woodstock

Maria Popova of Brain Pickings directs our attention in a thoughtful and expansive book review of graphic artist Chip Kidd’s recently published programme and kind memoir that imparts a great sense of reverence and goodness for the touchstones of Charles Schutz’ Peanuts characters.
The enduring success of the franchise comes about as perhaps for the humanities one of the longest running autobio- graphies and confessionals, Schultz claiming he was not only Charlie Brown but a little of every character, Snoopy included. Not only does feature explore the complexities portrayed with a sometimes conflicted and existential gang as only Schultz could create—a vexed bafflement on par with Hamlet serialised, but there is also a touching account of how the Peanuts reflected current events and fears over segregation in the States and brought in the character of Franklin in response.

nuance and nudge

Mental Floss has a funny and informative comparison chart of how emojis are rendered differently on different devices, and the deviation from the norm seems quite significant for much of the core vocabulary.
It’s really interesting to think that we rarely stray from our familiar, native ecology and might never appreciate how one meaning is subject to code-switching (alternating between two different syntaxes) in a sort of meta-communication. Of course, it is humorous rubbish that our short-hand might become garbled but the general ramifications might become something broader in terms of precision and understanding.

5x5

wiki, wiki, wiki wiki-room: Wikipedia’s agnostic, philosophical co-founder is a healthy skeptic of the developing product

format-wars: after four decades, Sony is retiring Beta-Max

non-verbal: as an encore of the facial recognition algorithms that guessed one’s age, there a new application that produces an emotional composite from one’s expressions

cast-offs: as a fashion-statement, Dutch designer folds newspapers into disposable shirts you’d think twice about throwing away

thin white duke: David Bowie gets down on Soul Train

timeliness, objectivity and narrative

Building strong partnerships with leading museums and educational institutions around the world to help bring the iconography and language of modern art to the broader, internet dwelling public, the clearing house Artsy is wonderful resource for discovery and triangulation.

Learning enough to pique one’s curiosity to learn more about the inter- connectedness of the community and their contemporaries—through the lens of their portrait of Dorothea Lange, for example, whose evocative Migrant Mother (probably for most one of those archetypal images that we hold in the quiver of minds) captured while under commission for the American Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, but there’s really a more elusive, evasive quality in this photograph and its framer that settles after the initial, unmediated impression. The network of related artists—most of whom I’ve never heard of but seem quite worthy of further investigation—imparts context, but it’s really taking a step back, through biography and scrutiny, that helps to disabuse one—after a fashion—for what we as an audience might take for granted. I think I’d rather conflated Migrant Mother and the haunting blue-eyed Afghani girl from that National Geographic cover in my mind—making the Depression-era photograph colourized—perhaps because the identities of both subjects was once anonymous but are now identified: Florence Owen Thompson and Sharbat Gula. It takes a commitment on the part of the viewer, which is I suppose what powerful and memorable art demands, to see the humanising portrayals and to take something too away from the setting. Though history and poverty always best themselves, it is impossible to imagine the backdrop of abject poverty and starvation that the government attempted to stave off through resettlement and relocation. This scene also conjures up another one of Lange’s programs—documenting the forced internment of Japanese and other foreigners, which was suppressed at the time. I’ll be sure to visit this resource again to get my bearings and discover someone new.

gasworks gallery

The ever inquisitive Nag on the Lake has a nice vignette about the creative repurposing of the elegant, Victorian girders of the Pancras Gasholder to frame a nice park in London, which reminded me of the Gasometers we’ve encountered reinvented and venues for a wide variety of displays.

Not a meter but rather a container, like a water tower (which are also beautiful works of architecture), the function of these mammoth structures was to store a large volume of natural gas in situ ready for local use—to power gas lighting originally and then for heating. When more and more gasworks became redundant (though some are still in use in many areas for balancing pressure), municipalities faced challenges in reclaiming the real estate as the business was a dirty one but there are quite a few notable and creative solutions that incorporate the original casing, like apartment blocks in Vienna, or rather famously the Gasometer of Leipzig, which now hosts a visual panorama (das Panometer) that displays—across a huge canvas of some thirty meters by one hundred meters, the largest photographs in the world, accented by light and sound effects and sweeping vistas.

golden years

Though governments still will enunciate the fact that a huge class, cadre will reach retirement age all at once and stop contributing to state pension schemes and leave the labour force all at once—which is the greater threat to those funds solvency—it seems more convincing to instead raise a spectre that all can relate to, perhaps out of fear of derision should one group (to which a majority of officials surely belong) be made to bear the entire burden.

Increasing longevity is cited as the prevailing argument for raising the retirement age, and while many people are living much longer on average than the sixty-five years of age that was suggested in the late nineteenth century as a social safety net was stitched together, that milestone was understood as the threshold of feebleness and general uselessness and rather not as the mark whence one had contributed his or her share to the system and could enjoy the next third or more of his or her adult life in retirement. Notching up the age redefines sixty-seven or however much it climbs as the new redundancy and further fails to respect the fact that there are profound differences, dependent on one’s employer and career-path, in benefits and retirement packages. Those best equipped and willing to keep working are reaping those years of good custody and care, and those who continue working are the fittest among us to begin with. On the other hand, those compelled to keep up their jobs because their pensions would provide insufficient income or are just counting the days have not only been robbed of a sense of purpose, no reciprocity lays ahead. What do you think? Though the welfare and will may be there to increase our useful life-spans, it seems to come at the expense of our Golden Years.