little matron

Via Nag on the Lake, we are treated to a playful stop-motion short from award-winning Dutch-Canadian filmmaker Jacobus Willem “Co” Hoedeman. “Matrioska” (1970) was one of his first commissions for the National Film Board of Canada—having immigrated there in 1965 on the hope that the esteemed institution might hire him on. After producing several films including a treasury of Inuit folktales, Hoedeman went to Czechoslovakia to study puppetry and currently serves as an advisory member of the board and animation consultant. Explore more of his works at the link above.

Matrioska, Co Hoedeman, provided by the National Film Board of Canada

toppop

A debt of gratitude is owed to Dangerous Minds for acquainting us with the Dutch answer to the UK chart show Top of the Pops—in some ways even exceeding the format’s original imperator in terms of variety and taking the programme to the artists.
During its run from 1970 to 1988, nearly every musical act were sure to include TopPop on their European circuit and the venue also boosted the domestic scene, giving rise to a genre called Nederpop.  Production often included making music videos, which were of surpassingly good quality and sometimes were appropriated by the performing artist—a notable example being Nena’s 99 Luftballons where she is trekking through a bleak lumberyard near Hilverslum in north Holland was used as footage for the official video. Much of the show’s archive is available online for your viewing and listening pleasure.  More to explore at the links above.

hov lane

Via Design Boom, we learn about a simple but effective intervention that the city of Utrecht has instigated to create sanctuaries—bees stops (Bijstopt), for urban insects by planting grasses and wildflowers on top of bus shelters, some three hundred of them throughout the city. This is a step we could all encourage where we live. Much more to explore at the link above.

tears in the rain

Veteran Dutch actor Rutger Hauer passed away at the age of seventy-five. Among numerous credits to his name over a career that spanned decades, his portrayal of rogue Replicant Roy Batty in 1982’s Blade Runner is probably his most iconic and memorable—especially so for the self-scripted soliloquy his character, cornered, delivered from a wet rooftop before powering down, the android (see also) aware of his imminent mortality built into his programming: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain. Time... to die.” Batty expires (the film itself set in the year 2019) having just rescued the Special Agent Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) from a fall, hunting Batty down so he can “retire” him.

konkrete kunst

Here is a tondo (a circular enframed work of art, from the Italian rotondo, “round”) from Swiss artist Fritz Glarner (born on this day in 1899, †1972). Heavily influenced by painters of De Stijl movement, particularly the geometrical studies of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, Glarner’s style focused on “relational” schema as revealed through architectural patterns. Studying in Paris, Glarner spent most of his professional career in New York’s Long Island artist colony, before retiring to Locarno in 1966.

gouden eeuw

Similar to an ongoing restoration of a Johannes Vermeer work in line with the artist’s intent, Cynical-C directs our attention to a work by Dutch Golden Age painter Judith Jans Leyster (*1609 – †1660), an avowed talent among her peers and accepted into the Haarlem Guild but rather tragically forgotten after her death, called The Last Drop.
Somewhat rehabilitated and recognised as a pioneer among her cohort around the turn of the last century (though this painting was still misattributed until a keen observer noticed her JL* monogram on the tipped tankard), it is thought that a dealer committed the act of overpainting the skeletal figure brandishing an hourglass—which surely held significance as the dissolution that revelry ultimately brings as there was an accompanying genre piece called the Merry Trio (one dropped out apparently) that depicts an earlier phase of drinking, to make the work more marketable and less moralising when it was acquired by the Guildhall gallery in London in 1908. After extensive research and x-ray analysis, curators were able to bring back the original scene in the 1990s.

8x8

blood meridian: two animated maps (see also) chart Manifest Destiny from contrasting perspectives

lobby cards: the iconic film posters and title sequences of Saul Bass (previously here and here)

strong to the finich: because of the leafy green’s steroidal qualities, some are calling for it to be banded like other doping agents

scientific method: brilliant vintage middle school text books via Present /&/ Correct

nineteen eighty-four was not meant to be an instruction manual: workers trialled with beacons and bracelets to monitor performance and productivity

best in show: a curated selection of the winners of the National Geographic travel photography competition

lj: going into production in 2021, the Lightyear One represents the industry’s first long-range and untethered electric vehicle, via Design Boom

pomological catalogue: the 1886 US contract for watercolour depictions of all the world’s fruit

ik denk dus ik fiets

We enjoyed pursuing this curated gallery of posters and placards documenting a decades’ long campaign to transform and retain Amsterdam as a world capital for pedestrians and cyclists.
This 1976 call for a demonstration of solidarity against automobile traffic and for more public transit options, in the name of safety and to ease congestion, features one of the first appearances of the Fietst (Dutch for riding a bike and an eponymous lobby and association) mascot, a character comprised of two wheels and a big head (sort of evoking the international symbol for a vision impaired person so that others realise that they’re sharing their space with them) with the triple cross crest of the city as a body. Fietst soon after became a more fully-formed and articulate mascot as a cycling girl called Liesje. Much more to explore at the links above.

stratocaster

Originally conceptualised by an engineering student at Berlin Technical University and inspired by the Gibson Flying V line of guitars, Delft Polytechnic is working with Dutch airliner KLM to prototype a new two-pronged aircraft aimed to be the most fuel-efficient long haul plane out there. Visit Design Boom at the link above to learn more about sustainable aviation and some of the design features of the cabinet and propulsion system.

bolstering bridges

The twenty-six hundred residents of Giethoorn are seeing their relationship with the tens of thousands of tourists descending on the “Dutch Venice” (previously) every year growing a bit strained—appreciating the revenue the visitors bring but not necessarily the added traffic to this car-free town that is only navigable by foot and boat. Minor though frequent collisions with the residents’ private bridges that span the canals and connect the islands are sustaining enough damage that passage along these waterways criss-crossed by some forty-five of the traditional bridges is needing to be restricted so repairs can proceed and make conditions safer for villagers and punters alike.

palimpsest

The discovery of the new/old painting by Old Dutch Master Johannes Vermeer (previously) has unfolded in a very captivating way that makes sleuths and amateur art historians out of us all.
Early, unauthorised x-ray examinations of his Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (Brieflezend meisje bij het venster) among the trove of the then recently repatriated treasures of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen of Dresden—taken to the Soviet Union as spoils of war we returned to boost residents’ morale and curried the interest of Western scholars. The analysis revealed a Cupid (like these other famous putti who also reside in the Dresden galleries) walled over and painted out of the image, in what was assumed over the ensuing decades after the initial discovery was an example of regrettable pentimenti.
Recent re-examination conclusively determines that the over-painting was not done by Vermeer himself and approximately two centuries later, so conservators have chosen to restore (shown in progress with the unrestored version above) the artist’s original vision, confident that the visual vernacular of figure on the wall is in keeping with the artist’s style and contributes something to his overall message, interpreted as the girl hoping to expand her horizons outside of her domestic sphere.

winkelcentrummuziek

Found among the latest selection of curated links from Pasa Bon! we’re treated to a rather taxing forty minutes of instrumental of mall muzak (previously) from 1974.
Long playing records were distributed as the shopping soundtrack suitable for almost any retail environment—see if you can identify the commercial classics covered such as “Restroom Retreat.” The title is the Netherlandish word for the phenomenon of such background music—muzak having become proprietary eponym or genericised trademark, like Q-Tips and Scotch Tape—and the language, championed by Philips in the 1960s, has a related concept, fumu, from functional music—targeted performances orchestrated to boost sales. I don’t know how scientific the later were but the former does not really put me in the mood for shopping.

7x7

electronium: a classic electronic music sequencer from pioneer Raymond Scott is reinvented with an artificial intelligence software patch

sacred spaces: Thibaud Poirier photographs modern church interiors

the right to be forgotten: internet giant allows users to control if and for how long it retains one’s data

spoorzone: a self-sustaining bus station in Tilburg

b(7)b: a handy guide to the re-categorised information withholds of the latest version of the Mueller Report released to the public

h. p. loveshack: ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn

hic sunt dracones: an interactive map of legends from English Heritage—via Maps Mania  

bekende deense meubelontwerper

I’ve always thought that this fabric wall hanging that came with my furnished workweek apartment was pretty keen and hoped that I might be able to arrange to have it move out with me, when that day comes, but didn’t realise until just recently that it is a piece of Danish graphic designer and interior decorator Verner Panton’s Mira-X Collection.
A student of the psychology and working in the studio of architect Arne Jacobsen, Panton (*1928 – †1998) is probably best known for his line of furniture, including his signature moon lamps and chair still licensed and in production by the company Vitra and for incredibly psychedelic office spaces like the cantina for Spiegel magazine headquarters in Hamburg, executed in the same style as this indoor swimming pool shown at the link.

basicode

Previously we’ve explored how computer games and software applications were in the early 1980s broadcast over the airwaves for recording and executing with Bristol’s Radio West’s Datarama, and now thanks to Amusing Planet we learn that there was a parallel effort underway in the Netherlands with the state public service radio NOS (Nederlandse Omroep Stichting) transmitting code as well. Hobbyscoop was one popular programme for early computer enthusiasts and while the first few episodes were for specific models of computers, the Apple-2 or the Exidy Sorcerer, the producers had the idea to make the content offered more universal by standardising the format, broadcasting BASIC language programmes and installing each computer with a translation programme to interpret the ASCII representation into its native machine language. Radio stations across Europe were quick to start doing the same. Much more to explore at the links above.

executive function

Whereas most research studies have operated under the assumption that by examining the WEIRDs (that is—Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic) we are looking at representatives of humanity as a whole, the cognitive flexibilities demonstrated by populations subject to less stable environments where repetition and conservative behaviour are less tenable are causing ethnographers and psychologists to confront their institutional biases.
Secure in our routines, we adopt one cognitive set, informed by past success and a predictable present context, instead of being receptive to set-shifting, since there’s little sense or economy in reinventing the wheel and expending the mental energies needed for that task, but people like the semi-nomadic Himba of Namibia are rewarded for their mental limberness and willingness to pursue new and novel strategies.

the ballad of john and yoko

A week after Linda Louise Eastman (*1941 – †1998) married Paul McCartney, John Lennon (*1940 - †1980) and Yoko Ono had their wedding service in Gibraltar on this day in 1969, traveling to Amsterdam five days later for their honeymoon.
Knowing that their marriage would be a big press event, the couple decided—at the height of the Vietnam War—to put the media attention to good use and staged the first of their weeklong Bed-Ins for Peace. An international contingent of journalists were invited into their bedroom in the presidential suite of the Hilton Hotel daily from nine o’clock in the morning until nine o’clock at night. Afterwards they dashed off to Vienna, sending acorns to heads of state around the world in hopes that they would plant them and rear oaks as symbols of peace.

zwarte beertjes

Browsing the archives of Present /&/ Correct—always an advisable pastime—Coudal Partners’ Fresh Links has us cottoning onto the fantastic book cover art work of illustrator and author Dick Bruna (*1927 – †2017). Best known for his beloved character Miffy (Nijntje in the original Dutch), Bruna amassed an impressive catalogue of children’s stories and other commissions—despite being told early on that he had no talent as a painter. Peruse a gallery of dozens of posters, greeting cards and book covers at the link up top.

houtblazer

Via the always outstanding Everlasting Blört, we are regaled with a musical performance from medievalist and musician Jim Spalink on lute, harp and hurdy-gurdy playing the composition branded onto the buttocks of one the unfortunate, tortured souls condemned to the infernal flames of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych (previously) The Garden of Earthly Delights. Spalink had to clean up the notation a bit and got a bit imaginative with the introduction and the end, employing appropriately what’s known as the devil’s interval, a dissonant triton that traditional rules of composition referred to as diabolus in musica, a modality to be eschewed and avoided. Another example of this sort of forbidden chord is in Jimi Hendrix’ opening to Purple Haze.

7x7

la pittrice: the outstanding life and career of female Italian Renaissance painter Sofonisba Anguissola

sentoculture: artist and drafter Honami Enya creates cross-sections of Japanese communal bathhouses

blockhead: good old Howie Schultz explores running as a third party candidate

all the rembrants: Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum displays all the works in its accession (previously) by the Old Master

sent from my iphone: Apple curates some superlative photographs taken by telephone

newlyweds: exploring the kitsch and social conventions of the mid-century honeymoon resorts of the Niagara Falls

muse and museum: the enigmatic subject of some two-hundred fifty Andrew Wyeth paintings he’d kept secret from everyone