a chicken in every pot

In these days when the overwhelming majority of Americans are either experiencing grave job insecurity with housing and healthcare all bundled together or a hero and a hostage to a broken, exploitative medical delivery system that’s been pared back to maximise profits by eliminating any sort of buffer, Jamie Zawinski—proprietor of San Francisco’s legendary DNA Lounge, a dance hall and live music venue—shares a long dormant memory of a comic panel from 1990 called Give Me Liberty with the president doling out a Christmas turkey for all.
The recollection doubtless jarred awake by the insistence of Trump that his signature block and auto-pen appear on the physical stimulus cheques mailed out to the underbanked (a problem exacerbated by first restricting the fiduciary role of the postal service’s geographical spread and now threatening the institution with insolvency to further isolate and disenfranchise) that will cause a delay in receipt of this much needed, be it insufficient relief—twice the amount that the Obama administration distributed but to remedy a crisis untold magnitudes greater than the recession precipitated by the sub-prime mortgage bubble. It’s a tragically apt vignette of self-promotion and deflection as surrogates for leadership and cohesion. …And two cars in every garage.

the day of the sun: juche 109

Deriving its name from the meaning of Il-sung for “becomes the Sun”—one of the revolutionary leader’s noms de guerre, this day stepped in founding mythology marks Kim’s birthday, the founder and Eternal President of North Korea and has been an official holiday, the highest annual observance since 1968, proclaimed as the titular celebration in 1997—three years after Kim’s death. Simultaneously the country adopted the regnal Juche (the concept of self-reliance) calendar, reckoning dates from Kim’s birth in 1912 onward. The usual festivities have been cancelled this year with citizens urged to hold customary merriment and thanksgiving at home.

high maniera

Though my first impressions of this image was that it was an exorcism or spellbinding in progress, I appreciated being invited to consider another perspective, redirected to its inclusion under the category of Accidental Renaissance—see previously here and here. I do hope that very, very soon that this picture falls out of context and we’ll have to go to great pains to try and explain what’s going on here. Have you captured an unintended masterpiece of grace and proportion?

≒

I really liked these clever reminders to maintain a respectful and healthy distance from the design studio Nosigner as part of the public service campaign Pandaid using jarringly memorable and relatable metrics, like one to two Beatles, depending on one’s stride—from an iconic scene which incidentally public works have taken advantage of people staying in-doors to give the Abbey Road zebra-crossing (previously) a fresh coat of paint. Although the specialised symbol makes perfect sense if one thinks about the other characters and ideograms that the equal sign could be mistaken for, we also particularly liked learning that this variant shown for approximation (≈) is utilised in Japan, the Koreas and Taiwan.

autostadt

Via Things Magazine we discover that adjacent to the flagship Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg there are two museums, ZeitHaus, one dedicated to the brand’s greatest automotive hits with pavilions full of Lamborghini, Škoda, Bentleys as well as their own cars—with the other wing surely worth the visit as well, is filled with prototypes, test models and show cars that never went into production for the driving public. Exhibits include the 1990 Vario, a concept, a transitional buggy test-marketed prior to the introducing of the new Beetle. See more unrealised roadsters at the link above.

sıcak caz

After being directed to Open Culture’s nice primer on Japanese jazz sessions—that I could play as ambient music all day—from Nag on the Lake, I was excited to see an expanded, cosmopolitan coffee break set pieces from the same DJ Zag Erlat playing vinyl grooves from Africa, Brazil, Bollywood, Russia and Anatolian rock from his native Turkey. Most of the selections date from the 1970s and make me want to go crate-digging at the first opportunity. Sample all the genres of Erlat’s Analog Journal at the links above.

when somebody’s the president of the united states, the authority is total—and that’s the way it’s gotta be… it’s total and the governors know that

Whilst Trump—who previously begged off any responsibility for the way that corona-crisis has unfolded and dismissed it as a hoax and refused to impose a nationwide shut down, leaving the states and municipalities to sort that out themselves and squabble over life-saving equipment as medical infrastructure becomes overwhelmed—now proclaims dictatorial powers, despite Amendment X to the Bill of Rights regarding delegated rights and devolution to the people and the GOP traditionally staunch proponents for that principle, and will order the states on reopening economic activity and relaxing restrictions on movement and congregation. Governors and mayors, despite this assertion, are coordinating efforts and pledge that health outcomes and scientific modelling will determine future courses of action and not the politics of incumbency.

himmelsspektakel

During the pre-dawn hours of this morning in 1561, there was a mass sighting of an unexplained celestial phenomenon involving what was perceived to be the aerial battle of hundreds of unidentified flying objects in the skies above Nürnberg.
Though widely dismissed as hysteria reinforced by the contemporaneous publication, documentation of the event in the city’s broadsheet for circulation by printer Hans Wolff Glaßer and explained away as the convergence of otherwise mundane atmospheric phenomena, aspects of the reported skirmish by witnesses of darting bright spheres, tubes globes, crescents and cylinders followed by the appearance of a large black triangular object that occulted the rising sun before crashing in the countryside is pretty tantalising and is a textbook close-encounter of the second kind. A similar sighting occurred five years later in the skies over Basel on three occasions in late July and early August.