friday matinee massacre

For those of you playing along at home, just to re-cap the individual, Devin Nunes—who drafted and dropped a think-piece that reinforces the narrative of the government agencies being infiltrated by ideologues of the Deep-State and are conspiring against the Trump administration not only wrote the memorandum himself, ordered de-classified and released to the public by Trump (propelled by the momentum of a twitter storm) against the wishes of the Federal Bureau of Investigations since it could not be expected to rebut this characterisation without disclosing classified and privileged information—was the same individual who in April of 2017 was temporarily removed from the investigation into ties with the Russian oligarchs and possible meddling over disclosure of classified documents to the White House he had obtained from the White House.
Trump was convinced that Obama was spying on him via his microwave oven and Nunes later rejoined the Committee. This was our Friday Matinee Massacre—paralleling the way Watergate pivoted after Nixon’s series of firings. To see what could come next, one need only look to the beleaguered Turkish people under their despot Erdoğan whose purges have not stopped and have intensified recently after medical professionals and academics (already under assault) are being ostracised and alienated for the smallest perceived infractions and anything that does not please the ruling party. Those found afoul in the public sector are not only summarily dismissed from the jobs, they are also not allowed to seek any government-sponsored assistance, and blacklisted—atomised as it were from contacts and social support—are either impoverished or imprisoned and have to resort to selling off their possessions and property to survive. These changes tend to creep up on you and we tend to miss the gradations until they’ve become so ensconced that it’s difficult to regain liberties and trust we’ve sacrificed.  We have to try and stay a few plays ahead.

red rover

Kottke directs our attention to a small but truly breath-taking gallery of photographs that the semi- autonomous Martian rover Curiosity (previously) has amassed in the first two-thousand sols (the measure for the time it takes for the fourth planet to orbit the Sun, slightly longer than our mundane equivalent). It does given one pause to appreciate how sharp and clear these images (approaching half a million) beamed back are and that we can explore an alien world with such a degree of awe and intimacy that we might expect for remote yet very terrestrial terrains.

southern exposure or defaced blue ensign

Via Futility Closet we learn that from 1889 to 1968, the flag of the British overseas territory of the Turks and Caicos islands displayed a stevedore working between two piles of salt (representing the chief trade good of the time when the Admiralty decided that the Caribbean islands needed a distinctive banner) with a sailing vessel in the background.
Upon review, a helpful bureaucrat—perhaps ignorant of the geographical location and the main export of the island group—shaded the leftmost pile as to suggest the door of an igloo. The correction endured until a royal visit prompted an update, changing the coat of arms to feature the islands’ symbols—a conch shell, a spiny, indigenous lobster and a native sort of melon cactus whose flower resembles a fez and bestowed the Turkish name on the smaller landmass, with the native Taíno words for a chain of islands, caya hico, making up the remainder.

choux de créteil

Completed in 1974, Messy Nessy Chic acquaints us with the Brutalist concrete ensemble of apartment towers dubbed Les Choux (the Cauliflowers) due to the distinctive balconies, which residents were encouraged to grow gardens on in hopes that the community would become a self-sufficient utopia.
Indeed the neighbour that architect Gérard Granval created for the south-eastern suburb of Créteil had everything that its dwellers could want for—a cinema and a shopping centre—and was designed to uphold principles of minimising one’s ecological footprint and discouraged gentrification by admixing a population of students with people of various income levels and social support reliance. In 2008, the Ministry of Culture recognised the group of ten cylindrical buildings as piece of architectural heritage. See a vintage promotional video of the grounds and a few other structures created by Granval at the link above.

tincture

Colossal introduces us to the colour-classification system that was devised by a German geologist called Abraham Gottlob Werner to create a standardised nomenclature for describing minerals and then expanded by Scots painter Patrick Syme to include subjects for students of Nature in 1814—which the Smithsonian is reissuing. Each poetically-named hue cites occurrences in the animal, vegetable and mineral domains, and a copy of this volume accompanied Charles Darwin on his journeys in the HMS Beagle. Like with the rich and precise language that heralds use to describe armorial bearings, before photography and the general portability of information, accuracy of transmission was paramount for identification and faithful reproduction.

bell, book and candle

From Valentine’s Day through mid-May, Washington DC’s Hirshhorn Gallery is reviving the political-charged projection of Polish-Canadian monumental artist Krzystof Wodiczko [UPDATED], first put on display on the museum’s façade in October of 1988.
The massive image of a clutched candle and a clutched pistol between a row of microphones was interpreted as a backlash to Regan-era foreign policies and gunboat diplomacy at the waning end of the Cold War—which I don’t think anyone saw on the horizon back then—is being presented as part of a wider exhibit on the 1980s when art became a commodity and the artist an influencer, a pivot that still defines and informs our notions of contemporary art.

perturbation

Exploiting some of the same technical achievements that enabled the precision measurements sensitive enough to detect passing gravitational waves as they ripple through the Cosmos, as Slashdot reports, researchers at the Goddard Space Flight Centre have demonstrated that they can radically tune up the resolution in their search for the signature distortions that exoplanets would have on its host star. This level of refinement means that the hunt for Earth-sized and smaller rocky worlds would be much easier to carry out. To make this experiment a practical exercise would require an observatory that’s built to stability standards that have not been trialled in the field of optical astronomy, shuddering or settling with less tolerance than an atom, but it is nonetheless an attainable goal.

tanpopo

Spoon & Tamago features the delicate and wispy structural art of Yusuke Aonuma who has selected a very ethereal, ephemeral media to work in the parachute-like seeds of dandelions (タンポポ, tanpopo). His last exhibition in Tokyo which invited guests to gently blow on his creations to watch their reaction and imagine what it would be like to drift away on a breath but more showings are scheduled for later in the Spring.