roaring twenties

In order to promote the national chain of cinemas reopening later this month, the US-based entertainment group hopes to attract throngs with the throw-back pricing of a century ago with tickets set at 15¢ a piece for the day.
About one-sixth of venues are set to welcome in the public and perhaps theatres can once again accommodate audiences safely and we sympathise with other operations that one has to scale for reduced capacity that was not built into their business scheme, though this does not seem to be the way to do it responsibly. Apparently rather than being driven by the assessment of public health experts, it was pushed by the topic of the previous post. What with the failed efforts to reopen earlier and all the grubby nickels and dimes changing hands, I think that this script for this marketing ploy was written by the virus and apparently is playing favourably to test audiences.

barrister, broker, billiard-maker

The classic of ostensibly children’s literature that contained the imaginative, nonsensical poetic interlude The Hunting of the Snark was original penned by Lewis Carroll in 1876 but was not in print in Russia until 1991—authorities having perhaps detected a subversive undertone to the rich allegory—
and is presently receiving a new treatment by Berlin-based illustrator Igor Oleinikov to project the “Agony in Eight Fits” through the lens of despotism and disaster with uniformed and besuited men leading the expedition. The illustrator that Carroll commissioned himself, Henry Holiday (*1839 – †1927, back cover shown, the Boojum, being highly dangerous and another made-up word, is the Snark’s true nature and will make the hunter “softly and suddenly vanish away, and never be met again”), for his initial publication also considered the poem a tragedy and full of existential angst and has been the topic of much academic analysis, deconstruction and debate, inspiring a great deal of other homages despite the author’s warning not read too much into it.

deception

Our gratitude to Fancy Notions for sharing and recalling us to these surreal Nancy comic panels,
which in turn enlightened us to the possible existence (or not) of a crypto-sequel to the 2010 science fiction action film co-produced by the couple Emma Thomas and Christopher Nolan (see previously here and here), though the cinematic successor to the original seems to be only the second instalment the way The Odyssey was for The Iliad. Watch the preview of the movie called Tenet (which is out in theatres or not) below and learn more at the link above but save the experience for the home box-office for the time being.

saint cassian of imola, pray for us

Fourth century tutor and teacher, Cassian—whose martyrdom is venerated on this day (†303), refused to make sacrifices to the gods of the Romans—as was ordered by Emperor Julian the Apostate (the epithet a gift of the church he distrusted)—and so was turned over to his pupils, judging that their education and emendation should be an effective prescriptive. Cassian was bound to a stake and the students tortured him to death, stabbing him with their pointed styluses—eager to get revenge for the punishments and trials that their teacher had inflicted on them. This act is recounted in several contemporary cultural sources including the Annie Dillard novel The Living, John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces and the namesake of a teachers’ lounge at the Bethel College of Liberal Arts in Kansas and the parable open to interpretation. Cassian is the patron of the commune of Bologna, México City, Las Galletas in Tenerife as well as educators, stenographers and parish clerks.

vertumnalia

Most famously portrayed in Milanese Mannerist painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s 1590 portrait of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II with a fruit and vegetable filter—Arcimboldo’s signature work as well, signifying the age of prosperity under his reign, Vertumnus is the shape-shifting deity of the seasons and metamorphosis and is celebrated with festivities (fasti) on this day on the Roman calendar.
Suitor of Pomona, the goddess of gardening and fruitful abundance—a hamadryad, that is a kind of nymph that lives in trees, Vertumnus seduced her in her orchard, having earned her confidence in the guise of an old woman, whom procedures to lecture her on the dangers of rebuffing advances, and this myth is considered to be the first Latin one, not derivative of earlier Greek traditions—the domesticated nature of landscaping and tending fruit trees perceived as too tame for the woodland spirits yet neither something as intensive—or fickle and dependent on the favour of the gods as agricultural activities. The god’s statue in a temple near the Forum Romanum was hewn from maple trunk and decorated according to the changing seasons typified by vestments made of the turning of leaves.

lilium martagon

Our thanks to friend of the blog Nag on the Lake for helping to identify a flower that I’ve encountered quite often in mid-June over a window of a few weeks during my walks in the woods. I had tried to research and learn what they were but having heard of an elusive and exotic local variety of orchid, I had pursued the wrong line of investigation.
The martagon lily (Türkenbund-Lilie, the epithet referring to the characteristic reflexed petals also derives from the word for a type of turban) has a range across Eurasia and is popular as a garden plant as well due to its long life span of fifty years and more. It was believed to have curative properties by practitioners of traditional medicine but is highly toxic to cats.

model 5150

Sharing the anniversary of its release along with many other events of great pith and substance including the sage 1869 proclamation of Emperor Norton I of the United States and Protector of México that dissolved and abolished political parties under penalty of imprisonment, as our faithful chronicler records, the first IBM Personal Computer (PC) was presented to the public on this day in 1981—its open source architecture (see also) and off-the-shelf elements attracted third-parties to create software and peripherals that were otherwise PC-compatible, thus creating a market and speeding adoption of office and home computing.

now that’s the ticket

Via Boing Boing, we are treated to a preview of the combined campaign poster for former rivals and contenders for the office of president of the United States of America which completes Joe Biden’s re-branding and represents only the fourth time a woman candidate was championed for national office by a major political party (see also, footnotes on number two) but crucially, the first time one prevails, we believe. Moving away from his solo work, for which Biden had previously used the more angular and sharp font Brother 1816, he and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris have chosen a newly commissioned typeface called Decimal from Hoefler & Co. (see previously)—the same foundry that created Gotham for Barak Obama’s run for high office.