merrie melodies

As a coda to this day’s events, our faithful chronicler, Doctor Caligari, directs our attention to the story behind the animation studio United Productions of America (UPA), which originated over striking animators under contract with Walt Disney (who infamously denied the guild the right to organise) and a sense that animated works weren’t meant as a medium for anthropomorphising nor a reflection of the constraints—however well executed—of real models and ought to forward and promote an air of abstraction and cartoon physics. Outside of the studio system, UPA could undercut the competition and garnered contracts to relay the education and training syllabi (within budget) and established itself as a foil to the cinematic realism and didacticism of Disney fairy-tales.

sufganiyot!

Via Miss Cellania for the Festival of Lights (which begins at sunset today, 25 Kislev) and runs through nightfall on 10 December), we are treated to the musical styles of a cappella group Six13’s rendition of “Bohemian Chanukah,” which includes some historic and cultural background of the holiday. The first verse begins:

Is this the eighth night
We light with the family?
Recall with great pride
Our escape from Greek tyranny?

Kindle the lights
Remember the Maccabees
How did those five boys
Lead us to victory?

5x5

village détruit: exploring nine ghost towns in northern France—via the inestimable Nag on the Lake 
   

¤: : a short animation celebrating the obsolete coins of the member states now using the euro

no longer part of the squad: the art of unfriending prior to social media—via Things magazine

onomatopoesie: a conservancy for endangered sounds—via Coudal Partners’ Fresh Signals

holidays are coming: a primer on Advent season—a movable, malleable fest

my beautiful laundrette

On a quiet day with a peaceful overcast pall, between walks I visited a derelict shopping centre which has a working but very much under-ultilised laundry room attached.
I am happy that it’s there for my personal use.

It’s usually pretty deserted at any time but this day profoundly so and I took the moment to appreciate the aethetics of empty spaces and the symmetry in repetition and redundancy.

I think the fact that was never afforded a glimpse of this place, in contrast, as somewhere bustling or inadequate for demand—just a convenience not yet swept away, makes the stolid lines of machines, prone to breakdown and only now have the “out of order signs” placed by the maintenance staff and angry patrons now gone, just and mostly, and the facilities fully rehabilitated resound as an unintentional art space itself.  I got the washing done in more tranquility than usual.

orgelpositiv

Having enjoyed the framing and composition of Robert Götzfried beforehand in his series on German bowling lanes, we appreciated learning thanks to our fellow peripatetic Things Magazine that the intrepid photographer is still very much active with new collections including some truly outstanding specimens of pipe organs with other subjects to be found at the referring links above.
A positive or box organ is one built to be more or less mobile if not march—from the Latin ponere “to place”—and wouldn’t be part of the elaborate interior facades of buildings—which themselves were a Mid-Century Modern revival in church and concert hall symphonic architecture (called the Orgelbewegung, the Organ Movement) that was especially strong in the US and Germany in the 1950s.

pirate radio

Digging through the archives (always an advisable course of action) Waxy finds and shares this monograph from Kotaku recalling how listeners in Bristol within the sound of the broadcasted squelch of data could “download” computer programmes to the cassette drive from the Radio West’s show Datarama during the early 1980s.
Can anyone remember doing this?  I certainly recall running a programme from a cassette tape but never one captured on the airwaves.  This and similarly transmissions became a forum for sharing programmes, games, MIDI music and even digitised images before the development of modems and more advanced storage formats for home computing.  Relatedly, I came across another neologism that came a bit after this phenomenon in the form of prosumer—a term that sounds at least to my ears as a more disdainful way of describing an enthusiastic early-adopted.  Carrying some negative connotations of being amateurish and readily surrendering money on something untested, expect through test-marketing, I am kind of glad glad it fell out of use.

6x6

snow globes: a new holiday tradition to us—sending Street View Christmas cards

ammartaggio: a for the nonce Italian Word of the Day in tribute to the InSight touchdown

appellation d’origine contrôlée: a detail world atlas to explore gustatory landscapes in detail—via Pasa Bon!

condominium: a library straddling the US-Canadian border has become a venue for emotional family reunions for those (we all are) affected by the Trump administration’s immigration policies—via Super Punch 

orden mexicana del águila azteca: the Mexican government presents Trump’s son-in-law with its highest honour reserved for foreign dignitaries

jantar mantar: an incredible eighteenth century Indian astronomical observatory whose architecture previsions Brutalism 

principal organ

Germany’s vice-chancellor suggested to France that the country should turn its permanent seat on the United Nations’ Security Council into one for the European Union as a whole.
The five permanent members, China, France, Russia, the UK and the US—all World War II allies, were appointed to prevent the outbreak of future conflicts and share power with ten other member states that serve on a rotating basis, but the five have the crucial power to veto and block resolutions of the supranational governing body. What do you think about that? It is unclear whether Paris would be willing to abdicate in favour of the EU, and critics of the UN hierarchy call this unconditional power undemocratic and leads to gridlock and inaction. The United States, infamously not a part of the League of Nations (the UN’s predecessor) and the conspicuous absence was considered a big factor in the failings of the organisation, refused to join the UN in 1945 unless it was guaranteed a veto.