port authority

Though we’ve previously encountered some of these fantastic, never realised plans for buildings and infrastructure in New York City as isolated proposals, like a gargantuan skyscraper by Antoni Gaudí or an elevated ten lane highway crossing Manhattan, having the chance to see many of this past visions as an ensemble superimposed on a scale-model of the great metropolis is completely transformational.
Among the many innovative and utopian ideas that we were introduced to by this nicely researched and curated exhibition to be held in the Flushing neighborhood of the bureau of Queens the urban air authority was our new favourite—a massive airport and runway built over the docklands along the Hudson River.

co-morbidity

Some cancers are more pernicious than others oncologists are finding due to bacteria that can metabolise a certain strain of cancer-fighting medications taking up refuge in tumours and gobbling up the drugs before it can be used to combat the malignancy. Developing resistance to traditional treatments is potentially catastrophic and if we lose the efficacy of all antibiotic remedies we’ll find our healthcare reverting to that of the Middle Ages but this seemingly novel resistance through a sort of unintended symbiosis certainly bears out further study and may be more prevalent than expected—all the more reason to protect what resources are in our quiver.

sign and shingle

An exhibit at San Diego’s Mingei International Museum features sixty nineteenth century kanban (billboards or hoardings) commissioned by shop-keepers from professional artisans who handcrafted them. These Edo-era pieces were designed to be attention-grabbers and often were crafted in the form of the wares on offer to allow shoppers to navigate crowded commercial streets and markets intuitively, like the pictured canting kanban for a spectacle shop. Be sure to visit Hyperallergic at the link up top for more curious curations.

omphaloskepsis

One hears the phrase navel-gazing bandied about quite often in a (mostly) figurative sense to call-out egotism or indulging in self-absorbed pursuits, but we failed to realise that contemplating one’s belly-button is an ancient prescribed practise rooted in yogic and Eastern Orthodox traditions. Mediating on the navel—the seat of the sacral chakra—is a heuristic tool that aids in reflection on the self and the wider Cosmos or inducing a trace-state.

any port in a storm

Taking advantage of a constitutional crisis that has promulgated the dissolution of parliament (I can remember when a nation’s collapse into chaos garnered more coverage), neo-Nazi internet refugees behind the publication of The Daily Stormer have taken up residence in Iceland, and not because of the country’s pledge to create a sanctuary of internet freedoms but rather because enshrined within that legal framework it is stipulated that only the executive can revoke an .is domain and it appears that they’ve won at least a few weeks’ worth of reprieve since Iceland is lacking one. As repulsive as hosting such a presence might be, Iceland ought to be proud of this technicality and have some extra motivation to form a stable coalition to be rid of this parasite soon. The present editor-in-chief to the publication is heir to Julius Streicher’s (Gauleiter of Franconia) original Der Stürmer that focused chiefly on the problems of miscegenation, an unofficial weekly digest for useful idiots which became a growing embarrassment to the Nazi party who was nonetheless executed in Nuremberg for war crimes.

ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny

Researching another topic, I came across the line that reportedly one of der Führer’s favourite go-to sayings was that “politics is applied biology,” misattributed to nineteenth century biologist and educator Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel, who did remark that the social sciences—a much broader retrospective of human affairs—are instances of applied biology.
It’s also another mark against him too that he espoused rather racists theories couched in the language of science but without scientific basis, captured in the title phrase (that may sound familiar) that an individual’s biological development is a summary and reflection of its evolution as a species—based on the imaginative though equally incorrect premise that human embryonic stage resemble a progression through more primitive forms of life—which I recall being taught in elementary school. Haeckel’s vast body of work and contributions to life sciences aside from these significant missteps define the way we view the natural world and his place in the scientific community (like his favoured non-Darwinian Jean Baptise Lamarck who privileged exercise and atrophy over natural selection) ought not be excised from history. Haeckel did a lot for scientific literacy, having introduced the public to the rich ecological diversity at scale all environments support and prefigured the ascending understanding of genetics by introducing concepts like the stem-cell and the missing link.  In his way, Haeckel also started the discussion ethics in biological research and experimentation and how humans might one day soon not only be able to understand but also to edit Nature. Despite the fact that Nazi propagandists selectively exploited some of his research and he reinforced the prejudiced views of race of the day, the political movement that Haeckel founded in 1905 centred around pantheism was disbanded in 1933 and disparaged—along with all other partisan groups—and Haeckel would be dismayed to see his teaching perverted had he lived to see it.  As a war correspondent late in life, coined the term “First World War” for the beginning Great War, a term that did not come into common use until its post-mortem six years later, worried that this European conflict would spread. Despite having the same ambiguity in both German and English, we did not need to wait until there wasn’t a First World War II for it to be clear whether people feared for an expanding global battlefield or whether the richer countries of the planet were fighting amongst themselves, as that classification scale was a Cold War invention.

othello

The social construct of race—a figment though its derivative racism is very much a reality—was coined with the debut performance of the stage play Thomas Middleton’s The Triumphs of Truth on 29 October 1613 in which the character of an African king addresses the audience and remarking upon the amazement that beset the faces of all these white people.
At the time of the playwright’s career, the colour lines were already coming into sharper contrast but that sense of otherness had lied just as much between the English and the Irish or the Italian and the Sicilian and was without respect to racial identity. The language and concept of race grew out of tribalism (ancestry) as a way to justify colonialism, enslavement and secure international trade—but there was not always a time when such superficial and broad classifications of one’s complexion was accorded so much power. What do you think? Though as handmaidens of ideas that we’ve matured beyond, prejudice and bigotry no matter how unwelcome cannot be said to have outlasted their purpose—since one group will always want to claim dominance over another and needs divisive abstractions to these accomplish these ends—but perhaps by dint of the transformative and relatively very short histories of race politics we can again foster societies that don’t ascribe to such standards that foist affiliations on others by their outward appearance.