camp

Having just returned from a caravanning trip across the breadth of France—nearly three thousand kilometres there and back with several diversions—we appreciated, via the venerable and always interesting Things Magazine, the introduction to the aesthetic and repertoire of artist and builder Jay Nelson through his series of projects exploring the spaces, shells, huts and hulls, we inhabit whilst we’re vacationing. Much more to discover at the links above.

mont saint michel au péril de la mer

We began our journey through Bretagne revisiting (for the third time) a spectacular site just on the Norman side of the Atlantic Coast along la Manche (Mor Breizh, the English Channel) with the abbey constructed according to feudal hierarchy (God represented by the church and monastery at the summit, administration and housing in the middle and supported by the farmers and fisherfolk below) on the tidal island of Mont Saint Michel, having acquired the monicker above for the perilous trip it offered for pilgrims that failed to time the rising and falling of the seas correctly.
Established by a pair of contemplative hermits at the beginning of the sixth century, the bishop Aubert having received successive visions from the archangel Michael to build an oratory there in the style of the first shrine dedicated to him at Gargano in the Lombardy, a mission was dispatched to the site in Italy to retrieve some relics—prompting reportedly a great wave to cleave the island from the mainland (discovered to their surprise upon returning). Just prior to the Norman Conquest of 1066, the duchy took possession of the peninsula from a weakened and compromised Brittany and the community of monks that had since established themselves there had sided with William I and supported his invasion of England, currying the order considerable favour and autonomy—including a rocky outcropping off the Cornish coast. The Reformation and the later French Revolution (see also) meant that the abbey became more and more inconsequential and even dubbed the “Bastille of the Sea” the compound was used as a prison for ecclesiastics that did not support the Republic or its values. At one point, there were over seven hundred inmates in the employ of making straw hats and an accidental fire did significant damage to the structure—were it not for the intervention and advocacy of celebrities like Victor Hugo (previously) le Mont Saint Michel might have been razed to the ground. Though only fifty permanent residents reside on the island, including a dozen monks and nuns, some three million visit annually.

go set a watchman

Via Boing Boing, we‘re exposed to a rather inverted demonstration project that leans heavily into the susceptibility of neural networks to human prejudice and pareidolia to pluck what could pass as evidence from the grainy though not necessarily sensitive to granularity.
Researchers—the sort that also lean heavily on gimmickry and Security Theatre—are training artificial intelligence on progressive facial resolution and recognition to limn in the incriminating details spared in historical footage. As shown nightmarishly on pixelated emoji, the subroutine wants to attribute greebling characteristics that are not honestly present with the potential of a netting an intruder or interloper whose culpability is boosted by being the unfortunate victim of circumstance and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. These applications can potentially turn into digital age witch-trials are rooted in the same mentality that supposes any image could be enhanced indefinitely or that the work of forensics is instantaneous and straightforward, speaking to authorities and actuaries that want a villain without regard to accuracy.

msaxl

Viennese artist and educator, Marianne Saxl-Deutsch, born on this day in 1885 (†1942, murdered at the Treblinka death camp) produced some of the iconic posters used in the original push for women’s suffrage (and revived when society goes retrograde). Still under copyright during the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s (entering public domain in 2013), her work was often used without attribution—her signature MSAXL cut out and leading to her not being remembered as she should have been.

a proper miniature car

On this day in 1959, the British Motor Corporation (BMC) launched its iconic, signature Mini, conceived by Greco-British automotive designer Sir Alec Issigonis (*1906 – †1988), commissioned to produce a domestic “proper miniature car” in response to the import of German and Italian bubble cars.
Aggressively marketed with celebrity-endorsement and some two-thousand exemplars exported to a hundred countries to coincide with the premiere of the Mark I—meant to satisfy demand for a stylish car responsive to the need for fuel economy set off by the Suez Crisis a few years earlier, the original model and later iterations acquired dozens of monikers and pet names including the Morris Mini Minor, the Wolsesey Hornet, the Riley Elf, the Innocenti Mini and the Austin Panther.

le chameau

On this day in 1969, coincidently on the same day as the shipwreck of the French naval vessel The Camel occurred two hundred forty-four years before in passage from La Rochelle to the colony of New France in North America, the high court of Canada awarded the recovered cache of gold and silver coins to the wreck’s finders, a trio of treasure-hunters, after being tied up in litigation for years regarding the venture partnership’s liabilities to one another. The specie (then valued at seven hundred thousand Canadian dollars was meant to pay workers and the ship’s manifest of some three-hundred passengers included the replacement Intendant, governor-general, for Nouvelle-France. Some of the coins and the rest of the maritime artefacts are on display at a museum in Halifax.

follow the fellow who follows a dream

As with all enduring productions of Old Hollywood, the Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (there had been previously two earlier adaptations of L Frank Baum’s children’s fantasy, first as a silent film and then as a Canadian animated feature), which was first released nationwide (having debuted in Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood ten days before) on this day in 1939, there has been exhaustive studies made of the Technicolor fantasy musical but it’s nonetheless worth reflecting on a cultural icon and the fullness of its lore and legacy. I’ll admit that I didn’t quite get the Kansas scenes probably quite as well as I ought to have at first—I think not quite making that connection that most of the characters, including the farm hands also appeared in Oz but that it was quite revelatory once I did realise it. I did not know, however, that Dorothy’s touching line to Scarecrow—“I think I’ll miss you most of all”—was a artefact of a concluding scene that was later cut.
Never filmed unlike the other rejected sequence “The Jitterbug” where Dorothy enters a song competition to convince an otherwise philistine princess that classical music isn’t the only form of expression to appeal to young adult audiences, there was to be a bit of a coda of resolution back in Kansas after the farmstead is rebuilt and they’ve recovered from the tornado damage, the farm hand Hunk (Ray Bolger, also playing the Scarecrow though originally cast as the Tinwoods Man) would take his leave for agricultural college but not before extracting a promise from Dorothy that she would write, implying a budding romance. Good for Hunk (his alter ego already declared the wisest in Oz, and was so all along) for pursuing higher education and not be overly particularly about vo-tech. Perhaps that was too adult and not in keeping with the rest of the story. What are some of your memories or misconceptions about the iconic film? We’d like to hear them.