looky loo

Via the ever-interesting Everlasting Blört, we are treated to a rather insightful peek into the dirty and idle differences of gender public-private expression as revealed through an ethnographic look into the graffiti scrawled in restroom stalls.
Clinical and behind a sanitary screen, this study comes complete with evidence and methodologies and illustrates a stark difference between men and women (in a segregated environment) when it comes to messaging, content and audience. One wonders what other factors, biological accommodations, etc come into play and how these differences are magnified or muted in other venues. 

6x6

someday my prince will come: life lessons gleaned at the Princess Academy

decolonise this place: a collection of maps presented from an aboriginal perspective, via Nag on the Lake

bathyscope: a ten-hour montage of mesmerising ocean footage

if you just smiled more: an epic discussion thread uses classical paintings to illustrate everyday sexism

the master and margarita: a compelling reading recommendation for Mikhail Bulgakov’s Soviet satire

берёзка: the floating step of a ballet ensemble founded by choreographer Nadezhda Nadezhdina 

performance triad

Goals and milestones are important and something to focus our efforts but sometimes marketing or marketing ennobled as a rule of thumb can establish norms that make the underlying mission of well-being more opaque—rather than a positive and progressive marker.
One such metric is the adage of getting in one’s ten-thousand steps daily—something that I ascribe to and challenge myself to surpass, but it turns out that the origins of the idea go back to a 1965 campaign by a Japanese pedometer manufacturer (see also), capitalising on the fact that the ideogram, character for ten-thousand (pronounced man or ichi-man) resembles a person taking a stride: 方.

googie

Curbed’s Los Angeles bureau introduces us to the Chinese-American architect that helped establish and inform the Atomic Age style of vernacular architecture that originated in Southern California and manifested itself as Streamline Moderne and populuxe elsewhere in the pioneering personality Helen Liu Fong (*1927 – †2005).
Iconic works including Norms restaurants, Pann’s coffee shops and Bob’s Big Boy among other roadside attractions, many casualties of progress, Fong’s most celebrated and culturally significant project, helping a community on its recovery from internment and ostracizing treatment was the Holiday Bowl in the diverse Crenshaw neighbourhood of the segregated city, the lanes serving as a civic anchor for four decades. Much more to explore at the link above.

non molto bene

The self-promoting human haemorrhoid, Steve Bannon, despite a recent session of speaking of truth regarding his former client’s (lack of) wealth, business acumen and candour that’s nothing terribly insightful and the conclusions that we haven’t reached by ourselves, will have to look elsewhere for a campus for his planned “gladiator school for cultural warriors” other than the for thirteenth century former Carthusian monastery outside Rome.
The Italian government did not dash the plans of the disgraced ex-propaganda minister out of ideological reasons (and to be a legitimate businessman in Italy, I’d imagine there’s more requirements for aplomb and a stricter dress-code), but rather that this grifter took a page from the playbook of his real estate mogul past boss (maybe it was Bannon’s idea in the first place) and tried to short-circuit bidding process for receivership of the state-offering, the property, and attempted to secure his first year’s lease using forged banking documents. Let’s hope that the financial world has learned the lessons from Trump’s enablers Deutsche Bank and tells these hucksters and carnival barkers vada via.