etsomnia (12. 370)

Via Marco McClean’s Memo of the Air, we are introduced to the very long-standing tradition (for which we were woefully remiss about perusing beforehand) of My One Beautiful Thing’s weekly curation of a sampling of some of the strange crafts discovered on the e-commerce site (see also here and here) with an emphasis on handmade jewellery, totes and home decor. The above disorder leading to sleep deprivation is a self-diagnosis from obsessive browsing of said upcycling marketplace, whose name itself comes from etsi—Italian for oh yes and French and Latin for what if. Frequent themes include taxidermied plush animals, ceramics, inspired doormats and wall signage and overly-accessorised charm bracelets and bedazzled garments.

meet me by the fountain (12. 352)

First spotted by Nag on the Lake, we really enjoyed this expanded preview of a documentary about a group of eight people who built a secret apartment inside a mall in Providence, Rhode Island and were residents there for nearly four years from 99% Invisible after having watched the colossal structure slowly come together—with cautious optimism that this development might revitalise the state capital’s downtown but encountered increasing horror as construction began to swallow up everything around it, including the home of the plan’s future leader. They found a neglected entryway that led to a hidden cavity within the building and slowly, at first as an art project, began smuggling in furniture and materials to convert the space and felt vindicated for using this empty and forgotten room just as the developers had left no inch unclaimed as Providence Place was coming together. The remainder of the episode is devoted to an equally fascinating discussion on the origin of the mall, with Victor Gruen (previously here and here) wanting to recreate the community feeling of Vienna’s Altstadt for American suburbia and keep shoppers engaged and captive, a surrogate downtown with all the amenities, ample parking and perfect weather, the rise and decline and near demise of the consumer institution and pastime, its causes and while it’s not quite dead.

synchronoptica

one year ago: Imperial Airways (with synchronoptica) plus more on leap-seconds

seven years ago: artist Květa Pacovská   

eight years ago: reusable booster rockets plus the vice president requires a chaperone

nine years ago: a collection of Ouija boards plus vanishing languages reincarnated as music  

ten years ago: medieval machines of war plus ancient automata

sears, roebuck & co (12. 201)

On this day in 1925, the retailer which had previously focused exclusively on mail-order sales, opened its first brick-and-mortar department store on the massive campus it had acquired and maintained as a city-within-a-city on the westside of Chicago—the complex hosting the company’s warehouses, catalogue printing, prototyping and product-testing laboratories, fashion studios and employee amenities—with its own fire and police departments and on-site private bank.

Despite its remote location on the outskirts of the city, it proved popular with customers, owing the increased car-use and leading to the development of shopping malls and its later reputation as an anchor store—pivoting from traditional urban flagship stores (see previously) and catering to motorists. During the height of its success in the 1960s and 1970, Sears was the largest retailer in the world and moved its headquarters to the Sears Tower in 1973, the world’s tallest building briefly, surpassing New York’s World Trade Centre. Over the next decade, the company began its slow-decline, diversifying its portfolio away from retail into brokerage and real estate, a credit card—Discover—and an online subscription venture with IBM called Prodigy. Divesting itself from ancillary operations and eventually declaring bankruptcy in October of 2018, it was acquired by a private equity firm called Transform Holdco, with the remaining stores leveraged for their property value before being shuttered in 2022.

synchronoptica

one year ago: top-charting seventeenth century ballads (with synchronoptica), The Point (1971) plus a craving for compass liquor

seven years ago: French brutalist apartment blocs, postcards from Mars plus attacking the Deep State

eight years ago: a documentary on the making of Psycho

nine years ago: CS Lewis’ The Abolition of Man, assorted links worth revisiting plus US presidential candidate Ted Cruz

ten years ago: the Lost Generation plus eight or nine wise words about letter-writing

13x13 (12. 185)

embossed: turn of the century tactile teaching aids for the visually impaired for lessons on nature and geography  

lab-leak theory: US Central Intelligence Agency embraces controversial vector for COVID-19 pandemic, discounting zoonosis factors 

ghostwatch: the supernatural horror BBC mockumentary broadcast on Halloween (see also) 1992 and never shown again due to the panic it elicited  

sb593: Oklahoma legislature introduces bill to “restore moral sanity” and criminalise production, distribution and possession of adult material—see previously 

minimoog: a fully-functional analogue synthesiser in LEGO  

haptics and macros: an idea to add gait gestures to one’s smart phone—we can hardly do the right kind of fake kick to open the rear hatch on our car 

mox nix: language borrowings from German propagated by US and UK soldiers stationed there post WWII  

electric garden: a run-down lodge transformed into a living museum mapchat: interact with AI shopkeepers for local businesses—results may vary 

wassergöttin: prehistoric figurine from the Hallstadt culture found in 2022 in Lower Franconia goes on display at the Bavarian State Archaeological Museum in München  

walk without rhythm and you won’t attract the worm: graboids—see also—the other in-jokes that Tremors leans into  

underrepresentation: as part of order to eliminate DEI programmes, US Food and Drug Administration curbs clinical trials aimed at diverse populations for cancer research 

 switchmen: the sign language of railroad workers

11x11 (12. 086)

top fifty: a review of the biggest literary stories of 2024—including the Brontë sisters getting their diaeresēs 

we all live in the ruins of the rot economy: a long-read about the abusive and exploitative ways that the tech industry treats people at scale—see previously  

bottle episode: the amazing dioramas of folk artist Carl Worner—via Messy Nessy Chic 

emporia: Kottke’s 2024 gift guide  

chirality: scientists warn strongly against research into synthetic biology and “mirror life”—compare to the handedness of thalidomide

do not obey in advance: in agreeing to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Trump, the network is courting further nuisance claims over critical coverage, forgetting the first lesson of On Tyranny 

body-horror: an AI-generated impossible gymnastic routine 

velben goods: premium and surge-pricing 

sovereign citizens brigade: group in England claiming extrajudicial standing tried to kidnap county coroner, accusing the officer of the Crown of necromancy   

the network effect: social media fire-exits 

home box office: the cable network’s December 1982 previews

intershop (12. 081)

With the first boutique of the chain owned and operated by East German (publicly, what’s classified as a VEB, Volkseigener Betrieb) on this day in 1962 in the East Berlin Friedrichstraße train station, the original target demographic was Western tourists transiting in and out of the country as a vehicle to increase holdings of hard currency reserves (Westmarks, dollars, pounds, francs—the domestic Ostmark not being accepted) by offering a selection of luxury items, alcohol and cigarettes not available on the DDR market—sort of like a duty free-shop. Because of restrictions on East German citizens from holding foreign currencies (relaxed in 1974), locals could not originally make purchases but (with some connections) could window-shopping, and as the number of outlets grew outside embassy row to border crossings on the Autobahn (nur für Reisende aus dem nicht-sozialistischen Ausland) and expanded to Western-style Interhotels, it had the unintended consequences of giving citizens insight into Western brands and their own limited selection. Lightly criticised by Erich Honecker in 1977 as a driver of inequality, the General Secretary said, “These shops are not obviously permanent companions of socialism, but we cannot ignore the fact that rising numbers of visitors are bring more such stable currency than before.” Over four hundred affiliates closing with reunification in 1990 and with no photography permitted inside, little documentation—outside of Stasi monitoring records—remains.

white elephant (12. 061)

Via tmn, we are directed to a regular emporium of choice gift selections perfect for the holiday office party Secret Santa exchange—or that variation that one organisation that I used to work for played where you could trade up or steal the mostly gag and ge-gifted presents from others or open a new one and put it into play. Although animosity towards co-workers, particularly the merely tedious ones, tended to dull with such gatherings and probably would have regretted pointedly picking something from this guide for a sworn nemesis, but this catalogue is just too good, especially for those who have a poisonous reputation to uphold and equally has application outside of the obligatory office ritual: like the orphaned volume II of the cinematic adaptation of Atlas Shrugged—particularly if one is playing the trading version and someone is vying for it, apparel from a retailer’s Pride Collection (vintage 2022) before said chain-store began to concede to homophobic pressure or a scented candle inspired by the Warhammer 40k gaming franchise. What others would you add to this list? Themed calendars seem like a good candidate.  Gonna find out who’s naughty or nice.

grand marshal (12. 032)

First taking place along the route of 34th Street to the flagship store on Herald Square with store workers dressed up in vibrant costumes, floats, marching bands and borrowed animals from the Central Park Zoo (later replaced by balloons) and initially called Macy’s Christmas Parade, the annual tradition began on this day in 1924, welcoming Santa Claus with an enthronement ceremony on the portico of the department store’s entrance. Tied as the second oldest Thanksgiving pageant in the US after Philadelphia’s municipal one, it was immediately declared to held yearly due to popular acclaim despite it being barely covered in the press and has aired live on television since 1953. The popularity of the event was also due to civic pressure for an alternative way to celebrate the holiday rather than the custom called Ragamuffin or Beggars’ Day that came into being in New York shortly after the national holiday was declared by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 (see also) in the spirit of reconciliation after the Civil War. Children dressed, prior to the popularisation of Halloween, as exaggerated imitations of the poor and unhoused and went door-to-door, begging for pocket change and other treats—much to the annoyance of adults and sought to channel this activity into a more wholesome and organised one, with commercial sponsorship.

 

synchronoptica

one year ago: home taping is killing music (with synchronoptica)

seven years ago: municipal concessions to attract big business, speculation about the identity of the individual who invented bitcoin plus more profiles of colours

 

eight years ago: assorted links to revisit plus franchises universes

 

ten years ago: lycanthropy and other divided-selves  

eleven years ago: Wiesbaden’s Christmas Market plus the avatars of Thanksgiving past

7x7 (11. 943)

kenopsia: from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, dead mall walking evokes a fear of empty spaces  

korg-n-nord sound: an interview with the electro-synth band The Faint 

tiki-torch nazi, go back to high school: another mysterious sculpture appears in DC—see previously  

pegged: more clothesline creations from artist Helga Stentzel—previously 

touchpad: an wearable device that turns any surface into an extension of one’s desktop  

wake up babe, a new waltz just dropped: a lost work of Frederic Chopin discovered  

account of a terrible superstition: an 1865 study on lycanthropy and its origins—see also

high hats and arrow collars, white spats and lots of dollars (11. 848)

Although originally founded on Washington, DC’s F Street in 1867 in the capital’s shopping district, the luxury department store solidified its reputation on this day in 1924 with the opening of its flagship store on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, next to St Patrick’s Cathedral, made possible by its merger with the Gimbel Brothers, Inc. (both chains founded by Bavarian immigrants). Ten other metropolitan retail sites were opened over the decades with seasonal boutiques operating in executive resorts and universities before turning suburban malls, then to catalogue sales, e-commerce and factory outlets.

dear mister ward (11. 800)

Via the excellent podcast presented by Josie Long on adventures in found sounds Short Cuts (show segment embedded with selected readings at the link), we are directed towards the title project to curate correspondence collected, answered, conserved and later transcribed by the author’s grandmother during her stint at the Complaints Department at pioneering mail-order catalogue company Montgomery Ward, whose returns-policy and philosophy that the customer was always right from 1932 to the beginning of World War II. Customers reliant on such retail services revealed a lot in these letters, which not only provided a glimpse into the lives and preoccupations of rural America during the Depression but many are also quite funny and poignant—especially the ones asking for one of the few items the company did not sell. Much more at the links above.

modern ruins (11. 602)

Via friend of the blog, Nag on the Lake, and an exhibit curated by Hyperallergic we are treated to an extended portfolio of the photography of Phillip Buehler as he performs a post-mortem on a mid-sized mall in New Jersey and the forgotten, inaccessible islands, and triangulated with a third source in this student footage of an abandoned Ellis Island immigration processing centre from 1974, there’s a conversation between documenting histories and urban decay that’s a crucial one to have for both the changed landscape of commerce (see previously) and quarantine and crowd-control as well as the code of ethics for such spelunking, an acknowledged trespassing but with a definite prohibition on vandalism or over-publicising one’s exploits.

9x9 (11. 196)

mister jingeling: a dozen, beloved department store Christmas characters—see also—via Miss Cellania

bubblenomics: pondering the consequences of when AI goes the way of crypto and NFTs 

indefinite causal order: quantum batteries are powered by paradox—via Damn Interesting  

a winter’s tale: selected readings of Christmas ghost stories—via Things Magazine  

the waitresses: the cynical anti-holiday hit Christmas Wrapping that became a festive classic 

infinite jukebox: a clever AI application that extends songs forever  

high ground: study of the competition for space dominance between the US and China suggests America occupy Lagrange points to counter malign ambitions  

52 snippets: facts gleaned from economics and finance from the past twelve months 

snoopy come home: Gen Z rediscovers and identifies with the Peanuts’ character

oh no—my own dog, gone commercial (11. 137)

Via Waxy, we are directed to another soundtrack from Louie Zong (see previously) for a fictional albeit believable 1970s style Peanuts holiday special complete with Vince Guaraldi inspired jazz that captures the ethos not only for the shoppers but those working on Black Friday. Other musical segments include Cyber Monday Blues, Buyer’s Remorse, A New Week and Snoopy vs Capitalism. One could imagine the anti-consumerism messages of the limned out television special plus the harried cashiers and store workers just out the frame speaking with muffled trombone voices.

8x8 (11. 093)

outsider art: revisiting the narrative embroidery of Agnes Richter and other works in the Prinzhorn Collection  

market sundries: the paper bag baron of the East End—via Strange Company  

the crispy r: more on rhoticity and unusual consonant 

pentimenti: conservators reveal a hidden demonic figure in Joshua Reynold’s “The Death of Cardinal Beaufort”—see also 

the statistical breviary: an overview of the history of digital design 

uno, dos, tres, quatro, cinco, cinco, seis: DJ Cummerbund (previously) presents a mashup of the The Offspring and Boney M—with quite a few other musical cameos 

face-hugger: the parasitic crustacean Phronima sedentaria was the inspiration for Ridley Scott’s Alien  

sgraffito: the alleged safe-room where Michelangelo hid from his political enemies, decorated with his anatomical and engineering studies opens to the public

9x9 (10. 955)

cucumber castle: a star-studded promotional film for the Bee-Gee’s medieval-themed, chivalrous 1970 album  

as big as a football pitch: the vague rulers of informal metrology 

good(bye) design: a tribute to the aesthetic of vintage consumer tech by Miki Nemcek with a special focus on Braun  

grand master: World Chess Federation places restrictions on trans competitors  

1:25: a tour inside the scale model of St Paul’s, hidden in a chamber in the attic 

 ⛔: like Zuckerburg explored before—in violation of app store policies—Elon Musk is threatening to remove Twitter’s block feature  

magalog: combination magazine-catalogue that was successful print model in the 1970s  

langue étrangère: faced with budget-shortfalls, US public university cutting foreign language from its ciriculum 

elephant in the room: the imprint of favourite songs of our formative years and what that says about our capacity for new things

9x9 (10. 728)

daily double: Jeopardy! had a all-fonts category with answers in the typefaces they were looking for as the question—via Kottke  

on the eighth day: a 1984 BBC documentary on nuclear winter preparedness—see previously 

a la carte: a century of cultural changes captured in restaurant menus—see previously  

カクテル: an award-winning small Tokyo ex-urb defined Japanese cocktail culture 

that’s so fetch: tech retreats from the Metaverse to the new hotness  

exciton condensates: physicists find a link between photosynthesis and strange states of matter  

cabin crew: the argot of airplane travel 

mutually assured destruction: new analysis of the same Cold War  

grundvig: font-founder Reinadlo Camejo transforms a Copenhagen church into a typeface

8x8 (10. 372)

low-poly: needlepoint designs based on vintage video games—see previously 

ghost mall: visiting a virtually abandoned yet very much open for business shopping centre in New Jersey 

zenosyne: from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (previously here and here)—that feeling that time is getting faster  

digichromatography: a survey of the seconds, the raw files, of Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky’s documentation of the Russian Empire is a study in the development of colour photography—see also  

the pandoravirus: the melting Siberian permafrost is reviving long dormant but viable germs  

q-zone: a racing timeline of the most popular social media from 2003 to the present  

살: South Korea will abandon traditional age-reckoning in favour of an international recognised counting method beginning next year 

akka-arrh: Atari reprises a 1982 arcade game that was never released commercially as it proved too challenging for test-audiences

santa claus isn’t coming to town

With an extreme shortage of Santa’s Helpers available and unwilling to work and risk life and limb with a resurgent pandemic expected to get worse before it gets better (many of the usual candidates in character being older and larger individuals considered more vulnerable), many malls—worldwide—are turning towards a new Yuletide tradition and installing the red-light, green-light killer robot from Squid Games (previously). Adults queuing up at a shopping centre in Manchester even were served dalgona—the fragile sugar cookie-cutter candy from one of the challenges—whilst they waited patiently to have their picture taken with the giant doll.  Not to fret, however, since unlike one’s typical Mall Santas, the actual Father Christmas is immune and designated as an essential worker.

brick-and-mortem or from mall rat to snap chat

The curatorial team at Hyperallergic showcases the photographic essays documenting, unflinchingly and not just the empty, echoing nostalgia that ghost malls (see previously here, here and here) are usually treated with, the decline and decay of retail spaces after the pivot and paradigm shift away from the shopping centre and high street to online sales and virtual shop fronts of artist Philip Buehler.
The procession through the panels, the exhibits—buffeted with the memories we ourselves burden the scenes of wrack and ruin with—are also a eulogy for the idea of the third place, that oasis that was neither home nor work but a liminal spot for meaningful congregation—one’s social hour previously spent at church and then at the mall (most of the indoors anachronism are mainly food courts with a few anchor stores attached). Despite this gastronomical attempt at rehabilitation, a revanche and reorganisation of café culture packaged and commodified in the most tedious and antithetical ways possible has not fulfilled that role of the third place, nor has another dominant technology and lifestyle company with the hubris to try to become the new town square. Though this may be the day we finally put aside that artificial divide we’ve created between worlds on-line and off, it is high time we begin to acknowledge the importance of these oases and transitional places, no matter where they exist. Buehler show runs through January at a gallery in the Lower East Side, Manhattan.