closing thought

I wasn’t aware, until consulting our faithful chronicler Doctor Caligari, that the US staple news programme Nightline whose format has been copied the world over had its premiere in November 1979, and was begun under quite different auspices.
At first, it was not presented and packaged as a feature segment to examine different topics more in depth, but rather it aired as a special broadcast, anchored by the network’s State Department correspondent Ted Koppel, to recap the day’s events regarding the Iranian hostage crisis—and to compete with rival late night talk- and variety-shows for viewership. By the time the hostages were released 444 days later, Nightline was firmly entrenched as an evening’s alternative to monologues, soliloquies and celebrity guests.

moog indigo

French electronic music pioneer of the mid- to late-60s and avid early-adopter of the synthesizer Jean-Jacques Perrey passed away in Lausanne late last week.
An aspiring physician in the 1930s, Perrey immediately rethought his vocational-calling after his first encounter with an electronic keyboard and embarked on a literal studio career, experimenting with remixing and splicing techniques. Many of us might recognise Perrey’s “Baroque Hoedown” as the rather arresting theme for Disney resorts’ Main Street Electrical Parades but there are dozens of others in his discography that might ignite memories. It’s well worth the research to get a sample of some of this well sampled repertoire.

umami or hot-pot

Bringing to mind the idiom stewing in one’s own juices, apparently it is the done thing in Japan at the moment to bathe in a scented preparation that wafts of the broth of ramen noodles. Coming in a wide variety of flavours, as My Modern Met informs, easing into such a steaming cauldron makes me think of hapless explorers with pith helmets lured into the clutches of cannibals.  Would you be able to properly unwind smelling of dinner, dispensing with the more traditional bath-time fragrances?

revue, redux

Via the always marvelous Everlasting Blört, we are given to a bit of nostalgia with a retrospective look at this quite interminable campaign season through the lens of some of the best political cartoons and memes that documented the entire bizarre and self-mocking careening career of the 2016 election.
Of course we are not nostalgic over wanting to relive or particularly revisit any part of it—rather I think it’s coming to terms with the fact that this ideological war does not end once the votes are counted, even if there are no disputed precincts and there’s no ties. Neither party could claim a victory, much less a mandate, and I fear the division will only continue and no reconciliation is forthcoming. What do you think? What sort of coda is going to be pinned on what already seems like the longest, most contested election in history?

wendell wilkie or prospect park

Every four years during the US election season a Brooklyn artist decorates her lawn not signs for the pugilists of the day but rather spares a thought for those defeated in past battles. Apolitically, the artist is inviting passers-by to imagine how history and our present direction would have been different if elections had gone the other way.

the fourth estate or deplorable me

Budding entrepreneurs in one particularly enterprising digital corridor of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia could be said to be influencing political sentiment in America as much as much or more than any coordinated hacking attack by capitalising on a business-model that is very much the Frankenstein’s monster of social media, albeit not in a way that is quite so sensation nor begging of response in kind.

Having abandoned positive articles in favour of the candidate Bernie Sanders for propaganda having to do with the last contenders remaining—especially what’s been found more profitable and proliferate in undermining the competition, several score Macedonian webmasters have taken to generating content that recursively perpetuates whatever misinformation that the internet sustains and catering to the partisan who long for nothing more than conformation-bias. That social media sites are pledging to filter out the catch-penny content that they’ve encouraged and depend on is irony enough, but it seems all the more just in a way in the context of so many Albanians and their compatriots being duped by Nigerian princes and other schemes when the internet first came into being. What do you think? Our economic-models are already based to a great extent on flattery, but how does that become more or less incorrigible when planted directly in unchallenged echo-chambers?

5x5

it’s the blue meanies: Beatles’ LEGO Yellow Submarine with minifigs

net-zero: a fleet of hydrogen-fuelled passenger trains enter into service in Germany

you have died of dysentery: blistering look at voter suppression as told with an Oregon Trail style exposition

oooga chaka: music video director Jonas Åckerlund looks back at some of the catchiest and most influential Swedish songs from the past four decades

story-boarding: tiny film sets as movie posters