© and so say we all

Featured on the ever-excellent Boing Boing, writer Glenn Fleishman explores the fascinating and unexpected struggle over copyrights, ownership and lapsed licenses through the lens of the infamous and unnaturally long-lived legal wrangling of the Sisters Hill and the Happy Birthday song.
Perpetuated by the descendants in hopes of securing royalties for each instance that the song appears in television or film—for which it’s conspicuously absent and usually replaced with a rousing and somewhat incongruous chorus of “For he’s a jolly good fellow,” the unsettled lawsuits have really overshadowed the professional lives and scholarship of the pioneering Patty and Mildred Hill, who were respectively, at a time when most women did not have vocations, an early childhood educational theorist and an ethnomusicologist. Patty even worked with German pedagogue Friedrich Fröbel, whose wooden unit blocks (Fröbelgaben) we all know, and helped to introduce the concept of these educational toys to the States. For a white girl, Mildred really had some soul and championed so called black music as a national treasure to be cherished. Later the sisters collaborated on musical compositions for school children, eventually producing the celebratory tune. No one is trying to rob their children and grandchildren of a birthright but this singular case (another type of block or brick, Lego, is maybe something comparable) illustrates a lot of the tricks behind creative-controls and the integrity of invention.

5x5

ration card: the wartime UK version of Monopoly had to make concessions to the fighting effort

cosmopolitan: beautiful overhead views of world cities

pet sounds: Cornell University digitised their huge library of animal calls and bird-song

sakoku or ttp: nineteenth century Japanese woodcuts of exotic, visiting Americans after America insisted on diplomatic ties

isobar: Stockholm airport invites passengers to experience the weather at their destination before departing

pequod

Via the Everlasting Blort comes a really keen vignette from the archives of Brain Pickings on an almost two year project undertaken by artist Matt Kish to illustrate, page by page, the entirety of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale using mixed media and found canvases in the form of discarded paperbacks. Melville himself labored almost to the day the same amount of time to author his great work. There’s an evocative gallery of artwork to peruse that really stirs the observer to reflect on all the complex themes and motifs aloft in that story—the action of the drama contrasted with the poetic mediation that defies the usual literary architecture.

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warp factor: speed ratings of the fastest space ships in the galaxy

a gossip of mermaids: a delightful compilation of supernatural, ghoulish collective nouns, via the Wunderkammer that is Nag on the Lake

bling: uncompromisingly luxurious wrist watch that has an iWatch on the underside

plastic arts: prototype demonstration of a motorized sculpting glove

ennuigi: arcade game betrays Mario’s brother’s existential woes, world-weariness

psychobabble

The resplendent blog Mind Hacks confronts us with an elucidating list of fifty terms native to the industry—call them jargon or what you will—that ought to be avoided or especially refined from the way they are popularly featured and consumed. This catalogue of “maven” vocabulary is rather like the presumptuous way that connoisseurs describe, experientially and lusciously, the act of wine tasting, “velvety while a bit twiggy with a hint of brisk after-shave and the surprising suggestion of a soggy bonnet.” This warrant to speak of a nip in such rarefied language is a direct inheritance of the idea of dining libations as a medicinal complement to balance one’s humours, unsurprisingly like the prognoses and diagnoses of mental and behavioural conditions that fall under the protection of a certain ægis. Some words are better put back in the cabinet.  Such florid and expressive terms of the cognizanti that try to gain a purchase on unique cases ought not be banished from polite mention but should be used to forward dialogue on the common currency.

spoilers ahoy or mise-en-scène

Via Dangerous Minds’ Dangerous Finds, comes this brilliant cinematic critique of the current trend in Hollywood blockbusters’ expositions that have become impenetrably complex, byzantine and shamelessly porous. Rather than a simple, straightforward—however unlikely—plot that can be pitched in a few word, like if the secretary fails to type under forty words per minute with fewer than two typographical errors, the bomb hidden in the office will explode, which will then be buoyed up by a series of stunts and explosive precursors or with the sponsorship of a can of Mister Pibb consumed conspicuously. Cut and scene.

Since directors and producers have been dredging nostalgia for all its worth, perhaps having even travelled through time themselves in attempts to affect revisions and acclimate themselves to discontiguous time lines, however, it seems that movies have indeed become more ambitiously inscrutable. Perhaps this confusion is in part owing to franchises that hope to encapsulate and rehash universes and characters—who perhaps have cemented their identities in the minds of some fans as something iconic and inviolable or perhaps not by people less familiar with the particular genre and not as well studied as the filmmakers believe—that have been in development for decades. A ninety minute reel—though there’s also a trend in longer and longer movies, can hardly expect to distill an entire saga—even when a sequel or prequal is already a foregone conclusion, paradoxically. Whether or not a feature can holds its own outside of a triptych and creative minds are not concerned with resolution in storytelling, it does not satisfactorily explain the wherefore of escapades internal that settle as jarring and baffling for the audience afterwards. It’s not a memory that sits well, not like a stirring monologue or particularly spectacular chase scene, but rather something nagging and regrettable like proofreading one’s own missives after it’s already been published. Maybe the missing element that accounts for nothing shed on the cutting-room floor is, as the article suggests, that the license to syndicate, to portray a film centered around a defined group of superheroes adjudged to be iconic. Proprietorship probably does turn the process in ways that don’t pan out well on the screen. Of course I am not privy to any bemoaning examples, but some near equivalent might include a video game adaptation that could materialise in the near term or being able to offer one more action figure or variant in a different wardrobe already in production. It’s rather like the make-believe of security that the prop-masters, gaffers and grips—the stagehands of bureaucracy and contractors, that are ingrained and implicit in the theatre that stays behind the arras so the audience might never know. What do you think? Are you finding action movie plots a little too adventuresome and unhinged as well?