umzugstag

grimoire

By way of Oxford English Dictionary’s Word of the Day, we’re drawn to perhaps summon a demon or two. The first exorcise is in deference to a maleficent entity, who is either facing redundancy owing to the eternal, infernal memory of the internet or is now finding himself racing to beat the devil for a backlog of old business, by the name of Tutivillius, the Worthless One.
Tutivillius is charged with maintaining one’s permanent record, as it were, recording one’s misdeeds—specifically the sack of syllables that represent the mumblings, grumblings, gossips and complaints dropped unwitnessed—like so many crumbled cookies of one’s digital footprint—during church service, when one’s thoughts were supposed to be at their most refined and rarified. This recorded testimony is used against an individual on Judgement Day. A second—related or conflated demon and the creation of his own handywork—is called Titivillus, whose duty which he gladly discharges on behalf of Lucifer is to introduce errata into copy and text that escapes the keen eyes of scribes and editors and is the bane of proofreaders: namely in infamous publications like the 1631 edition known as the Wicked Bible since some of the Commandments omitted the not part from thou shalt. The two are probably one and the same—owing to a typo which the demon trafficks in. Titvillus is also blamed for mispronunciation and other slips of the tongue. The superstition that the latter possessed orators and haunted the presses is the reason a printer’s apprentice is referred to a printer’s devil, charged with the most onerous of tasks and was the brunt of blame (perhaps nowadays a jamming, problematic laser-printer) when an error popped up.

十代のスタイル

Enjoying a brief two year run from 1968, Teen Look was a weekly publication brilliantly illustrated by Satsuku Okamoto meant to promote a harmonising dialogue (which I guess all teen interest magazines are and always were) between adolescents and their parents.
We liked exploring the gallery of covers curated by Dangerous Minds and appreciated—as this is the case with many captivating works of graphic design (especially foreign ones) that are circulated widely but often without background or context—moreover the appeal for more information (nothing easily retrievable), both on the magazine and its readership and on the artist.

sniglets or the meaning of lyff

As the lexical progeny to Douglas Adams’ concept of a lyff—being a common object or experience, oddly often tied to a specific region or town, for which no term yet exists, sniglets, popularised by Rich Hall’s tenure as chief anchor on the 1980s spoof newscast Not Necessarily the News—as Tedium invites us to recall—were similarly described as any word that does not appear in the dictionary but should.
A few examples, in the lane of shared experiences, include: premblememblemation—the act of checking that a letter deposited in a mailbox has truly been done so in the correct fashion, icelanche—the sudden onslaught of ice from a beverage as one attempts to finish the drink, and aquadextrous—the ability to control the bathtub faucet and dials with one’s toes. Do you remember these? Like a lot of material from 1984, it does not seem to have aged very well and perhaps on the surface quite non-malleable, but I suspect there is some merit to playful neologisms and folk etymologies. I wonder, if the show’s writers had got to influence current nomenclature, what they would have called the selfie and doggo lingo.

le chant du monde

Early-career comparisons to Pablo Picasso are to be forgiven as he and fellow artist Jean Lurçat were virtual Dopplegänger and perhaps the albeit unique and pioneering abstract paintings of the later French artist and near-contemporary were passed over as derivative with Lurçat never achieving the renown of his Spanish counterpart, but the comparison (though importantly a point of access) does detract from the artistic merit of Lurçat’s later works, executed through his rediscovery of the medium of the medieval tapestry (tapisserie), and adhering to the craft’s stylistic horizons as much as possible. Limiting the palette of colours the artist availed himself of made monumental projects possible and after experiencing the Apocalypse Tapestry—for its depiction of the Book of Revelations—that the duke of Anjou had commissioned his residence in Angers, Lurçat realised that the format allowed for the hallucinatory abandon that he expressed in his earlier period when first decommissioned from fighting in the war.
Though off the battlefield, Lurçat and the members of his salon, a workshop of talent to operate the traditional looms and create the panels under Lurçat’s direction, were resisting tyranny in a multiple year, therapeutic catharsis that became The Song of the World, an abstract, contemporary to be inverted version of the Apocalypse, over-turned through a collective effort, hung in another wing of the same palace that displays the original. Learn more about Jean Lurçat and his vision at Messy Nessy Chic at the link up top.