monster of the week

While perhaps best known for his controversial cologne advertisement of kissing sailors in the midst of on-going debates about the US military doctrine of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell regarding the fitness of gay and lesbian to serve openly in the armed forces in 1995, amanuensis and apprentice to Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol David LaChapelle was also famous for his indulgent and wild photography sessions with celebrities. Apparently in circulation again is this exemplary series that encapsulates a certain look of the 1990s (possibly a little cringe-worthy) featuring X-Files stars David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson posed against immersive bright backdrops (perhaps an exploit of audience speculation on the duo’s platonic relationship) that look pretty astonishing for any decade. Visit LaChapelle’s studio to rediscover his work, which really informed the 90s and continues to make bold statements.

clusterfists

Recently my subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary’s Word of the Day (read about the founding contributors to the living document here) introduced me to the delightfully Latinate nonce word, uttered—or rather—committed to paper only once by Scottish epigrammist and translator Sir Thomas Urquhart of Comarty, quomodocunquizing. The term is defined as the act of making money by any means possible and appears in his 1652 work Ekskybalauron (Greek for gold out of dung and subtitled Or, the Discovery of the Most Exquisite Jewel, a prospectus on constructing a universal language) in the context, “those quomodocunquizing clusterfists and rapacious varlets.” On a side note, staunch Royalist and erstwhile political prisoner during the reign of Oliver Cromwell, Urquhart’s cause of death is listed as laughter, dying in a fit after having received the news of the restoration of the Stuart crown.

7x7

city mouse, country mouse: sociable chat bots reinforce linguistic theory that a bigger population of speakers simplifies grammar

anakongda: a fun text adventure from Neil Cicerga, via Waxy

night flight: Düsseldorfer Jakob Wagner takes us on a tour of nocturnal urban environments across the globe, via Twisted Sifter

silver bells and cockle shells: browsing seed catalogues with Lambert Strether

astray in a wood: Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell for semantic trespasses

park life: a photographer in Kiev documents a decade of a bench’s service to the community

inebriated narration: a drunk history lesson on rocketry pioneer and notable occultist Jack Parsons

the drum major instinct

Via Kottke, we find that a thoughtful individual who knew that Dr Rev Martin Luther King JR was highly critical of capitalism and the urges that it brings out in people countered the rather tone-deaf word from the sponsors of the national sportsball by overlaying the rest of King’s sermon (delivered sixty years to the day prior at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia) taken out of context over their own commercial.

It often causes us to live above our means. It’s nothing but the drum major instinct. Do you ever see people buy cars that they can’t even begin to buy in terms of their income? You’ve seen people riding around in Cadillacs and Chryslers who don’t earn enough to have a good T-Model Ford. But it feeds a repressed ego.

See both versions of the advertisement and listen to the whole sermon at the link up top.

our daughters’ daughters will adore us

Today marks the centenary of some women in the United Kingdom securing the right to vote in the United Kingdom. As with most European nations, suffrage came as World War I was reaching its conclusion and during the inter war years that followed and marked a significant turning point but not the culmination of a decades’ long struggle for equal voice and representation.
After having expanded the vote to all males without qualification due to manpower shortages during the war-effort—occupational credentials having hitherto been a voting requirement for the unlanded, parliamentarians realised that they could not maintain the fiction that women, who were also stepping up to fulfil vital positions in industry and research, were incapable of political engagement. Negotiations ensued and the Representation of the People Act 1918 was passed that provided women who were married to householders or were heads-of-household in their own right, occupiers of property with an annual rent of at least five pounds sterling, graduates of a British university and over the age of thirty (for men, it was twenty-one) could vote. Momentum continued (though not without backbiting and periods of regression) and in November of the same year, an act was passed allowing women, twenty-one years and older, to stand for parliamentary elections and be elevated from within to ministerial positions. A decade later, the Equal Franchise Act made all terms and conditions the same.