arrivals and departures lounge

Though it was endearing to see a family undertake a cancelled trans-Pacific vacation or to tour airports with a sense of nostalgia and Wanderlust, Singapore Airlines’ plans to take travellers aloft on actual flights to nowhere both starting and ending at Changi airport (the city state bereft of domestic travel opportunities) seems wasteful and perverse. What do you think? Circling the runway is very resource intensive and an economy that need to maintain such circulation seems childish and like a bit of grifting that we’d do better to move beyond and not let a cloying attempt to save a market with no rehabilitation further take down the environment with it.

grotte de lascaux

Discovered by eighteen-year-old Marcel Ravidat and three friends when his dog, Robot, fell into a hole on this day in 1940, the four companions descended the fifteen-metre-deep shaft into the underground gallery believing it might be the legendary secret entrance to Lascaux Manor and were astounded to find the ancient cave paintings covering the walls.
The depictions dated at around seventeen thousand years old are produced with pigments that suggest an advanced knowledge of deriving colour compounds as well as an understanding of scale and perspective and include human activities, abstract symbols and a host of animals, felines, horses, bears, deer and aurochs. The site has been closed to the public since 1963 once it was determined that the influx of visitors was causing the rapid deterioration of the paintings though many at scale replicas have been created.

rules of the road

Via Strange Company’s Weekend Link Dump, our attention is turned toward traffic planning and the evolution of the parking lot as a cultural and ethnographic study, guided and informed largely through the direction of businessman and civil engineer William Phelps Eno (*1858 – †1945).
Despite (and perhaps because) never learning to drive himself, Eno was an early champion for traffic control and regulation—mostly non-existent before his pioneering proposals for London, Paris and New York, and helped to move street signs, cross-walks, one-way streets, roundabouts and traffic islands into mainstream adoption.  Framing regulations, like right-of-way and priority Eno also helped frame the language: to rank was to line up vehicles one behind another aligned with the kerb—what we’d called parallel-parking—whereas to park, was to stand (left for “dead” as opposed to a “live” vehicle continuously occupied by its driver and prepared to move it for the accommodation of others) one’s car at an angle to the street. These new rules quickly revealed the need for dedicated parking lots and streets were becoming more congested and less navigable due to vehicles left unattended. Municipalities attempted to restrict the rank and file to “live” automobiles only but this became unenforceable as ownership increased beyond those whom would or could engage a chauffeur or valet and instead began allocating spaces for off-street parking.

doom loops

Via Cory Doctrow’s Pluralistic blog, we are directed towards an excellent, circumspect column from Ed Yong outlining nine reflective and recognisable factors driving the pandemic spiralling spread in the United States—as that country’s death toll surpasses two-hundred-thousand with no signs of improvement or organised mitigation measures on the horizon.
How many of these factors resound for you—not just as a criticism of others but a trap, a fallacy that you’ve fallen for yourself to a degree? We especially appreciated mulling over what Yong frames as the “serial monogamy of solutions”: only paying attention to one intervention at a time and rejecting it for its perceived short-comings when a success, prevention takes a multi-pronged approach. We can also relate to the regression to personal blame—beggaring one’s neighbour for not taking the situation and rituals as seriously as you have decided it is within the Overton window (which is also a heuristic for examining creeping normalcy and regression to the mean) of margins of behaviour—not flagrant violations thereof—that have been put out (or not) by authorities. One not only needs a coherent, universal policy informed by science to strengthen individual convictions (no matter how faithfully I wear a mask and avoid crowds, I can’t do that for others) one also needs to redress systemic problems that are obstacles to recovery, like social programmes and access to health care.

8x8

filling the frame: long-exposure photographs taken at a distance of the torii of Japan by Ronny Behnert 

kartellamt: Germany proposes law requiring interoperability to break up tech monopolies and hurdles to data portability

shortlisted: this year’s finalists for Comedy Wildlife Photo—see previously

button power: a century of pin-back badges as cultural iconography

playlist: enjoy the latest mixtape from JWZ and DNA Lounge

a splash of colour: artist Camille Walala on public works for London’s Mural Festival

wakon-yōsai: Meiji Restoration-era woodblocks present biographies of Western artists and innovators—see previously

i don’t want to live on this planet anymore: superlative atmospheric and astronomical images from an annual competition—via Miss Cellania’s Links

september 2020

Via Laughing Squid, here is more drone footage of the fiery orange skies—which many automated lenses and filters try to correct for to the frustration of those trying to urgently document and communicate the apocalypse—over San Francsico in a short clip set to the musical accompaniment of Hans Zimmer’s soundscape of Blade Runner: 2049. I wonder for how many more iterations that that dystopian sequel will be advanced—2099… Many more frightening images at the link up top, juxtaposed with this Los Angeles montage from earlier this summer.

deceptive cadence

Back during the early 1980s composer William Basinski heard a snatch of music on the airwaves and quickly recorded the melody that it inspired and filed it away for use in a later project. Sitting forgotten until the summer of 2001, Basinski rediscovers the recording and plays it back.
The tape, however, was old and brittle and playing it back, it began to disintegrate both visually and audibly—Basinski, fascinated, captured its vanishing. Nearly finished remixing his Disintegration Loops at his New York studio on 11 September, his epic became an elegy. Fast-forward to the summer of 2019, Robin Sloan just acquainted with the moving orchestral piece—we discover courtesy of Things Magazine—had a neural network interpret the work with some surprising results and invites others to listen and contribute to his Integration Loop project.

blick von williamsburg, brooklyn, auf manhattan, 11. september 2001

Captured by photojournalist Thomas Höpker with five people sunning, relaxing along the shore of the East River in the foreground while a cloud of smoke billows over the World Trade Center in the background—seemingly oblivious is not the callous portrayal that controversy after it was first shown to the public in 2005 as part of a retrospective of fifty of his works but is a chance juxtaposition caught at just the right moment.
View the whole frame here—respecting the artist’s rights and the fact that it again seems provocative without context. The composition has been compared to works like Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1558 Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (that is actually a trope and the subject of several paintings at the time—not of Icarus’ actual crash but of the 1560s). Höpker was en route to Manhattan, having abandoned his car and proceeded on foot, continuing to take pictures.