Poseidon’s Underworld presents a curated gallery of stylist to the stars, Jose Eber—vintage 1982, posing with some of the celebrities who’ve had their hair-dos done by the French hair-dresser. It’s really sort of a guilty-pleasure to pore over these glamour shots with accompanying, campy short interviews—confessions derived from an assessment that’s meant to identify one’s colour and thus one’s personality. Clients include Goldie Hawn, Penny Marshall, Farrah Fawcett, Jamie Lee, Cathy Lee, Barbara Walters and Pia Zadora.
Tuesday 11 October 2016
shear madness
Monday 10 October 2016
tron/troff or pitch-perfect
Recently an archivist made a fascinating discovery in the form of the first programme, score of digital music from 1948. Cryptologist and polymath Alan Turing wrote the instructions to have his building-sized computer at a laboratory in Manchester perform God Save the King followed by a few other melodies.
While we do have some insight into the pragmatic drive for Turing to modify the mainframe to produce sound—wanting to untether himself from monitoring gauges and screens to check the status of a running programme, a B- of an F-note indicating whether the programme had concluded or ran into a logical glitch (the beep, bop, boop of vintage super-computers), so he could check for bugs elsewhere or attend to the engineering requirements of the hardware, we are sadly not privy to what Turing thought about electronic music or its potential, since for years Mister Turing was blacklisted and his contributions to computer science went unacknowledged.
Sunday 9 October 2016
crossbenchers
Though we are still hoping for a Parliamentarian Roadshow, this alternative proposal of putting the House of Lords on an air-mattress barge on the Thames temporarily whilst the Palace of Westminster undergoes some major renovations from the architectural firm Gensler does seem like a pretty sound and non-disruptive solution. What do you think? Us commoners have often been displaced and had to work out of intermodals during major construction. After the devastating fire of 1834, King William IV offered parliament the nearly completed Buckingham Palace—though this gesture was to rid himself of a detested residence that he didn’t care for, and the gift was roundly rejected.
troglodyte
Somewhat reminiscent of the accursed crew of the Flying Dutchman who are beginning to fuse with their ship in the Pirates of the Caribbean, the excellent Futility Closet introduces us to Altamura Man, discovered in a karst cave in Apulia (the heel part, near Bari) in 1993. The Palรฆolithic fossil is the best preserved and most complete example known, but owning to the calcite concretions of some one hundred and fifty thousand years of water funnelling over limestone, Altamura Man is merged with the cave and can only be studied in situ.
7x7
art deco revival: Paris’ 1920s Hotel Bachaumont is reopening with all its former grandeur after four decades
sequoia: the puzzling phenomena of the albino redwoods provide a glimpse into how trees communicate and support one another
suburbia: New York City is getting an underground park complete with Victory Gardens
transhuman: the first Cyborg Olympic Games are being held in Zรผrich
nightliner: with competition from discount flights and long-haul busses killing romance, Austrian railways are trying to save the sleeper berth
luminophore: self-charging, glow-in-the-dark bicycle and pedestrian paths in Poland
