but our princess is in another castle

 I was impressed to see that our old hometown, which was undergoing quite some extensive construction work under the streets of the historic old town to modernise its gas lines and feed it from a biofuel processing plant, had been creative enough to canvas over the site with a Super Mario Brothers’ theme—sort of like the neat frieze of refrigerator magnets that my sister had given us a few years back. Each panel represented a different level and told about renovation challenges, timelines and the benefits that would eventually materialise. Mario’s companion is a sea-monster called Nesi—which is also the namesake for the fleet of buses that comprise the local public transportation (NES being the license plate designation for that county—Neu Stadt an der Saale) and the video game segment even incorporated the landmark gate towers of the Altstadt.

zersetzung

Our faithful chronicler, Doctor Caligari’s Cabinet, informs that among many other momentous occasions, on this day in 1944, director George Cukor debuted what would be the second cinematic adaptation based of playwright Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 psychological thriller, Gaslight (previously, when the term obtained its clinical sense). Featuring the acting talents of Joseph Cotton, Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer and Angela Lansbury, the main theme of the film centres on a husband (Boyer) who tries to unmoor his wife’s (Bergman) sense of reality in order to distract her from his criminal enterprise.

intern’yet or press “like” to help jesus win

Earlier this week, Democratic party members of the US House of Representatives obtained and released a cache of some thirty four hundred targeted advertisements produced and distributed by the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency via social media giant Facebook and Instagram. While I will admit that none of us (not just the American voters) are immune to the architecture of choice and propaganda and that ignorance and churlishness leveraged are force-multipliers, it is a sobering reminder how pathetic the counter-messaging was and how vulnerable we’ve allowed our democratic institutions to become and how through our neglect, we risk to lose them forever. Elections and inaction has consequences, and I suppose now the question is not who was to blame (everyone is) but whether we who were careless are yet redeemable and whether we might one day be able to restore civil society and get back our on-line privileges. Though we don’t always recognise it, we’ve been on restriction for quite some time.

geocentric or keeping up appearances

Via Open Culture and through the medium of rather beautiful star charts that rallied against the Copernican revolution that unseated the Earth as the centre of the Cosmos, we met the adherents of Muggletonianism.
The namesake of Lodowicke Muggleton, championed by his cousin John Reeve—tailors both—the sect started in 1651 London (Muggleton was styled as the last prophet as foretold in the Bible) as a refutation of scientific method, philosophical discourse and conversely did not believe in sermonising (a self-described, most disorganised religion) or that there was any sort of divine intervention until God choose to destroy the world, though infamously, they practised public praise and denunciation, believing that they could reduce one’s social standing with a curse. Their maps (there is a more extension gallery plus links to other resources to be found at the source up above) and cosmological hierarchy may have influenced the style of William Blake.

no filter

My Modern Met has a nice appreciation of the effortlessly whimsical portfolio of New York-based photographer Rodney Lewis Smith (1946* - 2016 †), who insisted on remaining on remaining true to the art and discipline, setting up his subjects with only natural light and relying on his trusted Leica 35 mm camera and his refined vision to tease order out of chaos. With a career spanning over four decades, Smith has influenced many portrait and fashion photographers that followed as well as leaving a vast archive of sentimental and surreal snapshots that represent a cross-section of moments—especially punctuated by the artist’s own sense of spontaneity that complements his talent for composition.