l’autre moi

We’re again indebted to the brilliant Nag on the Lake for bringing us quite a fascinating biography of two brave and creative individuals whose story and contributions to the resistance went untold with the life and times of step-siblings and life-time partners Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe—also known as Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore.
Pioneering selfie-artists and authors, Cahun and Moore (the other me, as Cahun called her lover) challenged traditional gender roles and honed their identity and craft at a time when the world was going full-on fascist and fled Nazi-occupied Paris for the Channel Islands. Up to this point, their situation reminded me a bit of that of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas during the war but seeing that after resettling in Jersey in 1937, they really stuck their necks out rather than keeping a low-profile as Jewish lesbians might do. Nazi forces invaded the island in 1940 and the two risked their lives with a psy-ops hearts-and-minds campaign to make Nazi soldiers believe that there was a large-scale, professional effort to take back Jersey imminent, aided by a typewriter and translated text to lend credence to their claim and helped with the liberation of the island. They were eventually taken into custody by the secret-police but their stance was enough of a reprieve to stay their punishment until the Axis powers in Europe surrendered.

rocket man or unga chunga

The imbecile Dear Leader was given a platform at the United Nations general assembly which to the consternation and alarm of not only those US allies in the region but I’d venture every soul departed, on Earth and yet to come pledged to “totally destroy” North Korea and its twenty-five million residence should it continue to menace its neighbours and America.
Despite his past criticism for the international body for inaction and inefficiency (and cheap emerald marble backsplash), he flinched, thankfully, in his pugilistic rhetoric by heaping the onus on the UN by saying that hopefully a military response wouldn’t be necessary: “We’ll see—that’s what the UN is there for.” Such bluster is not only a grave embarrassment that strips America of all credibility—and although Americans might distance themselves from their leadership, the rest of the world is losing patience fast with those apologies and pretenses—it carries consequences and responsibilities that Dear Leader has proven himself incapable of assuming.

6x6

hello, I am a bear: ursine pondering and poetry, via Dave Log

alles in ordnung: German government being sublimely dull

down in the underground: the forgotten catacombs underneath Brussels, via Messy Nessy Chic

muted: hushed and concise social media is reviving the cinematography of the silent film

orbit city: celebrating the life and work of Gin Wong, the architect who inspired The Jetsons

adult swim: synchronised images of Soviet-era public pools

port authority

Though we’ve previously encountered some of these fantastic, never realised plans for buildings and infrastructure in New York City as isolated proposals, like a gargantuan skyscraper by Antoni Gaudí or an elevated ten lane highway crossing Manhattan, having the chance to see many of this past visions as an ensemble superimposed on a scale-model of the great metropolis is completely transformational.
Among the many innovative and utopian ideas that we were introduced to by this nicely researched and curated exhibition to be held in the Flushing neighborhood of the bureau of Queens the urban air authority was our new favourite—a massive airport and runway built over the docklands along the Hudson River.