Why you never wear GREEN on TV๐ค pic.twitter.com/IsC8TuE3Ei— Jesse McLaren (@McJesse) July 28, 2017
Friday 28 July 2017
tabula rasa
wayback machine
Brilliantly, as Waxy informs, the Internet Archive (previously here and here) is curating daily snapshots of a dozen of major internet properties (CNN, Reddit, YouTube, Amazon, the BBC, Yahoo! News, et al.) of how these web sites looked a decade ago. The historical chronicle elicits a sense of nostalgia and contextualises where we stand now.
Thursday 27 July 2017
motorama or ร la kart
Messy Nessy Chic brings us the profile of George Barris, the late, legendary designer of custom cars who was responsible for nearly all the iconic vehicles featured on film and television throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
Though perhaps the contribution of his workshop that’s most easily conjured up would be the original Batmobile, Barris also brought us My Mother the Car (a much maligned sitcom that was premised on the idea that an attorney purchases a used Porter touring car that his mother has been reincarnated as), the dragsters from Mannix, the Dukes of Hazzard and the Banana Splits as well as the signature cars of the Munsters and the Clampetts and another sentient automobile in Knight Rider’s KITT plus his nemesis. Barris’ studio also recreated many novelty vehicles for special exhibitions and designed custom cars for celebrities, including Zsa Zsa Gabor, Elton John and Elvis Presley.
dot-dot-dot
A suspension point—or an ellipsis comes from the Greek term for omission or falling short and has paradoxically transformed as punctuation mark to signal a continuance rather than a trailing off (aposiopesis, a figure of speech whose literal translation is becoming silent) or something suggestive of an unspoken alternative thanks in part to that shit gibbon occupying the Oval Office who’d prefer to legislate from the bully pulpit in one hundred and forty character conniptions.
Dear Leader’s latest chained but unhinged affront to reason and dignity and human kindness, the ban on transgender personnel from serving in the military, is not indicative itself of course of any larger agenda or policy shift in itself and was only a ploy to secure funding for his Border Wall and more immediately a distraction from the health care debate and the ongoing investigation into Russian interference and collusion. He does not care and has no strategy, but that does not mean his deputies won’t seize on the action to discriminate and discharge whole classes of service members en-masse and won’t continue with their goals of ideological course-correction that will push America to a much darker place that’s far bigger than the volunteer army. Another sad irony of Dear Leader’s announcement was that it fell on the sixty-ninth anniversary of Harry S Truman’s issuance of Executive Order 9981 which abolished racial discrimination and segregation in the Armed Forces and on the fifty-fourth anniversary of the institution of the policy that forbade service members and federal workers from patronising businesses or institutions that practised discrimination, opening up the route for greater equity and social justice in the country as a whole.
inside the actors studio
At a USO sponsored event, I got the opportunity to see the accomplished actor and director Bryan Cranston—of Malcolm and the Middle and Breaking Bad fame—give a motivation talk about his career and the importance of seizing on one’s good fortunes.
Though only subjects adjacent to the discussion and not brought up at large, it was interesting to discover that Cranston, in addition to the numerous credits to his name, was also the vocal artist behind some of the monstrous villains of the American adaption of Mighty Morphing Power Rangers—and made such an impression on the cast, the Blue Ranger was retroactively named Billy Cranston in the actor’s honour and that this autumn Cranston will be starring in a London stage adaptation of the film Network, playing the role of Howard Beale. We’ve been fans of his performances and agree that he’d be perfect for this new part too.
sine, cosine
