earth, wind & fire

It escapes me how so many of us missed the twenty-first night of and are now rushing to remember the eponymous 1978 hit on the last day thereof but here is a medley (of two) of homages for your enjoyment. First listen to the musical styling, courtesy of Laughing Squid, of Leonid and Friends perform a fantastic cover of the song with the accompaniment of a string and horn section. Afterward, while the tune is stuck in your head, mediate on these couplets of rejected lyrics from McSweeney’s contributor Gary M Almeter. “Ba de ya—Chrissie Hynde is a Pretender.”

rent gap and rehabilitation

Via the always brilliant Nag on the Lake, we are invited to play an unauthorised edition of the board game Monopoly whose rules and scoring invoke the spirit of the original version of “The Landlord’s Game” far better than the Parker Brothers’ interpretation or regional variants.
The art collective Chinatown Soup’s Chinatown edition features anchoring shops and local businesses rather than more or less desirable properties for development and poses challenges to players to save neighbourhoods from the blight of gentrification rather than be rewarded for it as a virtue and promotes socially responsible growth. One has to rehouse, for example, displaced residents priced-out of their homes—another reason that the board is not given addresses owing to the amorphous nature of gentrification that’s not bounded by certain streets or districts and people are moved to the margins. Learn more about the collective’s activities and activism at the link above.

w1a 1aa

On this day in 1967, the BBC rebranded its Home Service as Radio 4, differentiated the Light Programme into popular music and entertainment, becoming Radio 1 and Radio 2 and made its Third Programme, an arts and culture show, Radio 3. The reorganisation was prompted by increasing competition from continental broadcasts and offered a broader array of programming throughout the day within its constellation of stations. 

 

 

mycoremediation

Yesterday H prepared a fantastic mushroom and pasta dish with what’s called Kräterseitlingen (Pleurotus eryngii, le trumpet royale—elevate your minds!) as the main ingredient—the one in the background, not the psychotropic fly agaric in the foreground—and it turned out to be uniquely flavourful and relatively simple to make.

To serve four, one needs:
250 grams (9 ounces) of band noodles (fresh or dry)
250 grams (9 ounces, three large mushrooms) of King Trumpet mushrooms or substitute button mushrooms or chanterelles (Pfifferlinge)
2 teaspoons of butter
1 container of Crème Chantilly (unsweetened whipped cream, Schlagsahne) for texture
1 tablespoon of vegetable broth
A sprig of parsley
A clove of garlic
A large leek (Lauch) or onion
Salt and pepper to season

Begin preparing the pasta according to the instructions, boiling it in slightly salted water. Meanwhile dice the leek, garlic and mushroom, finely chopping the parsley. Braise the garlic and leek slices in a frying pan in the butter until the leeks turn glassy. Introduce the mushrooms and turn until lightly brown. Mix in the crème and broth and top with parsley over the pasta.

visual vernacular

Thanks to Present /&/ Correct, we can now correctly name an art movement known as Suprematism (Супремати́зм) through the careful temporary arrangement and proper disposal of trash that washes ashore by Hungarian photographer Balázs Csizik as a homage to the style.
Founded by painter Kazimir Severinovich Malevich in 1913, his work garnered international attention and a following after being exhibited in a 1915 show in Saint Petersburg (Petrograd), provocatively called the Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10 (like saying version zero point one, having erased the past and inching forward fresh).
Departing from Cubism and Russian Constructivism, Malevich’s art is distinctively anti-material and employed sparse compositions of simple geometric shapes and basic colours and are more akin representationally to a sort of visual grammar rather than a depiction of things. Though not allowed to be displayed per Stalinist cultural policy, Malevich’s work was quite resonant and influential, inspiring among others architect Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid to create purely abstract buildings.

das münchner abkommen

On this day—with negotiations continuing through the night and on to the next morning—in 1938 Italian il Duce Benito Mussolini, France’s Prime Minister Édouard Daladier and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met with Adolf Hitler at a conference in Munich to lend a façade of legitimacy to Nazi Germany’s long-standing goal of annexing the newly-coined territory of the Sudetenland, lands with an ethnic Germany majority along the borders with the also freshly minted Czechoslovakia.
Despite the conspicuous absence of any representation of the Soviet Union or the Czech government or outlandish claims including Czechoslovakia being accused of plotting to exterminate the Sudeten Germans and being characterised as a vassal state of France created for the express purpose of being a base of operations for the French armed forces to overrun and finally vanquish Germany, afterward Chamberlain praised the summit as heralding “peace in our time,” though many others (including president Edvard Beneš and the Czech people) saw it as a dangerous and precedential tactic of appeasement. German diaspora who had mostly set up trading operations in Hapsburg lands suddenly found themselves in foreign lands after World War I and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, bereft of much of the freedoms and privilege (reportedly) accorded to Prussian subjects prior. Because of the nature of their import/export business, these Germans living abroad were more affected than the native populations by the economic downturn of the Great Depression and their demands for autonomy—with the backing of the German government—became more and more shrill.

social confirmation

An important and timely instalment of Hidden Brain explores how a movement, a reckoning erupts as a cultural moment and the insufferable becomes no longer tolerated through overcoming or redirecting the discouraging mechanism of social or behavioural confirmation bias that reinforces grudgingly accepted norms by making us blind to the brittleness of custom and to the fortitude of our own convictions and has an interesting post-script, an unsung hero in the figure of Tarana Burke. After interviewing young survivors of sexual violence, Burke found herself without words but gathered resources over the next decade, founded an outreach network and gave her movement a name: Me Too. Another decade later, solidarity reached critical mass and the slogan championed behind a hash tag became a unifying message that the future is not going to look like the past.

tituli picti or norman consequence

On this in 1066, the forces of William, Duke of Normandy (previously) crossed the English Channel (la Manche) and established a beachhead at Pevensey, East Sussex, in order to dispute the claim to the Anglo-Saxon throne by King Harold Godwinson, precipitated by the extinction the Wessex line with the death of Edward the Confessor, who died without issue.
Harold’s elevation was challenged on three separate from by the Norwegian sovereign Harald Hardrada and Harold’s own brother Tostig—whom were repelled divisively (but at a great cost of men and materiel) under the Battle of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire on the twenty-fifth of September, but eventually fell to William’s armies at the Battle of Hastings on the fourteenth of October. Norman troop frustrated when their advances were stopped at first and were unable to penetrate English front lines adopted a tactic of pretending to retreat and then—more agile—turn back on their pursuers.