winterval or delogistics

It’s always a little sad to finally be packing up the Christmas decorations and decorously escorting the tree to the tree graveyard. We bid the ornaments a fond adieu until next year. With all that science can give us, however, one would think that they at least could genetically engineer Angels’ Hair (tinsel) to mature in that tatty green basket grass in time for Easter—or the municipal Christmas tree to shed down to a ready Maypole.  Maybe that’s how it used to be done.

6x6

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

sands of time

This wholly natural occurrence seems rather incredulous (especially if we were to encounter such a formation on Mars) but this “scratch circle” (Scharrkreise) happens when in windy wintertime a dry reed of dune grass is allowed to sweep out a perfect circle unimpeded, pivoting around its bent stalk.

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.