drawn together

Hamburg-native and illustrator responsible for bringing to life English author and playwright Julia Donaldson’s Gruffalo, Axel Scheffler, has called London home for nearly four decades but since the Brexit referendum and the UK’s departure imminent, these days he’s anguishing over the outcome. In response, he invited some of his colleagues to illustrate their visions of Europe united and divided.

the fame monster

The always brilliant Nag on the Lake directs our ears to the neo-Baroque canon and counterpoint of arranger and performer Vincenzo Culotta in his adaptation of the 2009 release “Bad Romance.” Learn more and get the sheet music at the link above but I don’t think the artist managed to work in a G-A♯-G-A♯ tonic-dominant progression.

👑👠💰

Emoji are popping up more and more as evidence in court cases, as Slashdot informs, subject to interpretation and double-entendre, and often demonstrate that judges and attorneys are not prepared to deal with a level of innuendo and implicit deniability.
The inherent ambiguity in language is of course nothing new and employees legions of legal experts to study and in some cases capitalise on shades of meaning, but the case in point—trying to determine the guilt or innocence of a man entangled in a prostitution sting operation and whether he was proposition the undercover informant with the emoji string in the title in a text message—proceeded by the phrase “Teamwork make dream work”—is interesting to ponder because their seems, without further context, compelling arguments either way.
What do you think? Moving beyond the realm of awkward advances that can quickly become harassment or grounds for infidelity (sometimes an aubergine is just an aubergine), parsing meaning and intent becomes even more fraught as one is asked to judge what’s insulting (💅), threatening or intimidating—confounded by the fact that reception of messages sent as positive or negative is not insignificantly coloured by the forum and platform that one uses.

executive overreach

On this day in 1856, among many other things both great and good, the American Party—isolationists and xenophobic who proudly styled themselves as the “Know-Nothings”—as our faithful chronicler, Doctor Caligari, informs, had their first political convention in Philadelphia and nominated their first campaigner for high office, former president Milliard Fillmore. Discreet to the point of secretive about affiliation and wanting nothing more than to stoke culture wars much like today’s fraught political landscape, it’s worth taking a moment indeed on this of all days to note the similarity between the person of candidate Fillmore and the actor, Alec Baldwin, who portrays (and apparently under threat for doing so) the current national emergency and pretender to the throne with such polish and acumen.

petri dish

I know that living cultures are not globules of a lava lamp nor do they exist for our amusement (like this ill-conceived portable sea monkey kingdom of tardigrades that was fortunately never realised) these bacterial lamps from designer Jan Klingler are, on the other hand, quite keen specimens and the epitome of having a conversation-starter in terms of home décor. At first selecting microbes for their aesthetic value and freezing the growth of the culture in place once the desired effect had been achieved, the resin plates can also be sourced from specific people and specific places.
Romantically, Klingler captured and projected the microscopic biome of the lamp post in Stockholm where the artist met his partner in one of his creations, sort of a post-modern fossilised keep-sake, and it would be an interesting dialogue and clinical trial—in keeping with the laboratory-inspired look, to display their separate microbial constellations (magnitudes larger than our human bodies alone) from when they first met and compare them to how they’ve changed as they’ve mingled and exchanged strains of bacteria.

grand ole opry

We are reminded of the fact that fried chicken magnate (with business partner Mahalia Jackson) and singer Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon (*1912 – †1996) who was better known by her stage name Minnie Pearl contrived a rich backstory for her signature character, including a fictional hometown of Grinder’s Switch (expanded from a real location outside of Centerville named for and consisting only of a rusty railroad junction box) Tennessee. I don’t really know what a Grindr or a Switch (oh—and oh, I think I am confusing it with Twitch but I don’t really get that either) is in the milieu of contemporary networking but I can’t imagine the two contexts have any particular affinity—though who am I to say?

and here we have idaho

Whereas many US states have adopted multiple official anthems coloured by one context or another—the majority sourced to eras not to be particularly proud of, New Jersey alone refreshingly of all the states and territories chooses to recognise none—though seemingly out of an embarrassment of choices rather than high-mindedness.
Others have waltzes, ballads, poems, state songs emerita attesting to the rousing horribleness celebrated that’s still too much tied up in the character of the place to let go of it altogether, marches and hymns. New Jersey, despite its diabolical native son in the Jersey Devil, does not have an official cryptid while acknowledging and taking ownership of more problematic symbols like the square dance, a patently racist contrivance rooted in no one’s cultural heritage.