6x6

fought and sold: the evolution of military recruitment advertising campaigns 

modern classics: in the vein of abstract vintage paperback cover art, eighty-four works of literature as postage stamps 

sleight of hand: objects from the Ricky Jay collection—more here, via Things Magazine 

20/20/20: revisiting a retrospective of the work of Afrofuturist Bodys Isek Kingelez 

every time they hear der bingle croon: episode two of Radiolab’s Mixtape miniseries explains why early entertainment was live and not Memorex  

america’s moveable fighting man: new G.I. Joe action figures available for pre-order

aw, she’s the ginchiest—life does begin at forty

Broadcast for the first time on this day in 1990 and reattaining its reputation as a minor cult classic with the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment, the 1961 horror film Ring of Terror, following the trials of a young medical student portrayed by a significantly older actor, Lewis Moffitt, twenty-two, played by George E. Mather, then forty-two, who submits to hazing before he is able to join a fraternity. Despite a haunting childhood trauma that involved an incident with a corpse, our protagonist Moffitt puts on a brave face for his first autopsy. His initiation ritual, which involves him retrieving a ring from a dead body, proves far more frightening and reveals his past. Universally panned for its pacing and casting choice that marked the beginning of the trope of old teenagers. The only episode of MS3K to have the short after the feature, it concluded with another chapter from the 1939 serial The Phantom Creeps.

the joys of being an amateur

Expounding on the above observation by the recently departed Csíkszentmihályi Mihály that recognises in its literal sense means loving devotion, we learn courtesy of Kottke, about the psychologist’s classification of creatives by their paradoxical behaviour, listing out ten traits that seemingly tear asunder.

1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they’re also often quiet and at rest.
2. Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time.
3. Creative people combine play-fulness and discip-line, or respon-sibility and irresponsibility.
4. Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality.
5. Creative people tend to be both extroverted and introverted.
6. Creative people are humble and proud at the same time.
7. Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping.
8. Creative people are both rebellious and conservative.
9. Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well.
10. Creative people’s openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment.
    

Do you find your own tendencies laid out here? Sometimes it’s easier to sell the contradiction when one differentiates between public-facing and inward-focussed.

in the stacks

Prising important insights into the professions of curation, conservation and circulation, a storage facility in Rotterdam is opening its doors to visitors to allow them to peruse the museum’s entire collection, the ninety percent of the art and artefacts that their formerly public-facing galleries could not accommodate, we discover via a thematic round-up from Messy Nessy Chic. We really liked this idea to invite guests behind the scenes and hope that this sort of programme expands.

america’s present need is not heroics but healing—not nostrums but normalcy

Born this day in 1865 US president Warren G. Harding (†1923, elected on his birthday in 1920), who fairly popular whilst in office—largely due to his long suffering wife Florence who worked overtime to keep his scandals out of the public eye that emerged after his sudden death, did not have a pedestrian middle name in Gamaliel—not George as one might expect, though not wholly unique for mid-nineteenth century America. Nicknamed Winnie as a child, the Greek form of the Hebrew name means “God is my recompense,” indicating rather tragically that this son had an earlier sibling that was lost as an infant and was the given name of several rabbinical authorities. Problematic libertarian journalist and cultural critic H. L. Mencken (previously) mocked Warren’s oration and delivery as Gamalielese, described as meandering, irritating, “it is balder and dash”—though more charitably, others characterised its indeterminacy as the rhetoric to allow listeners to limn it with their own aspirations.

neologism

Via the always informative Miss Cellania, we are directed towards a treasury of contemporary terms that the editors and lexicographers at Merriam-Webster (previously) are adding for inclusion in their dictionary. Words notably entering common-parlance include the recent vaccine passport, otaku (ヲタク) a name to describe an individual with a consuming interest in manga and anime, super-spreader, digital nomad, dadbod—dating back to 2003, and astroturf with the sense of something artificial and contrived though made to appear as organic and grassroots. Much more at the links above.

starting point

Via Super Punch, we are treated to a piece of superlative copy-writing in this advertisement from Patagonia outerwear outfitters displayed on a Litfaßsäule in the vein of this powerful poem from Brian Bilston that invites, compels  us to shift our perspective and not be resigned and nihilistic when the time for decisive action is urgent in the face of this climate crisis.

woty: vaxx

Though very much a carry-over from the past year’s extraordinary multiplicity of choices to limn an extraordinary year, from fully-vaxxed, anti-vaxxers, to vax cards and vax apps vax passes demonstrates that lexically, our common-parlance still places us firmly in the midst of the moment. The Oxford English Dictionary’s choice by September as the jury was finalising its list of nominees was cited in print fully seventy-two times more frequently than the year prior. Aside from addressing our social and cultural moment, I wonder about the stylistic consensus to double the x in this clipping and can’t decide if it’s apothecary’s shorthand or just slang, the root coined by physician and scientist Edward Jenner to describe cowpox and his method to immunise people from the more severe smallpox through exposure and variolation.