willkommen in der hölle

Corporations and kleptocrats are deserving of the coming mobs with pitchforks and protests are quickly slipping into violence and vandalism because people are feeling more and more powerless—especially when made to suffer and sidle such buffoonery and abject doltishness emanating from the US. No one has time for that. Outrage (DE/EN) should still be channelled and harnessed gingerly—however, and there’s no excuse for attacking for attacking the police and the emergency services who have incredibly tough jobs to do nor for senseless, opportune destruction and looting.
Such chaos and devastation are not political instruments and a resistance failed. The city of Hamburg deserves better and is better than the prevailing portrayals of the moment—while there’s many stand-out and shameful scenes, there were more peaceable demonstrations, concerts and marches with a message and mandate happening concurrently. That said, the responsibility lies fully with the politicians and their image makers not only by insisting upon prestigious venues but perhaps also by the fact that such rallies could not (with or without undirected rage) take place in the streets of Washington, DC, Riyadh, Ankara or Moscow.

buffer memory

One archivist and curator of endangered and at risk television programming is discovering that there is a palimpsest of preserved historical data to be retrieved from VHS and Betamax tapes that might seem otherwise without much merit from a conservationist point of view in the form of teletext pages that were collaterally recorded along with the surface shows.
Before the internet and home-computers became ubiquitous, the Ceefax service furnished a wealth of information, as with these captured feeds from June of 1983—plus resources to be found at the link up top that have compiled whole days’ worth of behind the screen programming.  Most broadcasters ceased their teletext operations in the early- to mid- 2000s once the internet (especially news websites) became robust enough to handle high-traffic volumes but the service still continues for some in TV Land.

eye in the sky

Via the always marvellous Nag on the Lake, we are treated to a carefully juried selection of the best photographs taken by aerial drone pilots from cameras aloft. These superlative examples of the genre, like this best in category Nature of lavender harvesting in Provence were solicited and curated by a specialty photography that really appreciates fresh and unexpected perspectives site called dronestagr.am, previously featured here.

leerdammer, limburger

BBC Culture treats us to a tour of an exhibition hosted in the galleries of the Maurithuis of the Hague—the kingly cabinet known for curating the collection of Old Dutch Masters, which not only extols the aesthetic appeal of cheese as a subject for still life paintings but also for its inspirational virtues through the ages. There are dozens of examples mentioned worthy of further exploration but one of the more resonant ones was how a particularly ingratiating morsel of Camembert (and not Einstein’s contemporary writings on time dilation and relativity as some have suggested) that drove Salvador Dalí to create his iconic melting clocks in Persistence of Memory.