7x7

true blue: synthetic, petroleum-based dyes go into a billion pairs of jeans a year but one company is committing to natural, indigo denim, via Things Magazine

scyphozoa: Ernst Haeckel’s (previously) exquisite jelly fish

through a different lens: a collection of the photography of Stanley Kubrick

electronic engineers’ master volume ii: vintage 1985 tech company logos and resources from Marchin Wichary, who also sets them to a screen-saver—via Coudal Partners’ Fresh Signals

notability, fame, notoriety: watch Time magazine create its cover for the Age of the Drones edition

hela: the immortal Henrietta Lacks (previously here and here) is honoured in the US National Portrait Gallery

bell-bottom blues: voice-over artist Ken Nordine narrates some trippy Levi’s advertisements from the 1970s 

my god, it’s full of stars

On this day fifty years ago, Stanley Kubrick’s theatrical adaptation of the Arthur C Clark science fiction novel had its initial release at the Uptown Theatre in Washington, DC.
The cultural impact of this work is nearly impossible to gauge in totality but among the many ground-breaking firsts of the film (previously here, here and here) was the appeal to the possibility of space-tourism (projected already for the turn of the millennium) and product placement and brand tie-ins with the hotel-restaurant chain Howard Johnson’s (effectively defunct in 2006) presence on the station with its Earthlight lounge. Back on Earth, there was a 2001-themed kids’ menu for years after.

star child

Via Kottke we discover that an architect, artist duo in Los Angeles have recreated an exacting replica of the iconic, other-worldly bedroom from Stanley Kubrick’s epic production of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
After disabling HAL, Doctor David Bowman confronts older and younger versions of himself in this setting when he goes to investigate a mysterious monolith in orbit around Jupiter. The bedroom film-set is in a massive warehouse transformed into an exhibition hall and thematically it is part of a series of displays meant to take visitors on a hero’s journey, an homage to Joseph Campbell’s trope of the monomyth.

daisy bell or oneironaut

A bit ironically—as I think this Stanley Kubrick classic taught us rather to start worrying and fear the machine, artist Bhautik Joshi, as the always brilliant Colossal shares, transformed the entirety of 2001: A Space Odyssey into a neural dream sequence, a routine that enhances visual input by trying to recognise patterns and begins—logarithmically, to tease them out of every detail, sort of the artificial intelligence (one assumes) version of human pareidolia. Some adjustment to the protocols allowed Joshi to reinterpret the visual style of the movie after his favourite artist Pablo Picasso, which makes for some wildly hallucinogenic scenes. Be sure to check out Colossal to watch the full feature and learn more about the artist’s oneironautic (pertaining to dream-travellers) adaptions of other visionary sci-fi films.

redrum

Via Kottke’s Quick Links, we discover a wondrous homage to all things appertaining to Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece of modern horror The Shining from the caretaker of the Overlook Hotel. The driven snows from Hoth, we know already were recycled from the neighbouring film set, but who knew that much of Blade Runner’s aerial footage was also courtesy of the Torrence family as well?

tycho magnetic anomaly-1

Having just written about another, older film that helped inspired some of Kubrick’s most memorable montages, I thought it was a nice coincidence that the always brilliant Dangerous Minds served up this engrossing appreciation of the development and divergence of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The article, with more to explore, discusses the difference between the storytelling devices of the director and the writer, Arthur C. Clark, and how the different media access the imagination, mystery and a cosmos fraught with either enfeeblement or indifference, but it also reveals another homage, influence Kubrick had in Russian film-maker Pavel Klushantsev’s 1957 The Road to the Stars that debuted a decade earlier—which is far too full of artistry and vision to be labelled as propaganda but did coincide with the launch of Sputnik.

the overlook

While iconic producer and director Stanley Kubrick’s staging and ensemble could never be labelled derivative, having inspired countless other homages, and nothing less could be ascribed to The Shining, there is nonetheless than some point for point correspondence that Kubrick himself attributes to a much earlier inspiration.
The Swedish film called Körkarlen, the Wagoner, was presented to British and American audiences a year after its debut under the title of Thy Soul shall bear Witness or The Phantom Carriage in 1922. Both films have to address the torture of alcoholism and the resulting missteps in family life, although the silent version had more ledgend to draw upon than the local lore of hotel staff with a sort of Flying Dutchman curse of the street urchins and dissolute of the town of Landskrona that holds the last person to die in the previous year is charged with acting as the Grim Reaper and collects the souls of those to die in the next. A departed drinking buddy who led the protagionist astray in life tries to make amends in death by arranging encounters with people who can help him get his life back in order. One can view the film in its entireity at this link, and appreciate its pioneering use of special effects and complex storytelling which makes use of flashbacks within flashbacks.

room 237

Der Spiegel (leiderlich nur auf Deutsch) has a nice photo-album tribute to Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece of horror, The Shining, on the occasion of its thirty-fifth anniversary. The captions for these iconic stills need no translation but do have some interesting trivia—like that Jack Nicholson axed through sixty doors before the director was satisfied with the shot or the snow from the garden labyrinth ending was recycled from a neighbouring film production going on the same time, Kubrick gladly taking the stage-snow after the rebellion fled Hoth.

magical mystery tour

After the box-office success of HELP! there was a pitch to the legendary film director Stanley Kubrick to cast the Beatles in a production of the Lord of the Rings saga. The Tolkien estate eventually rebuffed the proposal, but just imagine how our conception of the characters would have been otherwise, not to mention the scoring. Incidentally Carl Sagan had approached the band about including the track Here Comes the Sun on the golden records carried aloft on the Voyager space probes. The Beatles were enthusiastic and honoured but for whatever reason, their record label refused. That would-be first encounter would have been surely even more monumental and definitely immortal.

back-lot or quadratura

Berlin’s film museum, the Deutsche Kinemathek, is celebrating the work of set-builder and stage-crafter Sir Ken Adam, who conceived some of the most memorable, iconic and colossal cinematic backdrops of the past fifty years.  Adam’s vision of the White House War Room for the Stanley Kubrick classic Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb even had the newly-elected real-life, Hollywood president convinced that was the command-and-control centre he’d inherit when he took office. Adam created the atmosphere of epics like Ben-Hur, several James Bond films and other cult movies.  Quadratura is an Italian term used to describe the technique that applied perspective and foreshadowing to flat surfaces to create the illusion of depth and space. 

purity of essence or always/never

This day marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Stanley Kubrick's master-work Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned how to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which the New Yorker celebrates with due fanfare for its prescience and enduring relevance.

Though dismissed as unimaginable at the time of its premiere, it has since been revealed that a single individual could easily initiate a nuclear launch autonomously. Though the risk and compromise was clear, the consequences of allowing an assault to go unanswered, unrequited seemed far more risky. Beyond fail-safes, the film also of course offered critiques on doom's-day devices kept secret and thus useless as deterrents, which were very real for both superpowers, however guarded. There's no fighting in the War Room, gentlemen.

context clues or you see, it's OK. he saw it on the television

Mental Floss featured an interesting round up of eleven creative interpretations of classic films that's a bit above the caliber of the investigative work my friends and I did watching a VHS cassette of Three Men and a Baby one frame at a time to catch a glimpse of the tortured ghost stage-hand that was caught on a millisecond of the released version of the movie, but still rather implausible though well-constructed. The alternative reading that struck me the most was theories on the Stanley Kubrick film The Shining. I had heard the suggestions before that the movie was a veiled allegory of the director's views of the Holocaust or the genocide of the aboriginal peoples of the Americas, a significant departure from the book on which its based, but over all not a very compelling argument.
As the author of the original novel posits, however, all writing is a confession although it is not always clear what one is owning up to—though in this case, the author admitted that he had had some dark thoughts about his family when they got on his nerves, the article, referencing a documentary called Room 237, debuted during the Directors' Fortnight of last year's Film Festival at Cannes, entertains the idea that the changes in the screen-adaptation were the esteemed director's secret confessions for his part in the mock-up, staging of the Apollo Moon landings. Conspiracy theorists and Moon-landing deniers have found all sorts of supporting evidence, including, the sweater that Danny Torrence wears bears the Apollo 11 rocket, the lunar mileage was about 237,000 miles—hence the warning to avoid Room 237—and the distinctive hotel carpet pattern that Danny races his Big Wheel across bears some resemblance to the launch pad for the mission. An awful lot of the iconic scenes only come from the film—the wave of blood from the elevator, the ghost twins in the hallway and the writer's block expressed on dozens of typed pages. It seems like a pretty far-fetched explanation and one can surely find hints like these anywhere, if they support one's thesis. What do you think? Do you think there are such admissions lurking in the subtleties of gaffing and artist license?

the whole point of a doomsday machine is lost...if you keep it a secret

While there is word that US government computer systems are set on blocking access to this newspaper for fear that soldiers and bureaucrats might become a bit more informed or inadvertently participate in spillage (network-hygiene, it's called), undeterred by this potential loss of readership, the Guardian is reporting on how the former number-two in rank of the US Army leaked to journalists the methodologies behind an open-secret, admitting that the American cyber-offensive colluded with Israeli forces in order to sabotage Iran's nuclear programme.

To show that Justice can be a slow and deliberative process for one's own, these events first unfolded in 2010. This disclosure, unsourced beforehand, was a major scandal for both prosecuting governments, although all involved employed some very bellicose rhetoric—regardless what was behind the words, and instigated a regular witch-hunt among the press-corps and individual reporters were harassed with less indiscriminate and sweeping (not protected by the herd for protecting their sources) tactics in retaliation. These heavy-handed techniques, trying to out the sieve, resulted in a pointed diminishing of US standing in the eyes of the rest of the world in terms of press freedoms and transparency. Intelligence did not trickle down but came in a torrent from the top of the Pentagon, it seems. Deciding autonomously to share manoeuvres is of course a perilous and potential compromising choice, and not without the hubris that one sees the big picture, but the officer's rationale, while not all would agree it was right or sound, held that such weapons were not very useful as a deterrent if such abilities are kept incognito.