merrie melodies

As a coda to this day’s events, our faithful chronicler, Doctor Caligari, directs our attention to the story behind the animation studio United Productions of America (UPA), which originated over striking animators under contract with Walt Disney (who infamously denied the guild the right to organise) and a sense that animated works weren’t meant as a medium for anthropomorphising nor a reflection of the constraints—however well executed—of real models and ought to forward and promote an air of abstraction and cartoon physics. Outside of the studio system, UPA could undercut the competition and garnered contracts to relay the education and training syllabi (within budget) and established itself as a foil to the cinematic realism and didacticism of Disney fairy-tales.

sufganiyot!

Via Miss Cellania for the Festival of Lights (which begins at sunset today, 25 Kislev) and runs through nightfall on 10 December), we are treated to the musical styles of a cappella group Six13’s rendition of “Bohemian Chanukah,” which includes some historic and cultural background of the holiday. The first verse begins:

Is this the eighth night
We light with the family?
Recall with great pride
Our escape from Greek tyranny?

Kindle the lights
Remember the Maccabees
How did those five boys
Lead us to victory?

5x5

village détruit: exploring nine ghost towns in northern France—via the inestimable Nag on the Lake 
   

¤: : a short animation celebrating the obsolete coins of the member states now using the euro

no longer part of the squad: the art of unfriending prior to social media—via Things magazine

onomatopoesie: a conservancy for endangered sounds—via Coudal Partners’ Fresh Signals

holidays are coming: a primer on Advent season—a movable, malleable fest

my beautiful laundrette

On a quiet day with a peaceful overcast pall, between walks I visited a derelict shopping centre which has a working but very much under-ultilised laundry room attached.
I am happy that it’s there for my personal use.

It’s usually pretty deserted at any time but this day profoundly so and I took the moment to appreciate the aethetics of empty spaces and the symmetry in repetition and redundancy.

I think the fact that was never afforded a glimpse of this place, in contrast, as somewhere bustling or inadequate for demand—just a convenience not yet swept away, makes the stolid lines of machines, prone to breakdown and only now have the “out of order signs” placed by the maintenance staff and angry patrons now gone, just and mostly, and the facilities fully rehabilitated resound as an unintentional art space itself.  I got the washing done in more tranquility than usual.