gca68

On this day, fifty years ago President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed into law the Gun Control Act of 1968, which focused on regulating the firearms industry and owners by restricting interstate trade in guns and weapons to licensed dealers and exporters.
The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy nearly five years earlier prompted the legislation, which still languished in Congress and the Senate, when it was discovered that the president was killed with a rifle purchased by mail-order from a magazine. The murders of Martin Luther King, Jr and Robert Kennedy earlier in 1968 renewed the effort to change the law, which additionally mandated that buyers have licenses for and register their weapons and prohibited categories of persons, including felons and the mentally incompetent, from owning guns.

leaf-peeping

I took a stroll through the fields to the forest’s edge above our village watch the slow transition of the leaves to their autumn colour palette.  The sunshine was not as forthcoming as yesterday that bathed everything with a blushing golden hue in the mid-afternoon but the woods still put on a spectacular show for this opening act that is to be followed by several encores. 

untitled (questions)

Composed first in 1990, conceptual artist and collagist Barbara Kruger’s massive, declarative mural in Futura Bold Oblique that begs important and resonant questions will be reinstalled on the south wall of Los Angeles’ MOCO Temporary Contemporary building.
An anonymous donor is paying to have the installation recreated ahead of US mid-term elections and will remain up until at least 2020. The nine questions posed are anything but rhetorical devices and are as follows:

Who is beyond the law? Who is bought and sold? Who is free to choose? Who does time? Who follows orders? Who salutes the longest? Who prays the loudest? Who dies first? Who laughs last?

Learn more at Fast Company at the link above.

8x8

a benign and relatively common parasomnia: by an eerie coincidence, I experienced the “exploding head syndrome” drifting out of sleep this morning

let me reach, let me beach on the shores of tripoli: a look at the cultural impact and legacy of Enya Orinoco Flow

buchstabcenschrift: the rise and fall of Nazi Germany’s one time signature font—via Kottke’s Quick Links

moral compass: scenarios that make one wish for two trolleys

head in the sand: we are mostly ignoring dire and immediate climate-change warnings

god bless you, mister rosewater: Kurt Vonnegut, JR—sketch-artist

casualty rate: death by numbers examined from various angles

be a joyful rule-breaker: the reprisals of two interviews from Terry Gross and Pope of Trash, John Waters, made our day

velocità astratta + rumore

Arguably best known for his 1912 painting Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash which encapsulates all of the elements of Futurism—depictions of light, movement and speed, we are introduced to the portfolio of artist and educator Giacomo Balla (*1871 - †1958) via the serendipitous and unexpected discovery of murals from the artist, conserved for decades behind wallpaper and drop-ceilings.
Commissioned to decorate the fashionable and up-and-coming jazz club Bal Tic Tac in Rome in 1921, Balla’s racing vision of things to come matched the experimental nature of the musical acts and were feared lost to the ages when the property became a bank and was repurposed. In the near future, the space will become an exhibit hall. Learn more at the local—Italy’s English language daily at the link above.

whether ours shall continue to be a government of laws and not of men is now for congress and ultimately the american people

Tonight forty-five years ago, the Saturday Night Massacre occurred in the Nixon White House when US Attorney General Elliot Richardson refused the direct order to dismiss special prosecutor Archibald Cox, charged with investigating the Watergate scandal. Richardson resigned rather than interfere in the proceedings of the probe which advanced the deputy to the top lawyer position, William Ruckelshaus, who also refused to concede to the president’s wishes and was fired. Turning to the person in the fourth highest post in the Justice Department, Solicitor General Robert Bork, Nixon with some reluctance had his command obeyed. This display accrued for the first time a majority (though still very polarised) in favour of impeachment and Nixon two weeks later announced his intention to resign in lieu of being fired the following August