parola del giorno

The local’s daily vocabulary dispatch furnishes us with quite a useful word to express suffering from the winter blues—that are already gaining a purchase here north of the Alps—and to suggest commiseration over the weather: meteopatico. Most speakers eschew the dictionary form—which is meteoropatico and doesn’t quite come trippingly off the tongue. An English near-synonym might be depressione invernale for seasonal affective disorder but meteopatico sounds more poetic and approachable.

architettura minore

 We appreciated the chance to make the acquaintance of preeminent architect, planner and educator Denise Scott Brown through an exhibition of her photography, which Scott Brown begs off as any art that comes of it being accidental and incidental, with her focus being solely on the architectural vernacular of a place.
A large part of the show features studies of the Las Vegas strip that Scott Brown compiled in 1972 as a heuristic device to explore forgotten or estranged symbolism and meaning in contemporary context but features a whole portfolio of images she captured in the 1950s and 1960s of disparate scenes—Venice and empty highways among them.

tafl top

Our gratitude to TYWKIWDBI for the introduction to the family of Nordic and Celtic strategy board games played out on a grid with asymmetrical armies with the player on the defensive clustered at the centre of the board—protecting a king or castle from capture.
Known as hnefatafl (fist-table—I guess for pounding the table and upsetting the pieces out of frustration over losing) or Viking chess, variants were played in the British Isles and Scandinavia for centuries—with the received rules written down by natural philosopher Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, but so rife with errors and mistranslations that the rules needed to be re-written and the original form of play was lost. Trying to reconstruct this ancient game, however, and watching it evolve has proven to be a fun and fertile activity. Learn more at the link up top.

ny-12

On this day, US election day a half a century ago, not only did Richard Nixon defeat incumbent Democratic vice president and presidential contenders Hubert Humphrey and George C Wallace, Shirley Anita Chisholm (*1924 – †2005)—as depicted here by illustrator and regular contributor to the New Yorker, Kadir Nelson, commissioned in 2008 by the US House of Representatives to posthumously create her official portrait—became the first black woman elected to congress. Serving her constituency in Brooklyn and Queens for seven terms from 1969 to 1983, Chisholm also campaigned for president herself in 1972.

7x7

gooey, crunchy, cheesy, yummy: Pizza: the Musical by Anthony Clune, Sarah Fiete and Eric Tait, via Everlasting Blört

craft master: paint by numbers with Dan Robbins, an appreciation from Nag on the Lake plus lots more to discover

bauhaus 100: Dezeen continues its special series on the upcoming centenary of the art movement with a profile of Walter Gropius

corporate identity: a retrospective look at the design studio of Massimo Vignelli (previously) and cohorts

rock, paper, scissors: agitating militia groups expected to surge at the border present a more dangerous challenge than the refugees

ghastlygun tinies: MAD magazine remixes Edward Gorey’s macabrely doomed children for the era of school shootings, via Boing Boing

the shape of water: vintage illustration of the alien beauty of the nudibranchia (previously here and here)

creative-commons

Open Culture publishes a very open love letter to the US Library of Congress, one the country’s most enduring and non-partisan institutions that ensure peace amongst the stacks and shelves no matter who one’s ideological neighbour is.
The institution’s staff has ensured unfettered access to the knowledge and made available many of its collections before in digital formats but its latest offering, Free to Use and Re-Use, categorised by vast, archival sets from WPA posters to Japanese prints, is a resource sure to occupy one’s time for hours on end. For an institution whose business end is to monitor and police for copyright infringement according to the interpretation of other agencies, it has done the world a pretty good turn in getting out and keeping access open for what should be free and the lien-hold of none.

olfactory bulb

Via Marginal Revolution, we are introduced to artist Sissel Tolaas celebrates the olfactory when the world becomes estrangingly deodorised, enshrining everything that’s visceral and memorable about the often derided sense of smell.
Her brave and unabashed landscapes perfumed with perhaps what we’d as soon forget create a odour distinctive to time and place and craft a unique narrative with each waft—telegraphing specific characteristics that rather defy digitalisation and the usual heraldic shorthand, though our sensibilities seem to shy away from confronting the vulgar without detergent. Tolaas has even crafted a compliment of vials containing bespoke smells never smelt before to break in case of an event that one wants to create an indelible memory for. It’s assuredly a good thing that we must needs be present for the perception that is most immediate and unmitigated to the brain (though whole industries are devoted to building those barriers) and to perform witchcraft, chemistry and biology, unable to elevate ourselves above the miasma that was formerly blamed for all maladies.

rewilding

We took a drive through the countryside and stopped at the foothills of the Rhön and hiked up the stony and wooded slope of the Schafstein, the Sheep Rock. A lot of forests are maintained in a sustainable manner (or at least so we’d like to hope, not really appreciating the impact of our harvesting has on the ecosystem) in Germany but there are few untrammelled places but since the 1990s, the inner core of the trees growing here, within a much larger reserve, have been left to their own devices in hopes of re-establishing an old-growth forest.
Please click on the pictures for larger images.  Basalt boulders and fallen trunks covered with different mosses punctuated the terrain and were stepping stones for the ascent, not treacherous but certainly a demanding climb. Let’s hope more places are allowed to revert to their pristine state. Afterwards we continued on to Guckaisee, a series of lakes at the base of the mountain whose water levels had been essentially negated due to the hot, arid summer—though visiting ducks were content to plop into the lake bed and do a little bit of mud surfing.