bailout package

Whilst searching for some other documentation, I came across the notification that I would be receiving a stimulus check in response to the economic fallout of 2008 sub-prime mortgage crisis that the world just barely recovered from and gleaned no lessons from—not that this present collapse is comparable in kind or ramifications that project out much further and irrevocably, and left thinking that more than a decade on that a paltry sum only marginally bigger—or even at twice the relief will not have the impact significant to restore even the precarity that most of us are accustomed to much less the blinding robustness that impels us to stammer forward without too much worry. It’s sort of like that sinking, searching feeling one gets when trying to remember what one gave and received last Christmas, even though, at least like in response to the recession, there was a measure of thought, charity and appreciation in those gifts. What do you think? Considering that the US government’s response—one part of a multi-pronged—barely makes the rent for individuals already digging themselves out of a desperate deficit much less the medical bill that prospect of treatment might cost for the uninsured, other, ongoing interventions are needed for not just quelling the revolt of working-class against the feudal lords—which I think much of the sport and spectacle of stock market and similar venues is dedicated to, placating those seeking to preserve the status quo but for moreover building a progressive and inclusive economy and safety-net that is immune to the allure of recidivism that lets privilege and birthright ultimately trump equity.

7x7

a healed fracture: anthropologist Margaret Mead fields a student’s question about the earliest hallmarks of civilisation

money tree: the 1964 New York World’s Fair American Express Pavilion

pivot point: watch the ministry for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment shift their rhetoric on COVID-19

byob: a virtual bar in Saint Petersburg lets people socialise while eliminating the possibility of contagion

dragula: an 80’s jazzercise video synchronised to the Rob Zombie song (in turn the namesake of Grandpa Munster’s race car)—via Memo of the Air

chaotic good: a social-distancing alignment chart

delightful creatures: with the city under lockdown and the waters waning cleaner, dolphins are returning to the canals of Venice after sixty years

равноде́нствие

This moment marks the point when our friends in the northern hemisphere experience the vernal or northward equinox when the apparent motion of the Sun crosses from the celestial southern hemisphere on its March towards the Tropic of Cancer. After this transition, for those for whom this day signals the start of Spring, the daylight hours gradually start getting longer.
At extreme climes (high latitudes) during the equinoctial day, the Sun is seen to move along the horizon, marauding at dawn and dusk and extending twilight to a couple of hours in duration. Idiomatically, the card means that the new season is just around the corner—literally in Russian, on the tip of one’s nose.

frühlingsbote

комбат

Born on this day in 1899, prominent Soviet photographer Max Vladimirovich Alpert (†1980) is best remembered for his iconic image Kombat (short for battalion commander).
Though the date and the subject are not known for certain, an investigative reconstruction of events undertaken in the 1970s are reasonably certain that the political commissar—the Politruk, the officer with the responsibility of political education of their assigned unit—of the battalion who took command after the actual Kombat was incapacitated, Aleksei Yeryomenko, is shown rallying his troops for a counter-attack against the German offense. Research dates the picture to 12 July 1942 on a battlefield in Luhansk (then called Voroshilovgrad) Oblast in far eastern Ukraine, skirmishes intending to halt the advance Fall Blau (Case Blue, the codename for this summer campaign and continuation of Operation Barbarossa) towards Stalingrad.

a clean, well-lighted place

While this meme of the iconic Nighthawks in the time of quarantine has been circulating, it is worthy to note how the artist Edward Hopper (*1882 – †1967) survived some pretty tumultuous and transformational times—including World War I, the 1918 Flu pandemic, the Great Depression, World War II and the onset of the Cold War—and through that lens regard his portfolio, many of those works—Nighthawks included address the subjects of loneliness, privation and isolation.

reintegration

Captured by Pulitzer Prize winning Associated Press photographer Slava “Sal” Veder on this day in 1973, the moment of reunion on the tarmac at Travis Air Force Base in California between a just released US prisoner of war, held for five and half years in Hanoi, and his family—captioned Burst of Joy—came to symbolize the beginning of the end of the US aggression in Vietnam and signaled the time for healing and reconciliation to start.
Among the first soldiers to be redeployed in Operation Homecoming, the spontaneous, happy image belies a grim reality, like the war itself (see previously)—there being nothing redemptive to the latter tragedy even in terms of good optics, with the marriage on the verge of collapse due to the stress of the soldier’s confinement and infidelities and reflects its opposite side as well with all the lives of Vietnamese and Americans that were beyond restoration. The couple reunited under orders, it was later revealed.