a clean, well-lighted place

While this meme of the iconic Nighthawks in the time of quarantine has been circulating, it is worthy to note how the artist Edward Hopper (*1882 – †1967) survived some pretty tumultuous and transformational times—including World War I, the 1918 Flu pandemic, the Great Depression, World War II and the onset of the Cold War—and through that lens regard his portfolio, many of those works—Nighthawks included address the subjects of loneliness, privation and isolation.

reintegration

Captured by Pulitzer Prize winning Associated Press photographer Slava “Sal” Veder on this day in 1973, the moment of reunion on the tarmac at Travis Air Force Base in California between a just released US prisoner of war, held for five and half years in Hanoi, and his family—captioned Burst of Joy—came to symbolize the beginning of the end of the US aggression in Vietnam and signaled the time for healing and reconciliation to start.
Among the first soldiers to be redeployed in Operation Homecoming, the spontaneous, happy image belies a grim reality, like the war itself (see previously)—there being nothing redemptive to the latter tragedy even in terms of good optics, with the marriage on the verge of collapse due to the stress of the soldier’s confinement and infidelities and reflects its opposite side as well with all the lives of Vietnamese and Americans that were beyond restoration. The couple reunited under orders, it was later revealed.

(d/p) · 10ⁿ

Not to discount the suffering of anyone or prematurely make assumptions on how this pandemic will conclude, it is refreshing that we are more willing to discuss death in perspective and possibly lose tolerance for any of loss caused by avoidable behaviours.
We don’t have the luxury of being precious. For example—via Slashdot—one study suggests that the government imposed lockdown and the general aversion to travel and socialising and the attendant net reduction in air pollution may in the end save more lives than limiting the contagion itself through distancing. Estimates place the annual fatalities worldwide from travel related pollutants at seven million. Divergent as these threats (albeit years of overexposure to smog probably put more at risk of developing COVID-19 by compromised lung function) are, it is worth investigating why we react so differently to each vector and let the latter support the sustainment of the former.

amabie

Via both our friends Spoon & Tamago and Everlasting Blört we are introduced to a timely and portentous yōkai (see previously) that presents as a sort of merfolk with three trunk like legs emerging from the sea to forecast either abundant crops or epidemic.
Pictured above is a late Edo era wood block print depicting an encounter in 1846 off the coast of Kumamoto investigated by local authority, whom were told by the creature that identified itself by name that good harvests would continue unabated for the next six years and should disease spread, display an artistic likeness of it to those afflicted to ward off sickness.  I can’t sketch so well and there are many better examples at the links up top from popular illustrators, but I figured I could at least share my contribution, thinking maybe we could all draw and share our own amabie (アマビエ) as an art therapy project whilst we self-isolate.

pyhä urho

Overlooking the possibly fictional but actually assigned patron Bishop Henrik (martyred and fêted on 19 January with a well-articulated legendarium of his own), a department store clerk of Finnish-extraction in the confusingly named town of Virginia, Minnesota lamenting that his homeland did not have a figure like Saint Patrick to celebrate their heritage and as a source of shared cultural cohesion and as an excuse to extend the general revelry (this year especially, please drink responsibly by staying at home or forever forfeit the right to be around other people hereafter) invented Saint Urho (hero) in 1956. Only known to diaspora (with the exception of the folklore and ethnography department at the University of Turku), Urho is variously credited with driving out the frogs (see also) or grasshoppers (with the command Heinäsirkka, heinäsirkka, mene täältä hiiteen! – Grasshopper, grasshopper, go back to Hell!—thus saving the grape harvest but inspiring acts that seem suspiciously like Springfield’s Whacking Day, incidentally on 10 May) and one is to regale themselves in royal purple and enjoy wine and/or purple beer so as to not mix one’s beverages.

fra banc to banc, fra wod to wod

Scotland’s new twenty pound note, printed on durable paper-like polymer continues the series the Fabric of Nature and as a security feature, the frolicking red squirrels’ fur glows under an ultra-violet lamp and showcases an excerpt from the sixteenth century Sonnet of Venus and Cupid by native poet Mark Alexander Boyd (*1562 – †1601), which Ezra Pound declared the most beautiful in the language:

Fra banc to banc, fra wod to wod, I rin

Ourhailit with my feble fantasie,

Lyk til a leif that fallis from a trie

Or til a reid ourblawin with the wind.

Twa gods gyds me: the ane of tham is blind,

Ye, and a bairn brocht up in vanitie;

The nixt a wyf ingenrit of the se,

And lichter nor a dauphin with hir fin.

Unhappie is the man for evirmair

That teils the sand and sawis in the aire;

 Bot twyse unhappier is he, I lairn,

That feidis in his hairt a mad desyre,

And follows on a woman throw the fyre,

Led be a blind and teichit be a bairn.

graffito blasfemo

Believed to be among the earliest surviving depictions of Jesus was rediscovered in 1857 through excavation work on the Palatine Hill of Rome at a site that was the palace of Caligula prior to becoming a finishing school and it during this phase of the structure’s history some pupil presumably etched the graffiti into the wall plaster depicting a young man prostrating to a donkey-headed figure on a crucifix with the caption, apparently meant to mock a fellow student, ΑΛΕ ξΑΜΕΝΟϹ ϹΕΒΕΤΕ ϑΕΟΝ “Alexamos worships [his] god.” The standard method of execution until abolished by Constantine in the fourth century, Roman society found it incredulous that Christian would follow a figure so basely undone, conflated with the belief by contemporary Romans (around the second century) believed that Christians and other religious minorities practised onolatry—that is, donkey worship. In the next chamber, there is a seeming retort with no accompanying image but the inscription in Latin and by a different hand—presumably the victim of this ridicule: ΑΛΕξΑΜΕΝΟϹ FIDELIS—that is, Alexamenos is faithful.

all sales final

Via the inestimable Nag on the Lake (and a lot more to sample there), we were pleased to pour over and study this collection of ephemera of antique receipts, bills of sale and company letterhead from Whitechapel. Not only are the illustrations and typography and the use of pre-printed stock brilliant, it is amazing to note what detail and narrative is captured in these varied transactions, from the conventions of assigning telephone numbers and telegraphic addresses to book to wares purveyed.