grand cru(ise)

Intoxicatingly, French motorists are being cautioned along the motorways of some wine-producing communities during this year’s harvesting time to drive with care due to the risk of spillage onto the lanes from lorries transporting grapes from the vineyards to processing centres. The warning signs are temporary and will be taken down after the season is over.
Viniculture in much of western Europe was bookended with a pair of Roman festivals called the Vinalia—one in Spring and dedicated to Venus to break open the casts of the previous year’s vintage and prayer for a good growing season, and the second held in the early Autumn, dedicated to Jupiter (who controls the weather) as a pre-harvest celebration and selecting of the finest grapes that would be reserved for sacramental wine. I believe that this year was the first time authorities were prompted to install traffic signs but surely there must have been some overflow since ancient times.

dovetail and dowel

Distressingly, we might be witnessing the slow demise of an art form passed down for generations, but perhaps the efforts of a one curious pupil—not born into the guarded tradition of Japanese joinery, carpentry without nails, who struggled to penetrate the instructions of handbooks (a recent relaxing of the way families, now dying off, formerly jealously protected their methods for centuries). Despite the best intentions, the guide remained inscrutable and so the pupil dismantled and reverse-engineered the art from outside in and created beautiful animations to illustrate his progress, which can hopefully impart this age-old practise to a new generation of makers (and three-dimensional presses).

choosy moms choose jif

On the fifth of November, 1999 an auto-de-fé was proclaimed in order to rid the emerging on-line environment of an image file format (.gif) that most considered to be clunky and unsuited for facilitating the quick transfer of information.
First invented in 1987, this lossless (uncompromised, except for richness of colour) yet compressible image extension was the industry standard yet showed no potential that it would ever be the rendering for anything but static pictures and was being pressed aside by one lobby or another—even the idea of a “GIF tax” was being proposed to banish the Graphic Interchange Format, the bailiwick of Compuserve and Netscape. The cinemagraph, the parlour-trick that’s best suited for what we think of as GIFs nowadays in conjunction with browser protocols and later the looping video clip, was not perfected until 2011 but would have probably never materialised unless it had been allowed to incubate, maybe selfishly, during the intervening decades. Read all about the history and development of the GIF and get a primer on how image compression algorithms work in Popular Mechanics article at the link up top.

palimpsest

I’ve found myself obsessed too with the concept of ghostly signage and the forgotten, former incarnations of buildings for quite some time, and so was really excited to learn about this hybrid of projection mapping, light show and augmented reality experience on the streets of London to reveal the past superimposed upon the present. One can even take tours of selected districts in the city and follow a historic narrative that says volumes. Be sure to visit Fast Company at the link above to learn more about this project and its plans to expand.

pro-bono or controlling-share

Rather than yielding to investor demands that the social media giant sell out to the highest bidder and thus loose its independent voice (Yahoo! was once offered the Facebook and where are they now?), I thought that a government, like the tech-haven Iceland, ought to swoop in and operate Twitter for the public good, sort of like an NPR of socials.
Despite the ability of Twitter to turn a profit, those charged with maximising returns are sensing the opportunity for a windfall—however that’s reckoned in business terms. There is another avenue to explore, as Boing Boing informs, that may be for the good of all stakeholders in allowing the users to take it over (in the sense of financial stewardship) and run it as a cooperative venture. As the proposal points out, and not being a follower of the sports ball really, I would have never appreciated the genius of this model, there’s a parallel to be found in the premier status that the small town of Green Bay in the state of Wisconsin has retained over all these years and the last of its kind. The Packers (named for Acme tinned meat company) are owned by their fans and have never been the playthings of billionaire investors. What do you think? Greed tempers censorship as much as any other ideology.

parity of esteem

Since first hearing about the small village outside of Antwerp over the summer on NPR’s Invisibilia, I’ve really been intrigued about the story of Geel and its approach to addressing mental illness and appreciated Hyperallergic’s giving the community and its mission further exposure. After becoming a pilgrimage destination for the mentally ill in the late twelfth century, the villagers have hosted displaced and alienated souls, bringing them into their homes and providing a course of treatment and therapy that doesn’t try to make their guests conform.
This unusual patronage is traced back to the daughter of a pagan Irish chieftain and a Christian mother, called Dymphna (Little Fawn) who herself converted to Christianity against her father’s will. Dymphna’s mother passed away when she was a teenager and her father became absolutely inconsolable, quickly descending into depression. His courtiers pleaded with him to re-marry, and reluctantly, the chieftain agreed, provided he could find one as beautiful and charming as his lost wife. The chieftain’s overtures turned towards the teenaged Dymphna, and fearing what would come next, she fled to Belgium with her confessor and, oddly, the Court Jester. Dymphna and her crew problem would have never been found, but at Geel, where they settled she founded a hospital for the poor and suffering and her charity eventually made its way back to Ireland. Her father went to Geel to retrieve Dymphna but she refused at which point her father beheaded her. Though perhaps not the imbalanced party and unsuccessful at that particular juncture, many of the demon-plagued who visited the place of her veneration were pronounced cured of their condition, maybe not advancing the understanding of mental disorders in the broader public awareness but at least reducing the social stigma on a local level. The lives of the boarders are chronicled in a series of photographs that blurs the distinction between guest and host and is in stark contrast with the usual methods of reintegration through institution.