recap

Via Duck Soup, we are directed to another year-in-review told through the editorial board and camera pool of The New York Times, month-by-month of 2020, which serves as an incredible reminder to headline the lack of correspondence between the world depicted in the first quarter with what was just over the horizon. All captioned and curated, one can explore these pivot-points, especially those that receed apace from the present, in this interactive retrospective. As indelible as 2020 seems, it’s surprising what iconic images seem to belong to another time and place.

fraunces tavern

As our faithful chronicler reminds, on this day in 1783, a week after his triumphant re-entry into New York City, General George Washington disbanded and dismissed the officers of the Continental Army during a formal fête held at the storied public house (see also) at the corner of Pearl and Broad. Yet still a dining establishment and museum with artefacts and exhibits relating to the American Revolution, the mansion converted to tavern originally named the Queen’s Head was witness to several preceding and pivotal events. Meeting place of the local chapter of the secret society of the Sons of Liberty members organised protests against the 1773 Tea Act and subsequent import tax with a parallel Tea Party, tossing the cargo into the harbour disguised as Native Americans—as was done in Boston and as the war of secession approached its end, a sort of truce was negotiated to placate American leadership that none of their property—meaning formerly enslaved individuals who were emancipated by the British after impressment or other service to the Crown—be allowed to depart with the British, though the representatives of latter were relatively successful in ensuring that their freedom was their own and could be evacuated. Later during January 1785, under the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union (the purpose of the Continental Army was only to oust the British and then each would go its own separate way) the federal offices of Foreign Affairs, War and Finance were held there with the city as the first capital until 1790 when relocated to Philadelphia whilst Washington, District of Columbia was constructed over the next decade.

words of an unprecedented year

Whereas in times past, the Oxford English Dictionary nominated one representative term to sum up the Zeitgeist, lexicographers due to the dread fullness of 2020 could not settle one word and instead have underscored dozens encompassing the pandemic, changed social norms, civil unrest, disinformation and systemic racism. Read the whole report and get some insight into the research and vetting process at the link up top.

set me free

Three days after the Wall unexpectedly opened, an impromptu, eleven-hour long Konzert für Berlin was held for an estimated fifty thousand visitors in a West Berlin concert hall on this day in 1989.  The line-up included Melissa Etheridge, Joe Cocker & Band, Udo Lindenberg, Nina Hagen, BAP, Nena, die Puhdys and many more. Residents were asked to position their radios in their windowsills so the audio would be available to all, with the Governing Mayor of West Berlin acknowledging the historical significance of this first all-German rock concert and opening the show, especially emotionally charged at that pivotal moment. Both mayors jointly opened more crossing points to accommodate the crowds now crossing freely.  Not broadcasting counter-programming but most radio stations and television networks carried a benefit concert from the city’s philharmonic that had been scheduled well in advance, so not much actual footage from the event is available but performers reprised their numbers for a studio album.

electoral integrity

Despite couching his authorisation with caveats, the United States Attorney General is showing partisan bias in directing federal prosecutors to investigate voting irregularities and tacitly endorses the defeated Trump’s disinformation campaign and narrative that the Democrats rigged the election. While it behoves one to recall that it was the Justice Department that conjured up a battalion of shock troops to disappear problematic protesters in what were interpreted as Democratic strongholds, this chicanery of sore losers (and continued purges) will not translate to a coup d’état in any sense with democracy and its institutions berated and bedraggled as they may be still prevailing despite the pandemic, economic collapse, plus massive and concerted efforts of disenfranchisement—still the people spoke.

novemberrevolution

Lasting through August of the following year, the revolt and uprising that replaced the constitutional monarchy of Germany and led to the formation of the Weimar Republic (previously) began on this day in 1918 with the Kiel Mutiny (Kieler Matrosenaufstand)—a revolt by a sailors of the High Seas Fleet (Hochseeflotte) demoralised and defeated in a senseless war. As testament to the social tensions between the general population and the aristocracy, the movement expanded outward from the city’s port and garnered some forty thousand rebels from the ranks of the navy, the army (which had been dispatched to quell the situation) and sympathetic workers, and by the next day they were able to organise articulate fourteen points outlying the revolutionary council’s demands: resolutions and demands including the release of political prisoners, complete freedom of the press, halting censorship of correspondence, cessation of fighting and the separation of being on- and off-duty (see also). By the seventh, King Ludwig III of Bavaria capitulated and announced the creation of a People’s Free State, and by the ninth, Emperor Wilhelm II abdicated and went into exile and Germany was declared a republic.

ημέρα του όχι

Though the response of the Greek prime minister to the Italian ambassador regarding Mussolini’s ultimatum to allow the Axis armies to occupy strategic points in the Hellenic lands delivered on this day in 1940 was a bit more bellicose and francophone—“Alors, c’est la guerre!”—than the popular account that the prime minister answered with a simple and laconic No—όχι/ohi, it was the latter that resounded in the streets and shouted first by members of the resistance then by all. The refusal was met by Italian troops stationed at the Albanian border invading Greek territory, beginning the Balkan campaign of World War II. This act of defiance, rejection of fascism is commemorated annually in Greece, Cyprus and the diaspora as the “Anniversary of the No!”

the good lord bird

Having commenced his raid the night before—considered to be the overture to the US Civil War—with the kidnapping of the officer-in-charge, great-grandnephew of George Washington and the seizing of ceremonial weapons presented to the first president by the Frederick the Great and the Marquis de Lafayette imbued with mystical powers, taking more hostages and capturing the federal armoury and seizing rifles for a revolt of enslaved individuals (having failed to enlist the support of Fredrick Douglas and Harriet Tubman who thought the exercise suicidal), the early hours of the second day of the taking of Harper’s Ferry in 1859 by radical abolitionist John Brown first brought a train-jacking which spread the news of this insurrection by a social justice activist whose notoriety very much preceded him—having worked to turn unincorporated territories like Kansas towards the side of freedom rather than slavery.

Delayed until sunrise but otherwise unmolested, the engineer dispatched telegrams to summon the cavalry. The reinforcements that Brown expected did not materialise and soon the white residents of Harper’s Ferry besieged the armoury, forcing Brown and his compatriots to retreat to the firehouse and repel the counter-attack as best they could but were eventually forced to retreat. Having received updates throughout the course of the raid, President Buchanan (whom had previously put a bounty of Brown’s head) sent in federal troops and put the town and garrison under the command of future leader of the Army of the Confederacy Robert E. Lee. Imprisoned and later arraigned in nearby Charles Town, Virginia—now West Virginia, Brown was found guilty of treason and conspiracy against the Commonwealth and condemned to death by hanging on 2 December. The execution was witnessed by a crowd of spectators that included John Wilkes Booth, future assassin of Abraham Lincoln (see also), and though the gathering was kept well back in order to prevent Brown from delivering a final, fiery speech (his last oration in the courtroom was considered by many as nonpareil in American history—he was able to pass along a note to his gaoler that encapsulated his reaction in brief: “I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done.” Whilst most Northern anti-slavery advocates were sympathetic with Brown’s failed call for uprising, it was condemned in the same circles for being brash and foolhardy, Southern plantation-holders whom did live in fear of a revolt took the coup’s lack of widespread support as an affirmation for the status quo. For Union soldiers, the death of this fighter for freedom became a cadence call: “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave, his soul goes marching on,” to which at the suggestion of a friend, fellow abolitionist and woman’s rights activist Julia Ward Howe took the tune and reworded it as the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” as an equally stirring but slightly more reverent tribute in 1861, just as the civil war began.

wuchang clan

Under the pictured banner that would go on to become that of the People’s Revolutionary Army circa 1913 to 1928, the eponymous uprising that began on this day in 1911 in the Hubei capital city marked the beginning of the revolution that deposed the Qing dynasty. Originally designed by revolutionaries in exile in Japan, the “iron-blood flag” had eighteen stars, representing each of the imperial provinces at the time.

These actions and decisions ushered in the establishment of the Republic of China, the resentment and dissatisfaction of the people with ruling dynasty focused and galvanised by the government’s announced intentions to nationalise local railway development projects and cede, sell control to foreign investment banks, in part to generate capital to pay indemnities and reparations incurred from the Boxer Rebellion of 1901 to oust Christian missionaries and the earlier Opium Wars. Seizing advantage of the popular sentiment, the revolutionary forces stormed the viceroy’s residence, the regional plenipotentate of the emperor with oversight of military and civil affairs, who quickly fled the province and the united protesters established a provisional military government for Hubei and Hunan, quickly taking more ground and encouraging vast swaths of territory in central and southern China to secede and join their cause over the next two months.

unprocessed cartoons

PRINT magazine contributor Steven Heller has a nice retrospective appearance and remembrance for an underground political cartoonist often overshadowed by his contemporary R. Crumb in R. Cobb. While many might more readily recognise the Cheap Thrills that duly excoriated our modesties of the former, we might not be as familiar with the latter, who recently departed (*1937) after a long bout of dealing with dementia, whose extensively syndicated illustrations laid bare how the governments—most pointedly the US establishment—was eroding civil rights, liberties and the environment.

Cobb turned his talents to raising awareness and championing social justice causes after being dismissed as redundant by Disney studios in 1957 once the animation of Sleeping Beauty was complete—notably the last film to use hand-inked cels. There are an embarrassment of panels from the late-1960s that are very resounding and correspond, appearing in the Freep plus more mainstream outlets, with what we face at present (see a whole gallery at the source up top), but we are choosing to highlight the ecology symbol Cobb created—combining e (environment) and o (organism) into a θ-like glyph that gifted into the public domain and was adopted by the conservation movement. After his career as a cartoonist, Ron Cobb designed conceptual art for science-fiction films such as Star Wars, Alien, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unfinished Dune, The Abyss and Total Recall.

primidi vendémiaire

Coinciding with the autumnal equinox for the Northern Hemisphere of that year and derived from the Occitan term for grape harvester, this date in 1792 on the French Revolutionary Calendar (see previously) marked the first day and décade of the new system of time-keeping for the Republic—the month corresponded with the season of the vintage of northern France’s wine producing areas. In following years, the new year was proceeded by five or six epagomenical days (jours épagomènes) called the Sansculottides, ending the summer quarter and aligning the calendar with the tropical year and named for the partisans “without knee-breeches” that underpinned the uprising and overthrow of the Ancien Régime.

overseas logogram

The peripatetic polyglots at the helm over at Language Log direct us to a host of for the nonce Sinographs from Hong Kong which could be described as neologism—rather neographisms or visual portmanteaux inventing characters by mixing the component parts and meaning-bearers from different glyphs to form something nuanced and paraliteral.  The pictured example seems to borrow selectively from 鎮靜 (zhènjìng, that is combined calm, poised) but taking on a new context in this form as equanimous and not un-dispassionate, unshaken.
As one reader commented, this zhìzào (制造, making characters) is reminiscent of the 1987 publication originally to be entitled Mirror to Analyse the World: The Century’s Final Volume by artist Xu Bing but was instead ultimately called after the Chinese term tiān shū that itself originally was reserved for divinely inspired writing (akin to speaking in tongues) but came to signify gibberish in “A Book from the Sky.” Very much up to the interpretation of the reader, the bound edition limited to a single print run, the book is composed with a set of four-thousand characters (comparable to the lexicon of modern Chinese writing) and imitate natural language on the page in terms of diversity and frequency but are wholly made up, nonsense words, as if a book in a Latin script were filled with Wingdings. The above banners, however, have a meaning and message that can be puzzled out.

ir-rewwixta tal-qassisin

Though suppressed by the Soverign Order of Saint John (SMOM—see also here and here, the Knights Hospitaller) who controlled the island after a few hours, the 1775 rebellion known as the Rising of the Priests was undertaken on this day by the clergy advocating for the Maltese people for a series of austerity measures instituted by Grand Master Francisco Ximenes de Texada in an attempt to replenish the Order’s treasury.
The unpopular cost-savings steps introduced included severe reductions in public spending, regressive tax hiks that made wheat and other staples unaffordable and a ban on rabbit-hunting (fenek tax-xiber) for commoners and preserving the right exclusively for the members of the Order. This date was picked for the revolt knowing that most ships would be at sea and coincided with the anniversary and festivities of the the Knights lifting the Ottoman siege in 1565. A group of thirteen priests took Fort Saint Elmo but were eventually overpowered. Some of the co-conspirators were imprisoned afterward in this same fortification at the northern tip of Valetta, three of the principle organisers being executed with the rest being sent into exile. The Order continued to rule the island until it was annexed by Napoleon in 1798, remanded to a British Protectorate through the second world war, finally attaining independence on 21 September 1964.

porozumienia sierpniowe

Today celebrates the August Agreement—otherwise known as the Gdańsk Social Accords—reached on the last day of August in 1980 between striking dockworkers on the Baltic and the Polish government over untenable demands, poor working conditions and continual shortages of essentials. The labour strikes had the immediate effect of changing the country’s leadership and revealed endemic corruption and mismanagement that had culminated in the dysfunctional economy and legislature and further led to reforms in the market, freedom of expression, civil rights and launched the Solidarity Movement.

avgustovskiy putch

Opposed to the decentralisation and reform efforts of the Soviet president and General Secretary of the Communist Party, Communist hardliner elements in the government attempted a coup d'état beginning on this day at noon in 1991 to remove Mikhail Gorbachev (see previously) with the Moscow military district commander declaring martial law in effect and signaling an imminent siege on the parliamentary compound (Белый дом—that is, the White House). Allies of the Gorbachev government barricaded the building and rebuffed the attack, codenamed Operation Grom—that is, thunder. Whilst these events unfolded—a power vacuum that lasted sixty hours, Estonia declared its independence with the other Baltic states following soon after.

well done sister suffragette

On this day in 1920, a long struggle and organised campaign came to fruition with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US constitution extending the franchise and right to vote to women (see previously). Instrumental to the success included such activists as Alice Stokes Paul (*1885 – †1977), whom after 1920 spent five decades as chair of the National Woman’s Party championing the Equal Rights Amendment, among other causes. Here pictured toasting their achievement, Paul is brandishing grape juice as Prohibition had recently come into effect.

jade helm

The same trolls (foreign and domestic) that championed conspiracy theories that mass-scale military exercises conducted in the summer of 2015 that proffered they were an overture to a hostile coup are now eager to live out fantasies and be deputised a defender of the homeland—since whatever consortium of government assets that comprise the secret police don’t have the manpower, organisation or wherewithal to carry out disappearing all the thought-criminals on their own and need more than the complicity of ignoring the growing problem but also active support.
This patchwork of paramilitary units is necessary because the actual US military has so far resisted most of the egregious orders to cross the Rubicon and mobilise against its own, especially for peaceful, unprovoking demonstration against those institutions that uphold the status quo of white privilege and racial injustice. Except this time, the crackdown on the resistance is real—even by their own admission—and under the auspices of quite a different administration with a different target and a professed agenda who has activated this contingency not on suspicion of a meteor impact or any number of speculations but to further capitalise on a global pandemic that’s been siphoned off to enrich the few and the deadly disdain of the public whose response was badly botched—citing the mandate to protect statues. Liberal strongholds are under assault and the attacks and abductions will continue until a permanent state of emergency can be declared to suppress the election and ensure the party remains in power.

канонизация царской семьи

Formally glorified—elevated to sainthood as martyrs and righteous passion-bearers by the Russian Orthodox Church on 1 November 1981 and then in 2000 by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) the murdered last imperial family, the Romanovs (see previously), and the domestics that died along with them are commemorated on this day (Old Style, 4 July), the day after they were assassinated by Bolshevik operatives in 1918 at Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg. Two members of their entourage were not canonised owing to the fact that their professed faith was respectively Roman Catholic and Lutheran, and the whole veneration was certainly not without controversy with opponents pointing out that the Romanovs were not killed for their faith and the flagging leadership of Nicholas II had caused suffering and enabled the revolution in the first place, counting some proponents who advocate the doctrine of tsarebozhiye (Царебожие, Tsar-as-God, deification) and that the last emperor was capable of spiritually redeeming the Russian people.

6x6

télévision œil de demain: a prescient 1947 short about the future ubiquity of screens

zeus mode: alternative phone casings featuring accessories including a built-in stun gun

harvey wall-banger adjacent: click on grid mode to see how these cocktail ingredients compare—via Nag on the Lake’s always excellent Sunday Links

corona cosplay: understanding Americans’ aversion to wearing masks—via Duck Soup

we’ll celebrate once we have a reason to celebrate: revisiting (see also) Fredrick Douglass’ 5 July 1852 speech

ipertesto: Agostino Ramelli’s sixteenth century bookwheels recreated by modern designers

honor america day

Though intentionally apolitical nearly to the point of obfuscation and denial, the Fourth of July celebrations held in Washington, DC in 1970 branded as Honor America Day could not ultimately separate themselves from the milieu of war and social injustice and incivility that it tried to rise above.
Richard Nixon’s milquetoast and hardly objectionable gala, orchestrated by hotel magnate J Willard Marriott, secured universal and neutral celebrities like astronaut Frank Borman, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Glen Campbell, et al—though to pull back the curtain a bit all were at least ostensibly supportive of the expanding war in Vietnam that had crept into Laos and Cambodia and had resulted in massacres domestically, at least to the point where they could be reliably trusted not to turn on the hosts and protest.
Unlike the pomp and pageantry of Nürnburger rallies of recent years, this asymmetrically white and mainstream celebration was not meant to cause more division than was already baked into the ongoing tensions but inevitably attracted protests and counter-protests. Conservatives, neo-Nazis, members of the religious-right plus the so called Silent Majority clashed and the event ended in tear-gas.