vinnie ream (10. 911)

On this day, aged 18, in 1866 Lavina Ellen Ream Hoxie became the youngest and first female sculptor to receive a commission by the US government for her most famous and celebrated work, the statue of Abraham Lincoln (see also here and here) in the Capitol rotunda. Ream also sculpted the bronze of Cherokee inventor Sequoyah (the town of Vinita, Oklahoma in Statuary Hall and the monument of David Farragut in Washington DC’s Farragut Square. Although her selection by the House of Congress to render a life-sized marble of the president had already generated some controversy over her experience and false accusations by some factions that she was a “lobbyist”—the term at the time referring to a public woman of ill-repute and Ream took the slander and attacks in stride, it was mild compared to the scapegoating and unrelenting attacks to come. Whilst working on Lincoln in a basement studio of the Capitol, the impeachment proceedings of Andrew Johnson were taking place in the chambers above. Failing to secure a conviction that would have removed Johnson from office, by a single vote, radical elements of the Republican Party sought out someone to blame other than their own members and deflect from the bribery that was actually the motivating factor. It was discovered that the Kansas senator, Edmund G Ross, who cast the decisive vote to acquit was staying in a DC boarding house owned by Ream’s father during the trial, and it was suggested that Ream, notably absent from the family lodging operation and busy with her work, had somehow influenced Ross’ vote in order to vouchsafe her commission and preserve the legacy of Lincoln through saving his predecessor. The House passed a resolution to turn the studio space into a guardroom and nearly ejected Ream and her unfinished statue from the Capitol. The press and the art community aired their outrage at this petty retaliation and Congress eventually reversed the decision. Ream went on to open studios in New York and Washington after studying in Europe and producing busts of continental celebrities including Franz Liszt and Gustave Doré, her career essentially ending after her marriage at twenty-four as it was considered unseemly for a married woman to earn an income.

 synchronoptica

one year ago:  Eilean Donan plus Castle Linlithgow

two years ago: your daily demon: Buné, assorted links to revisit, a silly super villain plus a Czech space opera

three years ago: artist Léon Spilliaert, cartooning the US constitution, assorted links worth the revisit plus moving forward with fusion technology

four years ago: more links to check out, a food writer and former pirate plus growing one’s own victory garden

 

fièvre jérusalemienne (10. 910)

Partnering with Big Think, Atlas Obscura invites us on a tour world cities with their own signature psychological disorders. Beginning with the more familiar Stockholm Syndrome—astonishingly with the namesakes of London and Lima also falling into the hostage category—most others, like the Jerusalem Syndrome and Paris Syndrome fall into less dicey albeit overwhelming and traumatic bracket of tourists’ built-up expectations and attendant maladies under the general term Stendhal syndrome and named for the author’s account of psychosomatic reactions during a 1817 visit to Florence, the former sometimes manifesting in delusions that the travel is a character from the Holy Books so as not to fall short of expectations and preserve one’s anticipation when reality fails to deliver.

💎 (10. 909)

Rivalling the Pentagon as the world’s largest office building—having held the title for the past eight decades, the Morphogenesis architecture group announces the completion of its diamond-trading bourse on the outskirts of Surat in Gujarat, a city with a strong, established heritage in the gem-cutting business as well as textile manufacture and other commercial enterprises. Although the six hundred thousand square metre complex which can host nearly seventy thousand professionals is certified as a green building project, one has to wonder about the human and environmental impact that the trade has and what synergy within a hub, campus means for those who work there. More from Dezeen at the link above. 

synchronoptica

one year ago: the lochs of Scotland plus assorted links to revisit

two years ago: Stevie Nicks’ solo debut (1981), network bumpers, previously unpublished pictures of David Bowie, beckoning cats, more on the inconsistencies of the English language, Avant Garde magazine plus AI generated Tarot cards

three years ago: one of the fourteen Holy Helpers, a iconic cartoon introduction (1940), a growing collection of non-words plus the GIFs of Katy Daft

four years ago: a funeral for a glacier, bee habitats on bus shelters, more on data breaches and lax consequences for compromising personal information plus more vexing vexillology

five years ago: Madonna Madonna, coral bleaching, a commemorative bee coin plus mapping climate change in Europe

nothing compares 2 u (10. 908)

The artist known professionally as Sinéad O’Connor, Shuhada' Sadaqat (having converted to Islam in 2018 after her ordination and career as a priest in the Latin Tridentine Church from 1999) unexpected passed away, aged 56. Unflinchingly brave and bold in her advocacy for human rights and vocal critic of organised religion, racism, she spoke openly about her spiritual journey and socio-political point of view including her own traumas. And while the incident in 1992 during an appearance on Saturday Night Live might be for some indelible and inexcusable (revealing later that the photograph of Pope John Paul II was removed from her mother’s bedroom wall on the date of her mother’s untimely, accidental death and waited for the right moment to destroy it to avenge the abuse sustained from her family and the Church, a statement and warning vindicated years later), that never diminished her talent and always remained a household name and icon for social justice—admitting she never wanted to be a pop star and rather “I wanted to be a protest singer.”

the salon (10. 907)

As part of their series of off-cycle, off-topic minisodes and in solidarity with the beleaguered entertainment community, we really enjoyed this latest instalment from the Flop House that rather brilliantly (especially well executed considering it’s an audio medium) pit a series of masterpieces of fine paintings up against one another in a variation of the game of Hug, Marry, Kill—Admire, Acquire or condemn to the Pyre.

you could have an aeroplane flying if you bring your blue sky back (10. 906)

Via our faithful chronicler, we learn that on this day in 1986 Peter Gabriel’s lead single from his fifth studio album So (“In Your Eyes,” “Big Time”) topped the US charts and peaked at number four in the UK, displacing the hit by his former bandmates of Genesis’ as number one. The dance-rock funk fusion was nominated for three Grammy awards and other accolades, including for its artfully crafted music video featuring stop motion animation and modelling clay figures. The backing vocalists are P P Arnold, Chyna Whyne and Dee Lewis. The introductory and closing solo is a synthesised Japanese bamboo flute called a shakuhachi (尺八)—which was a “preset” instrument in many electronic keyboards of the era.

synchronoptica

one year ago: exploring the Inner Hebrides and the Isle of Skye

two years ago:  the history of Home Office, Jesus’ grandmother, the linoleum patterns of Hazel Dell Brown plus “book-drunk”

three years ago: Esperanto Day, the end of segregation in the US armed forces (1948) plus assorted links to revisit

four years ago: the medals for the Tokyo Games will be reclaimed from e-waste, hairball headdresses plus a cute, retired shipping mascot

five years ago: assorted links worth revisiting, a look back at 1988 plus lone trees in fields

7x7 (10. 905)

home taping is killing record industry profits: the 1981 moral panic over mixtapes  

lisa lionheart: labour force participation through the many careers of Barbie  

swipe left: patrons of 1920s Berlin nightclubs could flirt via pneumatic tubes—via Messy Nessy Chic  

the rivers and harbours act: Texas Department of Justice sues governor for refusing to remove a stretch of buoys that violates federal and international law—see previously  

sickbay: the Pirate Surgeon’s Journals—via Strange Company  

comeuppance: it’s time for the annual census on the River Thames—see previously 

a lot of skill, hand-eye coordination—it’s cheap and legal: video arcade addiction was seen as a threat to prevailing social values in 1982

 synchronoptica

one year ago: Ullapool and environs plus Wester Ross

two years ago: a colour advertisement on black-and-white TV (1967), Einstein on the Beach (1976), Thomas à Kempis plus a mosaic along the Thames

three years ago: Trump’s mental fitness, proto-Wikipedia (2000), more on the US Space Force, St Cucuphas, Nixon in China vis-à-vis today’s relations plus more on stock characters and archetypes

four years ago: RIP Rutger Hauer plus a doctored presidential seal

five years ago: a neo-classic Delphic festival (1927), a student project that may have unwittingly identified targets of value in the Gulf War, anti-social media, Mid-Century Modern minimalism plus the hunt for subsurface water on Mars

dragnet (10. 904)

Via Slashdot, we learn that artificial intelligence is aiding and abetting US police departments is conducting en masse warrantless monitoring of individuals, equipped with a suite of tools that analyse driving patterns of cars in traffic, normally anonymised by the herd and the sheer volume of surveillance footage the pick up snapshots of single vehicles, to identify (with an questionable degree of accuracy sure inflated to the precincts who buy the software) suspicious patterns—the signature route of a drug dealer, in the case cited, and prising out a guilty plea thanks to this dossier. Beholden only to the caprice of its operators and without judicial oversight or safeguards, every cop becomes an overly zealous Inspector Javert with the Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) technology, which is also used to predict and tag customer experience at drive-thrus and shared as a potential bounty across state lines with jurisdictions that have banned abortions.