nxnw: striking storyboard illustrations for Alfred Hitchcock films, from Everlasting Blort
baby grand: enjoy the musical stylings of this virtuoso of the toy piano
minifig: get a LEGO head made in your likeness
chewie lewis and the news: clever series of Star Wars album cover remixes—Rebel Rebel is my favourite
barons of industry: an appreciation of the bold and post-modern artwork of Fortune magazine
allemande, promenade: dinosaurs probably performed elaborate mating-dances like birds do—it would be funny to see a tyrannosaurus hoedown
Sunday 10 January 2016
6x6
Saturday 9 January 2016
sands of time
tincture
Harvard University’s school of art conservation and restoration has amassed a formidable infirmary, medicine cabinet after medicine cabinet used to doctor and resuscitate faded works of art, in the form of a vast and unique collection of ancient and artisanal pigments from around the world. The public can visit this workshop and marvel and the chemistry of colour—an indispensable resource for revitalising damaged masterpieces with their true hues—and learn more about each sample’s provenance, like toxic green and the particular yellow derived from cows fed on an exclusive diet of mango leaves.
la mort et les statues
Correspondent Messy Nessy Chic documents, in a very well researched and composed article, the sad and little regarded fate of the avante garde statuary that peopled the avenues of Paris during the Third Republic.
With preservation of the many artful bronzes being the exception and not the rule, most were dismantled and melted down for scrap, lest the style or personages represented offend—or outright threaten—the occupying regime. The caretaker Vichy government of France was accused of giving into too many demands as it was, and of course the concessions that wartime France one did not solely hinge on removing controversial public art and did manage to avoid graver insult. The fact that this demolition was recorded and can be revisited presently, the figures still serve to represent all victims of war as all monuments and memorials do. Though of a vastly different character, these scenes parallel the time we visited the Citadel of Spandau to find a heap of displaced statues.
Friday 8 January 2016
gestalting or pinky and the brain
Via the always engaging The Browser comes a fascinating investigation into the ethics of genetic experimentation and hybridisation. Such husbandry is just about marrying up the right DNA—which does present technical hurdles though brute technology is quick to obtain and accommodate pathways that are penitentially advantageous to humans as organ farms, a repository of spare-parts, but from some fronts bodes caution, lest these chimera achieve an animal-singularity.
Personally, I couldn’t say that there was some enduring uniqueness to modes of human consciousness that make us special or so horrifyingly privileged. Some ethically-minded individuals are expressing concern that a human mind trapped in a laboratory rat’s body (reading gestating as gestalting) would elicit outrage. I’d dare to submit that an unadulterated rat probably is thinking along those very lines without some imagined vital spark. What do you think? Perhaps humans ought to be spliced with some humanity.
offworld or freemasonry
The always fascinating BLDGBlog reports that a group of researchers have discovered how to create construction materials for future colonists on Mars using native building blocks in an environment apparently devoid of water. Heating sulphur to the point of liquefaction, it is mixed with soil to produce Martian concrete. The resulting bricks are relatively easy, light but sturdy, to use and are infinitely recyclable—in addition to being far less of a logistics investment in bringing supplies from home. Earthling settlers, given the weaker gravity of the planet, might be free to create impossibly ambitious cathedrals to exploration and discovery.
