the past is another country

Two years ago—after the mid-terms—the Centre for American Politics and Design conducted a meta-survey of recently concluded political races and challenges for all types of public office to better understand the role of typography and graphic design in voting and campaigning, and are doing the same for every jurisdiction and elected official on the tickets for 2020. Explore some of the data and sample the logos (from president to dog-catcher and everything in between) included at Print Magazine at the link.

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bongo cat: a joyous, simple noisemaker—via Boing Boing  

der orchideengarten: Austrian fantasy-horror revue that prefigured and informed Weird Tales and related properties  

backscatter: spooky, simple photography techniques and visual effects to haunt one’s Halloween picture portfolio 

porto-potty: Austrian postal service issues a special, rather expensive toilet-paper stamp whose proceeds go to charities benefiting those impacted most by COVID-19 

llama glama: a llama-based webfont—via Pasa Bon!  

smitten kitchen: for this US Food Day (made-up as a counterpart to Earth Day but never really took off) a look into the recipe library of Georgia O’Keeffe plus others  

clean up on aisle four: glass-floor of a supermarket in Dublin reveals a millennium old glimpse of Hiberno-Norse history (see also here and here) 

flags and drums: young brothers in Pakistan play BBC News theme on the table

when the wind blows

Premiering on this day in 1986, the animated adaptation of the eponymous Raymond Briggs’ comic book—previously introduced to the public as a BBC radio play—marked the artist’s follow-on collaboration with the studio and directorship of Jimmy Murakami and musical stylings of David Bowie (Roger Waters of The Who thanks Dad Pink Floyd, Genesis, Squeeze and Paul Hardcastle also contributed to the soundtrack) after their 1982 success with The Snowman—another tune I regularly hum to myself. Based on Briggs’ own parents, the narrative accounts the efforts of a rural couple to maintain normalcy and survive in a nearby nuclear bomb blast. The attack portrayed was meant to be collateral from the escalating conflict of the Soviets in Afghanistan, and despite the bleak subject, the presentation encouraged viewers to stick with it until the end. Here is the trailer below and full version of the graphic novel read through here and the full score at the link. 

 

woad and madder

Courtesy of The Morning News and having only dared to ventured out to where the freshly-turned fields begin to remark on these colour-coordinated trees and their turning leaves, we quite appreciated this reflection on russet—the colour of peasants, foxes pelts and penance. 

In addition to the earthy and autumnal hues, in this thorough-going essay that explores the emergent colour—where the reds of blood, fire and ochre of the Caves of Lascaux and here in the dark ruddy-orange tinge of it—through fashion, poetry and sentiment—Biron from Love’s Labour’s Lost yearning for expression “in russet yeas and honest kersey [course woollen cloth] noes” and even Oliver Cromwell preferring a “plain, russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows over that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else.” And if the author’s column rings familiar in hue and cry—it’s the happy continuation of these previous instalments of colour stories.

anno mundi

On this day, sharing its anniversary with many events great and good, as our faithful chronicler reminds, according to astute if not somewhat creative calculations and biblical scholarship (see also from the day before) by Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland James Ussher (*1581 – †1656) the creation occurred either nightfall on the twenty-second (and by reckoning with that initial rhythm until the next sundown was counted as that, the first day) or more specifically according to some at nine o’clock in the a.m., the twenty-third of October, 4004 BC.

Though hardly unique and there were competing chronologies being put forward all the time in the seventeenth century as a counterbalance to the Enlightenment and the slowly mounting and unimpeachable evidence that the Earth and the Cosmos were far more ancient and interesting than the Young Earth of Creationism but none the less represented rigorous scholarship and textual analysis and is in a class by itself among these many attempts to pin down a date and time—which is easily but perhaps not for nought dismissed as small-minded, and did not stop in any case.

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politicians are not engineeringly-minded: an unrealised but extensively planned and covered technocratic utopia that the media dubbed Laboratory Land 

not enough hours in the day: an interesting look at the way people around the world keep time 

karen and donald are out of the running: a look at popular (perhaps too soon) baby names for 2020—via Miss Cellania’s Links    

swan song: sad footage of the last Kauaʻi ʻōʻō singing to attract a mate that will never come—more on Endlings here 

u-kiyoe: the lovely drawings of Kitao Masayoshi (北尾 政美)—via Things Magazine    

narrowing, widening, metaphor, metonymy: a refreshing reminder to revisit Merriam-Webster’s time machine (see previously) to see the year words first appeared in print 

prickly business: maintaining this hedgehog network binds a village in Oxfordshire together—via Messy Nessy Chic (with much more to explore on their latest aggregation, curation)  

oh brave new world with so many goodly creatures: Facebook’s Prospero I solar array (see also) will fuel fracking operations in Texas—via Super Punch

red scare, town square

Via Super Punch, we made witness to the spectacle and pageantry of the politics of fear and allure of bad actor cosplay in this vignette from 1950 about a small town called Mosinee in Wisconsin that staged a pretend Communist coup.

Given the state of America’s dictatorial and regressive aspiration, this episode is highly resonant and corresponds to a particular sort of reactionary tribalism and the paternalism of the well-intentioned and seems quite the antithesis of a similar demonstration undertaken in Canada less than a decade earlier to impress upon people the price of complacency. Albeit the latter was only a one-day affair and described by Life Magazine as the town’s most exciting since the business district burned down in 1910, and ‘according to the official Schedule of Events, the entire town would “cast aside their subversive roles and join in the raising of the American flag.” Boy Scouts would “burn all Communist banners, etc. in a huge bonfire” before the whole crowd would join in singing “God Bless America” and “start peacefully home, thankful to God that they live in AMERICA.”’

bully pulpit

Though there are many parallels to the Trump regime and the Nixon administration, possibly a more apt comparison bridged by the through-line of Roy Cohn might be Wisconsin circuit court judge and senator Joseph McCarthy for the sheer hysteria that they both incite through nihilism and demagoguery.

On this day in 2019, Trump’s legal team deflected the question in a hearing before the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals regarding the efforts to subpoena Trump’s tax returns by citing his infamous campaign quote, saying that high office shielded Trump from prosecution, were he to actually test the proposition. On 23 January 2016, during a rally in Sioux City, Iowa, Trump boasted about the loyalty of his supporters: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” There were echoes of a pronouncement made sixty-two years to the day before by public sentiment pollster George Gallup expressed a similar prediction about McCarthy’s die-hard base, saying that even if it were known that the senator had taken the lives of five innocent children, those who voted for him would still go along with him. Trump persecution complex does find witch-hunts everywhere. Thanks to a jury of his peers, his esteemed senatorial colleagues, that were willing to censure McCartney for his behaviour and character assassinations, the once charismatic figure is synonymous with villainy and obsession for power for its own sake and this prediction ahead of his 1954 re-election bid did not need to be borne out.