storefront or slate and shingle

Via the Browser, here’s one prognostication for the coming year regarding “distributed content” that’s a very good and quick study.

Already the publishing houses of the internet scuttle writing and reporting to select social networks, where their articles are handily propagated and garner much greater exposure in those wilds, rather than on their own tamer, manicured turf: their home page. The prediction is that news organisations and other forums will shed their own web pages entirely and only exist in that stream of consciousness. Sometimes hosting one’s own content does seem a little vainglorious or ungainly and unrefined, but—and even for all the flash and circulation—I imagine that it is still a better route to maintain some sense of place and ownership and pride for what one has made.

iconodule

Celebrated on the first Sunday of the Great Lent (1 March, this year), the Feast of the Triumph of Orthodoxy celebrates the restoration of icons, holy images, to the Church, and the victory of the iconodules—those who venerate images, the iconophiles over the iconoclasts who considered the practise idolatry.

The service that takes place in churches on that day has come to present the defeat of heretical thinking in general but the mass remembers a historic event that took place in March of 843 when the icons were returned to the Hagia Sophia. Recursively, an icon was created to illustrate this auspicious event. I had always believed that the iconoclasm was an internal matter and one could easily imagine disputes arising, as they continue to do, over the sacramental nature of holy objects—whether they help the faithful to focus their attention or are vain distractions, but it seems that the division arose and sides were taken due in part—at least, to mounting outside pressures: with the rapid expansion of Islam—who were strongly against any human or divine imagery of any kind, the Church began to reassess its position. Did these Muslims, who were making inroads on Byzantine territory and even threatening Constantinople itself, have God’s favour because they had roundly rejected graven images? As above, the debate—and often violently continues—within and without.

dnd or bread and board

Collectors’ Weekly profiles the passion of one Edoardo Flores, a labour ombudsman for the United Nations who traveled the world for three decades, and amassed quite a few usual and culturally-telling do-not-disturb doorhangers from the hotels where he has stayed. These souvenirs gave him a taste for travel ephemera and the stories that they tell—what locals think of the tourists—and has since gathered thousands, lovingly curated.

root, third and fifth

Courtesy of Nag-on-the-Lake, comes an interesting look at the choreography and vision of Oskar Schlemmer through his avante-garde production called the Triadisches (Triadic) Ballet, scored by Paul Hindemith, which premiered in Stuttgart in 1922 and toured Europe to spread the spirit and character of the Bauhaus design movement.  A certain Euclidian transformation takes place for these dancers in elaborate and bulky geometric costumes.  There is more to discover at the link, including a recreation (the original musical accompaniment lost to history but reconstructed) of a performance staged in 1970.