dreamtime stories

No—that’s not an incident of pareidolia nor even an example of an acheiropoieton that you’re seeing but rather an apartment complex in Melbourne, completed in 2015, called the “Portrait.”
Architects designed the façade of balconies to form the image, when viewed at a distance, of Beruk (Anglicised as William Barak) son of Bebejan who was the last traditional tribal elder (ngurungæta) of the aboriginal inhabitants, the Wurundjeri clan, of the lands that host the present-day metropolis. Barak, who died in 1903, dedicated his life to fighting for aboriginal social justice causes and was an important informant of his people’s folklore and mythology. Of course such a tribute has no pretensions of amending the grievous suffering that the Aborigines experienced because of European settlement but perhaps the edifice is at least edifying enough to inspire curiosity and move people not to just examine these darker chapters but also the heritage and culture of the population the portrait represents.

liturgy

The Ancient Greeks had a nominal system of taxes and tithes that helped promote trade and kept the polis able to operate on a day-to-day basis (compare to Rome whose wealthiest oligarch, Pompey the Great, accumulated all that treasure by owning the city’s fire department and extorting), but the financing of extraordinary expenditures—like emergency repairs to roadworks or bridges, a new amphitheatre, public festivals or even defensive actions fell exclusively to the super-rich to shoulder as their public duty and social obligation.
Not only were the wealthy eager to pay a progressive tax that needed no enforcement, theirs was also the oversight and execution of the liturgical (λῃτουργία, meaning public-service) tasks that they took responsibility for. The best technical counsel and artisans would be employed to make sure that their benefaction and charity optimised the welfare for all, since those whom delivered inferior public-works were as roundly condemned as those who were perceived to be tight with their money and horded wealth for its own sake. If one donor was feeling particularly put upon and suspected his fellow associates were poor-mouthing and shirking their duties, the former could issue a challenge: the later either take up the liturgy or submit to a tribute to determine who was richer—failing to answer that summons would result in the two parties exchanging estates. What do you think? The received representative democracy is certainly very different from the politics of the agora but maybe technology has advanced sufficiently to manage all the voices crying out to be heard without falling into mob-rule and disorder. I suspect, however, that we still need saving from ourselves. Such a voluntary taxation regimen seems appealing, but I do wonder if the same template could be applied without the engagement and participation of every single citizen and whether we’ve not—considering the mutual levels of distrust and distaste for politicians (professional or otherwise)—already to a person been designated denizens and guest-workers for the ruling-class.

stonewalled

Whilst some seem to have as much of a problem acknowledging truths outside of their default level of ignorance or denial, others are making it free to be you and me with the Republic of Ireland is managing to elect its first openly gay (and half Indian) Taoiseach, and heart-warmingly a devoted couple of male vultures residents at a zoo in Amsterdam, as Dave Log v 3.0 informs, have adopted and hatched a chick, keepers having given the frustrated but diligent and caring pair an egg that was rejected by another bird. Dear Leader has predictably remained silent on the matter of declaring the month of June as pride month, allowing his Number One Daughter to usher in a celebration for the sodomites.

case study or island of stability

Couched as we are in alternative truths and a totalitarian regime that would have us believe that we have always been at war with Eastasia, we appreciated this look back on the term gaslighting from the Neurocritic first through its contemporary resonance that insists on a new normal (that’s the most insidious thing for which we cannot afford to let our guard down), then looking back to its Victorian, domestic-noir origins and then to a series of citations in medical literature that appropriated the term from the 1944 film adaptation, already in colloquial use since the 1960s. This form of psychological terrorism uses trickery and deceit to plant seeds of doubt by means of persistent denial and contradiction and invalidate a counter-argument. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Though noticing a dip in the lights was dismissed as a figment of the abused’s imagination and seemed a rather insignificant detail to stake one’s sanity on, it was the one truth in the framing of the original story that the protagonist could find refuge in.

adventuræ maris, wreccum maris

After gold was discovered in the hills of California, there was incredible rush to deliver prospectors and cargo to the territory by way of the shallow wharves of Yerba Buena Cove of San Francisco, which as Super Punch informs, resulted in the impressment of any spare sailing vessel into this lucrative venture.
Once moored in the cove, however, captains found little incentive to make a return journey and many ships of all description were more or less abandoned. As the settlement grew and grew, these wrecks were absorbed as landfill and make up a strange and hidden landscape of buried treasure and is now being charted out with extensive detail by the city’s historical maritime counsel. Some ships were salvaged and repurposed as building materials but others due to the way the laws of subrogation were interpreted at the time were intentionally scuttled because the land under the sunken boat (the cove was very shallow and could be turned into dry land with a few wheelbarrows of sand and a day’s labour) became the property of the wreck’s owner. Read more about this project in National Geographic at the link up top.