After the penultimate show of his Ziggy Star Dust world tour in 1973, David Bowie who was then suffering from a fear of flying took a ship from Yokohama to Vladivostok and then the Trans-Siberian Railway back to England, with various whistle-stops along the whistle stops along the way, including the May Day Victory Parade in Moscow. This week-long trip was documented by Bowie himself, with a 
16mm videography entitled “The Long Way Home” and by friend and bandmate Geoff MacCormack (also known by the stage name Warren Peace)—meeting fans, drinking sessions with soldiers and sailors and giving impromptu performances, and is on exhibit at the Wende Museum of the Cold War in Culver City, California with an especially curated soundtrack.
Tuesday, 4 July 2023
station to station (10. 856)
contrafactum (10. 855)
Lyrics written by Andover, Massachusetts seminarian Samuel Francis Smith to the melody of the British royal anthem, God Save the King, the above adaptation reworking the tune from a symbol and trapping of 
monarchy to a statement about American democracy, “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” was first performed for Independence Day celebrations in 1831 and became one of the two de facto national anthems (along side the patriotic number “Hail Columbia”—the march of the vice-president) until the adoption of the “The Star-Spangled Banner” exactly a century later. The implementation of the tune and musical salute (which also exists in Latin, peace-time and Republican—God save the Guillotine—versions) for another national song, however, was not new and contrafacta arrangements were used, usually connected with royal ceremony, and still used in Liechtenstein (Oben am jungen Rhein), Norway (Kongesangen) and Switzerland (Rufst du, mein Vaterland, until 1961 when replaced the National Hymne) formerly used in the kingdoms of Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria and imperial Russia.
synchronoptica
one year ago: nebulas were known as guest stars
two years ago: Occupied Austria (1945) plus flowers in the woods
three years ago: American Top 40 (1970), Nixon’s Honor America Day (1970) plus more on spelling conventions
four years ago: Annual Reminder (1969) plus the Sky Disc of Nebra discovered (1999)
five years ago: more adventures on Lake Garda
Monday, 3 July 2023
lux รฆterna (10. 854)
permission, Stanley Kubrick opting not to use the work commissioned for the soundtrack and using public domain classic orchestral arrangements instead. 2001 is by far not his lasting legacy, having created many evocative and innovative works, like an arrangement for one hundred metronomes, but his plexiglass Ehrengrab (1923 - 2006) in Vienna’s Central Cemetery looks as if it could have been fashioned from the original Monolith. Read more about the progressive compositions of Ligeti at the link up top. Below is one of his final works, the 2003 reworking of the Hamburg Concerto with distempered tuning.
9x9 (10. 853)
lost animals: a short story by Geoff Manaugh who exorcises haunted houses with mundane equipment
clippit: discontinued Microsoft Office Assistant resurrected as a ChatGPT add-on—see previously
space10: IKEA reimagines a line of flatware encouraging the use of abundant, locally sourced materials—see also all-domain anomaly resolution office: newspapers of record passed on the bombshell story of US government programme to reverse-engineer captured extraterrestrial technology—via Slashdot
i do not want my name to be a thing: John Hancock explains his outsized signature on the Declaration of Independence—see also
duty to bargain: Google joins Meta in pulling its headline aggregators from Canada over the so called “link tax”
not to put too fine a point on it: the origins of a selection of hackneyed idioms
the ganzfeld procedure: a cheap, easy and effective sensory-deprivation technique
short fiction: six-word sci-fi prompts
ziggy played guitar (10. 852)
After one hundred eighty two concert performances and eighteen months of touring, David Bowie, with 
only bandmate and guitarist Mick Ronson knowing in advance, announced on this day in 1973 during live show at Hammersmith Odeon in London that he would be retiring, just before the final song “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide,” “Of all the shows on this tour, this particular show will remain with us the longest, because it is not only the last show of the tour, but it’s the last show we’ll ever do”—only to clarify to shocked fans and the rest of his band that he meant the persona of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars backing band. This final concert for Stardust was the subject of a documentary by D A Pennebaker and later released as a motion picture a decade on.
curtain call (10. 851)
NPR’s Goats and Soda features a commendable selection of superlative aerial photography from this year’s Drone Photo Awards (previously), which will be displayed in Siena’s Teatro dei Rinnovati during its festivities in October. 
In its sixth year, the annual competition to challenge our perspectives showcases a wide range of subjects from natural disasters, pollution, playgrounds to the precision symmetry of agriculture, like this strawberry field prepared for harvest as captured by Guy Shmueli in Hadera, Israel, that looks like the opening of a stage play. Much more at the links above.
synchronoptica
one year ago: Dog Days of summer, Double Indemnity (1944), assorted links to revisit plus DALL-E Mini
two years ago: the Phaistos Disk (1908), IKEA on the US government’s report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena plus on the etymology of the antiquated word hermaphrodite
three years ago: a narrow-cast channel featuring video artefacts and interstitials, Mount Rushmore plus the proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan (1979)
four years ago: assorted links to revisit plus Krispy Kreme leaves Iceland
five years ago: the cliffs of Lake Garda
Sunday, 2 July 2023
civics semiotics (10. 850)
As part of an ongoing series of glossaries on diverse themes (previously), Tedium presents an interesting 
index of Americana ahead of its national holiday, not as a patriotic apology but rather a celebration of the miscellany that has influenced the shape of the country—and there are some choice facts and figures, like how the Clinton impeachment helped launch Netflix, with the company selling DVDs of the grand jury testimony for 2¢ (plus shipping), Kraft dinner, disco demolition Night at ballparks, Jackalopes and other domestic cryptids, suppressing the metric system, or the phenomenon that is BJ Snowden—a cult figure more for the neighbour to the north of the US for her songs covering each province but also celebrated as an outsider musician in America as well for her album Life in the USA and Canada and this power ballad.
8x8 (10. 849)
♄: JWST captures outstanding images of the ringed planet, completing a family portrait of the gas giants
dining al fresco: excavations in Pompeii uncover a a still life featuring a proto-pizza—see also
ษ: rare phonemes and how to pronounce them
gas, food, lodging: one hundred twenty pump filling station, the world’s largest, opens in Tennessee as a tourist attraction—via Marginal Revolution ripples in a pond: astrophysicists detect new class of gravitational waves rolling through the Cosmos
abacusynth: a unique electronic musical instrument from Elias Jarzobek
liquid television: MTV’s first animated series, Stevie and Zoya—see previously
euclid and roman: a joint NASA, ESA mission to survey the skies for signs of dark matter and dark energy
synchronoptica
one year ago: assorted links to revisit
two years ago: your daily demon: Morax, the influence of 70s Japanese soft rock on Nintendo music, mid-point of the year, Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car, a trip to Oberwaldbehrungen plus the punishments of Pompeii
three years ago: assorted links to revisit, Airplane (1980) plus the Civil Rights Act (1964)
four years ago: disruptive cake icing to evade IP infringement plus the time that Pepsi (sort of) had the second largest naval fleet in the world
five years ago: holidaying on Lake Garda
six years ago: playable Wikipedia, a preview of the G20 in Hamburg plus words only said once
