We enjoyed seeing this collection of moths, butterflies, mantises and beetles created by Montreal-based fashion designer Raku Inoue out of seasonal foliage. This series was inspired from studying ikebana or kadō (華道, the way of flowers)—the art of floral arrangement considered one of the three classical Japanese arts of refinement along with kōdō (香道, the Way of Fragrance) or incense appreciation and chadō (茶道), the ritual of the tea ceremony, and taught the artist to respect and work with Nature, selecting bounty over beauty.
Wednesday 7 February 2018
stick insect
bratři v triku
Active from 1945 to 1965, influential Czech illustrator and animator Jiří Trnka was heralded as the Walt Disney of Eastern Europe for his manner of storytelling that drew on classic folktales but his distinctive stop-motion short films were allegories intended for adult audiences and a vehicle for satire. Trnka found two partners and started an animation studio called Bratři v Triku (Brothers in Tricks) and eventually discovered his style, returning to the puppets that he used to entertain friends and family in his childhood.
Their early productions received international acclaim, recognised at the Cannes and Venice film festivals and Trnka managed to skirt the censors with messages that were mild to pointed rebukes of the Communist government. In his final years, however, Trnka’s output became more cynical and bolder in challenging the regime. His crowning achievement—and sadly his last work, dying four years later and banned as subversive after his death—was a short called Ruka (The Hand), which depicts a potter commissioned unwillingly to sculpt a likeness of the all-powerful Hand. Despite being pressured and plied awards and commendations, the potter views this as an unwelcome imposition (he’d rather be left to craft pots for his friends the flowers) turning into persecution as the Hand won’t relent. The potter escapes briefly and runs back home, tossing off his burden of medals and tries to barricade himself in his closet but as he does so, a flowerpot crashes down on his head—killing him. The Hand, afterward, holds a pompous funeral for the potter just as Trnka’s native Plzeň honoured him with a large public event. Only posthumously censored, The Hand may have been a prelude of the Prague Spring of 1968 and signal of a gradual socio-political thawing in the East.
monster of the week
Tuesday 6 February 2018
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
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.
Monday 5 February 2018
äquidistanzprinzip
The Local (Germany’s English language daily) alerts us to the fact that this moment, Monday 5 February 2018, marks the last time in history that the period of time Inner German border (deutsch-deutsche Grenze) stood was greater than the amount of time that Germany has been reunited. The BDR and the DDR were separate political entities for a longer period of time but there was no physical barrier until 13 August 1961. Visit the link up top for a selection of pivotal moments in the twenty eight years, two months and twenty-six days of the Wall’s existence.
