephen King, Devo, and the first goth bands emerging out of punk.

By the 1960s, family sitcoms like Bewitched, The Addams Family, and The Munsters drew subversive camp humor from introducing gothic characters and motifs from the nighttime hours into the American nuclear family itself. In addition to the endless capacity for satire of normality this afforded, it also presented a greater degree of sexuality, romanticism, and the pleasures and possibilities of male submission to female power. (Yes, many of the same qualities decried by the alt-right in terms of “beta cuckolds” and the like.) Not coincidentally, two nineties films reviving The Addams Family for an era when “dysfunctional families” were a major buzzword proved both a massive box-office hit and a permanent part of the goth film canon. Of the irreverent and often politically incorrect aesthetic styles of goth, Carol Siegel cites Csuba Toth in terms that:

“‘They’ve dealt with their feelings of alienation from society by reinventing themselves as “monsters”… They position themselves as reporters or tour guides to the macabre, rarely its victims… In [the music video] Gothic land of the end of the long cycle (of the post-industrial war boom), boundaries between the “normal” and the pathologized “other” collapse, and the “normal” is often more dreadful than its “unnatural” opposite’… Consequently, it is fairly easy to understand why for many people sexual ‘queerness’ of all kinds is associated with Goth, why clubs often combine Goth and fetish nights, and why many shops and online emporia that cater to Goths also sell supplies for bondage and S/M. As many of the postings that appeared on www.gothic.net after Columbine tell us, a central principle of the Goth scene is open-mindedness, especially about gendered behaviors and characteristics and about sexualities condemned by the mainstream.” (Carol Siegel, Goth’s Dark Empire p. 30-31)

The other go-to series into the 90s in terms of the dysfunctional family in the sitcom has been the long-running The Simpsons. In this set-up, the archetypal “Springfield” always teeters close to nuclear disaster under the “Corruptus In Extremis” of authority figures like the mercilessly greedy Mr. Burns, the behaviorist authoritarian Principal Skinner, and Mayor Quimby. The nuclear family too is under constant strain of pressures from both chaotic realities and the cultural imaginary. The Simpson family the narrative follows pits the values of the young and the old. Homer Simpson recons that if he always plays dumb and maintains a certain standard of ignorance, he will prove impervious to social transformation and his wife’s intellectualism. Marge Simpson is knowledgeable enough to feel concern, but often feels powerless about anything happening outside her family. Lisa Simpson is a young and high-achieving liberal feminist, but her idealism clashes with the realities of the society around her, including when she inherits the bankruptcy of the Donald Trump presidency. Bart Simpson is the disaffected rebel without a cause, the punk Slacker Hero who tells it straight and prefers gaming the system.

At about the same time Bart Simpson became so iconic, Richard Linklater’s 1991 film Slacker took a quasi-ethnographic Cinéma vérité approach to express the discontent of dudes and dykes of Austin, Texas, a kind of alternative politics mingled with apathy as Bush Sr. of Texas continued Reaganism. This film is, I think, the Rosetta Stone to this kind of 90s sensibility. Into the Clinton era, there manifested a certain aesthetics of speed to try to slough off the parochialism of Reaganism toward a globalized cosmopolitanism: Sonic the Hedgehog, MTV, house music, alt-rock, anime, skateboarding, editing with rapid cuts, the Web with fast data transmission. Mingled in this was a certain punk rock irreverence and iconoclasm that made the ostensibly truth-telling Fool of the Jerk Hero appealing (jester hats likewise had a certain appeal at this time).

In terms of the alt-right, what can be said is that they have adopted a certain rhetorical style and approach to media that manifested in the 90s, exploiting the youth-alienating vulnerabilities of Clintonism (Bill and Hillary alike) and the sanctimonious tenor of online progressives (the Don Quixotesque term “social justice warrior” evokes this frustration). In previous generations, leftist politics had a powerful ability to attract angry young men to their cause, much like the continuum between the Angry Young Men playwrights and the British New Wave cinema in 50s and 60s radicalism. But the ways Obama era progressivism and feminism tended to define the angry young man as the archetypal enemy proved alienating to them, and they became more prone to the alt-right style reactionary radicalism. Consequently, all that creative force and fury they had lent to leftism becomes lent to American neo-fascism.

To my mind, the evocative document of the period around the turn of the 21st century when South Park came out is Michael Moore’s film Bowling for Columbine. The 1999 Columbine shooting is now an all-too-familiar precedent, two angry young men in Littleton self-radicalized by Hitler’s ultraviolent eugenics into applying the method of the Einsatzgruppen death squads and concentration camps toward the extermination of their high school. Once an angry and alienated young man himself, Moore perceived how so many creatives like himself started out this way, and applied this emotion as a power for creative and social transformation. Toward this end, he interviewed the angry young men responsible for creating angry pop culture blamed by the news media and authority figures for the mass shooting.

He found a lot of thematic common ground with Marilyn Manson and Matt Stone, the latter South Park co-creator with Trey Parker also forming an alienated tight-knit homosocial dyad from Littleton underscoring the queerbashing dimensions of then-recent events, especially in terms of a culture of fear. Stone and Parker would ultimately hate Moore for this film’s mini-cartoon in a style similar to their own. Regardless, Moore’s montage shows a lot of nascent neoconservative backlash against South Park in terms of ruthlessly scorning the “quiet little whitebread redneck mountain town” in Colorado where it is set. This is a narrative of dysfunctional families where even fourth graders are largely devoid of an innocence expected by the post-War American family sitcom, formally establishing animated narratives like these flaunting the taboos of the Hayes Code as a massively successful TV genre.

In terms of why South Park with Comedy Central, or the Adult Swim programming block in the early 2000s established such cultural credibility among young people, I think much of it goes back to the Bush Jr. era in which they gained prominence. After the September 11th attacks, the Bush Jr. administration had skillfully manipulated the climate of fear to the point most American media was deathly terrified of contradicting or challenging him about anything. After denouncing the Iraq War at the Academy Awards is built upon fabrications and lies, Michael Moore himself was given the “never work in this town again” treatment (although he didn’t work in Hollywood anyway). Correlative to a president with such credentials among American Christian evangelicals and fundamentalists, the image of a certain Eisenhowerian megachurch and shopping mall consumerism prevailed.

Within this context, it was late-night comedy blocks surrounding animation, stop-motion animation, and puppetry that satirized and openly challenged these paradigms. Adult Swim’s The Boondocks takes a titular rural setting and dysfunctional black family otherwise akin to South Park’s “whitebread town”, and ruthlessly lampoons both political correctness and pop culture toward underscoring its black leftist themes. Likewise, their airing of the stop-motion series Moral Orel evocatively set in an imaginary state between Kansas and Missouri (implicitly recalling the Kansas-Missouri Compromise of 1820) suggests that despite its protagonist’s earnest search for moral integrity, the paradigm of Midwestern Protestanism ultimately leads to monstrous perversions. South Park was a show willing to expose the megalomania of Bush Jr.’s neoconservativism and the Project for the New American Century think tank for what they were. This was most explicit in Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s irreverent 2004 American-German co-production Team America: World Police using the frame of militaristic puppet and stop-motion animated shows like Thunderbirds to critique these paradigms in a time most filmmakers were still most reluctant to do so.

So how have things ended up like the present described in Lindsey Weedston’s essay on South Park? Certainly, K-12 education in America has a distinct element of cruelty and toxicity. Just as German children vising ghettos in Poland were known to play “deportation Aktion” with Jewish children presaging the latter’s mass murder at concentration camps, so K-12 students have been documented to take up the themes of Donald Trump’s rhetoric to torment other students. If Republicans have long opposed anti-bullying initiatives, this is in no small part because the more bullies are permitted to operate with impunity, the more the social and political climate shifts to the right.

So it was with Cartman’s own bullying within a social milieu that in reality was almost preordained to go with Trump, possibly taking with him a number of those who identified with the boys all these years. If the series was apparently supposed to be finished by the 2016 finale, one detects a certain creative paralysis in this political climate. One might recall that if Mamoru Oshii criticized Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli in terms of nationalist undercurrents beneath the surface of Article 9 pacifism, Miyazaki retired in the context of the height of PM Shinzo Abe’s bid to remilitarize Japan after a metaphorically self-referential film about an ingenious aviation designer who sold out to Mitsubishi and the militarists in full knowledge they would lead both Japan and Germany to ruin. Perhaps the show will go on after all, but with more conflict about what they’re doing, where the story goes, what messages they’re sending.

In the years between Clinton and Obama with their cosmopolitanism and culture of diversity, there was a certain effectiveness to claim to be offended in terms of violation of political norms implied by complaints about “political correctness”. But now in the Trump years with their nativism and culture of impunity, to claim to be offended, triggered, etc. is no more effective than announcing “hit” in Battleship, insofar as offense is both intended and reinforced. In this context, establishment liberals and paleoconservatives or neoconservatives display an uncertainty and political paralysis, while leftists and rightists shift toward radical action. Looking back at the history of pop culture and media trends for the past 50 years through this lens can be deeply uncomfortable in the knowledge they established certain precursors to this state of affairs.

In the context of Brexit and Trump, there is a certain cultural debate about the future of punk. Is it a form direly needed as an act of resistance, as Jello Biafra and Amanda Palmer have said. Should punk be declared formally dead and irrelevant, as with Vivienne Westwood’s funerary burning of a ship loaded with £5 million of Sex Pistols merchandise along with the effigies of 2016 demagogues on a ship declaring “Extinction!: Your Future”? What do we make of John Lydon’s longstanding affinity for “the working class” resulting in an about-face in praise of Nigel Farange and UKIP (in 2014 he warned “Their talk about immigration is subdued racism”), support for Brexit, and declaration of Donald Trump as “a possible friend”? However exactly the question of punk is answered, it is imperative the left go on the offensive rather than stay besieged and defensive.