moskvich xrl

Via the always engaging Things Magazine, we are introduced to one commission by the design genius Raymond Loewy (see previously) that failed to take the world by storm as so many of his other innovations and interventions had in the Москвич XРЛ (the model sequence standing for Experimental Raymond Loewy—see more about numbering conventions here), designed and engineered in 1974 as a flagship, global automobile for export markets to demonstrate Soviet talent in the field. Production problems condemned the concept car, however, and only models and mock-ups were ultimately produced.

die erste internationale dada-messe

Lasting through the end of August, the first Dadaist art exhibition opened on this day in Berlin in 1920, the movement having originated four years earlier during the war with the establishment of a bar in Zürich called the Cabaret Voltaire—invoking the namesake’s view that society was a theatre of arrogance and error.
The original salon and adherents only lasted for six months but parallel associations and artists like Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp (alter-ego of Rrose Sélavy) helped forward this approach to the discipline and practise which rejected sense and meaning and was a counterpoint to Expressionism—which espoused the global conflict as judgment from God and an earned punishment. Bertolt Brecht joined the Dadaist as they held a touring art fair through major German cities, the playwright styling himself as an engineer in line with the overarching idea that works of art weren’t more ingenious or inspired than technological creations and were amenable to fusion and recombination.

out on the wiley, windy moors

Initially inspired to create her rhapsodic tone poem at age eighteen after viewing a decade old made-for-television adaptation of the author Emily Brontë’s sole novel and then compelled to refine her vision for the song and choreography after reading Wuthering Heights and learning that she, Kate Bush (see previously), and Brontë shared the same birthday (today 1818/1958), the eponymous song about the requited but unconsummated love affair between Catherine Earnshaw and the tortured Heathcliff, whom Earnshaw returns to haunt in the second part of the novel was recorded in the summer of 1977 but it release was delayed until the end of January 1978. Despite this postponement and calculated competition, however, it rose quickly in the charts (Bush was the first female performer in the UK to reach this ranking with a self-written piece) and became an instant—though sometimes divisive—cult classic. A subsequent music video has inspired fans to hold annually “The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever” events (usually held in mid-July) across the globe with crowds cos-playing as Bush the artist in a gauzy red dress and perform the dance moves from the video in unison. 

minitel

Debuting in Saint-Malo on this day in 1980—ceremoniously decommissioned on the anniversary of its going on-line in 2012, the French videotext service called Médium interactif par numérisation d’information téléphonique was the most successful (see also here, here and here) prior to the introduction of the World Wide Web that eventually displaced it. Nation-wide by 1982, users could search telephone directories, chat, send and receive email, consult maps, conduct stock research, check bank accounts and make train and airline reservations—and naturally access pornography. At its apex around 1999, there were over twenty-five million users out of a population of sixty million with over nine million terminals (note the AZERTY keyboard layout) in circulation.

whistle-stop or i am the operator with my pocket calculator

Via these chiptune renditions of arrival and departing flourishes and leitmotifs used in Japanese railway stations (see also) we learn about train music (発車メロディ), composed in such a way as to prime the senses and move passengers, whether daily commuters or reunited families. Probably the first instance of such a jingle and musical cue and accompaniment dates back to the mid-nineteenth-century with Charles-Valentin Alkan’s Le chemin de fer, an étude that gave the same signals.

o-double-good

File under justice deferred—I suppose—and perhaps voter disenfranchisement made right but the South Korean branch of a cereal giant is releasing a green onion (쪽파 ) flavoured version of one of its signature brands in response to the results of an online “election” held back in 2004 in which breakfast fans held a run-off ballot between duelling candidates Chekkie and Chaka—with the former pledging to bring more chocolate to the cereal and the later added scallion.
Sixteen years ago, Chaka, according to exit-polls, pulled into an early and decisive lead, leading the cereal company, rather nonplussed with the prospect to purge over forty-thousand votes from the results, citing security reasons. The company (see previously) had committed similar election tampering in its Japanese market too by again siding with chocolate even though wasabi was the people’s choice by a landslide. Advance taste-testers of the limited edition that will be available in supermarkets from 1 July laud this small victory for democracy and a good idea (I wish we could annul this orange drink and I know where my partisan affiliations lie) but find that the cereal lacks the distinctive savouriness, umami (감칠맛) that the real article conveys

dynamic web pages

Via Mx. van Hoorn’s Cabinet of Hypertext Curiosities (see previously) we are not only treated to a nice oddity in this vignette called OMFG Dogs! set to this splendid chiptune soundtrack, quite reminiscent of Hamster Dance, we also learn that the inspiration is Carola Häggkvist’s 1991 Eurovision Song Contest (see also) winner Fångad av en stormvind—Captured by a Love Storm, appropriate for both this horde of puppies and the Ms. Häggkvist’s energetic, besuited backup dancers.
These are linkages web artefacts well worth checking out for something out of the ordinary and waxing nostalgic for the old, weird interwebs, a disappearing legacy and something worth conserving and treasuring (as much what is given a pedastool on any given platform) rather than consigning to oblivion, supplanted by the polished, pedigreed and present.