railroaded or letter of the law

The legal fiction of natural and corporate personhood—apparently with all benefits and responsibilities appertaining to, including the right to unimpeded free speech and no abridgement of religious liberties (though it is difficult to envision what that looks like for a corporation) has probably the basest and most twisted phoney, flimsy precedence that I’ve encountered since perhaps the selling of papal indulgences—and given the kleptocracy, kraterocracy that we’ve inherited, that speaks volumes.
About a decade after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution that provided that no person can be denied the citizenship and civil rights afforded to anyone without due legislative process that applies to every individual equally in the summer of 1868, a train magnate and Civil War Reconstructionist Robber Baron and a corruptible justice who fabricated accounts of deliberations of the constitutional amendment that ensured formerly enslaved people would be less systematically marginalized be testifying that the original version of the draft used the term “citizen” instead of person and by a patently sophistical argument by extrapolation if it was unconstitutional to discriminate on the basis of identified or attributed racial background, it stood to reason that it was equally a protected category when it came to natural versus agglomerated personhood—otherwise corporate citizenship. Though many landmark and recognisable cases appeal to the standard set by the Fourteenth Amendment: Plessy v Ferguson, Brown v Board of Education, Dred Scott v Sandford (the impetuous for the amendment that it overturned, an earlier finding that proffered Americans descended from enslaved people could not participate fully in civil society) and even latter day decisions like Gore v Bush in the disputed outcome of the 2000 presidential election or the bevvy of cases pertaining to marriage equality, the celebrity is overshadowed by the rather dull realm of the infringement by state or private institutions on corporate mission and vision whose litigations (despite the speciousness of the argument) make up the bulk of its legal exercise.

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.

your prize—a nubian goat

As a reminder to engage with story-telling more often—especially in its unmediated venues and within the limits the author limned for his voice—we really enjoyed this romp, via Coudal Partners, through the paperback canon of Philip K Dick with thirty-three picks of bizarre covers from domestic and international markets.
This curated selection represents only a small portion of his forty-four novels and scores of other pieces of essay and short-fiction and one has to wonder about what tales and commentary yet remain undiscovered because it won’t translate well to other narrative formats, with a handful (this or that and the other)—having undergone major rewrites and leaving much out—emerging on the other side. Sheep and goats were not considered a booby-prize either since after the nuclear apocalypse when the book is set that has destroyed most of life on earth, empathy towards and caring for animals was seen as a mark of the highest esteem and humanity.  Though knowing the story, I thought the title referred to something aspirational but rather to a Replicant’s need to count (electric) sheep to fall asleep.  Perchance to dream.  Do you have a favourite, perhaps of another author or franchise-universe, in this genre? Maybe these wild paperback illustrations mark the closest sometimes the unfilmable, impossible to produce adaptations get to a poster in the coming attractions section.