patco

Having first organised in 1968 as a trade association before representing the interests of members as a fully-fledged labour union and lobby, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers‘ Association was effectively disbanded on this day in 1981 when then president Ronald Reagan declared their strike, called two days prior, illegal as a “peril to national safety” and ordered the federal workforce back on the job, breaking the strike by firing over twelve-thousand employees.  Faced with a lifetime ban (later eased by degrees, relaxed first to allow them civil service jobs, just not their old positions back) on government employment and disempowered to pursue the working conditions that the industry needed, Reagan‘s firings—catching many off guard, the unions have backed his candidacy over Jimmy Carter‘s re-election over sore dealings with the Federal Aviation Administration thinking relations would improve—marking the beginning of the decline of organised labour in the US, lockouts, sickouts and strike actions having dropped precipitously over the decades.

bouba kiki

For some time, I’ve been convinced that my blog archives are gaslighting me and usually that belief gets vilified in the end after encountering several instances with no productive records, some creative searching will finally yield the topic I could vaguely recall posting about four years and revive it with a contemporary reference—other times, though, there is a strange unresolving defeat where I still think that that had been something we blogged about before.

It seems, when a recent entry reminded me of the phenomenon and global study, that the Bouba/Kiki Effect had decamped with the latter, rather than eventually revealing itself, not that there is not also bit of self-censoring, self-promotion and obfuscation going on as well—a search void being a notoriously hard thing to find.
First observed in 1929 and then more rigourousy studied in the early 2000s, there’s a strong preference—though with notable exceptions, for people to associate the more jagged, spiky shape with the identity Kiki and the amorphous, rounder one with Bouba—also in terms of assigning roles, compliance versus determination.
Researchers suspect that the results may indicate a neural basis for sound symbolism and a correlation with early stages of perceiving, conceiving and forming a word with meaning attached, the mouth making shapes that agree in a way, suggesting consistency of cognition, with the characters. A deliberate mismatch, a spiky Bouba, generated a fairly great deal of dissonance for something with such seemingly low stakes.

compression codecs

The ever brilliant Things Magazine refers us to a ghostly composition called moDernisT created by Ryan Maguire from the sounds lost to the lossy compression of converting the Susan Vega track Tom’s Diner into mp3 format, the rhythmic tone poem famously (previously here and here) used as the in studio control for the engineers behind the digitisation to catch themselves and recalibrate if they’d gone too far sacrificing fidelity for the sake of disc-space. Likewise, the accompanying video created by Takahiro Suzuki contains only remnants salvaged from the cutting room floor after creating the mp4. I am waiting at the counter for the man to pour the coffee…

schwarzes moor

With some relief from the rather dry summer and a cloudy, rainy day to provide some atmosphere, H and I visited the nearby nature reserve that has the upland bog called the Black Moor, the perimeter in bloom with what’s called fireweed or willowherb (Chamænerion angustifolium, Schmalblättriges Weidenröschen).

We passed the stone gate that was once the entrance to Nazi era work camp (Reichsarbeitsdienst) to combat unemployment while at the same time indoctrinating the disenfranchised since removed and reforested before entering the park and marking a circuit of the unique biotope on an elevated plank pathway that kept humans from traipsing all over the place.

The trail winds through several different environments and presents lessons on the ecological system that supports the flora and fauna, an observation tower rising in the centre of the small portion of the heather-covered heath that is publicly accessible.

pardon our progress

Via Coudal Partners’ Fresh Signals, we are invited to reflect on the bold but humble typography of Tokyo metro worker Shuetsu Sato (佐藤修悦), a practise and an art form that he cultivated in order to better perform his job of helping commuters safely and swiftly navigate through a maze of shifting corridors and detours that result from the continuous construction projects on the stations and subway lines.
Equipped with some rolls of colourful duct tape and an X-Acto knife, Sato san has transformed the matter of broadcasting diversions and disruptions into something brilliantly captivating, albeit temporary, with his neat and helpful guides. Much more to explore and an entire gallery of Sato san’s improvised signage at the links above.

crosswalk

Via Kottke’s Quick Links, we discover Every Noise at Once, an exhaustive scatter-plot map of over thirty-three hundred musical genres jockeyed and charted algorithmically, from a cappella and Blue Grass to Xmasness and Zydeco. Into its sixth year of song taxonomy and curation—surely a potentially fraught and argumentative field, its shifting definitions are data-driven and informed, sampled by meta playlists. There’s no key per se or geographical correlation but south is generally more organic (unplugged) whilst north us mechanical and electric, west is dense and ambient with east being bounicer and spiky.

no static at all

Pasa Bon! invites us to check out Poolside FM for our listening pleasure, asking that you just press play to accidentally, serendipitously synchronise contemporary music with more vintage clips of dance montages, commercials and publicity stunts from the ‘80s and ‘90s.

gesamtkunstwerk

Having observed the centenary of the successor Bauhaus movement earlier in the year, it was a real treat to visit the Wiesbaden museum (previously) for a grand and circumspect tour of the age in art and design that came right before with an inspiring exhibition of Jugenstil and Art Deco that for the first time brought together the institution‘s complete endowment of period antiques from the collection of local patron Friedrich Wolfgang Neiss, supplemented with a few objects on loan from Paris and Vienna.

It was not only dazzling with fine and elegant craftsmanship on display—lamps and chandeliers from Louis Comfort Tiffany, Émile Gallé, and the Müller Fréres, porcelain, paintings and furnishings (the individual suites were sort of set up like IKEA showrooms) but also was curated in such a way to address the artists’ philosophy and outlook.  Thematically it was also interesting to note the subject matter being different and unexpected with lots of mushrooms, bats and even jellyfish and mermen appearing throughout the collection aside from mythological and religious allegories.  These images are just a small sampling of the items that caught my eye.