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Via The Morning News that finally piqued my curiosity, I am regretting now not having before having checked out the Hood Internet’s on-going series of year-in-song reviews.
These audio-visual remixes and transitions are really quite fantastic and resoundingly nostalgic brief romps and am working through the back-catalogue (1986 is also particularly good) and looking forward to more instalments.

elections matter

vita s. ronani

Venerated since at least the tenth century, Irish pilgrim and founded of the eponymous hermitage in western Brittany and co-patron of the city of Quimper, the feast of Saint Rónán is celebrated today (and then again in July) with a procession called Petite Tromenies (la grande Troménie happening once every sixth year) around the village—demarcating the grounds of the priory as a place of sanctuary and refuge—hence pardon or in Breton (brezhoneg) Tro Minihi—the tour of the retreat.

Several miracles—both in life and posthumously—including restoration of speech and curing lycanthropy, are attributed to Rónán and curried trust with the semi-legendary King Gradlon and his subjects.

ubu roi

Dangerous Minds’ rediscovery of the oedipal trilogy of Ubu the King (1896)—the titular first play, Ubu the Cuckold and Ubu in Chains—by French surrealist playwright Alfred Jarry (*1873 – †1907) and reinterpreting this allegory for contemporary times—including the impeached, cowering, nincompoop pretender Trump whose personality and temperament fit the tragic bathos of the befouling, infantilely-engaged, self-serving protagonist as if the part were written for him also gives us the chance to revisit the work’s philosophical underpinnings in 'pataphysics. Learn more from Dangerous Minds at the link up top and see a 1966 television production of the play, as performed by marionettes after Jarre’s singular showing.

æstivation

Though less well attested and possibly uncommon, there’s a type of seasonal animal dormancy that’s the corollary to hibernation. From the Latin for summer, æstivation is a state of torpor that some organisms enter—both terrestrial and aquatic—to protect themselves from overheating or desiccation. I’ve sometimes noticed snails scale fence posts or nest in crowns of flowers (that are the remains of an earlier season of growth themselves) along with other insects, apparently æstivating it seems, but the slumber is a relatively light one and easy to raise from.

anthroposophy and apogee

Acknowledging the esoteric dangers that have emerged from the pseudo-scientific disciplines that arose towards the end of the era of Enlightenment just on the cusp of Modernity that try to reconcile the onslaught on evidence that the Cosmos is far older and complex than we can account for with the Bible and founding mythologies, Geoff Manaugh introduces us to the writing of one Sampson Arnold Mackey by leaning heavily into the paradoxical nature of such ethnography and theosophy that it’s in the effort of nailing down a narrative that brings up the problematic nature of speculation and amateur pursuits.
Never going away just repackaged and given a different sheen, we look at impossible epochs and receding events that disappear from the archeological record dredged up from archetypal memories and leading down pathways—some branches potentially problematic, either in fiction, espousing dangerous ideology or adopting thinking that rejects any achievement outsized in the mind of the beholder technically or sensibly has to be the work of the supernatural and one is left to deal with various theories that state the Pyramids of the Ancient Egyptians and Nazca Lines were the work of aliens. Mackey’s The Mythological Astronomy in Three Parts published in 1827 is no different than modern day disaster movies that gainsay the slow creep of environmental degradation with something dramatic like the flipping of the Earth’s magnetic poles and makes a deep and earnest investigation into a pet theory relating to the procession of the zodiac—that we’ve moved on from the Age of Pisces to the Aquarian one, except that Mackey hoped for more cataclysmic and drastic transitions—plunging humankind from an time of general prosperity into an “Age of Horror” plunging the world into deep enduring winters and arid droughts. Life and culture are driven so far as we know by stability and not swings between extremes, however distance that time out of mind may be. The work presents calculations, and like trying to pinpoint the primordial flood that haunts and informs our collective memory is a way to privilege one original story over another and suggest in was the deluge that formed the Mediterranean, for example, or makes some similar loaded and elaborated assumption—which again seems to be the overreach of amateurism that breeds more fables—but still invites one to ponder if these larger, unfathomable cycles might not have some bearing on belief and behaviour and constitution and how disaster imprints and lingers and that instinctual awareness of a pendulum fuels dread and hope.

snapmap

Whilst not a panopticon of what the situation on the ground is for an unfolding crisis, like the protests spreading across America, telling only the narrative of a set of witnesses that use a certain platform and are choosing to share their experiences—and a fleeting (by design) glance at that—this tool, via Maps Mania, is certainly a fascinating and informed one that provides important perspective and more or less live-views as new rallies form and take to the streets.
One can also drift away from the hot-spots, turmoil and revolt to get a real-time video dispatch from virtually any point on the map.

a riot is the language of the unheard

As anxious rage spreads across the US in response to the fatal and brazenly entitled manner—it was all filmed—that George Floyd (*1974) was detained over an alleged attempt to pass on counterfeit currency, the outrage at the injustice was institutional and a generous in the making, though Trump’s series of conspicuously violence inciting comments from his garbage pulpit (that again acted responsibly by flagging his words as incendiary while another swaddles itself in agnosticism and neutrality).
These protests are not about Trump no matter how he might have fanned the flames and made a bad situation much worse but rather seeking to restore a justice denied and rebel to reverse the sickening racial divide that has come to define America, with the only appreciable contribution of that doltish, impeached pretender being to have sewn such distrust in the media that the protests would take aim at an ally outlet—either that or Trump has brought in agitators to attack his own enemies, a tactic that the Republicans and their propagandists like to accuse the left of. The unrest—the National Guard is being deployed supported by military police units in a second domestic action after they were sent to the southern US border in support of wall building operations—will without a doubt be used as a pretext for postponing the election or calling its veracity into question. In other events that transpired at the same time, all rather backhanded set-backs presented as accomplishment Trump decided to postpone his hosting of the G-7 Conference when Merkel announced that Germany would not send a delegation until and unless there was dramatic improvement in the handling of the pandemic that’s also raging unabated across America, but only adding that the membership is outdated and wants to bring Russia and India to the table when the summit is finally held at some undetermined future date. The US severs its ties with the World Health Organisation and strips Hong Kong of its favoured status, undermining its position as a financial hub. Finally, for the first time in nearly a decade, the US has regained the ability to conduct crewed space missions from its own territory—although this is not really a restoration of core competencies as the work is being contracted out and has for an end goal not the enhancement of science or exploration but rather the commercial ventures of orbital tourism, prospecting the Moon and assembling a merchant marine force to fight off any claims-jumpers or extra-planetary activities that the US disapproves of. No one confuses destruction for up-building and no one wants to see their city razed but sometimes such actions are the only means to change