silent majority

Echoing the 1919 turn of phrase employed by Warren G Harding during his campaign in the aftermath of World War I that was meant as a euphemism to distinguish the quick from the dead (with those who’ve passed then and now far outnumbering the living and by extension more moral weight like all future generations), Richard Milhous Nixon popularised the appeal to the quiet in a speech on this day in 1969:
“And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support.” Assuming that those who were not actively protesting Nixon’s policies, joining the counter-culture and rallying against the Vietnam War were in fact an overshadowed demographic and gave Nixon their tacit approval. Casting this idealised demographic against a “vocal minority” was a strategy of divide-and-conquer and the “disenfranchised” were not the precarious, forgotten or downtrodden but rather the comfortable who aspired for more and were menaced by those that had less. It was effective.  This demographic of Middle America (though now more international in its application) has gone through many incarnations since—from the Angry White Male to the Soccer Mom, Loggers, Coal Miners and many other labels before returning to its original form. If one does not speak up, it becomes much easier for others to speak for you.

expedition 1

On this day in 2000, the first long-term residents arrived at the International Space Station, ferried up by a Soyuz spacecraft, the crew activating ISS systems and unpacked equipment to prepare for a series of deliveries by shuttle and other resupply vehicles.
During their four-and-a-half month stay in orbit, the three person crew also conducted experiments to study the behaviour of plasma and protein crystallisation in microgravity and filmed footage for a 3D IMAX documentary. Since the complement was refreshed with Expedition 2 in March 2001, there has been an uninterrupted human presence in space to the present day.

8x8

queen bee: a review of the 1955 Joan Crawford film that informed Mommie Dearest  

solar sail: speculation that the mysterious interstellar interloper Oumuamua (previously) might be a remnant of an alien propulsion system

oobi land: “I contain a message to another human being. Please further my journey an inch, a foot or a mile.”

envir-o-can: a beer can touted as more ecologically-friendly due to the absence of a pull-tab

ad astra: an ode to the immeasurably expanding achievements of the nine-year Kepler mission that discovered over twenty-five hundred exoplanets

development hell: former cast and crew reflect on earlier attempts to make The Other Side of the Wind

ask the past: how to eat a pumpkin, 1597

innuendo: Queen’s lesser-known, soulful operatic anthem

compositie 10.

The Wiesbaden Museum (previously) is hosting a special retrospective exhibit of the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (*1872 - †1944) and I had the chance to inspect the galleries and got to monitor the pioneering modern artist’s progression to an increasingly abstract style, reaching a point where his visual vocabulary was resolved to a grid and geometric colours.
Click on the thumbnails for larger versions.  Like the roughly contemporary Suprematism movement, De Stijl that Mondrian co-founded with Theo van Doesburg became something that transcended representation and was incredibly influential—synonymous with modernism itself—affecting the ideal in architecture and fashion as well as in the art world. It was pretty captivating to see his earliest, formative studies of trees and windmills.

opus latericium

Material science students in Cape Town have developed a process that forms a durable, pliable building substance out of urea, sand and a strain of bacteria that metabolises urine into calcium carbonate that cements the loose sand to fit a given mould.
Not only would construction sites draw in and sequester atmospheric carbon during the growing phase, reinforcing the sands with limestone matrices, the reaction that produces the bricks, pillars and cobblestones happens at ambient temperature and doesn’t need to be fired in a kiln—another potentially huge benefit as the cement and concrete industry contributes a huge volume of greenhouse gases.

moonrise

Thanks to some detective work, art historians and geomancers were able to reverse engineer the date, time and location of this black and white photograph captured by Ansel Adams of the Moon ascending over the unincorporated settlement of Hernandez, New Mexico.
Under contract with the Department of the Interior, Adams spent six months documenting the south west and came across this scene in the late afternoon of 1 November, 1941 and stopped on the shoulder of a highway, driving through the Chama valley toward the city of Española, to take the picture. Multiple prints were made from the original negative and became one of the most popular and collectible images for the next three decades, with one print personally developed by Adams selling for the unprecedented price at auction that’s strangely coincident (adjusted for inflation) with the first acheiropoieton executed by an artificial intelligence.

general audiences

On this day in 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America replaced its stringent and interventionist Motion Picture Production Code (the Hays Code after the association’s president Will H Hays) that had been in force since 1930 with a voluntary ratings system, which appealed to filmmakers and cinema-operators and did not smack of censorship and prudishness as much as the previous regime of conduct. Originally the tiers of suitability were:

Rated G: Suggested for General Audiences
Rated M: Suggested for Mature Audiences—parental discretion advised
Rated R: Restricted—persons under sixteen not admitted, unless accompanied by parent or adult guardian
Rated X: Persons under Sixteen Not Admitted

By 1984, the standard included PG-13 (parental guidance suggested—some material may not be suitable for children under thirteen) and in 1990 X (originally not sanctioned by the MPAA) was replaced by NC-17, no children under seventeen admitted. The broad categories have translated to over half of the movies released in the past five decades have garnered an R-rating or higher.

rubicon, rio bravo

Despite the refutation on the part of the US Secretary of Defence that “this department doesn’t do stunts,” Trump’s fearmongering is playing to the crowds thronging his Nuremberger rallies with his announcement that he will deploy up to fifteen thousand active duty soldiers to the southern border to act in a support capacity for the army of deputised goons already there, and could hardly be characterised as anything else. Fully thirty-nine military units have been put on notice. Barred by federal law (posse comitatus) from acting in an enforcement capacity within the United States, their role during this mission will be limited to intimidation and building temporary barriers.