Our faithful chronicler, Doctor Caligari’s Cabinet, that on this day—among many other momentous occasions—the US president Ronald Reagan, speaking at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin in 1987, publicly challenged General Secretary of the Communist Party Mikhail Gorbachev to open up the barrier that had physically divided the city since 1961.
Though not the first time the Wall itself was the subject of an address—having previously made similar overtures to the “evil empire” from 1982 onwards and not accorded with its legacy and influence until the Wall actually came down a year and a half later and was criticized at the time respectively by US and Soviet advisors as extreme and unpresidential and provocative and war-mongering, the speech looms large in the popular imagination, perhaps at the expense of appreciating the complexities of geopolitical undercurrents in East and West Germany and the Soviet Union.
Tuesday 12 June 2018
tear down this wall
zone out
Having hosted the debut of the first film script written by a neural network, Ars Technica was already versed with the screen-writing talents of an artificial intelligence named Benjamin, who is now re-enlisted the acting talents of the cast of his first short film, Sunspring, for a bolder experiment in which Benjamin was given full creative control and nearly single-handedly responsible for production from start to finish. Sponsored by the recently concluded Sci-Fi London 48 Hour Challenge, Benjamin adhered to a few basic movie prompts and a few other criteria and drawing on footage from public domain cult classics The Brain that Wouldn’t Die and The Last Man on Earth and digitally inserted the performers into his film.
blogosphere
catagories: ๐, networking and blogging
Monday 11 June 2018
4,645
Eight months after Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico, devastating the island and many residents in remote areas are still without basic utilities, the official government tally of fatalities has stood at sixty-four.
An impromptu memorial two weeks ago (and we’re all ashamed for having overlooked such a powerful and important gesture, which illustrates how beastly and uncaring and so easily called away we can be) on the marble courtyard of the San Juan capitol grew into thousands of pairs of empty shoes being neatly lined up to represent a truer number of the number lost in the storm.
6x6
empanelment: ten anti-Trump cartoons that the Pittsburgh Post Gazette refuses to publish
won’t you be my neighbour: Anthony Bourdain was like Mister Rogers (previously) for adults, plus the article that launched his career, via Coudal Partners
binney & smith: Crayola launches a cosmetic line based on its crayons
race to the bottom: a business-model based on the destruction of the resources it relies on is strikingly uneconomic
here we come on the run with a burger in a bun: dinosaur taco-butlers
bodyguard: a profile of the elite Nepalese Gurkha contingent protecting the Kim-Trump summit in Singapore
catagories: ๐ธ๐ฌ, ๐บ๐ธ, ๐, ๐, environment, food and drink
the use of words of good omen
Boing Boing’s archives directs our attention to a useful resource for copy-writers who’ve run out of innocuous, weasel words to mask the unpleasant realities of fascism and white supremacy that’s encroached on civics and politics and has gotten quite the unsettling foothold. Give it a try and see what doublespeak headlines are generated.
Sunday 10 June 2018
posture pals or the whispered ah!
During the late nineteenth century—well before yoga and mindfulness enjoyed a resurgence in Western medicine and overall thinking, there were some important and seemingly organic precursors that came in campaigns to promote mind-body interventions through postural awareness methodologies. While many of the exercise regiments may have been modish for a time to be subsequent forgotten and while none have been accorded the full faith and credit of the health insurance industry, one technique in particular developed by Australian Frederick Matthias Alexander, later expanded by students of his method, medically and scientifically described in neutral terms and which still has adherents struck me as rather intriguing.
Motivated to help himself during moments of debilitating stage-fright, absent a somatic cause, Alexander believed his habitual patterns of tensing up and seizing up certain parts of his body and physically recoiling from anxiety was disrupting his oration and probably similar conditioned patterns in stance and gait were either aiding or hindering other aspects of his life as well. Alexander believed that careful self-observation (noticing how one flinches and deports one’s neck, head and gaze when confronted with a stressful situation) and the will to change, he and others could restore their natural statures and after some testimonials from celebrities of his day, Alexander formalised and shared his method, encouraging students to explore a wide range of motions but prescribed no specific exercises so as not to suggest that bodies were built the same and that there was a best way to do things, save two: lying on one’s side at about a forty-five degree from the supine to learn how to rest constructively before a session and the “whispered ah!”a way to get rid of bad habits that inhibit our innate abilities to breath properly. The unlearning has a few steps, first calling for one to think of something funny to elicit a smile (so one is not pulling downward on the facial muscles as we’d be apt to do otherwise), let one’s jaw fall open and place the tip of one’s tongue on one’s bottom teeth, where ever one is during inhalation or exhalation, whisper “ah!” (that is a refreshing beverage!) as long as one can until feeling the breath squeezed out of one. Once the whisper has become ragged an unsustained close one’s mouth and the breathing reflex triggers one to draw breath through one’s nose and the expansion of the lungs.
catagories: ⚕️
dankest of the dank or early modern memetics
We appreciated this overview from Public Domain Review of the way woodcuts for woodblock print illustrations were recycled—sometimes with little alteration—and used in several different publications and contexts contemporaneously.
These common images weren’t just early stock photography collections but were reused for the malleability for any number of messages, much like the way the longevity of contemporary memes depends on their versatility, like this repeating image from the playbill for the seventh century Beggars’ Delight—also appearing in print as a broadsheet and a miniature in a bound volume, whose variations recall that meme still in circulation (I guess) of the boyfriend with the wandering eye (which too began life as a stock image) for its mutability.
Be sure to visit Public Domain Review at the link up top for more exemplars that were frequently sampled and the effects that printing was having on broader society and culture in significantly increasing the horizons of shared experience (even if vicariously) and the rapid pace of re-appropriation lead to the formation of copyright protections for creators.
catagories: ๐, networking and blogging