Wednesday 7 February 2018
catagories: ๐ก, ๐ญ, transportation
stick insect
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 kadล (่ฏ้, the way of flowers)—the art of floral arrangement considered one of the three classical Japanese arts of refinement along with kลdล (้ฆ้, the Way of Fragrance) or incense appreciation and chadล (่ถ้), the ritual of the tea ceremony, and taught the artist to respect and work with Nature, selecting bounty over beauty.
bratลi v triku
Active from 1945 to 1965, influential Czech illustrator and animator Jiลรญ 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 Bratลi 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 Plzeล 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.