fig leaf

Writing for Æon magazine prehistorian Ian Gilligan from the University of Sydney proffers an interesting alternative theory to the rather labour-intensive and leisure limiting congress of development of agriculture and animal husbandry that it emerged not out of a need for sustenance—hunter-gatherers were happy campers in the above regard (see below) and it was more efficient and less taxing on the environment—but rather out of an urgent need for fibre and pelts with layering and insulation being what brought humans to the other side of the last ice age with an expanded range that would eventually dominate the whole Earth—though the dinosaurs and their highly-achieving avian ancestors might take exception to that claim. Because threads of evidence would quickly fade away, much of this proposal is speculative but rings true and seems like a plausible catalyst to protect our relatively hairless bodies from the harsh elements and lend us to the attendant toil. More at the links above.

billiard balls & bowling green bowles, turnt correctly

We quite enjoyed perusing these antique furniture trade cards (see previously) from the shops and emporia of old London—reportedly discovered in a secret drawer of a hypothetical cabinet. There are carpenters and casket-makers, upholsters as well as looking-glass and chair manufacturies. 

doppelhaushälften

Via Present /&/ Correct, we quite enjoyed meditating on this series of larger family properties converted into duplex units in the heavily industrialised region of the Ruhrgebiet (previously) as captured by photographer Wolfgang Fröhling as a consequence of the departure of the younger generation as mining and factories close and are repurposed. The defiantly contrasting exteriors of the cleaved homesteads draws one into the lives of the respective residents. More at the links above.

reeperbahn

We quite enjoyed this peek into the industries of rope-making and yarn-spinning that gave Cable Street of the East End and Whitechapel through the lens of the late eighteenth century company of the Frost Brothers when it was documented in illustrations and photographs in 1905. Like the above-titled way in Hamburg, the area began as a straight grounds where hemp fibres were twisted into ropes for the ships that would anchor on the Thames between London Bridge and the kilns at Limehouse.

port authority trans-hudson

Though entertained throughout the 1940s and 1950s as a vehicle for urban renewal and to stimulate development, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller felt he had not gathered the sufficient and sustaining political and public will to sign the bill directing the construction of a World Trade Centre for Manhattan until this day in 1961 and fraught with zoning and controversy, not completed until twelve years later—almost to the day. The project, intended to rehabilitate the Port Authority where ridership was declining, displaced New York City’s Radio Row, a warehouse district that had existed since the 1920s which hosted many electronics goods stores and was a driver of innovation by proximity and saturation as well as affecting many tenants and small businesses in the dense waterfront neighbourhood. Many of the affected protested that the city should have gotten involved in a prestige project masquerading as social stimulus.

married to the sea

Via Strange Company, we were introduced to the missionary felines of the Seamen’s Church Institute of New York and the cats were delights in themselves of course, brave Bosun, Seaweed and her family and other seafaring companions, but the history of this organisation with its fleet of floating churches would be engrossing enough in itself.

Established in 1834 by the American Episcopal Church and still in operation, it is the biggest advocate for sailors, longshoremen and merchant mariners providing educational, legal, union representation, hospitality and pastoral services for the ports of New York and New Jersey, sending chaplains and sponsoring events such as Christmas at Sea (more recently shopping and arranging supplies through gangway exchanges for those stranded by COVID-19) and training and safety programmes and supporting studies on more effective ways to approach piracy, stowaways, refugees and shore leave. More at the links above.

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

notions

Via Nag on the Lake’s always splendiferous Sunday Links (lots more to explore there), we are directed to a wonderful collection of antique trade cards of various London emporia for all one’s clogg, peruke, bunnbaking needs and more—retail or wholeſale. Developed at the end of the seventeenth century parallel to rise of cheap priniting, the advertising ephemera were business cards of a sort and included specific, detailed directions to the merchants’ stores, referencinf signage that could be quite elaborate, as no standardised system of street addresses existed at the time—see also. Be sure to check out Spitalfield’s Life bookshop for more treasuries of old London.

shelter-in-place

This day marks the one-year anniversary of the United Kingdom imposed with a national lockdown to quell the spread of COVID-19 so that health services would not be overwhelmed, reversing earlier thinking once we were better informed epidemiologically that suggested we should aim for herd-immunity rather than curfews and quarantines. The announcement coincided with the restrictions on movement placed on residents of Wuhan were being cautiously rolled back after two-months of total shutdown and followed measures enacted earlier in the month in Italy and France. The stay-at-home order banned non-essential travel and in person contact, the closure of most businesses with the mandate to telework when possible and those with symptoms to self-isolate. Measures were gradually eased in June through July with a resurgence in October, a so called second wave, that resulted in another month-long shutdown.

6x6

ribbit: frogs use their lungs effectively as noise-cancelling devices—via the new Shelton wet/dry  

oculus: architect envisions Rome’s Pantheon as world’s largest camera obscura (previously) with a conceptual installation 

fetish-free commodities: Existential Comics attempts to demystify Marxist marketplaces—via Nag on the Lake and Memo of the Air 

radiant baby: a brief biography of artist Keith Haring told with drawings and song  

ipa: an iconographic dictionary that corresponds to each phoneme of human language 

marshmallow test: cuttlefish demonstrate self-control and delay gratification, passing a cognitive benchmark designed for human children

6x6

seven minutes of terror: Perseverance lands on Mars, beginning its search for signs of past life  

cyborg tomato: AI Weirdness (previously) generates its own mascot—plus others  

polar flare: examining every map projection and how it distorts our world view at once—see previously  

simon says: a vast archives of electronic handheld and table-top games and consoles from decades past—via Swiss Miss  

fabian society: capitalism coexists with constructivism in Czech city of Zlín  

hello world: the newest Martian probe beams back its first images

invisible hand

We very much appreciated the thorough and disabusing essay on the misapplication of the term “free market”—as in free market capitalism, which is assuredly not invoked in the way classical economists like Henry George and Adam Smith intended the phrase to be used in the late nineteenth century. 

Rather than business unencumbered by government regulation, this school of thought championed markets free from rentiers (the characterisation parasitic is unduly insulting to actual parasites that are not some degenerate life form but instead highly evolved organisms that might otherwise be capriciously labelled ‘in a symbiotic relationship’), monopolies and other privileges conferred and rabidly protected that reduce fair and open competition. To counter-balance the advantages of inheritance for the landed gentry, Smith, Henry and others were strong proponents of high property taxes to supplant a tariff on income and encourage productive labour.

8x8

testi stampati: the riotous typographical illustratrations of Lorenzo Petrantoni  

painterly realism: Nathan Shipley trained a neural network to turn portraiture into convincingly true-to-life photographs 

civilian climate corps: a vision of how putting people to work on conservation projects can help save both the environment and the economy  

narratology: a purportedly exhaustive list of dramatic situations—see also here and here  

stonx: a long thread explaining the GameStop short-squeeze—via Miss Cellania  

paradoxical undressing: National Geographic forwards a new theory to account for the Dyatlov Pass Incident (previously) of 1959  

butler in a box: before digital assistants there was domestic aid in the late 1980s 

will success spoil rock hunter: Art of the Title looks at the opening montage of the 1957 CinemaScope classic

domestic agenda

Signalling a radical shift in policy priorities, Joe Biden for his first day and a half in office signed a tranche of executive orders reversing the direction that his predecessor (lest we forget the catalogue of horrors) had taken the country and the first steps to positioning America as a leader and innovative force. Redressing the pandemic crisis, Biden’s spending proposal for economic aid and relief and accelerating vaccination comes in at just under two trillion dollars, imposing a mask mandate on federal property and interstate transportation, extend student loan deferments and a moratorium on evictions and re-join the World Health Organisation. Moreover, Biden moved to bring the US back into the Paris Climate Agreement plus reimpose pollution restrictions recently relaxed and cancel the Keystone XL pipeline project that would shuttle a particularly pernicious type of petroleum from Canadian fields to American refineries. On immigration, Biden has directed the travel ban on some Muslim-majority countries to be repealed, reversed the inhumanly cruel practise of separating immigrant families at the border and ended the declared National Emergency that funded the Wall. In the Oval Office, the bust of Winston Churchill (previously) is replaced—in the background—by one of César Chávez.

safer at home

In the style of ex-voto devotional miniatures, Los Angeles artist Esther Pearl Watson lets these small vignettes reflect the tumult and strangeness of the past year of isolation, uprising and uncertainty with the same sense of reverence and memorial that the folk art genre recognises inception and intercession in forces greater than us. Learn more and visit the artist’s exhibition at Hyperallergic at the link above.

walk the plank

Having been glancingly acquainted with the existence of Sea Shanty TikTok just last week (see also), we were delighted to see this retrospective of the old genre and new community experimenting with these traditional maritime work songs—often about piracy, colonialism and whaling, though also the instrument—voice of the disgruntled and impressed and a sometimes a form of diss track exchanges for rival crews.

2021 is the year of the sea shanty pic.twitter.com/ohOAGvkbtC

— Tim - Poster of Hugo Pics (@Beertheist) January 11, 2021

arbeiter nr. 11811

Debuting on this day in 1927 at the Ufa-Palast-Zoo cinema in Berlin, the silent, expressionist dystopian drama Metropolis was director Fritz Lang’s vision of the eponymous science-fiction novel by Thea von Harbou. Filmed during the optimistic days of the Weimar Republik and informed by the philosophy of such attendant movements as Bauhaus, the ground-breaking piece forecasts, presciently, a bleak and oppressive future technocracy with a huge chasm separating the classes. With a legacy of immeasurable influence and launching numerous homages, it was inscribed on the UNESCO register of Memory of the World—the first film to receive this honour. The message of the movie, whose allegory is of course not meant as an instruction manual, is summed up in the final intertitle: „Mittler zwischen Hirn und Händen muss das Herz sein“—that is, “The mediator between the Head and Hands must be the Heart.”

psychogeography

Being a committed and rather incurable flâneur myself, learning about the playful praxis that combines elements of anarchy and the surreal in urban exploration and understanding how built environments and pathways influence residents and guests struck me as engrossing and endearing for its vagaries of association and membership.

One central tenet—though more nuanced than I am describing it—is that of dérive, drift, and how we’re attracted to those zones that conform to our neighbourhood and comforts and to let oneself go and take a penny-hike like I used to do (and still sometimes at an unknown crossroads) and flip a coin at a corner to decide if you’ll proceed right of left. Of course, proper reconnaissance admits more directions and apparently there’s an app for that too. Societies once dedicated to this movement that I could find seem to have gone inactive in the past few years but organised activities including loitering with intent, scavenger hunts, immersive challenges and workshops that called out gentrification, overtourism and eroding public transportation schemes as well as unearthed the legacy and vestigial signs of the architecture of exclusion. It seems like a good time to revive interest and start our own psychogeographical chapters.

8x8

the santaland diaries: a holiday classic from David Sedaris 

by jove: more on the complex system of Jupiter and its moons—including Valetudo, which crosses between the prograde and retrograde orbitals—see previously  

mimicry and mutualism: the monkey slug caterpillar (Phobetron pithecium, the larva of the hag moth) that evolved to resemble a tarantula  

where do i begin: Erich Segal’s Love Story at fifty

posse commmutatus: a fresh tranche of pardons (previously) from the outgoing and impeached Trump is an assault and insult on justice 

tree fm: for those who can’t readily go forest bathing or hug a perennial friend, tune into the soundscape of woods around the world—via Things Magazine  

pork-barrel politics: Trump frames riders in COVID aid bill as disgraceful after seven months of contentious negotiation, demands revision 

suggested serving: wintry cocktail and hot toddy recipes from eastern Europe

zucked

Much like the laisse-faire champion of free-markets who only thought it was the government’s place to intervene in monopolies when there was demonstrable consumer harm—never mind about democratic harm or erecting barriers to entry—the US judge and Solicitor General Robert Bork (and author of such titles as Slouching Towards Gomorrah) whose name became a verb for those (righteously) villifed and held to account by the mass media, the anti-social media conglomerate (previously) has finally generated enough ill-will to call to action the Federal Trade Commission joining suit with forty-six states attorneys general plus Guam and Washington, DC to get roundly borked and broken up.
Since the last times the American government was compelled to take legal and legislative actions against Ma Bell and then Big Blue, tech and telecos have seen few restrictions and rather nurtured and coddled to become some of the most powerful companies in the world. The FTC is charged with protecting consumers from cartels and monopolistic and monopsonistic practises and while perhaps a bit too timid over the past couple of decades, it has gathered up its courage and decided to push forward during this lame-duck session. Of course this corporate bully, armed to the teeth yet claiming it’s being undermined and unfairly assaulted—is formible with virtually unlimited resources to lobby, leverage the public (the fight comes to us too and we can continue to not dally in that walled-garden) and rail against regulation and dial-up the victimhood. These staid giants of industry are built on the model of suppressing or absorbing the competition and know no other route to success.