le pont de trinquetaille

Seeing that on this day in 1987, a Van Gogh (previously here and here) of a bridge scene in Arles fetched a then record twenty million dollars at auction made me reflect on a recent podcast episode about the individual responsible for the artist’s posthumous and compelling fame promoted out of necessity and circumstance, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger (*1862 - †1925), widow of theretofore Van Gogh’s greatest champion, his brother Theo, and sister-in-law who had acquired a great deal of the then worthless works and against the advice of friends and family brought them back to their native Holland from Paris after losing her husband. In order to provide for herself and her child, Van Gogh-Bonger collected and edited an epistolary exchange and between the brothers and family biography, helping to establish her brother-in-law’s fame and reputation, as well as arranging exhibitions, helping to define not only Vincent as a celebrity but the attendant marketplace of the art world as well.

8x8

here fishy, fishy, fishy: a tale of a talking fishing lure and sixty counts of mail fraud  

goldenrod: behind-the-scenes footage of droids C3PO and R2-D2 trying on their costumes  

plastic tracker: monitor the likely course of one’s discarded waste to the seas—see also—via Maps Mania 

discothek: a commercial photographer captured the golden age of nightclubs with all their eccentricities and exuberance  

juneteenth: America gets a new federal holiday to commemorate the end of chattel enslavement in the United States  

downfall: dégringolade n. a rapidly deterioration of circumstance or position, from the French to take a sudden tumble 

foreign exchange: a beautiful animated short of grains of sand and fiat currency explores the tenuous, specious agreements that underpin capitalism and the global economy  

the most compact, neatest, cheapest, and durable reel on the market: advertising niche that distresses and antiques modern sundries

g7 action figures - limited edition

 

fulfilment-by-amazon

Examining the anti-trust lawsuit filed against the e-commerce giant and the inextricably integrated logistics that makes marketplace and membership one in the same, it’s noteworthy how anti-competitive incentives are introduced by shoehorning French regulations into the conversation—the country has not only been the first one to boldly reform its tax regime to make digital overlords pay more of their fair share (see previously here and here) and very early on a prohibition against social media privelging and the invitation to follow on Facebook but rather “search the internet” for French businesses—with the ban on free-shipping to protect physical retail stores as well as other online boutiques. Amazon—with its captive patrons—has built the most robust and inescapable walled-garden, though it is arguable that anyone sets out with such intentions.

noordzee

The always intriguing and enlightening Maps Mania refers us to a suite of tools and tracers to help us visualise the huge among of marine traffic that passes in and out of the North Sea bordered by the Low Countries and Scandinavia, the waters off Belgium far exceeding the throughput of either of the shipping industry’s great corridors and potential bottlenecks, the Panama and Suez canals. Especially interesting is the data-driven scrollytelling from the financial daily De Tidj (pictured) which shows the activity and congestion of navigable routes along with the dredgers that keep the trade routes open to traffic.

zones of immaterial pictorial sensibility

Via Super Punch and vis-à-vis the enthrallment and repulsion that the markets are experiencing for tokens—fungible or otherwise—we really enjoyed learning about these performative pieces from Nouveau réalisme artist and judo master Yves Klein (*1928 - †1962) called Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle, who wanted his patrons to experience the void, offering vacant spaces in exchange for gold. The buyer received a certificate of ownership. Eight such invisible works were sold, some with elaborate rituals including throwing the gold in the Seine and burning the bill-of-sale.

rpow

Nearly a year and a half after the minting of the first blocks of the chain and demonstration that block chain was viable in code as a reusable proof-of-work system (a cryptographic transfer wherein one party shows to another that an established amount of computational effort has been expended with no other disclosure between the two sides), the first known cryptocurrency commercial transaction (see also) occurred between a programmer and a pizza chain, the later exchanging ten thousand bitcoin for two pies on this day in 2010. At the time of publication, this figure is valued at over three-hundred thirteen million euro.

generational brokering

Via Kottke, we are referred to this data visualisation of the past century of American generations represented as stacked, staggered bar chart which while reinforcing the reality that all ages come into being and pass and no one’s scheme for immortality has yet worked out and we’re not the first to think ourselves on the cusp of change or bemoaned our own cohort, or those past and future cadres and the factors that limn them. Questions of intergenerational equity aside and the real and perceived firewall that tips the scale in favour of lingering demographics—important as those questions maybe—these stair-step histograms also reveal, with a certain kind of elegant immediacy (see also) is the progress made in terms of life expectancy and quality of life. More at the links above.

nighty-nite

Via Boing Boing, we are referred to a simple, self-coordinating, synchronising programme conceived by Masamichi Souzou, a company championing happiness and well-being, that allows one to put to bed their website—according to the visitors’ time-zones, the kanji top-level domain suffix, みんな, being everyone—like a physical store or business branch with workers who need rest and recuperation and signal the importance of adequate sleep and highlight the forces and diversions that make us indebted in terms of something so fundamental as adequate shut-eye.

europawoche

Celebrated today on the anniversary of the 1950 Schuman Declaration which proposed the pooling of French and Wester German coal and steel industries and the first European Community, Europe Day was introduced in 1985 by the EU predecessor organisation the European Communities. The Council of Europe marked its own Europe Day earlier in the week with the anniversary on the fifth marking the council’s founding in 1949, both observances commemorating pan-European identity and integration.

flash crash

Triggered by a combination of human error—so called fat-finger trades that if not invalidated within thirty minutes after execution are considered legitimate—automated trading protocols set on edge by the sovereign debt crisis in Greece, over the course of thirty-six minutes of the trading on this day in 2010, US stock indices collapsed, loosing over a trillion dollars in wealth. The markets for the most part recovered quickly and additional regulatory safeguards were put in place to prevent the same thing from happening again. It held the record for the most volatile day for American stocks with the largest intraday change in valuation until August of 2015 when global markets faltered over concerns about the viability of the Chinese economy, but both events were pushed way down in the rankings by the crashes of 2020 caused by the pandemic.

9x9

why are you still here: our houses get sick of us never leaving too—via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links (lots more to see here)  

fake id: the unfortunately inevitable rise of counterfeit vaccination credentials  

disaster girl: meme as NFT (previously) nets a half-million dollars at auction 

comically overwrought: an oral history of the Crying Dawson gif  

resident evil village: games company produced a musical, gory puppet show to promote its latest instalment  

sunshine state: Florida will make it illegal for social media to deplatform politicians, with a especial carve-out for Disney—via Slashdot  

euphonium: found poetry in the history of acoustic waves  

web curios: Waxy lets us know that the fine and well-connected newsletter returns after a sabbatical of nine months with the folding of Imperia   

windows on the world: artwork by Liam Cobb that fills one with Wanderlust—via the morning news

origin story

Rather pleased with this new knowledge, we garnered a bit of insight into the etymology of company names and brand identities (see also) and learned that the first web mail, e-mail accessible via the internet from any computer with one’s log-on credentials, was called Hotmail for its inclusion of the initialism for Hypertext Mark-up Language and originally stylised as HoTMaiL. Acquired by Microsoft, those domain addresses are now supported by Outlook servers. The graphics card manufacturer NVIDIA comes from the Roman concept of invidia, envy in the sense of “looking upon” with the evil eye and feeling objectified and offending. There are aspirational, folk etymologies attached to legacy brands as well, like with MG Cars, from Morris Garages, now under new ownership that tout the label as “Modern Gentlemen.”

pecunia non olet

Via the always engaging Everlasting Blört, we find ourselves educated in the rather fascinating and sensical history of the Roman taxation scheme on human urine. Left to mellow and oxide, the substance undergoes a chemical transformation into ammonia not only useful for nitrogen-fixing in fertilisers but also as a cleaning-agent and detergent for laundry, oral hygienic and the dyeing of textiles. Levied during the reigns of Nero and Vespasian, the collection garnered the titular phrase that money does not stink, though the onerous and unpopular Vectigal Urinæ soon garnered detractors and has the lasting legacy in the public pay-toilets in some Romance-language places—France, Italy and Romania—referring to urinals, pissoirs as vespasiennes. The emperor’s son Titus objected to funding the Empire by such means and presented him with a gold coin, asking does this offend—to which Titus replied in the negative, “Atqui ex lotio est”—Yet it comes from the cesspool.

9x9

carbon footprint: mining is a dirty business

kiki.object: a feminist manifesta for block-chain  

bat stuck in hell: recently departed songwriter Jim Steinman’s unproduced Batman musical 

the gates of paradise: William Blake’s (previously) perpetual cycle of birth and re-birth   

the singing, ringing tree: not to be confused with this other etherial perennial, panoptica in the Pennine Hills of Lancashire

the hawking index: an unscientific survey of popular titles’ rate of abandonment by the clustering or spread of their highlighted text 

this is the type of errant pedantry up with which i will not put: a proposal that the past particle of choose should properly be corn  

project ceti: ground-breaking attempt to decode whale language—see also—via Slashdot  

fourth rock from the sun: Martian rover Perseverance extracts breathable oxygen from the planet’s surface soil

the yellow fleet

Via Kottke’s Quick Links, we are given a bit of historical perspective on the six-day plight of the Ever Given (previously) which has antecedents with a much longer, large-scale stranding resulting from the Six-Day War that broke out in June of 1967 between Israel and Egypt, trapping fifteen international ships and their crews in the Suez Canal that were passing through when the conflict broke out and remained impounded until 1975. Blockaded by Egypt to prevent its use by Israel, debris put in place continued to prevent transport and traffic for eight years during a time when the waterway was not the major artery of trade it is today. Named the above for the colour of the desert sand that accumulated on the decks of the vessels moored in Great Bitter Lake, a turning around point off the main canal, the ships’ crews from West Germany, the UK, the US, France, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Bulgaria quickly forged a community, sharing resources and even holding a mini-Olympic Games—the Swedish ship had a pool, and issuing their own Cinderella postage stamps with the recognition of host nation postal authorities. Within the first few months, countries flagged with these vessels were able to reduce crews to a bare minimum and repatriate their members, rotating in and out skeleton crews for the basic upkeep of the ships and though the population turn-over was regular and complete, the sense of comradery and community endured with each generation. The Suez was reopened with the Yom Kippur War in October of 1975, restoring this trade route but with the spectre of supplies being cut off again, businesses were pressured into making ever larger cargo ships to reduce one’s exposure, like the colossal Ever Given.

7x7

disaster capitalism: paintings of banks alight and other artworks by Alex Schaefer (previously) via Everlasting Blört  

convergent evolution: sea life becomes the plastic that is polluting it 

do geese see god: a documentary about the world palindrome championship  

full-stop: punctuation can really set a tone—see also  

№ 2 pencil: a fantastic Eberhard-Faber catalogue from 1915 

r.u.r.: online sci-fi dictionary (see previously) sources the term robot to 1920

living with the consequences: government austerity raises COVID deaths

forever given

We really enjoyed these curated tweets on the jack-knifed cargo ship blocking traffic in the Suez Canal from Super Punch including a dating app for those captains and crew stuck in the queue, an invitation to tag one’s battle avatar from among the named ships in the growing pile-up (see also, our favourites are a toss-up between Bulk Venus and the Nautical Deborah) plus some clearing up on the identity of the ship: not called evergreen—that’s the company—it’s evergreen’s monster.

beep, beep—I’m a sheep

Not to cast aspersions on the artist, only the medium which potentially threatens to undo what progress we’ve made on being better stewards of the environment and recommodifies green-washing and all its attendant woes, we were delighted to come across this Beeple Generator—via Waxy—but definitely will not be trying to pass it off as some NFT worth millions and compounded with every trade. Though is anything stopping us?  What do you think? Of course billionaires swapping priceless works of art amongst each other, deprived of seeing the light of day—see previously—earns a commission in the transaction and taking a photograph of a work of art hanging in a gallery doesn’t diminish its value for the museum but rather enhances it but something very different is going on with this interpretation of ownership and identity.

start spreading the news

Approved last month by the country’s parliamentary committee on the Organisation of State Power, Local Self-Government, Regional Development and Urban Planning approved the motion to restore the name of the settlement in the far eastern Donetsk Oblast back to Нью-Йорк (New York, officially romanised as Niu-York), which it was called until 1951 and the heating up of the Cold War prompted the change to the more sedate Novhorodske—New Town. Though unclear what the origins of the name were with competing theories ranging from German Mennonites invited to develop the area in the nineteenth century and calling it after their hometown Jork by Hamburg to a practical joke, residents are hopeful that the change will have a revitalising effect. More from the Calvert Journal at the link above.