i wish i had a million dollars—hot dog!

Remember when Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life was a regular round, a continuum of the season, and one could just pick up or leave off at some point and still manage to catch the rest? I blame the media for the scarcity of air-time, but I suppose we're at fault for taking for granted the opportunity to wallow in all sorts of emotions over this cinematic classic.
The Week (via Neatorama) presents seven enduring life lessons from the film, and what better form could the reminding take (since these teachings are unfortunately also the most easily forgot) than watching this timeless film?
Among the more subtle points—which only come out in context and contrast—include the jolly, proper send-up when the Baileys christen the Martini's new home, counting ones blessings, and the interesting treatment of the cantankerous old bank and thief Mr. Potter, who is neither a reformed Ebeneezer Scrooge (someone who experienced something very similar to George Bailey with supernatural help) nor punished by the movie's conclusion, whose portrayal was considered typical of Communist propaganda and flaunted the US Motion Picture Code of Standards in effect in the 1940s that mandated that villains should be punished ultimately and before the ending credits, which was a conscious and intentional decision to reinforce the idea that sometimes bad people get away with bad things and there is not always resolution, though I could not imagine a better one.
I guess these and other points to consider, both subdued and over-arching, only are born out in analysis—not over-stepping appreciation by any means or lingering thoughts and moments of catharsis and are rather folded perfectly into the screenplay and experience.

rookie card

Artist Glen Brogan offers a rare, uncut series of iconic meme cards for swapping. These are great, like Garbage Pail Kids, something to trade and collect like baseball cards for someone not necessarily affiliated with sports fandom. The artist created these images for a gallery showing last year but I hope that more will be forthcoming, though fame and recognition is ever a relative and fickle thing. I firmly believe, however, so long as one person gets the reference—either now or later, it is all worth the effort.

pelagic waters or octopi, occupy

As an addendum to an earlier post, there is a tumble-blog (incidentally, the inter-webs though having an initial affection for the letter e, with e-commerce and e-mail and so on, seem to be launching an offensive against the vowel, easily elided for trade-marking sake) dedicated to propaganda featuring sinister octopodes called Vulgar Army, which includes, among many others, the advisement to know one's Communists enemies, which is baldly the inspiration for some latter day programmes.

disco fox

Boing Boing co-founder Cory Doctorow is sharing his discovery of the musical genre called Electro-Swing with a catchy introduction by the band Caravan Palace. It seems that similar strains were incident to some of the party scenes of the recent adaptation of The Great Gatsby and one can really picture flappers hustling to these re-imagined jazzy, Big Band sounds, nicely constructed from the classics of that era, but this style has roots that go back for quite a few years.

turmbau zu babel

This summer we were treated to a tour of Castle Tarasp, one of the last remaining fortifications of its type saved by an enterprising entrepreneur who introduced the German mouthwash Odol to the world and made dental hygiene something of a social necessity (like the vacuum-cleaner made hoovering a duty), and our guide was quite accommodating, telling the history of each chamber three times over for the sake of his audience—once in Schwyzerdütsch for the locals, then in Italian for a couple visiting and then in Hochdeutsch for our benefit.
The show was pretty impressive, but I understand that entertaining such a diglossa is becoming quite a rarity in the Confederation. Rather than learning on the four national languages, young students are tutored in English rather than standard forms of German, Italian, French—or the minority Rumantsch, a language descending from Roman occupiers displacing the original Celtic settlers' influence. Neglecting national and standardised forms, Swiss people are regressing further into regional and urban dialects, which while being very important cultural aspects to preserve, like the Bärndütsch of Bern or Baseldytsch, are essentially incomprehensible to others and defy being written down in any agreed-upon way, just like Italian and French versions, from outside. I wonder what it means to adopt a lingua franca that's not a national language and to revert further towards something that affirms pockets of patriotism. What do you think? Are national standards only an illusion and an artificial construct of the fretful or do they signal an important loss of identity?

homeland and high-ground

I suppose there's no accounting for taste, and the mission-planners behind the selection of code-names, patches and mascots and free to choose whatever they see fit—surely within there own obscure rules for naming conventions, but there also seems no limits for hubris and insensitivity.

Consider the different angles of coverage of a secretive launch of a spy-satellite for an agency called US National Reconnaissance Office, brought to us by the Laughing Squid, whose payload may or may not include a swarm of micro-satellites that can be deployed against rival snoopers in emergency situation—or just offensively too I suppose. In the current international climate, it does seem especially tasteless and low-brow, like riding around in a pick-up truck with a Confederate flag in the cabin rear window or wearing some really awful t-shirt that's more pity than scary or offensive, considering no one cared about the wearer enough to suggest that that might not be putting forward his best image.

trim up the tree with christmas stuff or persistence of memory

This evening H and I had the chance to unbox a lot of the seasonal artefacts and populate the house with some Christmas cheer, and it was interesting to note, I thought, how, despite the passage of an entire, busy year we both remembered how each figure had been assigned a home, though this recall was not always immediate and was welcoming of new additions. The iron stocking holder belongs on the on top of the cabinet where the beer bottle collection has to be pushed back—carefully. Hanging ornaments on the tree is a similar affair stirring up memories with a long shelf-life. Carols playing as we arranged, assembled and hung the trappings, it is pretty remarkable how one can keep track of dozens of different creatures and their native habitats inactively. It reminds me of experiments regarding memory and being pelted with an overwhelming array of images. The objective, however, was not to be able to articulate every single impression in order and when replayed with a certain sliding admixture of pictures that were not included in the original showing, subjects young and old and with widely varying degrees of confidence in their power of recollection, could identify without fail the hundreds of images of the first exhibition from the additions.
If such could be demonstrated about successive displays, I wonder if the vintage and the spirit of the season contribute to tracking the whereabouts of a festive moose out of place. It's more of oh—I remember this guy rather than there's too much or where did we put all this before, probably the effects of the above experiment magnified. Trim up the tree with Christmas stuff, like bingle balls and whofu fluff. Season's greetings with more to follow!

window dressing

Collectors' Weekly has a pretty keen feature on the long and faceted history of the mannequin and how they reflect our sense of style. The figures advanced from a tailor or dress-maker's form, going back to ancient times, to basic racks to display garments to a growing, mechanized middle-class, to their present form—converging with dress-up dolls that came before and becoming the afternoon-idols of window-shopping they are today.
The story of their development is spiced with some interesting vignettes, like the dressing-dummies found in the tombs of pharaohs, that in an earlier career, L. Frank Baum (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) worked in the advertizing business and was a key advocate of using life-like mannequins to sell the “romance of Merchandise and Merchandizing,” the genre of horror films that came out as they became more sophisticated and idealized, and lighter cases of agalmatophilia that teased and vexed returning war veterans. The history is augmented by a few individual collectors who are curators of these objects of fashion and make-believe.