5x5

pastafarian: avatar of the divine flying spaghetti monster spotted underseas

umbrella corporation: a web search engine redefines it corporate profile

hall-tree and hutch: Dangerous Minds explores how sci-fi films require long, branching corridors

fun house: revisiting Lucas Samaras’ 1966 mirrored room installation

baumbastik: a visit to the small Alpine village of Neuschönau and the world’s longest tree-top trail

hand of glory

With the collapse of the banking system in Greece, a threatened haircut for private accounts and even the strict rationing of access to money, much of the affected population is understandably still wary of entrusting their wealth to any such institution. This lack of confidence and the physical lack of a safe place to park one’s money—the tycoons and magnates can be more resourceful and liquid, as the magnificent BLDGBlog inspects has led many stashing their cash and valuables under the mattress, and burglars are keenly aware of this shift.  Meanwhile, residents are resorting to creative methods of do-it-yourself security-measures in order to stave off or at least discourage break-ins.

I think that this practise and trend won’t stop at the borders and there will be an artistic revival in robbery and defense—skills that have very much atrophied as it was formerly more profitably and less risky to seek out victims virtually and at a distance or to simply exploit and abuse under a legal ægis—that, or just making neighbourhoods more gentrified. This scary and traumatic new landscape reminds me of some of the superstitious rites and rituals that I have encountered in my latest reading assignment: the Golden Bough, which goes into ethnographic detail over some of the totems and talismans that both crooks and potential victims employ.  The so called hand of glory—which sounds like a slumber party game, is a corruption of the word for mandrake root, which was also believed to possess paralyzing magical properties, but evolved into the ceremony of taking a desiccated, dismembered hand of some infamous master-criminal (although, like with the lucky rabbit’s foot not really a charm for the unfortunate rabbit, one wonders how the culprit was caught or lost that hand in the first place) mummified and given a candle to hold, which would supposedly render the inhabitants of the dwelling being burgled immobile. Various other gruesome candles made of the tallows of cadavers that met their fate in specific ways make the thief invisible or otherwise impervious and evade discovery or capture. As a recourse, victims could toss a voodoo doll, an effigy into a bramble bush to ensure that the thief would be caught and justice would be served. I wonder if in this new environment, where abstract things like a store of wealth becomes again made real, a regression that some of the sheltered, privileged classes will regard as positively medieval, new amulets and charms will be invented for the inventory of coping.

unit of account

After all the concerted efforts to take the wind out of the sails of the various movements that called for fundamental economic reform and the overhaul of usurious and predatory lending practises by shaming, as it were, the indebted with some kind of defective moral flagrancy and inability to curb one’s own spending habits—invoking the osmosis of trickle-down and sop-it-up finances, it strikes me as odd and ironic that this time out of any is called forth as a uniquely disparaging hardship. Invoking the historic notion of jubilee, debt-forgiveness, only illustrates—to my mind, that this problem has visited humanity many times before and modern times is inviting another great reckoning. The popular and somewhat intuitive account for the situation that we all recognise is that barter and trade led to the gradual invention of representative, fiat money as a unit of account and a store of wealth and then to the idea of credit and debt as a sort of virtual currency. And while such a progression seems plausible, I do not think we would have bounded our self-appraisals—the value of our civility to others or even placed a bounty on our not forcibly occupying the lands of another down to something of finite, quantifiable worth.
Plus the ethnographical evidence over an society ever taking the leap to bargaining one cow for a coin redeemable for fifty hens, an acre of pasturage or some repairs to one’s hearth and home as a matter of course is sorely absent and there was no such model economy, as far as we know. With the advent of monetary vehicles, such exchanges were reserved for settling a peace or arranging a proper dowry and union between families and gift-giving persisted on the intimate level—reciprocation and something owed being implicit although returning something of equal esteem would have been regarded, across all cultures, as an insult and as sign of settling accounts and wanting nothing more to do with the relationship. It seems that the progression is reversed and our self-worth looms just as large—only that just a select few—the one percent, have the luxury of creating wealth out of abstractions.  From little to nothing, infinite graces can be tapped and flooded, like the familiar parable of the tulip craze that caused the first stock market implosion or the selling of indulgences by the Catholic Church. Imaginative inflation is surely tethered to obligations rather than the accounting sleight of hand, compulsion and exploitation that buoy up the system. Debt and credit is mutually antagonising and though banksters and their ilk are hardly afforded a kindness, there is only a fast-drying well of sympathy for those on the receiving end of the ledger. Those who would dismiss the suffering of those reduced to poverty and desperation, the Greeks and the migrants that would pull everything asunder like their homelands, as a character defect, are themselves overestimating their obedience and abeyance, as it’s only a vanishing difference of a few tenuous degrees that’s purchased that security—albeit a false and vulnerable one. I would wager that many individuals crushed by debts—even many beaten down by inherited ones and knowing no other condition, would place a far higher price on regaining credibility and thriving than those who’ve merely managed to keep up with payments and appeasing one’s own creditors—which doesn’t seem like a very heroic moral high-ground after all.

awimbawe

Learning the other day that the coastal west African nation of Sierra Leone was so named by Portuguese explorers for how its promontory mountain range looked from the sea like a sleeping lion, I was struck about how little I gave much of a thought to the vast and variegated continent. Whereas the doo-wop song was originally a Zulu piece composed in South Africa, whereas I thought the name was a colour like Burnt Sienna, whereas I feel confident that I am not alone in this omission, and whereas I reserved a bit of a purchase on the region by knowing before all the dread news of refugees and communicable disease and blood diamonds that Liberia had a special relationship with the United States by having formed the vague idea that it was somehow founded by freed slaves, I suppose that most people out of Africa regard it as some sort of terrible incubator of the above ills.

While our sleeping lioness is no stranger to the usual litany of exploitation, corruption and mismanagement that’s understood somehow to be endemic—though recently and uniquely a seated government was ousted democratically and went away in abeyance with the vote instead of holding fast to power and there is a marked degree of religious tolerance, it is the overshadowing, cursorily familiar origin of its neighbour that tells this country’s story. Liberia, with its counties of Maryland, Mississippi and Monrovia, named for US president James Monroe, is rather a singular peculiar in the scramble of colonialism being that it was founded under the auspices of a society rather than by a European power. Though the membership of this society were committed abolitionists in sentiment and action (whose rolls of donors included Abraham Lincoln), the society believed, like the British sending power of Sierra Leone, that the solution lied ultimately in repatriation. Once the Empire had outlawed slavery at home and abroad, the protectorate of Sierra Leone came to embody a studious endeavour in sending Africans back to Africa, regardless of course whether the diaspora had lived in western, coastal Africa beforehand or whether they had been in Europe, the Caribbean, or America their entire lives. It really wilts whatever unformed and tenuous idea of Liberia I held beforehand, making it into a place of resettlement for individuals that could not be integrated into the milieu of polite society. Sandwiched between the British colony and the French land of the Ivory Coast, without the protection of a world power behind it, Liberia’s territorial integrity was under constant threat and suffered significant losses. This perception of neglect engendered feelings of resentment and disappointment with America.

5x5

markov-chain: a sub-reddit that harnesses the property of memorylessness by and for robots

memory & function (& memory): Nag on the Lake keeps us updated on what is afoot in Scarfolk, a township forever trapped in the 1970s

le grand huit: hundreds of brightly coloured café chairs form a static roller coast in Nantes

tempest in a tea cup: an interesting look at the anti-saccharine movement and the fickle sweet-tooth of Percy Bysshe Shelley who boycotted sugar and other staples that drove the slave trade in the Empire

spaceship earth: celebrating Star Trek’s pushing the envelop with George Takei

tow the line or beyond the bumper sticker

Via Neatorama comes a cavalcade of crap to proudly show one’s party affiliation for the rather crowded class of contenders. I feel much sorrow for our American friends and what they’re about to be subjected to—no matter who pulls into the lead, and I sincerely hope that the candidates had no input whatsoever into what awful, hokey merchandise that there names are attached to. I couldn’t imagine any of this going through the paces of an official endorsement.

I suppose some of these high-ticket, collectibles could be a way of individual donors getting around campaign contribution limitations, but I do not know for sure.  Take a look at the full emporium at Gizmodo in case you find yourself in need of a Clinton beer coozie or a Bush guacamole bowl or a signed copy of the US constitution by an independent candidate. Given these dynastic struggles, I am not even sure what decade it is over there.

© and so say we all

Featured on the ever-excellent Boing Boing, writer Glenn Fleishman explores the fascinating and unexpected struggle over copyrights, ownership and lapsed licenses through the lens of the infamous and unnaturally long-lived legal wrangling of the Sisters Hill and the Happy Birthday song.
Perpetuated by the descendants in hopes of securing royalties for each instance that the song appears in television or film—for which it’s conspicuously absent and usually replaced with a rousing and somewhat incongruous chorus of “For he’s a jolly good fellow,” the unsettled lawsuits have really overshadowed the professional lives and scholarship of the pioneering Patty and Mildred Hill, who were respectively, at a time when most women did not have vocations, an early childhood educational theorist and an ethnomusicologist. Patty even worked with German pedagogue Friedrich Fröbel, whose wooden unit blocks (Fröbelgaben) we all know, and helped to introduce the concept of these educational toys to the States. For a white girl, Mildred really had some soul and championed so called black music as a national treasure to be cherished. Later the sisters collaborated on musical compositions for school children, eventually producing the celebratory tune. No one is trying to rob their children and grandchildren of a birthright but this singular case (another type of block or brick, Lego, is maybe something comparable) illustrates a lot of the tricks behind creative-controls and the integrity of invention.

5x5

ration card: the wartime UK version of Monopoly had to make concessions to the fighting effort

cosmopolitan: beautiful overhead views of world cities

pet sounds: Cornell University digitised their huge library of animal calls and bird-song

sakoku or ttp: nineteenth century Japanese woodcuts of exotic, visiting Americans after America insisted on diplomatic ties

isobar: Stockholm airport invites passengers to experience the weather at their destination before departing