As the Reykjavík Grapevine informs, former Icelandic interior minister Ögmundur Jónasson granted a lengthy interview to EU think-tank Katoikos, with a warrant to speak for those sometimes feeling exiled in their own or adopted homes, in which he addresses his thought on the rise in nationalism, the financial crisis that ravaged the tiny island nation and—perhaps most sensationally, his standing up and eventual dismissal of the FBI.
Sometime ago, I recall noting how all the gadgets and booby-traps from the classic Batman television series were all really conveniently and explicitly labelled. As pleased as I was to discover that the collection is still growing, going back to look at the original post from Dangerous Minds (at the first link), I was now finding myself more perplexed with the nature of such ‘captions.’
Was this running gag something for the benefit of the audience and expedience in the narrative only or was it some sort of meta reference? I could just as well imagine the Boy Wonder telling the Caped Crusader something blindingly obvious—eagerness made all the more supercilious by the labelling. I still suppose it is preferred over something machine-readable only like a bar-code or something with no expository value. Good old Alfred was probably behind of it, but one could also imagine that many a diabolical plot was foiled thanks to basic literacy. What do you think? The items from ACME mail-order catalogue that was always Wile E Coyote’s go-to resource also left no doubt what they were to do as well.
bed-in: an epically funky cover of John Lennon’s Give Peace a Chance by Louis Armstrong with a chorus of back-up singers, via Marginal Revolution
for any occasion: the US Space Agency, NASA, has just created its own GIPHY board
on the shoulders of giants: the vice-president elect is also a good judge of anatomy
evaporating people: hundreds of thousands of Japanese looking to start all over disappear from respectable society to reinvent themselves on invisible black-market, via Super Punch
udderly serious: oregano and seaweed might significantly reduce environmentally damaging bovine flatulence
the purge: after installing a notorious climate change denier as a warden of the environment, the president-elect’s transition team is circulating an intrusive survey to identify those not marching in lock-step
The Atlantic presents a rather sweeping, comprehensive list of political, foreign policy milestones and anniversaries that will occur in the upcoming year, illustrating how fraught diplomacy with compounded legacies not easily shaken and those foundations probably ought not to be tempted.
February marks a quarter of a century since the European Economic Community embarked into a new system of greater legal and political integration—beyond trade deals, with the Maastricht Treaty, which led to the creation of the contemporary EU, though it now stands at a crossroads. It is the centenary of the Russian revolutions of 1917 that created the Soviet Union as well as the fiftieth anniversary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Of course cultural movements and revolution don’t exclusively cause contemporaries to confront (and tackling “on this day” is only contending with a shadow of the original event and certainly not its precedents—and perhaps in the moment of memorial, not its antecedents either) the past only on round birthdays (there are many more events covered in the article) and the nostalgia for chronicle and a surfeit of past to the fill the present has become a sort of a touchstone lately—and hopefully the trivia can tease out some curiosity into the deeper history and influences as well—and perhaps shows that the whole jabberwocky of bookends needs respect and continual servicing. What do you think? Perhaps there’s also a strong desire to step away from a present in hopes that we can bound it—and whatever slurry of 2016 won’t wash into the new year.
Our thanks to the brilliant Messy Nessy for her extended and studied appreciation of the sublimely strange Triadic Ballet of the Bauhaus Theatre movement of the 1920s.
We had marvelled at the production and revivals beforehand but we were not clued into the backstory, inspiration and legacy enough to be able to enjoy it to the full extent, one always being induced to learning more, like realising the aspirations of Bauhaus itself was in a way realised in the lifestyle engine that is IKEA. The passage through the acts to something darker and more mechanised, formal and constrained in its expression, symbolised synthesizing the Dionysian impulse (which we’d assign to dance) in purely artificial and abstract Apollonian terms—which is ultimately the fate or anything staged and the burden of performance art. In fact, one of the character designs of Oskar Schlemmer that appeared in the third triad became the inspiration for Kansai Yamamoto’s 1973 Ziggy Stardust exaggerated jodhpur jumpsuit. There is currently an exhibit on set layout, choreography and costumes in Metz, and while no troupe is performing the piece right now, you can watch a video of a seminal production at the source link above.
