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There’s a new film that could be described as a modern-day, Scandinavian retelling of Don Quixote called Kill Billy (DE)—a play on Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill.
A frustrated purveyor of traditional home furnishing (solid, quality pieces that were to last forever) is forced out of business by a Swedish furniture and lifestyle giant—maker of the eponymous and ubiquitous billy shelving-system—and thus resolves to kidnap the company’s executive officer. Though the Swedish magnate could not be reached for comment, it appears the company’s reception of the film was a positive one as well—after all, they were frank enough to admit that we’d reached peak curtains.

ouroboros

A poor python at a reptile centre in Australia was captured on camera having managed to moult its scales (ecdysis) perfectly within itself and capturing itself in its own skin. The snake eventually freed itself, none the worse for the experience, and its moment of fame recalls the ancient symbol of the ouroboros (literally, serpent eating its own tail), interpreted as a primal force in both philosophy and later psychology, but maybe that is what these pursuits can lead to.

so dark the con of man

Though perhaps the more cynical readers will interpret this magnanimous gesture as some kind of karmic penance for either plagiarism or promoting a hoax as academics (or both), but we nonetheless thought that this news item was pretty keen: one popular author is commissioning the digitalisation of some of the rarest manuscripts on esoterica and early incunabula of holy scriptures in order to donate them to the on-line world, including the definitive authority on Hermetic wisdom. Check out the article from Quartz magazine to find out more about these precious documents and their historic context.

fesche may never happen

Though we don’t reside in the deepest heart of stereotypical Bavaria (wir sind Franke danke) and try not to employee too many regionalisms, I found that I had encountered beforehand every one of these words and phrases—with the exceptions of “pfiat di”—an abbreviation of “behüt dich Gott,” bye-bye from God be with thee, and fesch, meaning chic, appealing. I was not able to learn much more about the etymology of the Bavarian term (although it was a lyric in a song sung by Marlene Dietrich in 1930) but did make me think about fetch from Mean Girls, when one character is accused of trying to start a trend by making up slang. I wonder if fetch was not completely fabricated, after all. “Stop trying to make fetch happen; it’s not going to happen.” Check out the whole list from the Local, Germany’s English daily.

transposed and truncated

Seeing these reclaimed fragments of porcelain transformed into a line of “translated vases” by Korean artist Yee Sookyung struck me too as a contrast to the Japanese tradition called kintsugi (金継ぎ)—the golden repair, wherein prized pottery is not discarded but rather elevated like a reliquary and enshrined with precious joinery and whose battle-damage is highlighted as sound beautiful and proud. Yee drew her inspiration for this series, whose forms evoke to me the notion of ancient fetish figurines, from the practise of her native potters of tossing out the factory-seconds or pieces deemed otherwise imperfect. In a disposable world, even if one cannot tease out the æsthetic, one can reliably find at least the therapeutic and the venerating in bothering to mend something. One can find out more about the artist and both these traditions at Colossal.