6x6

subraum: underground photography from Gregor Sailer—via Coudal Partners’ Fresh Signals

hängematte: an inviting house of hammocks in Vienna’s museum district

this too shall pass: inspired biodegradable packaging for foodstuffs

audio artefacts: Conserve the Sound curates disappearing noises of obsolete technology

demersal zone: oceanographers discover a hidden deep water reef off the Carolina coast in the Atlantic, via Slashdot

your show of shows: the New York Times shares a nice tribute to academic and playwright Neil Simon 

exergy

Late-stage capitalism with its cloying, insatiate greed is lurching towards its final days, according to research carried out at the behest of the United Nations, we learn via Slashdot, the economics of exploitation no longer sustainable or alluring. Climate change, leveraged indebtedness and the growing gulf of inequality are now being understood as convergent factors and the course of depletion rather than enrichment has been complicit in making the planet a more inhospitable and impoverished place.
We cannot just turn off the compulsion for growth and acquisition—the world’s poor deserve the lifestyle of the well-off just as much as we do—but we can reframe it in a transformative way if government policy supports directing energies to sequestering carbon with as much zeal and abandon as was given to extracting it in the first place, we might not only survive but also thrive going forward. The notion that capitalism always seeks the cheaper alternative over social good is not exactly a false dichotomy but plotted over the landscape of the immediate returns and the fiscal year myopic, mundane short-term thinking rules the moment and casts a seductive net that portrays ruthless cheating and bilking as business acumen.

durchstoßenes herz

On this day in 1988, the until-then world’s worst air-show disaster occurred at the US Air Base in Ramstein when jets of the Italian Air Force display team (Frecce Tricolori) collided while attempting a formation called the piercing-heart (il Cardioide) before a huge crowd of some three-hundred thousand spectators, killing sixty seven audience members and three pilots with hundreds more sustaining serious injuries.
The scope of the disaster revealed some grave logistical and compatibility shortcomings between the coordinated response between German and US military emergency services and this confusion and delay (since redressed through investigations, reform and closer cooperation) were the potential causes for more fatalities. Formed in 1989, Rammstein took its name from the catastrophe, with the original billing for the band being the Rammstein-Flugschau. It is disputed whether the second “m” was a misspelling or a reference to door-stops, Rammsteine.

ius gentium or a separate peace

On this day in 1928, the France and US sponsored Kellogg-Briand Pact—officially the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy—was signed in Paris by representatives of Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Germany, British India, the Irish Free State, the UK, New Zealand, Poland and South Africa to go into effect the following summer.
Named for the authors and chief negotiators US Secretary of State Frank B Kellogg and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, as the treaty was framed and acceded to outside of the League of Nations, the treaty remains in effect with Barbados ratifying it (along with most other countries) as late as 1971. Though failing rather spectacularly to prevent World War II (thirty one states had signed on by the 1929 effective date, including Austria, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, Spain, Switzerland, Japan, Italy, China and the Soviet Union), aggressions and occupations continued apace but without any formal declarations by the treaties signatories, it did subsequently encourage diplomacy through its requirement to establish conciliation commissions (normalising sanctions and tariffs as weapons preferable to military force) for conflict resolution and provided the framework to prosecute war-crimes, conceived as crimes against peace.

hazy cosmic jive

Via our peripatetic friend the Everlasting Blört we are introduced to artist and entrepreneur Todd Alcott who creates rather clever, anachronistic pulp fiction/pop culture mash-ups in the form of book covers. With special attention to the generally lurid imagery and typeface, Alcott has employed these compositions to—among other things—encapsulate songs and albums of musicians who arguably were informed by the Midcentury Modern aesthetic themselves to create lovely librettos of David Bowie, The Talking Heads, New Order and others.

the wombles

While this market and era of television was not exactly my formative and cultural-informing shibboleth, I did nonetheless appreciate Curious British Telly’s analysis of lesser-known vintage children’s programming.
I do recall seeing an episode or two of ITV’s Hattytown Tales (1969 – 1973), which I remember being quite keen and well composed (distributed by the production studio FilmFair who were known for this distinctive style), as stop-motion animation of anthropomorphised hats that recursively resided in hats that resembled themselves. Do you recognise any of these other titles?

nüshu

Sixth Tone brings us a poignant story about a disappearing tradition whose last caretakers are to a degree contradictory to the reason that the nüshu system of writing was contrived in the first place.
As opposed to the thousands of logographic characters of standard Chinese, nüshu was developed as a syllabaric simplification, a phonetic alphabet, for women to use to communicate and record their thoughts around the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries (the Song and Yuan dynasties) without the benefit of formal education that was afforded to their male counterparts in the county of Jiangyong in Hunan province. As the Cultural Revolution ensured that access to education was universal and equitable, the secret and confessional form of writing became—which locals refer to as “long-legged mosquito script”—antiquated and the last proficient and native user, a woman called Yang Huanyi, passed away in 2004, nüshu is now only known through study and research, instead of being passed on from mother to daughter as a provisional form of literacy Unfortunately, despite its new-found visibility with on bilingual shop signs to appeal to the tourists, it’s no longer the exclusive outlet of the under-valued but initiated (the in-grouping of the out-group) and much of what’s preserved with this resurgence is distorted and incorrect.

rip john mccain

Long-serving US Senator from the state of Arizona and two time presidential candidate John Sidney McCain III has died a day after announcing that he will stop treatments against a particularly cruel and aggressive form of brain cancer at age eighty-one.
One of few members of the Republican Party willing to openly criticise senior leadership and recognise the damage that dereliction of duty does—identifying those to blame rather than root problems and much less solutions, an abiding responsibility that I think was central to his career and outlook. The derision of idiots and cowards have no place in this honourable person’s legacy (it matters where one winds up) and if anything, a voice of dissent that’s not been silenced will serve to give others the grit and the courage of conviction (or shame in some cases—there’s small choice in rotten apples) to do what’s right.