Monday 11 January 2021
first fridays
catagories: libraries and museums, networking and blogging
Wednesday 6 January 2021
zusammenleben
We really enjoyed pursuing the extensive portfolio of images captured of East Germany in the photography of Ute Mahler, who embarked in 1974 for a decade’s long mission to preserve and convey his fellow friends, neighbours and strangers as they were authentically cool and collected—both candid and posed—and unmediated by geopolitics. Much more curated by the Guardian at the link above and at the on-line gallery exhibition hosted by La Maison De L’Image Documentaire.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ท, libraries and museums, Saxony, Thรผringen
Wednesday 30 December 2020
8x8
persons of the year: more Year End lists from Miss Cellania—see previously
75x75: seventy-five superlative photographs captured by as many photographers
mys: the Swedish word without an exact translation compliments hygge when it comes to coping with the prospect of a long, dark winterbenedict donald: more fine art work (see also)—suitable for framing
the twenty most powerless: the disenfranchised and estranged of the art world
she said see you later, boy: McSweeney‘s most read monologues, vignettes and confessionals of 2020
dance, dance revolution: a dance number from a trio of Boston Dynamics robots—see previously
refreshing your feed: fifty superlative podcasts according to The Atlantic—via Super Punch
catagories: ⚕️, ๐ธ๐ช, ๐️, ๐จ, ๐️, ๐, ๐ท, libraries and museums, networking and blogging
Sunday 6 December 2020
nefertiti
Representing chief consort and Great Royal Wife of Amenhotep IV, the iconic limestone bust was discovered on this day in 1912 by a team of archรฆologists working under the auspices of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (DOG—the German Oriental Society) led by Ludwig Borchadt in Amarna at site that housed the workshop of celebrated sculptor Thutmose. Since its first going on display to the public in a Berlin museum, Egyptian authorities at the bureau of antiquities have requested that the three-thousand three hundred and fifty year old artefact be repatriated, arguing the significance of the find was downplayed and had inspectors been allowed to fully examine the bust, they would have never allowed it to leave. Focus of aspirations for revanchism after the dissolution of the Prussian monarchy and defeat in World War I, Nefertiti was conscripted for a rather fraught political career of propaganda (see also) in the Third Reich in the years to follow. Presence in the Zeitgeist included the 1935 cinematic portray of the Bride of Frankenstein, patterned after the signature crown, and her role and cultural impact has now been rehabilitated insofar as she is considered the counterbalance to the figure of Tutankhamun and a good-will ambassador for representation, art and the field of Egyptology. The arguments against repatriation, characterising nations outside of Europe too unstable to properly care for their treasures and cultural heritage is particularly rubbished by the way Germany has torn itself apart, Nefertiti sent away for safe-keeping in a salt-mine and nearly lost to history.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐, ๐จ, ๐บ, libraries and museums, Middle East
Saturday 28 November 2020
the great bed of ware
Via Strange Company’s Weekend Link Dump, we are directed to one unusual artefact of the Victoria & Albert Museum collection in the monumental and for the time of its acquisition in 1931 for a princely sum of four thousand pounds budget-breaking piece of furniture.
Originally housed in the White Hart Inn in the town as sort of a tourists’ draw for the stopping off point a day’s journey outside of London to points north, the massive four-poster bed—at three metres wide big enough to accommodate four couples—and was built by carpenter Jonas Fosbrooke in the last decade of the sixteenth century with Renaissance style marquetry and ornament inspired by Hans Vredeman de Vries—and to add to its history and provenance, couples have carved their names or initials in the headboard to mark their stay and is mentioned by name in Twelfth Night (circa 1601) and works by Ben Jonson and Charles Dickens.Thursday 12 November 2020
gie
catagories: ๐️, libraries and museums
Saturday 7 November 2020
das wiesbadener manifest
Declared on this day in 1945 from their base of operations (collection point) in the occupied capital of Hessen, the officers that comprised the special commission of the Monuments Fine Arts and Archives organisation (the MFAA, the group also known as the Monuments Men) was a stern rejection that European treasure should be taken to the United States as plunder and the spoils of war. The recovery and restitution efforts beginning earlier that summer, the programme’s first director CPT Walter I Farmer of the US Army Corps of Engineers received a large shipment of Nazi-looted art and antiquities, and soon the enormity of the task was apparent, prompting the issuing of the manifesto, announcing: “We wish to state that, from our own knowledge, no historical grievance will rankle so long or be the cause of so much justified bitterness as the removal for any reason of a part of the heritage of any nation even if that heritage may be interpreted as a prize of war.” Over seven hundred thousand objects and artefacts were catalogued by the organisation, stolen from museums (works from the Berlin Gemรคldegalerie and Nationalgalerie including Botticelli, Rembrant, Rubens and Cranach), private collections, Jewish citizens and political dissidents and were kept safeguarded from reparation claims and trophies of war that had been taken back to America were repatriated, President Truman getting involved with the debate and ordering paintings and sculptures returned to Germany in 1948.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐บ๐ธ, ๐จ, Hessen, libraries and museums
Monday 5 October 2020
รคlmhult almanac
catagories: ๐ธ๐ช, ๐, ๐️, libraries and museums
glass microbiology
catagories: ⚕️, ๐, ๐จ, ๐, libraries and museums
Wednesday 30 September 2020
contrastive analysis
catagories: ๐, ๐ฌ, ๐ , libraries and museums, ⓦ
Saturday 29 August 2020
schwebebahn
With unreserved enthusiasm, Dan Schindel of Hyperallergic recommends us to indulge in this admittedly outstanding restored footage from 1902, another superlative highlight from MoMA’s Film Vault Summer Camp, of Wuppertal’s flying, suspension train (mentioned previously but have yet to make that trip plus see also) shortly after going into service. This clip is two-minutes in length and the entire circuit through the city, which one can still take today, lasts around half-an-hour, calling at ten stops. Much more to explore at the link up top.
catagories: ⚖️, ๐, libraries and museums
Thursday 27 August 2020
album amicorum
Long before the more modern manifestation of social media, there were friend books (see previously here and here) and as the Guardian reports one of history’s finest exemplars Das Groรe Stammbuch of Philipp Hainhofer has been acquired for the library of Wolfenbรผttel (also home of Jรคgermeister) nearly four centuries after the institution tried to purchase the celebrated and celebrity-filled volume.
The seventeenth century equivalent of an influencer found in Augsburger merchant and diplomat had acquired many followers whose signatures were illuminated with an elaborate artistic commission, and include autographs from the Holy Roman Emperor, the pope, the Medicis, various kings and many other contemporary luminaries. The duke for whom the library owes its patronage tried to purchase it from the estate of Hainhofer after his death but it was at the time fame and followers were out of his price range.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, libraries and museums, Middle Ages, networking and blogging
Friday 17 July 2020
a man, a plan, a can
Appropriately called out for its stereotypes and gendered biases that do not advance equity in the kitchen—though I do admit that it is often the most help and the least harm I can do is in setting the table and clearing up—we were struck with the illustrations of this vintage Working Couple’s Cookbook—via Weird Universe but curated then culled by our astute librarians (previously), which are strongly suggestive of adversarial graphic generation.
A Nitty Gritty production, written by Peggy Treadwell with artwork by Carl Torlucci—I can see that he specialised in this signature style but can’t find anything outside of this one collaboration unfortunately, with complimenting an author’s words seeming like an especially democratising task that is relatively accepted and well established as gender-neutral.
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐ฝ, ๐, 1971, libraries and museums
Monday 13 July 2020
7x7
flotus: chainsaw sculpture of Melania Trump erected in her hometown torched on US Independence Day
[screaming internally]: assorted news items including thrill ride guidance from Japan
holy wisdom: Turkey reconsecrates Hagia Sophia as a mosque after eight decades as a museum
dining alfresco: the variety of New York’s newly founded streateries
mallrats: a tour of shopping galleries past
strike a pose: professional model An Tiantian shows off her photogenic gestures
swamping the drain: Trump wines and dines wealthy campaign donors while America slides into failed statehood
Sunday 28 June 2020
new accessions and permanent collection
Via Waxy, we are introduced to photographer Barbara Iweins through her project to help her come to terms with and couch in language and statistics accessible to us all of cataloguing the over ten thousand artefacts, items that she has acquired and held on to through nearly a dozen household moves and what their acquisition means. Even devoting fifteen hours a day to categorising and framing each object, the undertaking took nearly two-and-half years to complete. If you embarked on a similar project, how would you exhibit all your stuff—even that which is mostly hidden and tucked away unbidden?
catagories: ๐ง๐ช, ๐ท, libraries and museums
Friday 26 June 2020
point-of-sale
On this day in 1974 after nearly a decade in development and first conceived as a method for tracking railcars and shipping containers, the first bar coded, marked with a universal product code (redundantly, UPC code) instead of a price tag item (see previously) was sold at a supermarket in Troy, Ohio.
Cashier Sharon Buchanan scanned (we are dismissive of such acts now as routine but Ms. Buchanan was very much from that moment on an engineer wielding the beam of a powerful helium-neon laser that bounced off a rotating mirror and onto the glass-plated register surface so a central computer could match the label against the shop’s programmed inventory—no mean feat that) a value pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum for customer Clyde Dawson (not his only purchase during that visit—just the first one rang up). Deconstructed, the encoding tables do look a bit like the I Ching, and afterwards the artefact, the (presumably a stand-in unless the purchaser indulged the museum this memento) was acquired by the Smithsonian. I wonder if this first barcode is some sort of talisman, a charm imbued with power over all the scanning to follow.
catagories: ๐ก, ๐พ, 1974, libraries and museums
Saturday 13 June 2020
7x7
but vaderbase? only you would be so bold: the Rebellion Republic names its military bases
cause cรฉlรจbre: documenting Russia’s historic gay cultural icons and personalities
false-flag: Trump crafts propaganda from stock photos, labelling random protesters as agents of Antifa
undisclosed location: a tour of the White House bunker, from nineteen-year-old documentary photos provided by the US National Archives
vote hillary: an artist’s prophetic 2016 appeal in the spirit of Andy Warhol’s “Vote McGovern” campaign screen-print
crimes against humanity: Belgium comes to terms with its genocidal colonial past with the help of toppling statues
karens’ personal racism valet: a bevvy of resources on defunding the police and reforming law enforcement
Thursday 11 June 2020
9x9
the incalculable loss: New York Times again dedicates its pages to giving voice to overlooked obituaries
ruputer: Seiko’s 1998 smart watch proves the adage plus รงa change, plus c'est la mรชme chose (see also)
air bridges and air gaps: COVID-19 curtails international travel
invisible woman: incredible, augmented reality fashion show—via Things Magazine
privatising profits, socialising losses: the grifting companies receiving and retaining millions from economic recovery stimulus programmes in the US—via JWZ
metadata and memory hole: the internet’s repository is under assault
peaceful transition of power: the nightmare scenario if Trump refuses to leave office—via Cynical-C
chaotic good: DJ Cummerbund presents Weird Betty—nearly as good as Play that Funky Rammstein
and may those who lament their loss find better heroes: Egyptologist usefully share instructions on how to topple monumental structures
catagories: ⛓️๐ฅ, ๐ถ, ๐บ, ๐ก, ๐️, labour, libraries and museums, networking and blogging
Wednesday 27 May 2020
bridal registry
Courtesy of the Everlasting Blรถrt, we find ourselves quite taken with the endless galleries of deep dives and long tails that comprise the Museum of Ridiculous Interesting Things. Renaissance sexuality and women’s roles is not the most enlightened exhibition to explore, assuredly, but their curation of the sexy symbolism of the weasel and related varmints is indeed edifying and comprehensive.
Branching off from and bringing it all back around to the era’s most iconic depiction from Leonardo in the 1490 portrait Lady with an Ermine (Dama con l'ermellino) of Cecilia Gallerani, mistress of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, we discover what sort of associations were laden on this poor creature as a companion and signifier of status and hope and generally commissions for marriages. Da Vinci himself would later remark in his own bestiary that the ermine represents moderation, deigning only to eat once a day, and the purity of character to surrender herself to the huntsman rather than sully her fine coat. Speaking of which, the keeping of a pelt from weasel, mink or stoat was referred to as a zibellini, a luxuriant fur flea to drape over ones neck as a charm for getting pregnant, reflecting the rather nonsensical and non sequitur belief that weasels conceived through their ears and gave birth through their mouths, following the Marian tradition of the messenger angle whispering in her ear and Mary proclaiming the news—an homage that does not seem quite ideal in terms of fatherhood and legacy. Much more to discover at the links above.
catagories: ๐จ, libraries and museums, networking and blogging
Friday 22 May 2020
dรถstรคdning or duolingo
Revisiting an endearing collective of librarians sharing the best of the worst from their best housekeeping practises, we also are finding ourselves re-acquainted with another morbid-sounding term (like culling) that’s really practical, affirming and necessary as part of a personal and professional project in Swedish Death Cleaning.
Taking decluttering to the next level and not just its inevitable conclusion, the exercise—the foresight not just for those who need to clean up behind you but also for one’s own piece of mind—translates literally as death-standing and signifies over and above the tidying up that is to be assayed on a regular, unending bias (sorry, dying’s not even a release from those chores) but rather a more permanent and reward type of organisation. Working from home, our librarian is unburdening from their stacks of two copies of a workbook that touts learning German in ten-minutes a day, which in hindsight probably was not the most effective approach to that undertaking.
catagories: ๐ธ๐ช, ๐ฌ, ๐ญ, libraries and museums