Berlin & Casablanca

At yesterday's glass class, I assembled broken glass on clear glass squares--below (on white paper).
The two layers will fuse together in the kiln.

Those white forms on the table ^ are for making glass cabachon pendants, but I'd never wanted to make those.
I'd thought I was inventing these squares (I was, for me) but one woman said, "Oh, your sun catchers look like paintings".

Most of the class was making them too instead of cabachons.
Don't know what everyone else intends to wire-wrap next week. I'm bringing little toys.

The teacher, Janelle, is magnificent, like a Frank Frazetta pulp-art warrior with a braid and a broadsword. I am smitten . . . but she's a terrible teacher. Didn't explain anything, and talked in specialized technical terms. I'm glad someone else teaches the wire class.

Luckily, most of the class was experienced and knew what to do--they'd even brought their own tools––and they showed me.
"If you want to cut that, score it with this tool, then break if off with these clamp grippers."

I asked Janelle if she did architectural glass work, and she said this year she'd done the stained glass vestibule of a new downtown jazz club, the Berlin Music Club.
The club opens at 4 pm so I plan on going for happy hour soon. It closes at midnight. (THIS IS THE MIDWEST WE GO TO BED EARLY) (I wonder if it's for safety, too--to avoid the street violence after the rowdy bars close at 2 a.m.)

The blue glass squares are modeled after the stained glass Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (1962) in Berlin, Germany. 
I've never been to Berlin, and I'd never heard of this building!
"Following Allied bombing in WWII, the original tower remained standing as a ruin and is referred to as the “hollow tooth”:

After class, I stopped at Sisters Sludge, a coffee shop/bar near where I lived with HouseMate. During Covid, they'd set up heaters for outside sidewalk seating, and she and I used to go there frequently.
It's out of the way so I rarely go there now, but it's one of my happy places.

Yesterday I sat in the a/c, drank a porter (it's on my plan), and read We'll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood's Most Beloved Movie, 2017, by Noah Isenberg,

My shock at US politics in recent years stems from my unexamined belief, growing up, that Casablanca was THE American myth:
the hero who gives up love to fight against fascism.
(And the heroine who gives up her passionate. She leaved the choice up to Rick, but as Capt. Louis Renault insinuates, Ilsa didn't have to get on that plane. But it's Bogart's show.)

(I bet Ilsa and Laszlo are going to be happy together after the war (if they're not killed)--they have a good partnership, like the couple at the end of Brief Encounter.
While if she'd stayed with Rick, running a bar in Morocco after the war...? Maybe he'd sell up and do something else? What?

No, she'll be happier with Laszlo in the long run, and Rick will be happier with Louis. (Really, what was he going to do with Ilsa at the bar? Besides... um, that.)
It's a "Ho Yay" (Homoeroticism, yay!) TV Trope.

Anyway, I was shocked (for real, not "shocked, shocked") when my fellow Americans started to celebrate fascism. Not just our usual--but now more overt--homegrown white supremacy. I mean, I get the Confederate flag. But to see white American boys marching with actual Nazi flags in Charlottesville, 2017?
Hadn't they seen Casablanca?!?

Probably not, and it's not the myth they're coming from.
But still, don't they have family members who remember Grandpa (great-grandpa, maybe) fought in WWII to hit them upside the head?

This book, written before Charlottesville--might be wrong. We might not "always have Casablanca" as a shared national story.
I guess we already don't...

I'm confused. Does that mean we never did share Rick & Louis, Ilsa & Laszlos's story?
Was it a liberal illusion?

I didn't think so, but maybe I'm wrong.
From Time magazine, October 4, 2018 --(it mentions the shock of seeing swastikas at Charlotseville):
"More Americans Supported Hitler Than You May Think. Here’s Why One Expert Thinks That History Isn’t Better Known"

Now I am going out for Sunday coffee with bink, so all for now.
Love ya!
Don't let the bastards get you down!