chronogram

As much as these days can seem rather untethered, time still marches forward and Messy Nessy Chic brings us a thought-provoking survey of some of the myriad ways that civilisation has tried to regulate and legislate the cycles of the Sun and Moon.
One will encounter some of the earliest attempts to figure human reckoning, superstition and experience with cosmology and the progression of the seasons—and whether indeed time’s arrow isn’t a flat circle that brings everything around again, to efforts to install decimal time (or at least one that followed more regular rules) and the French Revolutionary Calendar plus other ways of resetting the clock. A chronogram, incidentally, is a headstone, plaque or commemoration that one sometimes encounters with those seemingly random capitalised or illuminated letters, like in the more straightforward epitaph for Elizabeth I of England: My Day Closed Is In Immortality—or, MDCIII corresponding to 1603, the year of her death or in lengthier passages called chronosticha on buildings that relate a parable and record when construction was completed.

over the hedge

Clad in eight kilometres of hardy, living hornbeam (Hainbuche Hecke) local architectural studio Ingenhoven has recently completed its landscaping of an office block in the heart of the city of Düsseldorf (previously), creating Europe’s largest green façade. Although as is the problem with most bold architecture is that it’s mostly lost on the occupants and can only be properly appreciated from afar, above, it is nonetheless the sort of innovative intervention that we need to see developed and while probably not half so sustainable, the neat hedgerows askance look like a vineyard and seem ideal for the city.

conversational implicature

First encountering this lesson on the “hidden rules of conversation” until I took the time to view it, I was assuming that it referred to the unwritten order of precedence for adjectives which English speakers follow and whose violations are called out—a fascinating if not narrow phenomenon in its own right, but subject tackled—quite well, the cooperative principle, the attainment and sustainment of effective communication, speaks to something fundamental to the nature of language—reinforced again by disregarding the above norms of exchange. The basic guidelines that define this pursuit of a social goals and consensus-building—as opposed to rhetoric and sophistry are known as Grice’s Maxims—as set out by H.P. Grice (*1913 – †1988): try to make only the contributions to the conversation that are confidently true, relevant, succinct and orderly. It was really engaging to note how much of our speech and correspondence can be implied and what mechanisms act as a leveller for assumptions, intuitions with those shared shortcuts being a vital and integral component for efficient communication.

the house around the corner

Born on this day in 1951 (†1999) in Melbourne, Howard Arkley became famous in art circles for his airbrushed depictions of the vernacular interiors and architecture of suburbia.
Having taken up an artist residency in Paris early in his education, Arkley realised that the trappings of home and the aspirational grammar of house-proud and prized real estate were a sort of formalism and energy that could be harnessed—perhaps to certain audiences—as handily as any of the past movements in art and design and these spaces could be celebrated and elaborated upon rather than escaping from them. Arkley had his big break when commissioned to execute a large mural, Primitive—a landscape coursing with cactuses, masks and tattoos, and then got to paint a carriage for the Victorian Ministry of the Arts and was invited to exhibit in Venice and Los Angeles. Shortly after returning to Australia from California, Arkley died from an accidental heroin overdose, a habit he’d kept a secret.

dorfgebiet

Exploring a newly discovered footpath (previously) that meandered along the periphery of the fields, I came across this beautiful though seemingly strikingly impossible to plan and envisage panoramic vista of our village. It’s not taken from an impossible angle but when a settlement has been allowed to grow slowly (or not) by dint of topology and location but rather it is quite rewarding and privileged to find such a vantage point.

lusofonia

Comprised of over two-hundred and seventy million people across the globe that share a linguistic or ethnographic connection to Portugal and its formerly extensive imperial holdings, Lusophone Culture Day is observed today in Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, East Timor, Goa, Macau, São Tomé and Príncipe and Cape Verde.
The designation is derived from the Latin term Lusitania (after the demigod Lusus, companion of Bacchus, the deity of wine and divine madness), the Roman Iberian province that roughly corresponds with modern Portuguese borders. Comunidade dos Paísesde Língua Portuguesa—the Community of Portuguese Language Countries—representing the commonwealth of diaspora selected this day during a summit in 2005.

the magicks of megas-tu

Following the previous episode and originally pitched for TOS, the October 1973 adventure finds the crew of the Enterprise on an alien world in a parallel dimension where magic is common practise instead of science and are placed on trial for humanity’s complicity in the Salem Witch Trials, subpoenaed to appear by a devil-like being called Lucien with near omnipotent powers. The officers of the court are not pleased that Lucien let the humans know about their planet and letting them dabble in spell-casting and are resolved to condemning both him and the crew for their transgressions.
Captain Kirk is able to successfully make his counter-argument, pleaing that mankind has advanced far since the seventeenth century and urges the judge show clemency—crucially, for Lucien too.  Convinced by this act of sympathy, the Enterprise is dismissed and allowed to return to their dimension. In the end, it is revealed that Lucien is synonymous with and the embodiment of the Abrahamic concept of Lucifer, this moment of dénouement being somewhat of a compromise since the creators wanted to feature an encounter with God as they had later wanted to do with the franchise’s first big screen adaptation—a pitch-script that itself never materialised in the form they had wanted.