strong and prosperous nation

Negotiating the divide between cultural and historic points of reference and by being generally agreeable and approachable, former war correspondent turned photographer Stephan Gladieu was able to recently travel to North Korea and was allowed to capture portraits of the people in a captivating series. Learn more and peruse a curated gallery of scenes from North Korea at It’s Nice That at the link above.

zea mays

Having recently posted about the original by the Hot Butter ensemble, we quite enjoyed discovering—courtesy of Pasa Bon!—this clever, well-arranged medieval cover (see previously) of Pop Corn. Many more covers versions to be found clicking through at the link up top or by letting the play-list cycle through below.

zehn thesen für gutes design

Via Present /&/ Correct, we rather enjoyed this fine visual homage to the palette and aesthetic of industrial design artist Dieter Rams from Chad Ashley and Grey Scale Gorilla studios. The Wiesbaden native who famously articulated the principles of good design and called obsolescence a crime, and tried to adhere to these guidelines of innovation, utility, accessibility, honestly, durability and minimalism in everything he created is best known for his work for Braun, which in turn is paid tribute in Apple’s operating environment, including the skeuomorph for the calculator, the reel-to-reel tape recorder in the podcast icon and the World Clock (see also), praising Apple as one of the few company’s upholding excellence in design.

spoiler alert

Via TYWKIWDBI, we quite enjoyed this cinematic, recursive juxtaposition curated and edited by Jacob T. Swinney that displays the first frames of a film side-by-side with the final scene. Where there is a correspondence between the visual milieu of the beginning and the end, I think it must register with the audience even on an unconscious level, even if we’ve forgotten the establishing shots. More at the link above.

your house is on fire and your children are alone

Courtesy of a film recommendation by one of our favourite podcasts, The Flop House, we learn of the 1963, Oscar-nominated film by Frank Perry that analyses the psycho-social toll of the Cold War that really speaks to the uncertainty and the fears harboured over our current collective crisis and what totems we rally to preserve through selective ignorance. Set during the Cuban Missile Crisis (previously) from just a year prior, following the protocol of classroom drills, teachers escort their students home at a rural elemental school after a warning siren sounds. Absent independent verification on the veracity of the alarm, no one is sure whether it is a false warning, a test or not. Some of the students’ parents dismiss these distant, abstract events as they frantically search for a fall-out shelter that can accommodate them all. One girl is ejected, with the claim there is not enough space and goes off to take refuge in a discarded refrigerator—introducing that trope, though her classmates don’t abandon her or forget about her altogether.

cult of personality

Along with the birthday of his father, founder of the nation of North Korea, this Day of the Shining Star (광명성) falling on the anniversary of the birth of its second leader Kim Jong-il, 16 February, 31 Juche, according to party lore, is among the most important public holidays, codified since his 2012 death. While Kim was likely born in Siberia during his father’s exile for inciting an uprising, the foundational mythos places Kim’s birth at a secret guerrilla camp (run by Kim Il-sung) on the slopes of Mount Paektu, a place in antiquity considered holy and the origin of the Korea people, his nativity heralded by a shooting star. With celebrations spanning two days including mass gymnastics, fireworks and military demonstrations, many couples also choose this day to marry. Like a Communist version of Lent, the two-month gap between the birthday of the founder (see above) and second leader is known as Loyalty Festival Period and is interspersed with spontaneous acts of devotion and festivities throughout.

7x7

penn station’s half century: vignettes of the original New York Beaux Arts transportation hub painstaking brought to life to experience the station prior to its 1957 demolition and renovation 

delightful creatures: drone captures manatees and dolphins frolicking in Florida Everglades 

raven story: Alaska Tlingit artist features on new US postage stamp with a depiction of the trickster spirit

poisonous green: the paint that might have been the death of Napoleon and other toxic tinctures—see previously  

de-programming: interviews with children of parents radicalised by QAnon trying to get their moms and dads back 

morph and mindbuffer: a mesmerising hypersurface of a globe composed of expanding isohedrons 

preservation watch: conservationists fear that the iconic, Art Deco lobby of the McGraw-Hill Building might be under threat

hungry like the wolf

The three-day pastoral festival traditionally ending on the ides of February (the instruments of purification, februum, bunches of branches used like a broom and in the extended sanctified sense below, is the name gives the month its name and is the source of the modern inheritance called Spring Cleaning) called Lupercalia is a syncretism and has been assimilated into Christian traditions of Saint Valentine’s Day, but originally focused on mysterious annual rites and sacrifices that a special priesthood performed in the cave below the Forum where the She-Wolf nursed Romulus and Remus and the site where Rome was founded. Young men of the city’s patrician families formed a collegia (association) called the Luperci (Brothers of the Wolf), performing various cleansing rituals and ablutions—sacrificing a herd of goats plus a dog at the altar. Following the feast, the men fashioned girdles out of goatskin (also called februa) and paraded wearing only these thongs along Rome’s original boundaries and circled the Palatine Hill in an anti-clockwise procession, lashing marriageable women with surplus stripes of flayed skin for fertility.