colophon

Mostly I tend to think that one should not mess too much with an established look, no matter how basic it is since it’s a part of one’s identity and recognition—although polishing and experimentation within limits, I think is perfectly acceptable.

We’re presented with pretty good and serviceable templates for use, and I suppose too that there comes a point of departure, best taken in small steps mostly, when one becomes a bit more sophisticated and curious with web-design to take strokes at something more than the standard quiver. 

Even if that’s just a bit of kerning and alignment that’s otherwise too subtle to notice. I wouldn’t want PfRC to become too busy and crowded and would like for the page to look sleek and composed. I am getting a little better—or perhaps just more conscientious, about placement and position and hopefully too making positive progress on having the patience and taking the time to fully unwind a thought, which still some times comes across probably as obtuse and obscure.

Content and scope aside, I did want to develop a nice new masthead that worked with the background as it is, nothing very ornate and overpowering but something a little more personal and unique. Matching the weight and character of a typeface to the idea (or lack thereof) that one has in one’s head can grow challenging enough on its own, and I respect those type-setters and artists who can turn out something very professional and know what tools to use with instinctual prowess, but try to add a cohesive image to that and I can certainly see why marketers, free-lance and consortiums, are vying for bids and commissions.

I am also learning why they say imitation is the purest form of flattery, though being derivative is usually asymmetrical. Though after some searching for inspiration and trying on own to conjure up something original and associative, I eventually settled on incorporating a logo from the Independent Wine-Makers of France (Vignerons indépendants de France), since wine and cheese go together, although there are plenty of other good pairings too.

In the process, however, I stumbled across plenty of motivating artwork and posters of a certain vintage and style, like the series on California cultivars (which incidentally replenished a significant portion of French stocks when the parent vines were killed by a blight in the 19th century; these vineyards then took decades to recover from the wanton neglect of the Prohibition Era themselves).

There were also several classic travel posters and campaigns that incorporated local, regional cuisine with allure, providing some good ideas and nostalgic impetus that will be certainly worth revisiting later as well.

diy or artisan class

In the month of October a century ago, the term, though not the concept, of Do-It-Yourself first entered our vocabulary. A magazine called Suburban Life introduced the words that have become short-hand for so many ideas in 1912, encouraging people to undertake their own projects, especially in carpentry and clothes making, sort of in counter-revolt to the spread of manufactured goods but also for reasons of economy.

The movement, really taking off in the 1950s through today, has continued to compliment and build upon as well as offer an alternative to the prefabricated, one-size-fits-all market. A price can’t be put on creativity and ingenuity, but moreover, there’s the sharing, show-and-tell aspect that has no comparison to commercial crazes that’s become a force all its own: found in home-improvement television, as well as the stores that keep crafters and makers well supplied, entrepreneurial websites like etsy and of course the subsets of cooking, independent film and music, blogging, mending, darning and repurposing and all the stories that go with them. In honour of this most auspicious and enduring culture, I plan to learn a new skill and create something this month. What crafty abilities of your own would you like to strengthen?

word-association or antonymy

I am far from sure that the semantics of opposites are a universal conception, ubiquitous across most languages—maybe big and little or long and short are passable everywhere but dog and cat or cat and mouse or even good and evil are not acceptable answers elsewhere. Maybe there is not always a real and handy word to express the idea of an opposite, though the concept is understood.
Doubleplusungood, or Penelope weaving and unweaving as she waits for Odysseus to return. There are too very fancy kinds of operative opposites, like hyperbole and its countermand litotes, exaggeration and understatement—though the same terms are not employed in the study of conics. Recently, I came across another pairing that I liked, although I am not sure quite satisfies the definition: phobia and soteria (φοβός και σωτηρία, the root of salvation). This is taken not only in the sense of the duality between fear and calm, but rather with the difference between almost clinical morbidity and paralysis and relief and the saving-grace called deliverance, being not afraid in proportion with the disproportionate aversion that the phobia represents. Not everyone has an unsalvageable disliking of specifically spiders and snakes nor generally of crowds or the great outdoors, but I think there would be in a clinical definition, should psychology care for what’s right and not just what’s wrong, of soteria complementary gradations of relief and unfear.

encounter at farpoint

One of my favourite bloggers, Bob Canada, presents a very thoughtful and well- constructed anniversary tribute to Star Trek: The Next Generation, which premiered on 29 September 1987, exactly twenty-five years ago today. It is hard to believe it has been that long ago and does make it seem like something’s a-miss with the whole space-time continuum.

buddhist “iron man” found by nazis is from outer space

In the 1938, an archaeological expedition was sent from Nazi Germany to Tibet as part of Heinrich Himmler’s Ahnenerbe programme, a project that sought to validate Germany’s hegemony through cultural and historic research of what was considered Aryan and some very creative and convenient revisions.

Much of their work involved fascination for mysticism and the occult—real Indian Jones stuff, and on this mission, members of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and scientific community brought back a trove of artefacts, including portraits of supremacy (studies of silhouettes and cranial measurements), seed samples from native grains, the robe of a Dalai Lama, volumes of holy books yet to be translated, and one iron rendering of the god Namtösé, one of the four heavenly kings of Buddhist mythology, which was catalogued as the “Eisenmensch.” The actual headlines used could not be improved upon.  They probably brought back this one statuette because it had a swastika, a traditional symbol of good fortune, inscribed in his chest but were unaware of the most unusual material that it was formed out of. University researchers in Stuttgart (where the idol ended up warehoused and nearly forgotten, sort of like the closing scenes where the Ark of the Covenant ends up) have just matched the thousand year old composition of the extremely hard iron to extraterrestrial origins and the makeup of other scattered fragments of the Chinga meteorite impact event over China and Mongolia eons prior. This was certainly not the first example of ancient peoples using meteoritic metals or possibly revering them by is probably the only graven image worked from such a piece from space.

post-meridian or l’isola del tesoro

Here is a brilliant graphic for the Treasure Island music festival held in the bay of San Francisco, on the artificial island of the same name built to host the World's Fair and Golden Gate Exposition and was used later as a naval station and numerous times as a film-set. The over turned ship is of course a visual reference to the Pirates of the Caribbean saga. I find that series infinitely watchable, especially for its rather convoluted storylines, and that particular maneuver to escape the Doldrums and the prior marooning of the captain on a deserted isle where he was made to face splintering alter-egos reminds me a lot of the Umberto Eco of the long, complex reminisces woven for the shipwrecked and stranded nobleman from The Island of the Day Before (L'isola del giorno prima). The ill-fated expedition was seeking out the Prime Meridian and anchoring skies, in an astronomical sense, and the forsaken character, alone with his memories, believes the archipelago straddles the International Date Line, with neighbouring shores just out reach in yesterday and tomorrow.

discontiguous

A few weeks ago, during the run up to municipal elections, I noticed this billboard—for what turned out to be a study proposing that Bavaria could manage for itself independent of the rest of Germany, posted on a concrete column at the intersection that tends to host political posters, though not exclusively.

My confusion subsided and I hear a bit about the arguments therein on a radio interview. There is no active separatist party or movement. There is, however, a more vocal coalition for the partition of Franconia, given its separate and historic cultural identity, from the Free State. Such sentiments are dismissed at the peril of the metropolitan entity, I think, but I did not think anymore about talk of secession until Scotland’s polite bid for autonomy started to figure more prominently in the news. Now, the Spanish region of Catalonia is pressing for self-rule as the rest of the country is under threat of laming policies of austerity and a surrender of its own sovereignty to a larger, umbrella confederation. The borders of Europe respected today are heirs of a long and complex history of wars, dynasty, union and omission, and I wonder how economic insecurities might contest anachronisms and relatively recent consent to rule and tribute. The parsing of this patchwork of nations may return with popular support, but is it truly a disburdening to distance oneself?