Sunday 17 November 2019

sametovรก revoluce

Commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of what had been inscribed on calendars across the globe as International Students’ Day, when in 1939 Nazi forces stormed the University of Prague and arrested over twelve hundred pupils and professors, the series of demonstrations that precipitated from this gathering, massing to a half a million people, turned against the Communist ruling party of Czechoslovakia.
The first large-scale and enduring rally since the Prague Spring, the peaceful Velvet Revolution, riot police often rebuffed with flowers and the spirit of change being something quite infectious and not limited to the metropolitan areas, the name for the movement being selected by the dissident students’ translator Rita Klรญmovรก (*1931 – †1993) and later the country’s last ambassador to the US before splitting into its constituent republics, and continued through the of the year, unseated the ruling Old Guard, opened the borders and brought about the first democratic elections held in the country since 1946 with rebel poet and human rights activist Vรกclav Havel (*1936 – †2011) voted into the office of president on 29 December.

Saturday 16 November 2019

hold me closer, tony danza

Even before seeing these reality show characters arguing across dimensions with a meme cat became a coordinated ugly Christmas sweater, we were fascinated with the phenomenon and really appreciated the backstory courtesy of Nag on the Lake.
The singularly unimpressed cat is called Smudge by his humans and resides in the suburbs of Ottawa, who despite what’s being served insists on having a seat and a setting at the dinner table. The image of the cat scowling at a salad garnered quite a bit of attention and admiration in its own right but really explored virally, redone with countless different captions when inexplicably juxtaposed it with an angry 2011 screen-grab from Real Housewives of Beverly Hills of Malibu beach party hostess Taylor Armstrong crying and pointing accusatorily. Which sweater would you be wearing to your holiday celebrations? Do remix your own and be sure to share.

mmxxix

Though we can know one event to happen ten years from now with some certainty, A Message from Earth was beamed by a high-powered radio signal towards exoplanet Gliese 581c in 2008 will be in reception range, it bears recalling the adage, via the always engaging Things Magazine, by scifi author William Ford Gibson that “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed”—with nearly a year’s worth of 2019 headlines focusing and informing how 2029’s reporting might look if we continue on this same trajectory.  While perhaps not in the expected milieu and sacred settings of blockbuster movies no epic flooding yet of New York City or London but we are on the cusps of experiencing such cinematic disasters Delhi or Jakarta and instead of delivering us to a life of leisure and a forty-minute workweek, we are instead fretting over mass robotic-redundancy and unemployment, so Gibson’s quote resounds with perspective. What do you think about these predictions? The past is good council but the present may make us all come up short.

รฅrets ord

Collins Dictionary has unveiled, beating out other neologisms, most of which are main-streamed and in common-parlance to the point where they need no definition, that played heavily into our conscious these past months like deepfake, bopo (body-positive), influencer, cancel-culture, rewilding and non-binary, its selection for Word of the Year as Climate Strike, a sustaining and motivating bit of traction and Trost (though we have had quite enough of the solace of hope without action) in a world otherwise pummelled with anxiety and confusion.

Friday 15 November 2019

a little bit country

Having noticed lately a proliferation of graffiti tags with the city prefix for the state capital where I work having popped up in various spots (the interest seems to have expired but there is always the issue of latency with street art but 0611 represent), we found this Swedish saying, nollรฅtta, to be particularly interesting and resonant.
Though with the predominance of mobile networks there’s no geographic discrimination or tethering, Swedish people living inside and outside metropolitan Stockholm still recognise the area code attached to the city as a mark of pride and a term of gentle (mostly) derision. Swedish for zero-eight, the dialling code for landlines in the capital region, it has become shorthand for typical Stockholmer (Stockholmsbo) and a way to comment on the real or perceived sense of disdain that city-dwellers (and vice-versรข) have for rural residents.

podium architecture

Though the phenomenon itself is a disheartening trend that well deserves the documentation, we were happy to see our Gentle Author garnering greater notice with an appearance in the BBC and perhaps gain more allies to fight against the ghastly folly of faรงadism (see also) that’s hollowing out many of the great buildings of central London, leaving just their historic outer shell of the structure.  Though this partial preservation and adaptive use is at least a passing nod to heritage and context, it seems very much like the coulisse, the scenery flats of a theatrical production and having surrendered all their reserve authenticity. 

taschenbuch

Animating vintage paperback book jackets since 2005, the Awesomer brings us the latest iteration of Essner graphic designer Henning Max Lederer (previously). Hamburg publishing house Albatross Press began pioneering the format of the book market for the masses with designs for portability, bold covers and with colour-coding for different genres in the 1930s but distribution was curtailed with World War II.  Penguin Classics in the United Kingdom adopted many of Albatross’ innovation, including the marine avian mascot.  See more in the series of clever jacket geometric and colourful transformations at the link above and at the artist’s webpage to survey his other projects.