hazy cosmic jive

Via our peripatetic friend the Everlasting Blört we are introduced to artist and entrepreneur Todd Alcott who creates rather clever, anachronistic pulp fiction/pop culture mash-ups in the form of book covers. With special attention to the generally lurid imagery and typeface, Alcott has employed these compositions to—among other things—encapsulate songs and albums of musicians who arguably were informed by the Midcentury Modern aesthetic themselves to create lovely librettos of David Bowie, The Talking Heads, New Order and others.

the wombles

While this market and era of television was not exactly my formative and cultural-informing shibboleth, I did nonetheless appreciate Curious British Telly’s analysis of lesser-known vintage children’s programming.
I do recall seeing an episode or two of ITV’s Hattytown Tales (1969 – 1973), which I remember being quite keen and well composed (distributed by the production studio FilmFair who were known for this distinctive style), as stop-motion animation of anthropomorphised hats that recursively resided in hats that resembled themselves. Do you recognise any of these other titles?

nüshu

Sixth Tone brings us a poignant story about a disappearing tradition whose last caretakers are to a degree contradictory to the reason that the nüshu system of writing was contrived in the first place.
As opposed to the thousands of logographic characters of standard Chinese, nüshu was developed as a syllabaric simplification, a phonetic alphabet, for women to use to communicate and record their thoughts around the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries (the Song and Yuan dynasties) without the benefit of formal education that was afforded to their male counterparts in the county of Jiangyong in Hunan province. As the Cultural Revolution ensured that access to education was universal and equitable, the secret and confessional form of writing became—which locals refer to as “long-legged mosquito script”—antiquated and the last proficient and native user, a woman called Yang Huanyi, passed away in 2004, nüshu is now only known through study and research, instead of being passed on from mother to daughter as a provisional form of literacy Unfortunately, despite its new-found visibility with on bilingual shop signs to appeal to the tourists, it’s no longer the exclusive outlet of the under-valued but initiated (the in-grouping of the out-group) and much of what’s preserved with this resurgence is distorted and incorrect.

rip john mccain

Long-serving US Senator from the state of Arizona and two time presidential candidate John Sidney McCain III has died a day after announcing that he will stop treatments against a particularly cruel and aggressive form of brain cancer at age eighty-one.
One of few members of the Republican Party willing to openly criticise senior leadership and recognise the damage that dereliction of duty does—identifying those to blame rather than root problems and much less solutions, an abiding responsibility that I think was central to his career and outlook. The derision of idiots and cowards have no place in this honourable person’s legacy (it matters where one winds up) and if anything, a voice of dissent that’s not been silenced will serve to give others the grit and the courage of conviction (or shame in some cases—there’s small choice in rotten apples) to do what’s right.